Do you depend on your provincial seed guides to help you make a choice about what varieties of canola you’re going to plant any given year? If so, you may be wondering, given that those great resources are available, why the Canola Performance Trials (CPT) are also important for making decisions for your particular acreage. […] Read more
The Canola Performance Trials
Who pays for them? Why? Learn more about how to make the trials work for you
Fertilizer prices, now and into spring
Timing fertilizer purchases is a guessing game. Here’s one expert’s take on the issue
The time to buy fertilizer is now, if you don’t have enough stored up on the farm. December and January, if you look at numbers from the last ten years, is the best time to buy fertilizers if you have the resources and space, says Todd Bergen-Henengouwen, project assistant at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, because […] Read more
Health care benefits for your farm
Farm Management: Health plans can protect your family and help you attract farm employees
Most farmer operators assume that health care benefits are only for people with off-farm jobs. Farmers usually pay for their own massage therapy and trips for the dentist. Farm employees aren’t always offered the same benefits they could get from non-farm employers. But, there are health care plan options for farmers. Buying an extended health […] Read more
‘Canola and snow’ is not profitable
New research says mixing cultivars does not mitigate the effects of continuous canola
Reconsider those plans to seed back-to-back to canola this spring, recommend Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) scientists. And they have new data to back that up. Dr. Neil Harker and other study researchers recently published the results of their five-year of the effects of continuous canola crops in The Canadian Journal of Plant Science. The […] Read more
Rethinking the natural water cycle
The natural systems we rely on and think of as simple are actually very complicated
Groundbreaking water research out of the University of Saskatchewan has just been published in the international science journal Nature. Researchers Jaivime Evaristo and Dr. Jeffrey McDonnell of from the U. of S. and Scott Jasechko of the University of Calgary have taken a new look at the hydrological cycle, something that’s been pretty well established […] Read more
New research shows plants talking
Plant researchers are finding a surprising amount of unseen communication among plants
Farmers know well the issues that can arise with their crops. One of the biggies is insects eating plants. What’s interesting, though, is that recently more studies are being done on how plants communicate with and to the environment around them. While research on plants has been happening for thousands of years, says Dr. James […] Read more
What to do with that flax straw
Many farmers think flax looks good this year. The downside? All that straw
If you’re already growing flax as a part of your rotation, or you’re thinking of starting to include flax at your farm, you might already know that the flax seed market is good. But, the question always comes up: what can be done with the straw? Often flax straw is seen as a waste product […] Read more
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
