THE HEART OF THE MATTER?
There isn’t one hard-working producer who won’t be susceptible at some point in a long farming career to the following problem. Yet, in the heat of the moment, the solution to this issue is usually the last thing to be considered.
Last June I got a call from a producer concerned about his canola seed. “I don’t think you should offer that seed anymore if it’s not going to grow,” said Paul, a levelheaded and experienced producer who farms 6,000 acres of canola, soybeans, wheat, oats, and corn just outside of Landmark, Man.
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The next day I travelled to his farm to discover the inside section of his canola field wasn’t growing, yet the plants in the outside round were completely healthy at the three-to four-leaf stage.
From a distance, the inside of the field looked terrible—the plants that germinated were stunted, yellow, mottled and dying. The odd plant, about one in 10, looked good. From the road I thought we could be dealing with any of the following factors: poor germination, seed depth, frost damage, a major moisture event, or perhaps cutworms.
When I inspected the field up close I was surprised to find a sharp, straight line that seemed to separate the healthy and dying round in Paul’s canola field. This led me to add some kind of sprayer issue to our growing list of possible factors affecting Paul’s field. Paul had done an early burn-off shortly after the field was seeded, so there was a chance chemical residue was the problem.
We eliminated weather as a factor. No frost or heavy precipitation was reported during that time period. Because no other customers had reported problems with that seed lot, we didn’t consider germination as a serious contender for the damage. Cutworms were not present in the field and therefore not the culprits. Because the outside round looked so good, chemical residue probably wasn’t the problem either.
We were puzzled by such a defined line between dying and healthy plants. Together we went over the seeding of that field detail by detail. Paul remembered he had stopped after the outside round to refill with fertilizer and at the same time had changed seeding depth. When we examined the areas where Paul crossed a drainage ditch, the change in depth didn’t seem to affect germination. The deeper seeded areas did not show any better germination than the shallower seeded areas, so seeding depth wasn’t the issue in this case.
Paul was seeding with 80 pounds an acre gross product of MES 15 fertilizer, which has lower salt content and contains 13 per cent nitrogen, 33 per cent phosphate and 15 per cent sulphur. When we checked Paul’s records and our own fertilizer pickup records back at the office, I knew I had an answer for him.
Why does Paul have an inside field of spotty, dying canola plants? Send your diagnosis to Country Guide, Box 9800, Winnipeg, Man. R3C 3K7; e-mail[email protected]; or fax 1-866-835-8467 c/o Kari Belanger. Best suggestions will be pooled and one winner will be drawn for a chance to win a Country Guide cap and a one-year subscription to the magazine. The best answer, along with the reasoning which solved the mystery, will appear in the next Crop Adviser’s Solution File.
