Pulse School: Precision planting shows promise for pulses

by

Usually when a farmer considers using a planter in Western Canada, it’s to plant canola crops, not pulse crops. But there are those exploring that option in Alberta.

Scott Gillespie, independent agronomist with Plants Dig Soil Consulting, has been working at scaling up plot trials he first saw at Farming Smarter. In this episode of Pulse School, Gillespie joins Kara Oosterhuis to talk about those plots and how this planting method works out for pulse crops.

“It was fairly impressive to see the consistency of the stand and how well it did — even in dryland, in a very dry area, near Medicine Hat,” says Gillespie, about the plot trials.

Fast forward to this year and one of Gillespie’s clients said they were interested in precision planting seed canola, but also wanted to know what else a planter could be good for. The client grows soybeans and yellow field peas — for soybeans, Gillespie says they’re a good fit, but for field peas, the quantity of seed would be an issue, especially with the precision planter’s 15-inch spacing.

In plots, high seeding rates are easily achieved; however, in the field, to reach that same target seeding rate, it’s a lot more seed to run through the planter, at a lot slower seeding pace. Gillespie had to reset his expectations of the seeds per square foot that were planted.

For the field pea stand, it worked out to seven plants per square foot, just below the recommended plant stand density from the pulse growers association.

The pea crop was sprayed with herbicide at the appropriate time, but because of the slow start to the season, the canopy closed over about a week later than normal. Gillespie suggests considering a cover crop to help out with that excess bare ground — like annual ryegrass or perhaps some clovers, that would grow low to the ground and wouldn’t interfere with harvest. A cover crop has to be compatible with next year’s crop, too.

Overall, a few tweaks have to be made to make precision planting work for pulse crops, but the method has potential.

Please register to read and comment.

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