“It’s a model-based estimate to the end of July. It may not capture the effects of that early August heat and dryness,” commented analyst Jon Driedger of Leftfield Commodities about the change in Prairie crop conditions.

“The numbers will be taken with a grain of salt,” he added, noting that some private estimates are likely below the figures StatCan will publish this week.

“Until you see the numbers, you don’t make too many assumptions,” Driedger cautioned.

Broker Ken Ball of Ventum Financial concurred with Driedger.

“I don’t think anybody has got a lot of faith in this [report],” Ball stated.

“The whole point of eliminating the [farmer] survey process was, I presume, to save money and to also speed up the process. That’s not really happening,” he continued.

Ball suggested StatCan might not have reliable estimates on crop production for 2024/25 until the agency’s December report, which will be based on farmer-surveys.

Until then, he pointed to provincial crop reports and a variety of yield estimates are likely to fill the gaps.

“It’s going to be a tough crop to pin down,” Ball said about this year’s canola crop.

A spokesperson for StatCan said in an email that the agency “has done extensive research to determine the feasibility of replacing the traditional survey data with Earth Observation model-based yield estimates.”

“Historical comparisons show that the EO model generally produced estimates of similar or better quality than the traditional survey-based methods for the same period,” they added, noting the agency is confident in the accuracy of the estimates made at the end of July.

“Statistics Canada understands the importance of timeliness in relation to published estimates. We continue to assess the current release strategy for the crop reporting survey, including the feasibility of releasing model-based estimates closer to the reference period,” the spokesperson said.

MarketsFarm senior market analyst Mike Jubinville suggested StatCan could revise its canola production number for 2023/24, by adding 500,000 to 700,000 tonnes to the approximately 18.33 million tonnes the federal agency has been going with.

He noted Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada pegged feed waste and dockage for 2023/24 at a mere 74,000 tonnes, when it would normally be seven to nine times that amount. In AAFC’s July report, feed waste and dockage for 2023/24 canola was pegged at 583,000 tonnes.

Bruce Burnett, MarketsFarm’s director of markets and weather, theorized earlier this summer that a canola harvest in excess of 20 million tonnes was possible. He surmised the estimate based on his crop tour of the Prairies as he made his way to Glacier Farm Media’s Ag in Motion show near Saskatoon.

However, like others in the trade, Burnett took in account the unfavourable weather that a good amount of canola received just as it was blooming. He pegged this year’s canola crop at 19.04 million tonnes, while Ball placed his call at 17.40 million.

Also, Ball estimated the country’s all wheat output for 2024/25 at 34.50 million tonnes, with Burnett higher at 36.23 million. For durum, Ball estimated 5.80 million tonnes and Burnett came to 5.88 million.

As for barley, Ball projected a crop of 7.90 million tonnes while Burnett placed it at 8.18 million. For oats, Ball was at three million tonnes versus 3.43 million from Burnett.

StatCan will follow up Wednesday’s report with another in September, as well as a stocks report, and its final principal field crops report in December, which will include farmer-surveys.

—Updated Aug. 27 – adds comments from StatCan.

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Ukraine saw several record high temperatures last month, and up to 39-40 degrees Celsius in some regions, according to the state hydrometeorological centre.

Taras Vysotskyi, the acting minister, told national TV that the early crop yield had not been critically affected by the heat. Southern and eastern regions saw a 10-15 per cent fall, which had been partly offset by increases in other regions, he added.

“On average in the country, the [early crop] result will be somewhere around five per cent less,” he said.

Earlier this month, state weather forecasters and producers forecast there could be a 20-30 per cent decline in the harvest of late crops in central, southern, and eastern regions due to extreme heat.

As of Friday, Ukraine had harvested around 20 million metric tons of grains, according to the farm ministry.

In June, the ministry raised its forecast for the 2024 grain harvest to 56 million tons from 52.4 million. Together with oilseeds, the crop could total 77 million tons, it said at that time.

—Reporting for Reuters by Yuliia Dysa

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The global stocks-to-use ratio for the major crops, excluding China, has been trending down since 2018, Jason Newton, Nutrien’s chief economist, told delegates attending the 24th International Farm Management Association Congress in Saskatoon.

Global crop consumption has been growing by 2.2 per cent per year since 2020, but yields have not kept pace.

“We’ve had four consecutive years of below trend yields globally,” he said.

That is due to adverse weather conditions and high input costs, which led to low fertilizer applications rates.

Global crop area has also plateaued, which hasn’t helped matters.

“As a result, global grain supply and demand has been tight,” he said.

China is a big reason behind the steady increase in consumption. The country’s corn and wheat yields have fallen below trend line in recent years, and it has run out of arable land.

The result is that a country that produced a 34 million tonne surplus of major grains 10 years ago is expected to have a 49 million tonne deficit in 2024.

“That has been a major factor that has contributed to support for crop prices,” said Newton.

Another factor is the explosive growth in biofuel demand.

U.S. renewable diesel production is forecast to grow to 7.4 billion gallons post-2025, up from 4.1 billion gallons in 2023, although that now appears to be wishful thinking.

“That is likely not going to happen because the crush capacity for that is not there,” he said.

U.S. sustainable aviation fuel production is forecast at three billion gallons by 2030, up from 25 million gallons in 2023.

North America’s crops are off to a good start because of plentiful early-season rainfall. Crops are green and lush, and crop condition ratings are higher than average for this time of year.

“As a result, we have seen pretty significant declines in crop prices over the last month or so,” he said.

The next month or two will make or break the Northern Hemisphere crops.

Ukraine and Russia are two interesting markets to watch.

Ukraine’s production has fallen 30 per cent from pre-war levels, while its exports have only dropped four per cent by comparison.

“Obviously that’s not sustainable,” said Newton.

Ukraine has drawn down its inventories to critically low levels, which will eventually have to be reflected in the country’s export numbers.

Russia’s exports kept a lid on wheat prices in 2023-24, despite tight global supplies of the crop. However, record heat combined with dry conditions will decrease winter and spring wheat production in that country in 2024-25.

Brazil is the key driver of corn and soybean markets. It is the one major source of cropland growth in the world, with cultivated area increasing four per cent per year over the last decade.

Global crop prices have dropped, but they are still in line with the 10-year average, which has led to a rebound in fertilizer demand.

Ammonia production costs spiked in the European Union in 2021 due to high natural gas prices. Costs have since come down, but 20 per cent of the EU’s production capacity has been idled and is unlikely to return.

China has been restricting exports of urea and phosphate fertilizers as it attempts to become self-sufficient in crop production.

The other big factor in the phosphate market is low U.S. inventories.

Distributors reduced stocks in anticipation of a flood of Moroccan imports due to what was expected to be drastically reduced duties on the product in early 2024. That did not happen, and they were caught off guard.

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“We wanted to create a way to promote our proprietary products that was different and fun for our customers,” said Derek Flad, agronomic innovation manager for the Southern Alberta Division of Nutrien Ag Solutions, in a release.

Flad is co-leading Nutrien Ag Solution’s Hometown Yield Challenge with Shelby LaRose, Crop Nutrition Product Manager for Canada.

Nutrien launched the program on February 2, and they are inviting farmers across western Canada to enroll in the challenge. The submission deadline is Friday, March 1.

The challenge will run until November 2024, when harvest totals will be tallied and the two top-yielding growers will be awarded $20,000 to go to a local organization of their choice. The three second-place winners will each be awarded $5,000 to go to a local organization of their choice.

“Competition always gets people fired up, but creating a benefit for the communities that our growers live and work in will not only engage our growers but their neighbours as well,” said Flad.

Growers participating in the challenge will have to seed at least 80 acres and will be required to use a number of proprietary Nutrien products, the details of which can be found on Nutrien’s Hometown Yield Challenge web page.

In a media release, Jesse Hamonic, Nutrien Canada’s vice president and country lead, said programs like this, which put a focus on community, are an important component of the work they do.

“While Nutrien Ag Solutions is a large, global company, we really pride ourselves on our focus and commitment to connecting with the communities where our employees and customers live and work,” said Hamonic.

For those interested in following along, farmers will be invited to post photos throughout the challenge with the hashtag #NutrienHometownPride.

—Don Norman writes for the Manitoba Co-operator from Winnipeg.

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Recently revised supply/demand tables from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada raised the forecast for domestic barley usage in the current crop year to 6.155 million tonnes. That compares with an earlier forecast of 5.471 million tonnes. If realized, that would be up by roughly 200,000 tonnes from the previous year.

Meanwhile, AAFC lowered their estimate for corn imports to 2.500 million tonnes from an earlier forecast of 2.800 million tonnes. That would still be up from the 2.147 million tonnes imported in 2022/23, but well below the record 6.141 million tonnes of corn imported in 2021/22 when Canadian feed supplies were decimated by drought.

Prior to the drought year Canadian corn imports had rarely topped two million tonnes, with a five-year average of about 1.7 million tonnes annually from 2016/17 through 2020/21.

U.S. Department of Agriculture export data for the week ended Dec. 14 shows that Canada has already imported 375,900 tonnes of U.S. corn during the marketing year that began Sept. 1. That compares with only 99,100 tonnes of accumulated imports at the same time the previous year. There are an additional 434,700 tonnes of corn on the books slated to move later in the crop year – roughly double the previous year’s outstanding sales at this time.

Delivered barley into southern Alberta was priced as high as C$325 per tonne range, according to Prairie Ag Hotwire data yesterday. That’s down by about C$15 per tonne at the top end over the past month.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin is an associate editor/analyst with MarketsFarm in Winnipeg.

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China reported a record corn crop this year and bumper harvests of other grains, but Beijing continues to be concerned with food security, particularly amid rising tensions with trade partners, climate-related disasters and military conflicts.

Record corn production of 289 million metric tons this year was achieved largely thanks to a 2.7 per cent increase in planted acreage, as authorities reclaimed land used for other crops for staple grains.

Speaking at an annual meeting that sets rural policy priorities for the year ahead, policymakers said China will “stabilize” grain sowing area and “promote large-scale increases in grain yields,” the official Xinhua news agency reported late on Wednesday.

It did not outline specific measures to boost yields, but Chinese corn breeders are preparing to plant more than double the amount of genetically modified corn next year than in 2023, as Beijing slowly introduces a technology that typically lifts yields.

Policymakers also said China should “consolidate the results of soybean expansion”, according to state media. China has boosted its domestic soybean production significantly in the last two years by promoting more planting to reduce its reliance on overseas imports.

The policy, however, has resulted in excess production of non-genetically modified soybeans for food use, forcing Beijing to buy up some of the supplies for state reserves.

Policymakers said China should strengthen the protection of arable land, accelerate the revitalization of the seed industry and prioritize building “high-standard” farmland in its bread basket area of the Northeast, famous for its fertile black soil, according to state media.

–Reporting for Reuters by Mei Mei Chu, Chen Aizhu and the Beijing newsroom.

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The YEN concept has become popular, with a Canada/U.S. Great Lakes initiative that completed its first year in 2021. Growers, researchers and agronomists are aligning with the YEN concept, which starts with a friendly yield competition to entice growers but keeps them engaged with a detailed summary of their practices and a window of opportunity on how to improve.

The two primary metrics are yield and percentage of potential yield. Most growers like the competitive nature of YEN but the greatest value reportedly comes from the latter statistic. That’s calculated by comparing actual and potential yield based on the amount of rain and sunlight captured. The Maritime YEN project began in Prince Edward Island with spring and winter wheat in its first year, adding barley in 2020 and oats in 2021. In 2020, the program expanded to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

“I had my eyes opened on what this was all about,” says Jewell, a third-generation producer who manages the cropping side of his family’s dairy operation near Meadowbank, P.E.I. “That was what got me intrigued by the program — all the data they were collecting — and we were seeing the yields they were getting in the U.K. That had me thinking, ‘why can’t we do this here?’”

The biggest differences in cereal production in the United Kingdom versus Canada are weather and management. Winter conditions in the U.K. are much milder than in Canada and although nitrogen applications appear to be more intensive and restricted, the actual amounts are similar, just smaller and more frequent.

Close to home

The timing for Jewell’s participation came with a shift in applying the same management practices as in other crops on the farm. Forages and corn are the primary feed sources and they’ve added soybeans. Jewell’s wife Jane looks after the young stock and dry cows, the latter of which are now fed wheat straw instead of grass forage, known as the “Goldilocks Diet” and the main reason they grow wheat, along with bedding.

In the 2020 YEN project, Jewell earned the silver award for the highest percentage of potential winter wheat yield with 82 per cent (the gold winner was 83). In 2021 he won gold in winter wheat yield with 4.04 tonnes (148.4 bu.) per acre. And it’s the detail contained in the final report that makes the biggest difference.

“What are our land and weather capable of doing and what management strategies can we put in place to get there? With potential yield, it puts everybody on their own playing field and compares everybody, but you’re being compared within yourself,” Jewell says.

One challenge is gauging rainfall and sunlight capture, but the YEN program provides the best approximation of those variables.

“It’s a good benchmarking opportunity because you get to see what others are doing, and that’s important,” he says. “In the dairy industry, we’re always going to these benchmarking workshops where they put six or eight farmers in the room, but there’s not one farm that’s the same.”

With the percentage of potential yield calculation, it’s Jewell comparing his farm with others. He says his father Kevin instilled that principle in him: do a job well first and get good at it before you get bigger. If you can’t do a job well with 60 cows, you’re not going to do better with 120.

Report’s depth of detail

The summary of each participant’s performance is almost overwhelming. Jewell’s report on his 2020 winter wheat crop was 18 pages including specific “box-and-whisker” benchmarking graphs and summaries. The one-page summary offered graphs for grain yield, percentage of potential yield, above-ground biomass, estimated light energy and water captured and heads per square foot.

“Of all the research and extension work I’ve done, I’ve never seen a method of growers learning from growers work as well as YEN,” says Alan Miller, research co-ordinator with the Atlantic Grains Council. “In the first year, we had a grain and oilseed conference and there were 200 people in the room, and for us, that’s big. But each of the winners talked about how they grew their crop. The sharing between growers was amazing and we’d never seen that level of engagement.”

Miller attributes some of the success of the Maritime YEN program to the voluntary checkoff initiative, which enabled the council to leverage the dollar-per-acre allotment gathered by buyers to leverage government funds for research. That process began in 2014.

“The fact there were no grain and oilseed commodity groups in each province gives you the sense of our scale,” says Miller, who started working with the Atlantic Grains Council in 2011 and has been farming for about seven years.

Yet the overall impact from the Maritime project is an ever-changing success story: it’s not the same growers lining up for the same awards in each crop. Miller calls it a survey of practical research, with a tremendous amount of power for predicting the elements involved in producing or capturing potential yield. The U.K. project researchers found that when they broke things up into genetics and climate and other components, they were shocked at how high a percentage of a farmer’s management played in that equation.

“It’s not the individual treatment but the combinations of what producers are doing,” says Miller. “It’s analyzing nitrogen application and managing the extra growth with a regulator and keeping disease at a minimum through timely fungicide applications. Those three things — one plus one plus one — can add up to 4.5.”

Ongoing collaboration

The depth of knowledge, the willingness to share information about the use of fertilizers, herbicides and fungicides and plant growth regulators are fascinating aspects, but researchers are also reaping benefits. Aaron Mills was at the forefront of the Maritime YEN project’s inception and says it’s a constant source of amazement at how growers have jumped in to participate and learn.

“We’re definitely seeing a progression towards higher overall yields for those who are engaging in this competition,” says Mills, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Charlottetown.

The point of the YEN initiative from his perspective came from the initial meetings with discussions about the 20 tonnes per hectare growers were getting in the U.K. Their counterparts in the Maritimes immediately began looking for the recipe, but researchers said, “You’re going to tell us what the recipe is.”

“Growers are more likely to believe a neighbour down the road who had ‘this’ work for them, so the biggest part of this is the peer-to-peer technology transfer,” says Mills, adding that he sees himself as a facilitator. “The biggest part of our contribution as scientists is focusing on those yield components, like the number of heads per square foot and the number of grains per head. Things that are fairly easy to do and provide an accurate estimation of what’s gone on in the field.”

As with other collaborative efforts, Mills sees the Maritime YEN as an invaluable opportunity to explore the benefits — or drawbacks — of certain practices such as fertilizer use. Early on, growers tended to put a certain amount of fertility with the seed, then top dress to increase protein. Mills tried to correlate the total nitrogen and timing to see how it affected yield.

“It actually negatively correlated with protein and yield in that first year because we didn’t have any rain,” he notes. “Growers kept applying fertilizer yet in the end, it was wasted. They might have had a marginally lower yield if they hadn’t gone in for that late top dress, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Mills says that some years, decisions as to final yield are made by the plant, halfway through the growing season. Getting growers to think more about some of those things beyond “Try this and wait till harvest to see what happens” is creating greater awareness of their crop and how it’s developing. Their colleagues in the U.K. measured the number of times a grower visited their fields.

“It positively correlates with the yields,” says Mills. “People who pay more attention to their crop end up having a better crop because they’re visiting it to see the effect of what they’ve done.”

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Yields are likely to be all over the map as weather conditions varied vastly from region to region during the growing season.

Weather conditions ranged from extreme drought in parts of the western Prairies, to excess moisture in the eastern regions of Western Canada.

The areas affected by drought are some of the most prominent durum- and barley-growing regions, so traders will be watching closely to see how much the lack of moisture affected the two crops, said Jerry Klassen, manager of the Canadian office for Swiss firm GAP SA Grains and Produits.

A compilation of pre-report estimates shows the trade generally expects durum production to come in at 4.5 million to 5.2 million tonnes, which compares with 5.19 million in 2014-15. Barley production is pegged at 6.9 million to 7.2 million tonnes, from 7.12 million last year.

Unfavourable weather is likely to lower canola production, which was pegged at 12.5 to 14.5 million tonnes for 2015-16, down from 15.56 million last year.

But what StatsCan says in its report will likely change before the end of the year, as weather conditions and yield prospects have changed since the agency gathered the data.

“The data is more than three weeks old by the time we get it. So, we have to gauge what yield growers would have posted on their crop in the last week of July, when most of the data was gathered,” said Ken Ball of PI Financial in Winnipeg.

“I’m guessing that the (canola) yield was likely lower than what they have on their field now, just from the way the crop appeared at that time,” he added.

Because canola prospects have improved since the survey was done, production figures are apt to grow from StatsCan’s Friday estimate.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this (canola) crop is well above 14 million tonnes by the time we’re done,” said Ball.

A similar story could be seen for the Canadian wheat crop, but not to the same extent as canola, as crop conditions haven’t improved as much over the last few weeks, according to Ball.

If StatsCan’s estimates are out of line with pre-report guesses, it could cause some reaction in both U.S. wheat futures, and the Canadian canola futures market.

“If the StatsCan report happens to come out above 14 million tonnes for canola, then we could be looking at a crop that’s above 15 million, and that could really start to change the undertones in canola,” Ball said.

“We would still be tight on canola, but not nearly as tight as it appeared a few months ago.”

After the report has been fully digested by traders, they will turn the focus back to weather for the Canadian spring cereal harvest, and to canola fields that are still developing.

“Quite a bit of the reseeded canola needs another few weeks of good weather,” Ball said. “It has accelerated with the warm weather, so maybe it could get by with another two weeks of frost free weather, and there’s nothing in the forecast right now that we’re going to see any frost threat in that time frame. But, you never know.”

— Terryn Shiells writes for Commodity News Service Canada, a Winnipeg company specializing in grain and commodity market reporting.

Table: The trade’s pre-report estimates for the Aug. 21 Statistics Canada crop production report, which will show Canadian crop production estimates as of July 31, 2015, in millions of tonnes. Final yields from previous crop years included for comparison.

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In Barnes’ world view, the farmer today has the opportunity to achieve more than ever before. If you bring the right juice to the game, and if you run with the right playbook, the possibilities can be incredible, whether on the farm or in partner businesses.

“I’ve seen things other people haven’t seen yet,” says Barnes, CEO of Farmers Edge, the Winnipeg-based variable-rate technology (VRT) startup that now has 190 employees in five countries.

Launched in a Manitoba basement by Barnes and co-founder Curtis MacKinnon in 2005, Farmers Edge today has its eye on global leadership in precision-farming technology and management.

But the technology is only half the reason for his excitement. Barnes has also seen the application of Silicon Valley’s corporate strategies to the world of farming, and it has changed his outlook permanently.

Can his playbook work on your farm? Would you even want it to?

Barnes is convinced that variable-rate technology and “big data” are revolutionary, not just evolutionary. “This will change everything,” Barnes says. “This is the next Green Revolution, this is the next GMO moment.”

His belief is making all the difference for his company, Barnes says, and it can make that much difference for farmers too.

Nothing is more important for young and mid-career farmers to understand, and to engage with, he says. “Nothing.”

Barnes wants to be understood exactly. He doesn’t want any of us to hear it wrong, only partly because it could be so easy to dismiss what he says as the kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking that agriculture can seem particularly prone to.

“I was born and bred in the field,” Barnes begins, talking of his early days on the farm near Pilot Mound, Man., after which he did a university degree in agriculture and became one of the hundreds of company agronomists across the West. It was a job he loved. He was even named a Certified Crop Adviser of the Year, and he bought fully into it the prevailing ethos. “If your nose isn’t in the dirt,” he remembers thinking, “you’re not going to make good recommendations.”

But that was then, not now.

Today, Barnes says with even greater conviction, “Agriculture is all math.”

When he and MacKinnon got their first taste of variable-rate technology a decade ago, they immediately saw it as a game changer. Until then, farmers aimed to make the best average decisions, an approach Barnes calls the soil-sample philosophy. You take cores across the field, but instead of analyzing those cores separately and using them for localized application rates, you dump them all into a pail and blend them before sending one sample to the lab to represent the entire field.

The goal was to fertilize at the best average rate, the same way you’d spray a fungicide, for example, picking the best average day for the entire crop.

Barnes admits that he and MacKinnon weren’t the only ones a bit star struck by VRT’s potential, yet few others quit their jobs, as he and MacKinnon did, when their boss refused to charge forward with the new technology as quickly as the duo wanted. And few others set up business, as MacKinnon and Barnes did in his basement, with no money, little credit except their personal lines, and almost no income.

Today, Barnes admits too that he and MacKinnon probably did jump a bit too early, in a way. Results in those first years were mixed. Technology and science still had to catch up. But the early start meant the two got in at the ground floor, and it gave them a chance to immerse themselves in the concept and to figure out its implications for the farm.

By 2012, when crop data was being successfully paired with localized weather instrumentation, Barnes was seeing, time and again, that analysts with remote data access could know more about what was going on in the field than local scouts, even though the analysts never left their offices.

However, what set the growth of Farmers Edge into overdrive was their leadership in understanding of what precision agriculture will mean for farms as businesses, not just as production units.

To this day, if you want to see Barnes bristle, tell him that VRT is a niche sector. “No one in agriculture will think that,” he snaps back.

Barnes sees the technology rewiring how farm business is done. “The farmer is the only person who makes a huge amount of decisions — million-dollar decisions — based on gut instinct,” Barnes says. “He’s got a great gut to do it, but in five years, that will change. He’ll rely on data generated on his farm to make decisions. That’s where I want to see us.”

Farmers will test a new combine on the farm, generating data about fuel efficiency, harvest speed, field losses and more to prove to the dealer what the combine is actually worth. They’ll know exactly what fertilizer to apply, what seed to plant, and how to schedule, manage and monitor complex field operations.

More than that, they will use this capability to build new partnerships, bypassing elevators and dealing directly with end-users, providing a General Mills for instance, a superior combination of genetics, climate and soil to grow its oats, together with data transparency so it can know exactly how many tonnes of what quality it will get, and when it will get it.

Nor is that a dream, Barnes says. In fact, the biggest gap isn’t technological. The big gap is in the farms that are ready to make those deals come together.

Barnes is convinced it’s a temporary gap that is already being bridged by innovative farmers around the world, and their success with data-based input decisions and data-based marketing initiatives is going to help fuel the growth of Farmers Edge over the next five years, making it a key player in five core markets — Canada, the U.S., Australia, Eastern Europe, and Brazil, which Barnes refers to as the Saudi Arabia of agriculture.

Along the way, many of those farmers may in turn be watching Barnes and Farmers Edge to learn how to turn their opportunities into modern business realities.

What they’ll mainly see is the critical role that they themselves will have to play.

The higher you go in business, Barnes will tell them, the more you will be judged on whether you bring the right stuff to the table.

Despite all the accountants and all the technical advisers, at the end of the day if you want to partner with even the biggest organizations, you can expect someone in a boardroom to demand a chance to look you in the eye and ask, is this someone I want to do business with?

If anything, Barnes is finding that his personality and his personal attributes grow more important as the company grows and the scale of its partnerships increases.

Barnes points to two Monsanto announcements that helped convince Farmers Edge to get extra serious about growth. “When Monsanto bought Precision Planters (in 2012), I went, ‘The world is going to change,’” Barnes says. “Either we sell right now or we raise capital and we change the business.”

The decision was to raise capital, and Farmers Edge bolstered its board of directors, bringing in key resources including Brian Heywood with his solid background in that arena.

Then in 2013 Monsanto paid $1 billion for Climate Corp., a startup founded by Google employees David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq that had an income stream of roughly $30 million. Again, the message was to get big or get out.

More than that, the message was also to get big by forming the right partnerships with investors who would open up new market opportunities.

“This is the side of it that a lot of people don’t realize,” Barnes says. “Raising capital is really hard. It’s much more difficult than anybody can ever imagine… not just raising capital, but raising the right capital.”

Soon, Farmers Edge was being studied for acquisition, but Barnes was also making his way to key boardrooms across Canada and in Silicon Valley, netting a deal with Kleiner Perkins after about a year of discussions, and with Mitsui after nearly two years.

In both, the process was similar, starting with a couple of phone calls and the exchange of some initial documents, then followed by extensive due-diligence analysis, followed up with a series of personal visits.

“It’s all about that,” Barnes says. “They’re making a bet on you as the CEO. That’s what it’s all about.” Such investors would rather see the company thrive with its own leadership rather than bring in a new team, which as a strategy has a more mixed track record.

So what did they look for? Barnes has a pretty clear idea. Both Kleiner Perkins and Mitsui wanted a player with entrepreneurial fire and with vision, and a leader able to attract and retain great talent. Critically, however, they also wanted a CEO who was prepared to be tough as well, and a leader who can make change, including in himself.

Barnes thinks the timing is great for farmers to expand into this new era. Not only is the field open, he says, but Canada has a good supply of smart ag graduates who can make great employees for employers who can create the exciting, challenging jobs that they want.

But also make sure you monitor your own performance, he advises. Every business goes through periods of stress, and it is in those times that employees and investors want a sense of structure, and a sense that the company knows how to get the job done.

“The entrepreneurial excitement is infectious, but if you don’t adapt, your people will get frustrated,” Barnes says, adding, “I’m a farm kid, I have no MBA or business training, but I know that if you believe in something, you have to change, grow and adapt. You have to keep the entrepreneurial, renegade spirit, but bring in structure and focus.

“If they see I’m changing, that’s infectious too.”

The post Wade Barnes’ new playbook appeared first on Country Guide.

Still, it’s essential to look for lessons, and if the 2014 growing season has taught farmers, retailers and extension personnel anything, it’s that planting conditions and cool summer weather can combine in the worst ways.

In turn, that means the big lesson this year is all about the risk of lower seed populations.

Seeding rates

Seeding rates have been a hot topic for the past three to five years. Then, with a drop in soybean prices in the forecasts last spring, many growers shaved their rates in order to cut their production costs.

Yet cutting your seeding rate isn’t for the faint of heart, and Horst Bohner for one isn’t a strong advocate of the practice.

Bohner understands the theory — beans are genetically good at compensating for low populations — and under ideal conditions, he says, it’s always good to keep an open mind about basic practices like populations.

But Bohner, soybean specialist for the Ontario agriculture ministry says this year, conditions weren’t at all ideal in most fields.

“You can solve a lot of agronomic problems by simply increasing the seeding rate or keeping it at a relatively high rate,” says Bohner. “An acre of land needs a certain minimum number of plants for maximum yields. If you fall below that, you will give up yield.

“By keeping seeding rates reasonably high,” Bohner explains, “you increase the chances of an acceptable stand. Problems associated with soil crusting, poor depth control, excess corn residue, insect feeding or a little bit of phytophthora are reduced by putting down enough seed.”

Yes, he adds, under ideal conditions and a long growing season, and by selecting the best tall and bushy variety for a specific zone or field, it’s possible for a grower to get away with a lower plant density.

“But this 2014 growing season is a perfect example of why it doesn’t always work,” says Bohner. “We had problems with plant stands, and with pod-set per plant.

“What we care about is the number of seeds per acre and the size of the seed. We don’t care about how many plants you have out there, but if every plant can only bear so much in a given year…”

So when planting rates go down, each of the plants is responsible for an even larger share of the overall yield, and there are also fewer plants to fight against any of the challenges that are almost bound to come up.

In other words, you’re heading into “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” territory.

Of course, fields can be overplanted too, especially where there’s a history of white mould, or when overplanting results in lodging.

“Within management strategies,” Bohner says, “there is a huge range, and there are producers who make lower populations work for them, and good on them — why not?”

But, he adds, just because it can sometimes happen doesn’t mean that it’s always a good idea: “It certainly takes a higher level of management when you get into those more unique strategies.”

The long and the short of it is that the growing season, even in extreme southwestern Ontario, is relatively short, and the goal is to capture as much sunlight as possible.

“If you go to wider rows and reduced populations, you just don’t have the leaf area to catch the sunlight,” Bohner says.

Diseases – east and west

As might be expected, sclerotinia (white mould) has been a problem both in eastern Ontario and in the southwest this year. For Clare Kinlin, sclerotinia is a constant issue in the east, one that was so bad in 2014 that in some fields he could see it from the highway.

Unfortunately, Kinlin says, the disease isn’t likely to go away any time soon, given the trend in rotation practices.

“We’re growing more and more soybeans every year,” says Kinlin, sales manager of the crop division for MacEwen Agricentre, based in Maxville, Ont. “We’re really starting to turn into a corn-soybean rotation.”

More beans in the rotation mean more pressure from white mould, especially in a moderately wet climate like eastern Ontario.

On the positive side though, growers are hungry for more information on how to overcome or compensate for the disease.

“They’re saying, ‘OK, we’re trying to get a tonne and a half out of these fields, so how do we get these beans to yield?’” says Kinlin. “There’s a real desire to get beans to yield, and the really frustrating part with soybeans is trying to get them to respond to anything.”

Plant populations in the region are generally 180,000 to 200,000, which was a slight increase for 2014. There’s also a greater tendency to move to 30-inch rows, a practice that’s gaining ground as more growers get rid of their drills and switch soybeans to their planters. The move is giving them better everything — better depth control, better emergence, better stands and less white mould.

“White mould is the big one, and it’s bad, it’s here to stay and that’s nothing new,” says Kinlin, setting his sights on 2015.

Asked if there’s anything to combat sclerotinia going forward into 2015, Kinlin says it all comes down to one thing: “Residue management — that first pass for next year is the combine this fall. We need to do a better job of (corn) residue management, in terms of spreading it or working it in uniformly and consistently. With 200-bushel corn and that leaves a lot of residue, and beans struggle with that.”

Six-hours’ drive west and south, Dave Curry faced the same problem in 2014. As agronomist with Parkland Farms near Sarnia, Ont., Curry oversees the operation of several thousand acres each year. And like Kinlin, he’s seen more white mould than he’d care to, although he would have expected to see more, given the cooler and wetter growing conditions this past year.

“We’re usually pretty good about planting the right variety in a field that we know has a history of white mould, where we tried to make sure we were going in with wider rows and actually planting with lower seeding populations, and planting a variety with a good genetic resistance to it,” says Curry.

Still, Parkland’s soybeans were largely planted during the last week of May and early June this year, so the crop wasn’t as lush and the onset of white mould was slower. “There was the odd pocket,” Curry says, “but I didn’t come across as much as I would have expected.”

Another sign of the cool, wet weather that Curry had to deal with was a higher-than-usual incidence of rhizoctonia on the wet spots that had some compaction issues in heavier clay. Despite the wetter-than-normal conditions, even in spite of the later planting, phytophthora wasn’t a problem, and sudden death syndrome was only an issue later in the season.

Curry was busy taking notes late in August, and mapping out the cropping plan for 2015, and perhaps eyeing 2016 in an effort to stem the spread of all of the diseases he saw.

“With certain diseases they’re going to last a lot longer,” says Curry, noting that the sclerotia associated with white mould can remain viable in the soil for years.

“It’s not a matter of if you rotate away for a couple of years, it’s gone,” Curry says. “We need to plan it longer term so that when we go back in with soybeans, we make the proper management decisions.”

Curry adds that it’d be great to be able to break the disease cycle completely by putting in a forage crop for three or four years, but for most growers, including his operation, that’s not an option. Many farmers he knows are moving to tighter rotations, although he’s maintaining his three-crop plan because he says he gets upwards of a five-bushel-per-acre yield rotational bump on his soybeans.

Curry also tries to manage the farming operation with very little tillage, yet he acknowledges there’s the temptation to bury the sclerotia associated with white mould, even to reduce the pressure for a year. But research from the U.S. suggests that given the long life of those mould spores, it’s possible that when you try to bury one year’s sclerotia, you bring other, still viable sclerotia back up to the surface.

Curry’s other concern is fungicide resistance. According to reports from the U.S., populations of two diseases, frogeye leaf spot and rhizoctonia have been confirmed to be resistant to strobilurins, and he’s watching that situation.

It’s still a long way from his Ontario ground, but Curry says that he knows of sugar beet farms in Lambton County and in Michigan that have run out of answers to the Cercospora resistance problem. And he wonders if its spread into soybeans closer to home isn’t just a matter of time.

This article was originally published as a Soybean Guide feature in the October 2014 issue of Country Guide

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