If you’re planning to straight cut canola this year, you should first have a look at the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute’s report on considerations for the practice. These are quick tips from the report, which is available in full at pami.ca.
Quick tips
- Seed early, to allow time for natural drying.
- Shatter-resistant varieties pose a lower risk for environmental losses. Varieties labelled as such vary widely in terms of high shelling loss.
- Start off small — make sure the change fits with your operations.
- Rigid, draper, and extended-knife headers all work. Rigid loss is typically higher than the other two methods.
- Fixed, rotary knife and vertical crop dividers all work. Dividers are a major source of harvest loss with rotary dividers tending to have greater loss.
- Natural drying will work in many situations. Dry, mature stalks were preferable; can be obtained via natural drying or desiccation (desiccation was not studied as part of this project).
- Potential for economic benefit to straight cutting.
- All harvest systems resulted in similar crop quality under the conditions tested. Overall crop management and harvest timing still play a large role in crop quality, regardless of harvest system used.
