I received a call in early May from Lloyd, a progressive producer who farms approximately 10,000 acres with his brother near Redvers, Sask.
Their main crops are canola, wheat, barley and flax, but they also grow field peas, oats, soybeans, sunflowers and fall rye. Lloyd was concerned with frost damage in their crops, as last spring was cool with frequent frosts through late April and early May.
The next morning, I paid a visit and checked out the damage with Lloyd. Our first stop was canola. While not the healthiest crop we’d ever seen, we came to the conclusion there were still enough healthy plants in the affected areas (low-lying, high trash areas) to make a crop. Reseeding was not warranted.
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We then moved onto the brother’s wheat field and I was surprised by the damage. “What’s going on here?” Lloyd asked, shrugging his shoulders. “Missing plants, dead plants, one-leaf plants?” As wheat is very tolerant to light frost and the damage was far more evident on higher ground, we ruled out frost.
I wondered if we were looking at a disease problem or just the stress of slow growth due to cold weather and soil conditions. Lloyd said a seed treatment was used and the mortality pattern did not fit weather-related stress on its own.
On a hunch, I asked Lloyd about his application process. After some thought, he explained that in this particular field, the seeding was split between two different types of drills. The same blend of liquid fertilizer was applied through both drills, but the placement was different.
We realized the problem with missing and dead plants was specific to where one drill had been used to seed. The air seeder uses a split boot, but there is very close proximity to seed and fertilizer. The other drill places the fertilizer in a definite band beside and below the seed row. We looked at each other and nodded glumly.
“I’ve got a riddle for you. How many problems does it take to ruin a wheat field?” Lloyd said quietly.
What combination of factors damaged the brothers’ wheat field? Send your diagnosis to COUNTRY GUIDE, 1666 Dublin Ave., Winnipeg, Man., R3H 0H1; e-mail [email protected];or fax 204-947-9136 c/o Krista Simonson. Correct answers 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 correct answer, along with the reasoning which solved the mystery, will appear in the next Crop Advisor’s Solution File.
