Jennifer Thomas is a crop input manager at Richardson
International in Balgonie, Sask.
Near the end of last June, I got a call from Bruce who farms 3,200 acres of barley, wheat, oats and canola at Yorkton. Bruce wasn’t happy with the density of his canola stand and he thought there might be something wrong with the seed.
“It looks like the seed has rotted away — it’s no good,” he said, asking me to come out to his farm right away to investigate the problem.
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When Bruce checked a seldom-scouted, hard-to-access field for spray staging, he got a nasty surprise. There were very few plants in the centre of his canola field.
“I never had any cause for concern because all my other canola fields seeded before and after this one are fine,” he said.
When I arrived, we scouted Bruce’s canola field in his truck and I could see within the first 60 feet healthy stands of canola plants in the two-to three-leaf stage. As we drove on to the harder-to-access area, we came to a section near the middle of the field where plant density was very sparse with only one to two plants per square foot.
Bruce had his own theories. He thought bad seed might be making the plants slow to emerge or perhaps frost had killed his canola. We started to investigate Bruce’s field.
We compared the fringe area, which had a healthy stand of plants, to the area where there were very few plants. In the seed row we found empty seed coats. We kept digging up the rows looking for emerging plants. We found nothing but a few odd plants dotted around the area.
To determine the problem in Bruce’s canola field, we had to eliminate certain possibilities, such as field condition, frost, fertilizer blend and germination.
Bruce’s field condition looked normal. He told me it was summerfallow in 2008, and I could see some straw pressure in places. I wondered if frost could be killing off parts of Bruce’s field. When I checked, the weather had been cold but no other plants showed symptoms of frost damage, not even in the low areas or places with straw pressure.
Fertilizer blend didn’t seem to be the issue because there was no evidence of seed burn and the same application rate was applied across the farm. Also, all the other fields were fine with the 75-25-0-15 side-placed blend.
Seeds were germinating because we found empty seed coats in the rows. Also, Bruce mixed the new seed with seed left over from the previous year at a ratio of 75:25 and instead of seeing 25 per cent of the plants missing in a row, entire patches were devoid of plants. So again, germination was not an issue.
Seeding rate was correct at 5.5 pounds per acre. All seeds were a half-inch deep into moisture, so seeding depth was not the problem.
I felt certain the soil held the solution. While digging some more in Bruce’s field, I found my answer.
Why is Bruce’s field bare in the centre? 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.
