Some tips on choosing the right person to help navigate the maze of new crop varieties and technologies
There was a time when growing crops was fairly straightforward. You planted in spring, sprayed in summer and harvested in fall. There weren’t all that many varieties to choose from. Chemical inputs were limited. The provincial guides to field crop protection were only a few pages long. Today, there are scores of registered varieties and […] Read more
Only two older wheat varieties are resistant to Ug99, a devastating race of stem rust which threatens to spread around the world
Working under tight security in their plant science laboratory at Morden, Man., Tom Fetch and his scientific colleagues look as if they’re handling extremely hazardous material. After changing into hospital scrubs in a locker room, Fetch and his team deactivate an alarm system and go through four doors to enter the laboratory. The Level 3 […] Read more
The plan is for a single checkoff next August 1, but will different provincial recipients all go in the same research direction?
What a tangled web. That’s one way to describe the system of checkoffs to support cereal research in Western Canada. From a centralized system administered by a single agency, the plan has splintered into six separate checkoffs and five different producer-run wheat and barley commissions in three provinces. This patchwork will simplify a little on […] Read more
Government has cut back, private companies are not keen on crops that don’t need to be reseeded every year, and you can’t check off sales to farmers’ own livestock
Forages are Canada’s biggest crop but you wouldn’t know it because of the few resources that go into breeding them. You’d think that, given its size, forage would be a giant in the world of plant breeding. Unfortunately, it’s more of a midget. Canada has only four major publicly funded programs for breeding tame forages, […] Read more
This cousin of the feared Palmer amaranth has reached the Canadian border, and could soon begin marching across the West
A new alien is lurking in the fields of North Dakota and Minnesota, preparing to invade Canada and cause no end of trouble. The potential enemy is a noxious weed called waterhemp, a member of the pigweed family and a cousin of Palmer amaranth, a glyphosate-resistant weed currently plaguing cotton and soybean growers in the […] Read more
Moisture gives the top U.S. soybean-producing state a yield advantage, but also causes more disease problems
Is Manitoba the new Iowa? That was the official theme of one Manitoba Agronomists’ Conference as professionals considered the future of soybeans in the Keystone province. It is also the question that producers and industry officials are pondering now that soybeans in Manitoba are well over the million-acre mark. The doubling of soybean acres in […] Read more
What do climate change and western corn share? “Plenty,” says Jeff Rubin
Jeff Rubin is former chief economist for CIBC World Markets, now a bestselling author, and he believes a warmer climate will result in a longer growing season and more heat units on the Canadian Prairies. This, he suggests, could turn the region into the new North American Corn Belt as production inevitably creeps northward. “The […] Read more
Flea beetles that eat leafy spurge are only the first wave of biological weed control
What is it about weeds? No matter how hard you try to eradicate them, they always come back. Worse still, each method of weed control has its drawbacks. Spraying with herbicides can lead to weed resistance if the same product is used continuously. Tillage can result in soil erosion (remember the Dirty ’30s?), and although […] Read more
Fortunately, we already have many of the tools we need to delay or stop resistance in its tracks
We hear a lot about herbicide-resistant weeds these days. Repeated use of herbicides, especially ones from the same group and with similar modes of action, promotes the growth of weed populations that the chemicals can no longer control. A prime example is the emergence of weeds resistant to glyphosate, the most widely used weed control […] Read more
Soybean Guide: Despite their province’s soaring soy acreage, Manitoba’s hog industry is still locked into expensive imported soymeal. Worse, change may still be years away
It was another banner year for Manitoba soybeans in 2014 with production hitting a record 1.1 million tonnes, up 3.7 per cent from 2013. Figures from Statistics Canada show that, although average yields dropped 14 per cent to 32.3 bushels per acre, a 21 per cent increase in harvested area more than made up for […] Read more
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