Reading Time: < 1 minute Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) has a new deputy minister. Greg Meredith will become deputy minister on Jan. 9. A deputy minister is a ministry’s chief civil servant, managing its implementation of government policy. Meredith replaces Dr. Deb Stark, who recently retired as deputy minister, capping a 30-year career in public […] Read more
Ontario names new top ag bureaucrat
Pest Patrol: Farmers are reducing weed seed return after cereal harvest
#PestPatrol with Mike Cowbrough, OMAFRA
Reading Time: 3 minutes I was driving down a long country road and noticed two large fields where winter wheat had been harvested almost eight weeks earlier. Each had a beautiful thick canopy of oats. Figure 1 (at top). An oat cover crop planted almost eight weeks ago following winter wheat harvest. That same day, when I came across […] Read more
OMAFRA seen needing a soil health ‘tuneup’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Ontario’s environmental commissioner is calling on the provincial ag ministry to rebuild its soil health expertise and find ways to encourage farmers to adopt soil-friendly production practices, to deal with what she calls a “catastrophic” loss in soil organic matter levels. The report recommends better soil carbon level monitoring and 10-year programs to financially encourage […] Read more
Four growers who believe in inter-seeding into standing corn
"It’s something that we have to start doing and advertising to the consumer," Gerard Grubb, Mildmay farmer
Reading Time: 11 minutes As trends go, this one is picking up steam. Two years ago, it seemed a novelty. You were lucky to see it outside of a few test locations such as at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show, although there were also isolated growers who had become believers, especially in Quebec. Today, the movement has clearly spread, not […] Read more
A new look at 30-inch rows for soybeans
If you think the case is closed on 30-inch rows, get ready to think again
Reading Time: 7 minutes Soybean growers near the Ontario-Quebec border have tested wide rows, and some have even adopted them already as a way of managing white mould pressure. The disease thrives here. even though agronomists can’t exactly say why. But there’s also more to the 30-inch debate than just mould control. Based in the eastern end of the […] Read more
Last call for continuous soybean crops
Continuous soys are tough on the soil, tough on yields and tough on the pocketbook. So why do we still plant them?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Many years ago, Ross Daily, the television host of “This Business of Farming” spoke at a county-level federation of agriculture meeting, and in the course of his speech congratulated growers on their six-year rotations. The audience was frankly bewildered until Daily offered an explanation to clear the confusion. “You know what I’m talking about: soybeans-soybeans-soybeans-soybeans-soybeans, […] Read more
A big step for small grains
New market opportunities will come with research and advocacy
Reading Time: 5 minutes For several years now, there have been questions about adding crops to the Grain Farmers of Ontario (GFO). Beyond the charter commodities of corn, wheat and soybeans, for instance, there have been murmurs about bringing in edible beans. But early this past July, it was farmers who grow oats and barley who became the latest […] Read more
The Integrated Pest Management (IPM) challenge for today’s crops
Are you keeping on top of all these new pest-control opportunities?
Reading Time: 8 minutes The term has been around for decades, and it trips off our tongues as easily as “no-till management” and “cover crops.” Yet one of the challenges, even for those in search of a silver bullet in crop management, is the constant evolution of the term “IPM.” Its meaning is rapidly evolving, and so are the […] Read more
Are farmers suffering from too much information?
With today’s big data, it sure would help to have those provincial crop advisers back on the team
Reading Time: 7 minutes While agriculture in Canada has been evolving in the past 10 to 15 years, there has also been a curious evolution in the quantity and the quality of information available to farmers. In the late 1990s, at least in Ontario, the governing Conservative Party began scaling back on what was referred to as “bricks and […] Read more
PHOTOS: Pest Patrol: What is the best way to get rid of common burdock?
Seeds may be viable for up to three years so manage accordingly
Reading Time: 2 minutes Knowing how this plant reproduces will influence how you manage it. Burdock is biennial and reproduces only by seed. Following seed germination in the spring, burdock will grow into a large leafy rosette plant with a large taproot that allows it to overwinter. In the second year, burdock will flower and produce the burrs we […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
