Cartogrammer had a fun post on Charts in the landscape. If you look at field shapes, they often resemble different kinds of charts. Near Petrel there are pie charts: View Larger Map And you can find bar charts where early French Canadian settlers farmed: View Larger Map It’s fun to look at the world from [...]
This year we’re doing some ramp calibration strips on peat soil. Most of the soil that we deal with is clay or sand, but we have a few clients that have considerable amounts of peat soils in their fields. Due to their high organic matter, there is a significant amount of nitrogen that may be [...]
Our annual meeting went well. Dr. Martin Nyachoti emphasized how important it is to know the feed you are supplying to your animals. As corn and wheat prices fluctuate, more and more people are looking at alternative feed ingredients. Be sure to know what nutrients alternative feeds supply and in what forms to ensure that [...]
I’m getting ready for our annual meeting where producers, applicators, and others get together in our office. This year Dr. Martin Nyachoti will be discussing Evaluating alternative feed ingredients. One of our clients, Garry Wollman, will describe how he applied the Feed Model in the real world to cut down drastically on overfeeding of phosphorous. [...]
If you would like a dose of hope, listen to Lowell B. Catlett’s Smart is Beautiful: 21st Century Agriculture’s Revolution speech. From what I have seen his figures are valid, so dare to hope!
I often run across results or recommendations in tables in PDFs. Unfortunately doing anything with PDFs apart from reading or printing them is awkward. Some common tasks such as calculating the sum or average of specific rows (e.g. what’s the average yield of 10 particular varieties of canola) would require retyping the PDF or trying [...]
When taking pictures that show a field from ground level, panoramic photos are often quite useful. I’ve been using the software that came with our digital camera and it’s been working pretty well. I’m sure that as I get more photos I’m going to run into some issues where the photos don’t stitch together too [...]
Last week I attended the Manitoba Soil Science Society‘s 53rd Annual Meeting. I felt that I learned the most from the first two speakers. Henry Janzen of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Lethbridge’s key point was “What will our descendants wish we had recorded or started?” He gave examples of studies in the late 1800s and [...]
If organic farming interests you, the Guelph 2010 Organic Conference Proceedings are available for download. I’m not convinced of the value of organic farming by itself. You avoid chemicals and fertilizers, but the energy input seems awfully high. On the other hand, by avoiding the “easy ” answers of more/different chemicals and fertilizers organic farming [...]
We had a few of our Garmin GPSmap76 units unable to find satellites. It was pretty obvious that they were out of whack – the date was wrong, the time was wrong, and the unit was beeping plaintively that it could not find satellites. Here’s what I did to fix them. Turn the GPS on [...]
