A couple weeks ago there was a good discussion on Twitter discussing the varying thousand kernel weights (TKW) of canola coming from suppliers this season. I hear this discussion pop up every spring, it seems like, and no wonder. Average TKWs on seed fluctuate from year to year, yes, but there’s been a trend to… Read More
Category: Canola
The Canola Council of Canada is alerting farmers that existing genetic resistance to clubroot may not prove effective in all Alberta fields. Dr. Stephen Strelkov of the University of Alberta led the analyses of several field samples, and data suggests that some forms of clubroot resistance are “no longer functioning well” against the disease in… Read More
Are you seeding your canola at 5lb/ac? Unless your seed rate was calculated based on that seed lot’s thousand kernel weight (TKW), you may be losing yield potential, as plant numbers decline with increasing seed size. Angela Brackenreed, agronomy specialist with the Canola Council of Canada, suggests re-calibrating when the TKW of a seed lot… Read More
This is your friendly neighbourhood public service announcement: go check your bins. For those of you not in Manitoba, spring is arriving…and for those of us in Manitoba, it may arrive soon, I’ve heard. The warmer (ahem) daytime temps and longer hours of spring sunlight can get bins warming up and, if higher moisture pockets… Read More
Canola seed size has climbed in recent years from a once-common 4 grams per 1,000 kernel weight to north of 7 grams per 1,000 seeds. What does that mean to you, the farmer? It means that if you’ve stuck with your typical four pounds per acre seeding rate (and there are good reasons to do… Read More
From a distance, a nitrogen deficient canola plant and a sulphur deficient plant can actually look rather similar. It’s only once you get up close and compare it to plants from other areas of the field, that you can better assess what’s hampering growth of the crop. In this episode of the Canola School, Dan… Read More
A couple of weeks ago, we posted a CanoLAB Quiz on our Facebook page, to test our readers’ knowledge of various problems they might encounter in a canola field. I’m not going to say I was overly impressed by the outcome of the quiz, but the few people who participated had far more fun than I… Read More
The Pest Management Regulatory Agency has approved the registration of a 12 month recrop interval for canola and a 24 month recrop interval for lentils after use of Authority. This means growers who used Authority in the spring of 2013 can plant canola in 2014 and lentils in 2015 on that land. “This label change… Read More
The impact of a frost on the canola crop is not likely to impact a field the same way twice. There are just too many variables at play — the temperature of the frost, the duration, the topography of the field, the growth stage of the plant, the soil moisture, trash cover and, perhaps most… Read More
What costs the canola crop the most in yield each year? Lack of fertility? Harvest losses? Spoilage in storage? Swath timing? The question isn’t actually entirely fair, as we can’t necessarily answer this question precisely, but we can most certainly start to stack up the evidence to support or refute each of these management areas’… Read More