Canola School: Planter vs. Seeder— What's Best for Canola?

by

There are few things that get a farmer’s blood pumping like a field ready for the seeder and shiny new iron to drag across it. With the growing corn and soybean acres in the west, more farmers have adopted row crop planters, and, inevitably, wondered how good a job they would do on other crops. Combine that with expensive canola seed and the planter’s claim of doing a good job with lower seeding rates and you’ve got a lot of buzz generated about planters for canola.

Organizers of the inaugural Manitoba-based CanoLAB at Brandon set up a precision seeding station where three types of planters were on display. Attendees got to see the kind of plants they could expect from the lower rates and wider rows, plus get a crash course on common hiccups.

In this video, Kristen Phillips, agronomy specialist for Manitoba with the Canola Council of Canada, runs through the major pros and cons of planters based on preliminary research results. There’s much more work to be done, and planters have promise, but there are significant trade-offs to be aware of — planters are often set at 15″ rows and wider, are not typically set up to handle granular fertilizer and require significant hydraulic output perhaps necessitating a bigger tractor than farmers currently run. What’s more, Andrew Dalgarno, who farms at Newdale, Man., shares the results of last year’s seeder vs. planter demonstration held at his farm — it’s only a demo, yes, but the glaring result is that timing and weather — not iron — hold the biggest sway in a crop’s eventual yield.

If you cannot see the embedded video, click here.

 

Wake up with RealAgriculture

Subscribe to our daily newsletters to keep you up-to-date with our latest coverage every morning.

Wake up with RealAgriculture

Other Episodes

Canola School (view all)Season 5 (2013) Episode 31
Episodes:

Privacy Preference Center

Necessary

Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.

gdpr, __cfduid, PHPSESSID, wordpress_test_cookie, woocommerce_items_in_cart, woocommerce_cart_hash, wp_woocommerce_session, wordpress_logged_in, wordpress_sec, wp-settings, wp-settings-time, __cf_mob_redir, wordpress_cache, realag
__cfduid

Marketing

Measuring interactions with the ads on the domain.

__gads,fsk_ut_2317
IDE

Statistics

These are used to track user interaction and detect potential problems. These help us improve our services by providing analytical data on how users use this site.

_ga,_gid,_gat,_cb,_chartbeat2,_chartbeat4
_ga,_gid
metrics_token

Preferences

Preference cookies enable the website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.

chartdefaults, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url
JSESSIONID, _os_session,anonymous_votes,csrf-param,csrf-token,user,user-id,user-platform,intercom-session,intercom-lou,intercom-session
personalization_id, tfw_exp

 

Register for a RealAgriculture account to manage your Shortcut menu instead of the default.

Register