Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Agriculture has released a report outlining the quality profile of this year’s crop. Only nine percent of the province’s spring wheat crop is projected to be graded number 1 — well below the 10 year average of 39 percent. For winter wheat, only three percent is expected to grade as number 1, compared… Read More
Category: Harvest Management
Do you know what quality impact moving corn through your handling, drying and storage set up has? It can be significant, but if you’re not sampling (and sampling properly) at several points in the process, you can’t know for sure. What’s more, a good chunk of damage, either through too hot/too fast drying or moisture… Read More
Plant breeding takes time. Significant amounts of it, in fact. While genetic resistance to things like diseases or pests or even built-in agronomic traits like standability are the ideal, a new wheat variety may take a decade to produce, and even then, still not meet all the needs of every farmer who grows it. In… Read More
Can deep-tilling soybean residue be justified? A researcher from the University of Manitoba is looking at whether tillage practices need to change as farmers in Western Canada grow more soybeans. Despite leaving less plant matter behind than most crops, it’s not uncommon to see soybean ground cultivated to leave a dark surface that warms up and dries out… Read More
The Official Grain Grading Guide, developed by the Canadian Grain Commission, lists all kinds of factors influencing the grade of Canadian pulses. From colour to odour, disease to damage, there’s a lot to consider when harvesting grains, and particularly, those incredibly sensitive pulses. Related: Third-Party Grade Could Be Useful In Marketing Crop With Variable Quality In… Read More
For the lucky soybean growers who still have maturing and not frosted soybeans on their hands, this post on pre-harvest management of the crop is for you! (And for you farmers in the east stung by the September frost, we’re sorry, and maybe keep all this info in mind for next year.) There are solid… Read More
Last Friday’s frost over much of eastern and central Ontario has knocked back the corn crop, and has left the soybeans looking rough. Top pods are worst hit, as is to be expected, which could mean overall yields won’t be as impacted as feared, depending on how deep into the canopy the frost penetrated. The… Read More
The Ontario corn crop’s “slow stagger to maturity” wasn’t helped any last night by an early frost. Lows of -2 degrees C and colder were reported across a large swath of eastern Ontario this morning, though official temps and final area impacted by the frost has yet to be released. (See map below from Weather… Read More
With last week’s snowstorm that covered a great area of Alberta, farmers are beginning to try and form their harvest strategy for some of the pancaked fields. RealAgriculture reader Jay Schultz asked his twitter followers what he should do. What do you think? Let us know in the poll below. #westcndag twitter pole. Retweet for… Read More
The 2014 Ontario corn crop went in the ground over the course of nearly six weeks — a hardly ideal scenario. While some lucky farmers in the far south were planting before May, most didn’t have the opportunity until mid-May and still more long after that. Coupled with a cooler than average summer, and farmers… Read More