With more and more of the Prairies going underwater, some farmers are wondering what the effects of all this water will be on the fertilizer they applied on their fields. I did some looking around and found a couple of good articles on estimating nitrogen losses on flooded fields. The MAFRI article, Impact Of Flooding [...]
This last week it’s continued to rain on and off, so mostly I’ve been in the office updating our spring records. On the bright side, we’ve already seen some canola flowering so there’s still hope!
Turns out I spoke too soon in my last post. We scouted some fields in the Interlake region yesterday and they looked like swimming pools. The water on the fields is a concern, but the bigger concern is that there’s nowhere for it to god. Most of the culverts that I saw were 3/4 full [...]
Things are fairly quiet right now as we do the crop scouting, identify potential problem pests, and make spray recommendations. So far we’ve been lucky in that our clients haven’t been flooded out by the massive amounts of precipitation we’ve received here. The crops are growing beautifully and we’re keeping an eye on them.
I’ve been going through our crop scouting records from previous years and it never ceases to amaze me just how useful they are. We had glyphosate-resistant volunteer canola pop up in a field and thanks to the notes we’ve kept it was easy to track down the last time Roundup Ready Canola had been planted [...]
The Canadian Wheat Board has expanded their offerings via the WeatherBug network. WeatherFarm offers a more complete weather service including forecasts and historical data for weather stations across Manitoba. You just need to create a login and you’re good to go. This will be tremendously valuable to us for crop scouting and for damage claims.
Farmers managed to get quite a bit of seeding done before the rains came – since then things have been pretty much at a standstill. So far the cold weather doesn’t seem to have affected any of our clients’ crops severely. There has been a decent amount of growth of both crops and weeds, so [...]
The weather here has been beautiful and a lot of seeding has already been done. It’s too late for a pre-season checkup for most people, but if you get some down time, it’s worth doing a planter checkup (PDF). Ron was out in the field checking seeding rates and spotted this on one of our [...]
With the warm weather, many farmers are seeding or getting ready to seed. If you want some interesting reading during downtime, take a look at History of Fertilizers (PDF). It gives a very readable description of the history of the fertilizers used to grow crops. I would have liked to see a little bit of [...]
It appears that Ontarioweeds.com, which I mentioned last spring, is branching out to Weedinfo.ca. It’s pretty much the same information, but appears to be aimed at all of Canada rather than just Ontario. If you’re looking for information on a weed, this is a good place to look. Sadly, they don’t have much information on [...]
