Soil health Archives - Page 11 of 24

Compostable bale wrap heads toward wide release

Nature's Net Wrap an environment-friendly alternative to long-lived plastic

By Scott Garvey March 1, 2024

Virtually every cattle farmer and rancher has tripped over an old piece of plastic baler twine or net wrap stuck in the ground in a corral or bale yard. The stuff just never seems to go away. But an entrepreneurial Alberta ranching family has come up with a solution to eliminate that problem with a […] Read more

Tile drains are perforated plastic pipes installed below the crop rooting zone, used to reduce the depth of shallow water tables in imperfectly and poorly drained areas of a field. This pipe has a filter sock to prevent sediment from getting into the tile system.

Crops, Features

Make it drain: Is tile right for your fields?

A producer and an agrologist consider whether tile is worth your while

By Jim Timlick February 27, 2024

Tile drainage may be the best tool in the toolbox to manage saline soil in fields, a southwestern Manitoba farmer told an audience at the recent Ag Days farm show. Aaron Hargreaves, who co-owns Harwest Farms south of Brandon, said he and his four partners have struggled with soil salinity on their farm since they […] Read more

At Lethbridge just one year in the past 10 booked above-normal precipitation during its growing season.

Columns, Weather

A decade of dry

Let's review the variability of weather and soil moisture at Lethbridge

By Ross H. McKenzie February 26, 2024

Weather is often the greatest factor that influences crop production across the Prairies — in particular, growing season precipitation and level of heat. The southern Prairies, particularly the regions of the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones, have the lowest growing-season precipitation, in the range of 150 to 200 mm (six to eight inches) and […] Read more

Many growers equate efficiency with applying their nitrogen "up front" instead of opting for split applications.

Corn, Features

Nitrogen use in corn re-examined

Research from the U.S. Midwest sparks controversy, but the solution may be easier

By Glacier FarmMedia staff, Ralph Pearce February 23, 2024

Glacier FarmMedia — When it comes to nitrogen use in corn, it’s always been a question of how much to apply. University of Illinois research on the source of N — that is, how much a corn plant gets from fertilizer and how much from soil — has initiated a considerable amount of debate since […] Read more

Twelve binders at work near Wilcox, Sask., in what's now the RM of Bratt's Lake, year unknown.

Columns, Crops, Spring Wheat

Where the wheat was

Let's track 85 years of hard red spring wheat yields in Saskatchewan, by RM

By Les Henry February 19, 2024

The folks at Saskatchewan’s ministry of agriculture have produced a digital dashboard that has a complete record of wheat yields for each rural municipality all the way back to 1938. It is an Excel file, 20.5 MB in size, which means a lot of numbers. It’s very easy to select any RM in the province […] Read more

U of M professor Paul Bullock checks data from a portable weather station during development of the FHB risk assessment tool.

Cereals, Crops, Wheat & Chaff

Online fusarium management tool due out this spring

Preliminary tests of the online tool showed a good level of accuracy

By Jim Timlick February 19, 2024

A follow-up to a story we first brought you last July about a new online tool being developed by soil scientists at the University of Manitoba to make fusarium head blight (FHB) risk management in cereal crops easier for Prairie farmers. Paul Bullock, a senior scholar with the U of M’s department of soil science, […] Read more

Columns, Markets

A hundred years of Prairie farmland prices

Don’t bet the farm on that much-anticipated easing of interest rates

By Les Henry February 9, 2024

Farmland prices continue to go up like a helium balloon, leading to speculation that it might continue and speculation in land as a commodity. In this piece we will look at a long history and provide some guesses about the future. Anyone who thinks they can actually predict the future is living in dreamland. Figure […] Read more

Columns, Crops

Soil testing and fertilizer recommendations on the Prairies

Are you getting the best 4R recommendations for your farm?

By Ross H. McKenzie February 7, 2024

I have been retired for almost 10 years, but farmers still contact me occasionally with questions about their soil test reports and for assistance with interpretation. I am a big fan of soil testing but soil sampling, soil analyses and interpretation all must be done correctly. If not, results can be very misleading and costly […] Read more

Features, Soybeans

Window now wider, but ideal timing to plant soy still same

Risks also remain if pushing luck with planting depth and rates

By Don Norman February 7, 2024

Glacier FarmMedia — Provincial pulse and soybean specialist Dennis Lange says the window for planting soybeans in Manitoba is getting wider. “In the past, one of our big concerns was planting soybeans too early,” he says. “That was our initial discussion a few years ago.” Soybeans are susceptible to frost, and historically, the risk of […] Read more

Seed treated with Vibrance Total, a combination of five different fungicide groups being brought to market for the 2024 season.

Features, Pulses

The year in pulse crop inputs

A quick look at new actives, new combinations and expanded labels

By Grainews Staff February 6, 2024

Following up on last issue’s roundup of product launches and label expansions in the cereal crop input market, here we’ve put together a quick list of new and/or improved pulse crop inputs that were announced in our earshot during the past year, including several due out for the coming growing season. Again, if we’ve inadvertently […] Read more

U.S. livestock: Cattle futures higher on screwworm news

Trade mission heads for Japan as Canada becomes the country’s top pork supplier

U.S. grains: Soybeans drop on lack of Chinese demand, wheat hits contract lows

GFM Network News