Steve Leavitt is the director of operations for Richardson International in Lethbridge, Alta.
Early last summer, Jim called me about his disappearing field of canola. He figured the seed was bad and wanted some answers fast. I travelled to his farm west of Lethbridge, where he farms 5,000 acres of canola, barley, and wheat, to offer my help.
When I arrived, I found it did look like his field was disappearing because areas around the edge of the field had very few plants, or were bare. Most of the field looked healthy with good stands of emerging plants, but it looked like his crop was shrinking around the edges with some of these bald patches extending into the centre. When I took a closer look, I noticed the stems of the plants were broken off at the soil surface.
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I had to consider wind, frost, disease and insects. I also asked Jim about speed of the seeder at seeding time, fertilizer rates, and seed treatment. I quickly determined wind and frost weren’t the culprits as parts of the field were completely healthy and the temperature had not dipped below zero for the past two weeks.
Seeds were present in the soil and I found most of them had germinated because roots were forming, so poor germination, the speed of the seeder, and the rates of fertilizer were not causing the damage to Jim’s field.
I asked Jim about seed treatment and he’d used seed treated with Helix. When we dug in the soil and found no activity of wireworms or cutworms, I wondered if I was dealing with disease or another type of pest. I needed to do some more investigating.
What’s the problem with Jim’s canola?
Send your diagnosis to COUNTRY GUIDE, Box 9800, Winnipeg, Man. R3C 3K7; email [email protected];or fax 204-947-9136 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.
