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.
Canola plants growing happily
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:
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And you can find bar charts where early French Canadian settlers farmed:
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It’s fun to look at the world from a different angle from time to time.
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 in the area. Since we’ve gotten a digital camera, we’ve also been taking more photos and documenting the effects of weed control measures across fields. This helps us develop better customized strategies for fighting back persistent weeds. If you don’t like keeping notes, that kind of record keeping is one more reason to hire a crop scout!
I recently ran across this presentation on Soil Survey in Manitoba (PDF) by Sheila Meyer, R. Wu, and Y. Zhang. It provides a very nice introduction to Soil Surveys. The two questions it answers are: What is a Soil Survey? and What are Soil Surveys used for? It’s definitely worth reading. If you need a soil survey carried out, give us a call and we can give you a hand!
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.
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 released from peat soils. With the ramp calibration strips, we’re hoping to see what effects variable amount of fertilizer have on those soils.
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 it’s getting time to think about spraying. The Canola Council has reminder to be careful when combining glyphosate products.
Wet Manitoba Field May 7, 2010
Wheat and Wild Oats Growth May 13, 2010 South-east Manitoba
A Nutrient Excretion Model is a way of measuring the nutrients that come onto a farm and accounting for where they leave the farm. We’ve been working on Nutrient Excretion Models for a few years and have had great success with them. The model highlights places where farmers are paying to have too much phosphorous fed to the pigs, then paying some more to have that excess phosphorous disposed of. We’ve been working with one farm on this for a couple of years and the savings from not feeding excess phosphorous to the pigs is over $50,000 per year. Add in the savings from not having to dispose of the excess phosphorous in the manure, and that’s a lot of money.
Extension.org has a report up on Nutrient Planning on Swine Farms which covers the same kind of projects on 13 operations. Since this was a funded study, they were able to explore a lot of details that we didn’t get into, but the key conclusion is that it’s worth having a nutrient management plan. If nothing else, you can see where you’re not using nutrients effectively and often there are simple actions that can be taken to reduce leakage. For example, it doesn’t get much easier and cheaper than not feeding the pigs more than they can use!
Extension.org has an article up on Preferential Flow of Manure in Tile Drainage. We’ve done some work with tile drainage and plenty of work with manure application, but no projects so far that overlap the two. A lot of of the advice seems like common sense, e.g don’t apply manure when the drains are flowing. The key is to be aware of the special conditions that subsurface drainage can create in a field and to make sure both the land owner and the applicator are aware of the actions needed to mitigate those conditions.
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 clients’ seeders.
You don’t want to be finding out about problems such as this one at harvest time!
