Reading Time: 2 minutes In years to come, 2012 in Ontario will be remembered as a drought year along with 2001 and 1988. Despite the cheery prospect of a winter with little ground cover and uncommonly warm temperatures, many farmers spent the early part of the year bracing themselves for a drier-than-normal growing season. At the same time, several […] Read more
Drought tolerance a ‘hot’ topic for 2012 and 2013
The right move?
Reading Time: 5 minutes For Dave Gillespie, the question of whether to install a new on-farm storage bin and drying unit was never really in doubt. At least, it was never really in doubt after the fall of 2010. “The biggest factor was when we sat and couldn’t pick any corn because we were still sitting on beans, and […] Read more
Surging wheat
Reading Time: 5 minutes Some refer to it with a smirk as “the weed that gets planted after soybeans.” Others see it as a mere rotation crop, something you have to plant whether you want to or not in order to break up disease and pest cycles. However you have always thought about wheat’s role in your own operation, […] Read more
He’s not buying it
Reading Time: 8 minutes It’s got to be the toughest question in today’s agriculture. What’s the optimum farm size? For a lot of experts — and a lot of farmers — there’s a simple one-word answer. Bigger. Or maybe we should make that, BIGGER. But Shawn McRae isn’t buying it, and although McRae isn’t the kind to try to […] Read more
A boost for wheat
Reading Time: 4 minutes Corn and soybeans have been the big winners in the race to introduce new seed treatments. In the past 10 years, eastern Canadian farmers have got Poncho for their corn, while soybean growers have been basking in the positive effects of CruiserMaxx Beans, as well as the expanding market for inoculants. But what about cereals? […] Read more
Stacked seed treatments
In seed treatments, it seems we’ve come a hundred miles in just a decade. Truth is, there’s another thousand we’re soon going to go
Reading Time: 4 minutes From Dividend to Poncho to CruiserMaxx Beans — and then back full circle to CruiserMaxx Cereals with myriad treatments in between — seed treatments have evolved into standard operating procedure in Eastern Canada. But as with the seed traits sector, growers are demanding more breakthroughs every year, and seed treatment developers are having to delve […] Read moreNematodes on the run
Reading Time: 4 minutes Soybean growers don’t like nematodes. They don’t even like saying the word. There seems to be something almost unnatural about the tiny worm-like pests that destroy more yield potential in Ontario soybeans than any other pest. Now there’s another reason to cringe when you hear the word. Nematodes are moving into corn. It isn’t the […] Read more
Clean up the smut
Reading Time: 4 minutes These days, most growers are interested in planting corn, then soybeans, then wheat. In terms of priority, barley rarely makes the 10, which is too bad, since incorporating a fourth or even fifth rotational crop has been proven to have significant benefits for the more popular “Big Three.” One factor that may be holding barley […] Read more
How wet is it?
Reading Time: 5 minutes For corn growers, winter is the season for pencilling out your costs, mapping out your rotations and evaluating any changes to your management system, all in preparation for the flood of work that the spring season brings. For the 2012 planting season, however, many growers will be thinking of another kind of flood — the […] Read more
Watch that IP market
We’re risking our hard-won IP status by chasing short-term corn profits. Maybe it’s time to run counter to the pack
Reading Time: 6 minutes There’s no denying it. Corn has outperformed soybeans for the last two years, both in the field and at the elevator. But at a time when many growers are questioning the overall value of soybeans, and when they’re voting with their planters in favour of corn, there are rumblings that maybe we’re throwing out the […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
