Reading Time: 2 minutes Ontario grain and bean handler Thompsons Ltd. is set to sell its crop agronomy business to a retail business partner in that province. U.S. grain firm The Andersons, the owner of Thompsons since January, announced Tuesday in its second-quarter report it plans to sell Thompsons’ “agronomy assets” to Burlington, Ont.-based Sylvite Holdings. Financial terms of […] Read more
Sylvite set to buy Thompsons agronomy business
How to cause nine cropping disasters
There are many ways to increase your chances of crop loss. Here are nine.
The water question
Should you be more concerned about drought tolerance, or water-use efficiency?
Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s a term that’s often loosely used, and it isn’t well understood at any level. Yet it may become one of the dominant yield limitations in your crop production within the next few years. Water-use efficiency has been part of agronomy’s lexicon for decades, yet as yields have increased, its definition and how it functions[...]
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Get there on time
Timely delivery is a big plus for “fertigation,” but can you afford the costs and the management demands?
Reading Time: 7 minutes In precision agriculture, the focus is typically on the low-hanging fruit, i.e. the use of yield data to create variable-rate fertilizer scripts, investing in individual row units with automatic down-force, or using aerial imagery to pinpoint trouble spots in a field. Most such discussions are also confined to choices about soil, seed and fertility. Yet[...]
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Canola Council resets course for ‘efficiencies’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Facing new limits on available funding, Canada’s canola value chain organization plans to refocus its work on its “core strengths” and collaborate with other players. The Canola Council of Canada on Wednesday announced a revised work plan, coming out of a “priorities review” undertaken after one of Canada’s biggest grain companies called a halt to[...]
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Higher yields begin with enhanced management practices, which means continuous learning
Reading Time: 6 minutes In recent growing seasons, the disparity between corn and soybeans has been getting harder to ignore. The frustration has been getting harder to ignore too. Why can’t farmers raise their soybean yields as quickly and as reliably as their corn? There’s little debate that corn yields have advanced greatly in the past 20 years, to[...]
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Another cover crop bonus – winter grazing
This Ontario producer lets the cows do the work, meaning benefits for both him and his crop-growing neighbour
Reading Time: 5 minutes Cover crops have caught on like wildfire for corn producers in the U.S. and Eastern Canada, mainly because of their benefits for soil health. But some producers have found another bonus — a source of feed for grazing cattle. Mike Buis has been doing it for about 15 years, seeing the overall benefits in animal[...]
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Sulphur gets hot
The nutrient’s use is definitely trending up, and there’s still more room for growth
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s a question that’s asked of a lot of nutrients in soils across Eastern Canada: Is there enough in my soil, or isn’t there? Discussions surrounding deficiencies and field levels typically target macronutrients like potash and phosphorus, or even other nutrients like nitrogen, or the micronutrients magnesium, manganese, boron, zinc or copper. But sulphur sits[...]
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PHOTOS: Pest Patrol: Cover crops versus glyphosate-resistant weeds
#PestPatrol with Mike Cowbrough, OMAFRA
Reading Time: < 1 minute Q: Can cover crops be an effective tool to manage glyphosate-resistant weeds? A: My colleague Dr. Clarence Swanton (University of Guelph) used to say that based on research he did in the 1980s, one should not expect to control weeds with cover crops. Their utility was in preventing soil erosion and improving soil health but[...]
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Relay cropping
The goal for Ontario’s Dave McEachren is three crops in two years
Reading Time: 7 minutes For the 2018 growing season, Dave McEachren decided to revisit the past with something old and something new. A dozen years ago, he had tried relay cropping after hearing about it and reading the research that had been done on it at Ohio State University. The practice involves planting soybeans into a wheat crop as[...]
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