Reading Time: 2 minutes By now it’s clear. Some control strategies work. Others, says Dan Orchard, just don’t. Pulling plants from dead patches at the end of the season and looking for the disease certainly worked. But it would have worked even better if the recommendation right from the start had been to pull plants and check the roots. […] Read more
The do’s and don’ts of clubroot
Specific, timely actions can help prevent the spread of disease in your soil
Joining the clubroot club
The disease is escaping beyond its Edmonton hot zone, and the rest of the Prairie region must get its response right
Reading Time: 11 minutes As you drive throughout the region surrounding Edmonton, canola is inescapable. It’s absolutely everywhere. And looking at the crops, it’s easy to understand why. With long days, cool nights and adequate rainfall, this is canola country pure and simple, and in most seasons, the crop flourishes under nearly ideal conditions. Canola has also been a crop […] Read more
Another story on Canada fleabane?
Yes, because the message isn’t getting through, and the situation is getting serious
Reading Time: 4 minutes It may seem repetitive, but that’s because the message isn’t changing. Canada fleabane keeps becoming a bigger problem with each passing year. The weed has been the topic of presentations at the Southwest Agricultural Conference dating back to 2012, as well as at FarmSmart Conferences and in a steady stream of weed and herbicide bulletins. […] Read more
The path to bigger wheat yields
Partly it’s genetics. Partly it’s agronomics too. But mainly it’s management
Reading Time: 7 minutes Too often, talk about wheat yields in Eastern Canada turns to what’s happening in places like Kansas, the United Kingdom or northern Europe, as if our best hope to increase our productivity here is to use the ideas they’re developing there. Increasingly, however, the smart money is on taking a harder look at our own […] Read more
A better way to mill barley?
Cigi investigates improved milling of food barley by blending it with wheat
Reading Time: 3 minutes The milling performance of Canadian food barley may be improved by blending it with wheat, opening up commercial potential for its use as a healthy ingredient. Funded by the Agriculture Funding Consortium, with food barley varieties supplied by the Alberta Barley Commission, a one-year project conducted by Cigi (Canadian International Grains Institute) is aiming to […] Read more
In search of a good label
On virtually every pesticide container, it’s written in big, bold letters, “Read the label and booklet before using.” My guess is almost no one complies, and with good reason
Reading Time: 4 minutes It can be a ridiculous request. Labels have become virtual novels. The label for the most widely used pesticide in Canada, glyphosate, can be over 100 pages long. If you tank mix glyphosate with another herbicide such as Pardner, add another 59 pages to your bedtime reading. Has anyone ever taken the time to read […] Read more
Agronomy project aims to raise yields 25 per cent
Complex project will study intensive systems approach to crop management
Reading Time: 5 minutes Sheri Strydhorst isn’t doing a lot of fishing this summer. And if her research bears out, you just might be willing to give it up, too. An agronomy research scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development in Barrhead, Strydhorst is leading an incredibly complex, multi-layered, multi-site, multi-crop research project designed to find out the extent […] Read more
Fungicide question on wheat is settled
For these farmers, it’s every acre, every year… but always at the right crop stage
Reading Time: 8 minutes Kristjan Hebert knows exactly what his target is when he is spraying fungicide on his wheat. “One hundred per cent,” says the Moosomin, Sask.-area grain grower, who farms with his father. “Our goal is to get it all covered at the heading stage.” That’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when the […] Read more
Preserve blackleg resistance
Clip canola stems this harvest to check for blackleg in your fields
Reading Time: 5 minutes Blackleg has a way of sneaking up on you. A farm can go for years without any noticeable problems. But without the grower knowing, blackleg races within a field can shift — often in response to seeding the same genetic resistance source over and over — and infection starts to show up where it hadn’t […] Read more
Genetic sequencing technologies open doors for potato breeders
Next-generation technologies have ushered in a new era of potato breeding, allowing researchers to select key traits with a high degree of efficiency
Reading Time: 4 minutes The potato genome is a medium-size plant genome, consisting of 12 chromosomes with a haploid length of about 840 million base pairs. In 2011, it was successfully sequenced through the efforts of the Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium (PGSC), an initiative of the Netherlands Genomics Initiative and Wageningen University and Research Centre that combined the efforts […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
