I was looking up some yield figures on the MASC site and I kept running across Risk Area 32. If you go to the maps, Risk Area 32 is nowhere to be seen. Shades of Area 51! Have I run across a vast government conspiracy? Sadly it’s nothing so exciting – MASC Risk Area 32 [...]
I just ran across this National Geographic article about soil: Our Good Earth: The future rests on the soil beneath our feet. There is some alarming information in there about the loss of of agricultural soil to various practices. What encouraged me is that there are practical operations taking place all over the world that [...]
Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives has collected a list of Soil Survey Resources. This seems to be a fairly current and comprehensive list. There are a number of presentations on the site which could be useful for providing a quick overview of different aspects of soil survey. One of the big questions that I [...]
I attended the Agvise 2011 Canadian Soil Fertility Seminar in Carman last week. There were a lot of really impressive speakers there. Here are a few of my notes on what was covered. Nutrient Trends – Using the Data. John Heard John Heard led off by letting us know that Better Crops Magazine has recent [...]
Here are my notes from the 2011 Manitoba Soil Science Society Meeting. Due to bad weather and closed highways, I missed the second day of the meeting. H. Asgedom’s talk on Nitrogen Oxide Emissions from Urea and Dairy Manure compared nitrous oxide emissions from five treatments: control unamended, ESN, Solid Dairy manure, Urea, SuperUrea. Urea [...]
(Image from Veris Site) I heard about this at a conference today. Veris has a soil probe that uses Near InfraRed to analyze and record soil properties on the fly. It appears that so far they just measure carbon but I can see this being tremendously useful for measuring phosphorous levels across a field. Cliff [...]
Richard Zollinger pointed out research on the NDSU-AGDAKOTA mailing list. Research Scientist Pirkko Laitinen in Finland shows that there is Significant glyphosate herbicide transport to plant roots. One of the things that makes glyphosate such a useful herbicide is that it breaks down very quickly. Even crops that are glyphosate intolerant can be seeded within [...]
How old is dirt? Ethan Siegel answers that question at his Starts with a Bang blog. Be sure to read the comments as some take issue with his conclusion. John Heard discussed the age of Manitoba’s soils in a recent print article. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of it, but as I recall he [...]
I’ve had to look this up twice now, so I thought I would post it for anyone who is interested in the soils of southeast Manitoba. It’s a minor classification error in the electronic version of the reports versus the text version. Here’s the problem: In the Agricultural Interpretation Database by Municipality for Hanover (hanover_shp), [...]
When looking at nutrients for crops, two key figures to keep in mind are crop uptake versus crop removal. Crops require a lot of nutrients to grow but some portion of those nutrients are left behind when the crop is harvested. Crop uptake of a nutrient is the amount of a nutrient used by a [...]
