Unfortunately, as farms get larger and tasks get more specialized, many farmers have found that their family members don’t have the skills needed to get important jobs done effectively. Worse, not every child wants to stay on the farm as they grow up, and this can lead to a manpower shortage just when an operation may be becoming quite profitable. Eventually, a farmer realizes that they need a combine operator, accountant, manager, or some other specialized position, and that they have to fill it from outside the family.

The very closeness of family and lack of formal management structures can make this difficult. For some farmers the first non-family member hired is the first time they’ve ever had to think just as a manager.

We’re not talking about hiring unskilled field hands to help gather fodder or other basic tasks — we’re talking about hiring someone with skills to fill an important, business critical position. With that in mind, we have assembled some tips to make the hiring process easier.

1. Define the position

Every farmer is used to being a jack-of-all-trades: being their own mechanic, botanist, salesman, and vet. They’re used to developing a range of skills and expect it from their children who work with them as well. Employing an outsider, however, requires carefully defining the roles, skills, and responsibilities of a position. These are how both you and your employee will judge their performance.

For example, say you needed a manager to handle selling your jams, jellies, and other preserves to supermarkets. You’d need someone with previous experience in sales, knowledge of the retail food industry, and skills working with canning and bottling machinery.

2.  Set a reasonable salary and benefits

To attract an employee you’ll need to offer a salary that makes it worth their while to work for you. Statistics Canada’s website can give you a range of average salaries for a wide range of jobs which will help you set a price that will work for you economically and still be attractive. Be sure to compare to wages in your local area for similar jobs because you’ll need to be a bit competitive to attract good people who have other options.

3. Advertise the position

As with many things these days the internet is your best and lowest priced option. Sites like Craigslist and Kijiji offer free job posting boards. If you want to shorten the search you can also post jobs with headhunting agencies that find employees. They’ll ask for a premium when you hire one of their candidates but they can be worth it because they’ll handle most of the job search for you and bring you qualified people.

4. Establish performance reviews

Once you’ve hired your new employee you’ll need to set up some measures to judge their performance. You don’t want to be dismissing someone after six months just because you “think they aren’t working out.” You’ll want a business case to justify letting them go and hiring someone else. For a salesman you would set sales targets and check whether they were achieving them; for a combine harvester driver you’d want to check that they’re keeping the combine in good repair and that they are an efficient operator who gets the job done in a reasonable amount of time.

5. Don’t expect them to do everything

One of the keys to keeping employees is not just salary, it’s respect. As noted in No. 1, while you may be used to doing everything on your farm a salaried employee expects to be judged by their performance in one set of tasks. If you hire a combine driver and then start asking them to handle sales, they’re going to start asking for more money or leave. If you’re a small operation where everyone needs to pitch in outside of their specific job role every now and then, be honest when you hire them and let them know a portion of their total hours will be free for “odd jobs” — perhaps 10 to 15 per cent.

6. Don’t play favourites

Tensions between employees in a workplace are common and a headache for all managers. The headaches are even greater when one of the employees is your son or daughter and the other is a (comparative) stranger. To retain good workers you’ll need to learn to be fair, rather than automatically siding with your blood relations. This may cause tensions but you should be clear with your children that this is a business and that you all need to get along to make it succeed.

While hiring employees can be difficult, the needed skills they bring to your operation can be invaluable. With patience and forethought, hiring and employing can be made that much easier, and become a regular part of your expanding operation.

The post Six tips for hiring and keeping your farm employees appeared first on Grainews.

His presentation, “The Ultimate Management Challenge: Succeeding At Succession,” addressed one of the most difficult parts of running a family farm: planning to transition ownership. While 99.9 per cent of farm businesses in Canada are family owned only 30 per cent of are passed down to the second generation, 15 per cent make it to the third, and only five per cent make it to the fourth.

The issues are not legal or financial. The real issues, he said, are relationships. Unresolved conflicts destroy family businesses.

To make transitions easier Fast recommended five habits for families to cultivate.

1. Define a common vision of success

The first thing Fast asks his clients to do is to come up with a common vision of what a successful transition looks like. It doesn’t need to be anything grand like the vision statement of a corporation. What it has to be is common: everyone has to be on board for it to succeed.

One family he helped had their vision of success defined by their mother: “Everyone is happy to come for Christmas dinner every year.” That is, a succession where everyone is still on speaking terms. He recommended making a habit of discussing and refining the common vision, ideally years before the retirement of the owners.

2. Avoid role confusion

Family businesses, Fast said, face a lot of complexity. On a family farm where multiple siblings work along with the parents you often have situations where someone is both a father and a manager, or where one sibling can be the de facto boss of another. This can lead to hurt feelings because impersonal business decisions can feel like personal snubs.

Fast gave the example of a family where the father decided that the fourth son of six would be head of the family farm, which was shocking news to the eldest. That painful situation, Fast said, could have been avoided if the father had come to his sons as a father to discuss what he felt was best for the farm before making a pronouncement as a manager, rather than confusing everyone by mingling the two roles.

3. Respect people’s choices

One major roadblock in succession planning, Fast said, is failure to respect each others choices. This is one of the key sources of resentment in families, particularly towards siblings who left the farm and now when succession is being discussed, expect a part of the business. The failure of respect is mutual — the sibling who left does not appreciate that they made a decision that involves a sacrifice, and the others do not appreciate that the sibling is still family and, while not necessarily entitled to a share, needs to be part of the discussions about succession. These conversations, like all the others, have to start early.

4. Prepare your founder for transition

A founder’s inability to let go is a problem in every type of business, Fast said, but it’s a huge problem on family farms. Retirement means giving up control and that can be very hard for someone who has worked their entire life building a successful business. They can worry that their children will screw things up. Worse, they can fear that their children will be more successful than they were.

To successfully transition the founder to retirement, Fast recommends encouraging them to cultivate hobbies outside of work long before retirement. He also recommends preserving an office for them to give them some place to go, to feel that they’re not completely out of the loop. Finally, he says that they need to be encouraged to see their children’s success as their own: it’s proof that you raised them well.

5. Build trust through communication

Ultimately, Fast said, good relationships come down to good communication. The ultimate habit, he said, the one that embraces all the other four, is making a habit of communicating with your family what you believe and feel.

It is not conflict, he said, that kills people or makes them ill with stress — it is suppressing conflict from fear. This means that conflicts can be buried so long that they will blow up and hurt everyone when they come out when they could have been successfully addressed years before. All members of the family need to start making a habit, right now, of being open with one another about how they feel and what they think about the farm and about succession before it becomes an issue.

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In spraying season, mud can be especially problematic: it damages sprayer nozzles, contributes to corrosion and rust and requires a lot of downtime for washing equipment. Mud can also be dangerous to your crop — pathogens like clubroot can spread from field to field in a glob of mud.

To get sprayers into wet fields, you need wider tires. Those wider tires kick up a lot more mud even at slow speeds.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the sprayer fenders weren’t made only for the slim (dry weather) size of tire, allowing a gap where mud flies free and can collect.

You can buy wide fenders, but they’re expensive, and it takes a long time to install them and remove them.

Where an average farmer sees only a problem an enterprising farmer sees an opportunity. One of those enterprising farmers is Eric Gray of Indian Head, Saskatchewan. Eric manufactures the FenderXTender, a bolt-on addition to sprayer fenders that covers the wider tires and stops the mud from being kicked up. They are made of durable polyurethane they do not rust, and can be stacked easily when they aren’t needed. Gray has also made sure they install easily; you won’t need to modify the fenders provided by your manufacturer.

They not only install easily, but uninstall just as easily when you switch back to narrow sprayer tires. This means you don’t need to worry about the wide fenders knocking the tops off of your growing crop.

Gray came up with the idea after a few particularly frustrating days spraying his fields. With the heavy rain they had been experiencing, maintenance and cleaning was taking up more and more of his time. “It was getting to the point where I had to clean off my sprayer with a shovel every day,” he says. He searched the Internet looking for a wide fender solution but could not find one. Realizing that no convenient solution existed Gray decided to create his own. “I called my Dad about this idea I had and he said, ‘Yeah, I think you’re on to something.’”

Working with his father, Gray came up with a prototype FenderXTender close to the current design. After testing it on his field they were both impressed by how well it worked and how much it shortened cleaning time and decided to take it to market.

They sold the first few units to neighbours and, after a year testing prototypes, officially launched it at the Farm Progress Show in Regina, winning Runner-Up in the New Invention Category. They have been taking it around to farm shows all winter and now dealers have started to come to them asking to carry it.

Gray is proud of how local the company is: the FenderXTender’s plastic parts are made in Saskatoon, the metal pieces are laser cut in Regina, and a welder in Indian Head assembles the final units. It’s also a family company: “My Mom is a retired school teacher and I recruited her to help out at the farm shows and my Dad comes to help out with the engineering. And I have an aunt that is the chief financial officer for the company.”

You can catch Gray at major agriculture technology exhibitions this year. With wet weather likely to be common for the foreseeable future, and clubroot a growing concern across the Prairies, Gray and his FenderXTender are likely to find a lot of business for years to come.

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The major problem, Schwarcz said, is that the public conversation about food, health and agriculture has become dominated by quacks — people purveying pseudoscientific nonsense to scare the public.

Farmers, governments, and agriculture companies have become complacent, he said, trusting that the public thought well of them and could sort out nonsense from sense, science from pseudoscience. Regrettably, this is not the case. Not only is misinformation about science becoming more widespread it is growing so widespread it could have a serious impact on how farmers grow their food by promoting legislation for regulating industry that is not science-based, with long-term impacts on both farm viability and consumer nutrition.

The word “chemical”

In Schwarcz opinion the most damaging effects of this misinformation has been the demonization of the word “chemical.” He showed slide after slide of organic food stands and advertisements advertising “chemical free” produce. The media are no help: they prefer “man bites dog” stories where people were harmed by chemicals over the countless stories of food made safer and more nutritious with chemical inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.

Numerous online bloggers, lacking any scientific credentials at all, have frightened many consumers into the belief that “if you can’t pronounce it, it’s not food.” Schwarcz showed the silliness of this by presenting a list of the chemical compounds present in organic apples, which included acetone, formaldehyde and isopropanol (rubbing alcohol). That might sound scary, he said, but asked the audience to always keep in mind the saying of Paracelsus, the 16th century alchemist and one of the founders of modern chemistry: “only the dose makes the poison.” Tiny amounts of chemicals that are lethal in large amounts have no known effects on human health.

All the chemicals in common use in agriculture, from herbicides and pesticides to preservatives and ripeness promoters, have been approved by Health Canada and other regulatory agencies; they have been extensively tested to ensure they are safe for human consumption. They are safe at levels far above the trace amounts that make it onto the average Canadian’s dinner plate.

The quacks and misinformed citizens respond to these facts (when they don’t claim all the research is biased towards the agrichemical companies) by demanding to know about the long term effects of those trace amounts. A few micrograms here or there of glyphosate may be harmless, they say, but what about a few micrograms per day over a lifetime? Couldn’t that cause cancer or other illnesses?

The fact, Schwarcz said, is that we do not know. Long-term effects are very difficult to study. What we are able to determine is that the chemicals we use have not led to any notable increases in human mortality, and have in fact been introduced at a time when human life expectancy continues to grow year after year. If they do have a negative effect, it is one cancelled out by the benefits of having access to plentiful nutritious food year round.

Effectively the quacks and scaremongers are asking science to do the impossible: to prove that harmful effects absolutely cannot happen. This cannot be done — it is always possible, in principle, for any scientific finding to be overturned. It will be tricky, Schwarz said, but we need to educate the public about how scientists and regulators judge risks against benefits.

The need for chemical agriculture

One important thing to remind consumers, Schwarcz said, is that the adoption of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides was not a purely profit seeking activity. It was necessary. To grow enough food to feed the world’s growing population requires continuously increasing crop yields. That is not possible without agricultural chemicals to improve plant nutrition and prevent losses from fungi, weeds and insects.

Schwarcz concluded by reminding his audience (and asking them to remind others) that “chemicals are to be neither worshipped nor feared; they are to be understood.” Through a sustained effort by every part of the agricultural industry, from large companies down to small farmers, we can begin to change the tide of public opinion away from the quacks and towards sound science.

*Editor’s note: In the original version of this article, we misspelled Dr. Schwarcz’s name. We regret the error. April 15th, 4:55 pm.

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Dorsey started off by pointing out that some strife between generations is normal and in fact healthy — young people need to make a space for themselves in the world and find out their capabilities and limits. What’s not normal is the increased strife we are witnessing now due to technological and societal changes. The costs of misunderstandings are being increased and threaten both family unity and the survival of family farms.

Dorsey addressed himself primarily to the parents in the audience, the baby boomers (ages 45 to 65) who are struggling to understand their millennial (ages 18 to 35) offspring. To help create better understanding and reduce friction, Dorsey asked them to keep in mind the following facts about the new generation of workers.

Entitlement

Baby boomers, Dorsey said, often complain about their children having a sense of “entitlement,” a feeling that they deserve things without working for them. He admitted that this is a real factor but says that the baby boomers have only themselves to blame; after all, they’re the ones who made the decision to be easier on their children than their parents were on them. They’re the ones who paid for college tuition and phones and first vehicles and, in many cases, are still paying their bills. It’s natural that young people who have grown up this way have higher expectations of what they deserve and lower estimates of what they need to do to earn it than their parents do.

The situation isn’t hopeless, Dorsey emphasized. It’s a matter of introducing responsibilities gradually and in a regular way. That starts with not expecting their children to have the same experience and skills they had at their age.

Starting ages

The average millennial, Dorsey said, is five years older than their parents or grandparents when they start their first job. “If your first job was at 18,” he said, “they are starting at 23, by which you had probably already had worked at three jobs.” This is because so many millennials have spent more years pursuing advanced education, education that their parents both encouraged and paid for.

The problem, Dorsey said, is that each generation bases their expectations of competence on their own experience, so baby boomer parents expect their children to be as professional and work savvy in their mid-20s as they were.

Baby boomers need to drop the expectations of competence, Dorsey said. That doesn’t mean they need to set lower standards but they need to allow their children to mature on the job and grow into their duties and responsibilities. Millennials can help, he said, by realizing that they have a lot to learn about work and that their parents are eager to help them.

Feedback

Baby boomers grew up and worked in careers where feedback was regular but very spaced out, typically an annual performance review. For farmers it may have come as a stern rebuke by their parents for their performance at the end of the growing season. They prefer to communicate their feedback in just this way to their children, with long periods between feedback but a large amount of it when it was due.

Millennials, Dorsey emphasized, have been educated in a different way: they’ve gone to schools that have cultivated their self-esteem with very regular feedback and they use social media like Twitter and Facebook which gives them constant approvals and ego boosts. The way to manage them, Dorsey says, is to communicate frequently with them about their performance, but keep the communications brief — let them know how they’re doing without overwhelming them at any one time.

Learning styles

Millennials, Dorsey emphasized, are overwhelmingly visual learners: they learn best by being shown how something is done and how it is expected to look when it is finished. “This is a generation,” Dorsey said, “that doesn’t go to Dad for help fixing their car; they go to YouTube.” Those with smartphones can help them by shooting short videos of how they want tasks done, as well as photographs of how things should look when finished.

Dorsey acknowledges these adjustments may be annoying (he admitted to the audience he had been a great frustration to his own father, a Texas farmer) but that millennials are eager learners when things are put in a way they understand. You’ll likely be surprised, he said, how quickly they come around and become valuable employees.

The post Working with returning kids appeared first on Grainews.

Integrity post structures

Incorporated in 2008, Integrity Post Structures specializes in the building of post-frame buildings for the agricultural and commercial market. A post-frame building, as its name implies, is built using wooden posts as a frame unlike the more common post-and-beam structures. Using pre-fabricated wooden posts allows for a diversity of layouts, energy efficiency, and rapid construction times, all important to agricultural producers in need of structures to house livestock, store grain, or keep farm machinery out of the weather. They can also build very large structures without the need for poured concrete foundations. Their services are in high demand.

Al Williams, co-founder of Integrity along with Jerry Myers, says they build between 300 and 400 buildings a year. “We manage 17 crews here,” Williams says.

Part of the speed and economy Integrity offers is due to the simplicity: “Our buildings are very, very simple,” Williams says, “we try to stick with basic structures. We just focus on building the buildings, not getting sidetracked into floors or electrical or plumbing.” In Integrity’s experience most farmers are able to handle those features themselves or find local contractors to do the work. “A lot of times their struggle is with building the building itself,” Williams says. Those buildings can be very large — up to 22 feet high with the larger 290 pound columns — but few customers require roofs that high.

One obstacle farmers often have is a lack of construction services. Concrete foundation contractors are sparse out in rural areas, and even when contractors can be found the foundations can be prohibitively expensive. This is where Integrity’s Perma-Columns give them a major lead over other contractors.

Precast concrete columns

Integrity is the licensed Canadian manufacturer of Perma-Columns. Crafted from precast concrete, they keep the wooden frame out of contact with the ground. This protects the frame from rot and adds years of useful life to the structure, without greatly increasing cost or sacrificing the speed of building. It’s a solid concrete foundation for the building’s posts without the need for a full poured one. “Once we saw the product,” Williams says, “we knew there was great potential for it in Canada.”

To every project Integrity brings a wealth of industry knowledge about the latest manufacturing and building techniques. Because of this they start each project by asking customers to talk to them about their needs rather than their wants. In one instance a farmer wanted a lean-to built onto an existing structure but Integrity was able to demonstrate that a whole new building would be less expensive than an expansion. “No two buildings are exactly the same,” says Williams, “they can be customized to suit individual needs. We’ve done this enough times that we have good solutions for a wide range of issues facing farmers.”

Of particular interest to grain farmers is Integrity Post Structure’s grain storage buildings. Built with their Perma-Column, the buildings can be assembled quickly and at low cost. They also come in a wide range of sizes and options, with insulated and uninsulated doors of various sizes, perfect for housing farm equipment likes tractors and combines.

Perma-Columns combines the economy of wooden post-frame construction with the versatility of a concrete foundation. Facing high demand for their services, Integrity is working on training new construction crews to continue delivering prompt, high-quality service to their customers.

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The rising costs have, so far, been more than compensated for by soaring prices for soybeans in the past few years but that trend will not continue forever; eventually farmers will begin to feel the pinch and will increasingly want to find ways to boost yields while reducing their use of the glyphosate resistant seeds.

Lower seeding rates

A natural solution is to reduce seeding rates. Evidence from many recent studies shows this can be done without significantly reducing yields. For instance, soybeans have been shown to produce 20 per cent more branches per plant at lower seeding rates (under 250,000 seeds per hectare) than at higher rates (near 450,000 seeds per hectare). Simply put, each plant is able to develop more fully when it has more space in which to grow and faces less competition from its neighbours. That means a higher overall soybean yield.

Unfortunately that lower plant density can make the plants more vulnerable to weeds. Common Canadian Prairie weeds grow more aggressively and compete more ferociously for water and nutrients than soybeans. The main way soybeans compete is to form a thick canopy, which starves the competing weeds of the sunlight they need to drive their metabolism. Less dense planting means a less dense canopy, and a less dense canopy means a more welcoming environment for weeds. This in turn reduces soybean yields and cuts into the profits farmers would have enjoyed through savings on seed.

Dense soybeans canopies are a part of integrated weed management (IWM), an increasingly important practice as common weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to growing season applied glyphosate. This would seem to leave soybean farmers at an impasse.

Pre-season herbicides

Recent research by scientists at the University of Wisconsin shows a way to a relatively low cost solution, a way to seed less densely without worrying about weeds reducing your yield. The study is titled, “Can Soybean Seeding Rate Be Used As An Integrated Component Of Herbicide Resistance Management”, and was published in the October-December 2014 issue of Weed Science. In the article, these scientists, led by Ryan DeWerff, studied the effects of combining pre-season residual herbicides with lower seeding densities.

The researchers found that early season weeds are a substantial competitor with soybeans. These can take away vital water from the vulnerable growing plants, as well as reduce the availability of soil nutrients. If these weeds are also resistant to glyphosate (very possible in fields where glyphosate is regularly applied) and other common weed killers then they will become strongly established and significantly reduce yields later in the season. Denser soybean plantings were not very effective at suppressing these weeds.

In contrast, pre-growth herbicide treatments with metolachlor and fomesafen (sold under the brand name Prefix from Syngenta) were very effective at suppressing early season weeds and allowed the soybeans to enjoy the greater potential to develop in a less dense canopy. Fewer weeds in these plots also lowered the number of plants that could become resistant to herbicides, an important factor for farmers looking to achieve integrated weed management in their fields.

The scientists concluded that pre-season residual herbicides use produced maximum yields with fewer plants per hectare than late season applications. This is good news for soybean growers wondering how to control weeds this season while economizing on seeds. Though the research was done in Wisconsin, results should apply to soybean farmers everywhere.

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Raising canola yields on the same land requires more intensive cultivation as well as rotating canola more frequently than in the past. This strategy carries significant risk of heavy losses as many canola pests and diseases are capable of overwintering in fields and on surrounding vegetation making them harder to control.

To test out the possible effects of this more intensive cultivation, researchers from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada undertook a series of trial to see what happens. This team, which includes Neil Harker of the Lacombe Research Centre in Alberta, recently published their results in the Canadian Journal of Plant Science under the title “Canola rotation frequency impacts canola yield and associated pest species.”

The research

To study the effects of more intensive cultivation the scientists conducted six years of trials at five sites across the Prairies using glyphosate and glufosinate resistant canola, treating them with the recommended amounts of herbicide each season. Each field had previously grown no-till wheat, barley, or oats. In different fields, they tested different rotation rates, alternating canola with various crops on one- and two-year intervals. After five years, researchers collected and analyzed the data, looking for the effects of temperature and precipitation, weed densities, blackleg disease levels, root maggot damage and canola yield.

“In terms of the number of sites,” Harker told us, “and the way it was conducted there hadn’t been a study quite like this before. To make this more useful we conducted an all-phases study, which means that if we had wheat in one year and canola the next we also had canola in that first year and wheat the next.” The all-phases nature of the research helped the research team eliminate single-year effects, like weather that may have just been, by chance, better for one crop rather than another.

The results

Among the major results of the study was the finding that canola seed yields were not hurt significantly by decreasing the years of rotation between crops. At the same time, canola yields always improved when wheat or field pea were followed by barley between canola plantings. So while there was not significant loss with intensive cropping, yields were higher with rotations, as was expected. “What stood out to me the most,” Harker said, “was how consistent the improvement in production was with years between canola crops. In other words as you go from zero years (between crops) or continuous canola you had yield improving constantly as you put both one year and then two years between them.”

As for diseases and pests, the study confirmed what was long suspected, that growing canola intensively invites increased yield losses due to predation. “As you went from zero to two years,” Harker said, “you had pests, whether they were insects or disease, decreasing.”

Without a year or two of rotation between canola persistent pests proved highly resilient and hurt yields significantly. Another result of interest was that higher yields were produced at sites that had relatively uniform precipitation (no extremes of wet or dry) and generally cooler temperatures. If you live in a region that regularly experiences cooler than provincial average temperatures this may be another reason to consider canola planting.

While high frequency rotation of canola may be profitable in the short term it will be highly risky in the long term. To ensure sustainable production (and a profitable farm) the researchers recommend that farmers balance high immediate-income low diversity cropping with lower immediate-income, higher diversity systems. This can be accomplished by not using your entire farm for intensive cropping but only a portion, retaining one area in longer-term canola rotation. Managed over several years, rotating the areas of higher intensity cultivation, can yield strong returns for the careful farm manager.

Harker and his colleagues plan to continue the study for three more years. In addition to seeing how the trends they’ve identified continue they will be working with economic specialists to calculate the effects of different rotation strategies on a farmer’s bottom line.

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A group of agronomists from the University of Guelph, and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture set out to answer that question. They recently published their results in the “Canadian Journal of Plant Science” with the title “Winter Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Response to Herbicides As Affected By Application Timing and Temperature.”

Given the popularity of winter wheat out here on the Prairies we got in touch with one of these researchers, Melody Robison, to ask her about lessons they learned from their study that can be used west of Ontario.

The study

The scientists studied wheat growing in open fields between 2009 and 2010. This was an important advance because previous studies of cold weather herbicide treatments had been conducted in growth cabinets in laboratories and greenhouses. They tested a wide range of herbicides both by themselves and in combination in three different timings: early (before the emergence of the crop), normal, and late. The early timing was set to coincide with below freezing temperatures over the test fields.

The majority of the herbicides were not found to cause lasting damage to winter wheat. Only 2,4-D by itself and the two combinations of dicamba/MCPA/mecoprop and dichlorprop/2,4-D were harmful to winter wheat, causing visible injuries like necrosis, leaf bleaching, and curling, but these healed as the growing season went on.

Though the herbicides produced little injury to the winter wheat this is not a reason to be careless with cold temperature spraying. The most important reason is because cold temperatures not only slow the metabolism and growth of winter wheat, they also slow the metabolism and growth of weeds. Slower metabolism means less uptake of herbicides, and thus less herbicide effectiveness. Spraying during cold weather, while it may seem like a way to get a jump on weed growth, may often be just wasting product and with it money.

It is also important to be cautious when applying herbicides to winter wheat late in the growing process, particularly combination herbicides. Dicamba/MCPA/mecoprop is the most damaging when applied late, and did adversely affect yields. As with so many things, timing is of the essence when it comes to treating weeds. Farmers should strive, whenever possible, to apply herbicides at the prescribed times to their crops rather than early or late.

Spraying too soon risks wasting money; spring too late risks injuring the crops. Herbicide sprayings should be timed to the growth stage of weeds, to make sure there is maximum absorption and effect.

To help you make better decisions about when to apply herbicides consider learning more about the Zadoks scale, a measurement of the development of cereal crops. Optimal herbicide application time on winter wheat is between Zadoks 21 to 29, when the plants stem is beginning to elongate. You will likely be able to find Zadoks scale guides through your local ministry of agriculture, and a quick Google search for “Zadoks scale” will turn up many good sites on its use.

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Though the year was hard that doesn’t mean this year needs to be. With some careful planning and hard work you can start to protect your farm to ride out this time of lower demand. One way to do so is to diversify your operation. This doesn’t just mean growing multiple crops — it can mean diversifying into livestock and producing food products right on your farm. With the aid of some free, simple decision making tools you’ll be able to find areas on your farm where you can change up your operation and bring in multiple streams of income. The tips on this list focus on choosing a new crop to diversify your farm.

1. Consider your options

There is a huge array of potential crops you can grow. The issue is picking the one that will produce the highest yields, at the best price, with the lowest inputs, and that takes best advantage of the qualities of your land. It’s no good to pick soybeans based just on high prices from last year, or the attractive futures contracts being offered this year.

The high price doesn’t mean anything if you need to acquire a lot of new equipment, herbicides, and pesticides that can eat up all your profits, or if your land isn’t suited for growing the crop.

2. Do your research

Try the interest for economic data about different crops and their performance. Provincial government agricultural ministries often provide a lot of information, and, no matter which crop you are considering, there is usually some information available. Look for information about what historically has grown best in what regions of the province.

Narrow your research by focusing on the crops that are producing the best return on investment, but don’t limit yourself too much — you may discover that your land is perfect for growing a less common grain, pulse, or herb which has strongly growing demand and is unrepresented in your region.

One excellent source for Alberta farmers is the AgriProfit$ program. This free service provides business management information for farm operators, including a detailed financial analysis of their farm, their current enterprises, and benchmark reports comparing them to other farms in their region.

3. Ask an expert

After doing some research and picking your most likely crop be sure to consult with an expert.

Each province maintains a staff of experts on each variety of crop, and know all about the performance of the crop in different regions. They’ll be able to give you advice that isn’t included in the reports on the government website because they’re knowledgeable about the latest research, including which varieties of the crop are most responsive to which inputs.

4. Budget for change

After you’ve made your decision, be sure to draw up a sound business plan and budget. According to Dale Kaliel, senior production economist, Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, good planning is important to managing your farm operation. Your “plan” will deliver the rationale behind the economic choices you’re making about what will be produced, how it will be produced and why it will be produced.

If you’re growing the same crop you grew last year plus a new one, you’ll have to factor in how much less income you’ll bring in from the old crop (because you’ll be growing less of it) in relation to the projected income for the new one.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a budget is just about dollars and cents — your time is part of the budget too, and like money you only have a finite amount of it. Researching a new crop, learning about the inputs and variables that affect its yield, acquiring the materials, and planting the crop all take time. This is especially true if you’re growing multiple crops on your farm. Make sure you take account of how long you’ll need to implement your plan.

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