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If your cropland is presently clubroot-free, keep it that way. Do not allow any mud-carrying equipment of any kind on your cropland other than your own farm equipment. Plant resistant varieties and keep the land clubroot-free to enhance your financial future.
Columns, Crops

Present and future plant disease and weed issues in the Prairies, Part 1

Disease prevention works if you follow standard crop biosecurity procedures

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Here are 10 of the more important disease and weed issues in Western Canada, but I could easily add 10 more. 1. Clubroot of canola2. Cereal cyst nematode3. Soybean cyst nematode4. Aphanomyces root rot of peas and lentils5. Verticillium wilt of canola6. Sudden death syndrome of soybean7. Potato cyst nematode8. Potato powdery scab9. Sclerotinia white […] Read more
What is soil fertility?
Columns, Crops

What is soil fertility?

There are no miracles in crop production, just sound scientific facts

By
Soil fertility for field crops is a very simple affair but extremely difficult to easily explain. Think logically. There are no miracle fertilizers, only plain and simple chemical nutrients whether from an organic source or from a concentrate of nutrients we call chemical or synthetic fertilizer. There is no such thing as a synthetic fertilizer. […] Read more
Good soils or loamy soils are ones that contain equal parts of sand, silt and clay. Unfortunately, this ideal mix is not that common on the Prairies.
Columns, Crops

What is soil?

Let’s explore the properties of your cropland’s soil

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In everyday conversation involving agriculture, we hear about poor soils, clay soils, good soils, ruined soils, eroded soils, degraded soils, sandy soils, silty soils and so on. These names or descriptions are, for the most part, meaningless and very subjective. Soil is, in reality, a storehouse of water, mineral compounds of multiple complexities and plant-essential […] Read more
Rats cause many millions of dollars in damage to crops, food losses and buildings in Canada annually.
Columns, Crops

Successful pest protection and prevention programs

Given the right advice and a willingness to co-operate, Prairie growers can do a lot to mitigate or prevent crop yield losses

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Pests of all kinds — weeds, animals, insects or diseases — would like to find a good home on your crop production acres. Prevention is by far the best method of pest control. If you can stop or prevent the pest from gaining a foothold on your acres, you are winning the battle. You do […] Read more
Bushel price for flax remains higher than canola, moving in one instance to a 40-dollar high. Present prices now remain in the $20- to $25-per-bushel range.
Columns, Crops

In praise of flax

Flaxseed prices compete well with canola and growing flax provides an additional rotational crop

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When I moved west to the Prairies many moons ago, golden canola fields were the Cinderella crop and flax made up reliable blue oilseed acres. Prairie canola now exceeds 20 million acres, whereas flax, primarily grown in Saskatchewan, hovers at around one million acres (400,000 hectares). While canola yields have moved from the low 20 […] Read more
Maize was developed by the Mayan peoples from a wild plant that looked more like wheat than the present-day corn cobs.
Columns, Crops

The bountiful Americas

Some thoughts on food

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When we think of celebrations, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving or even Halloween, we give little thought to the food we eat. What about that Christmas or Thanksgiving turkey, the centrepiece of the celebration? Did this iconic bird come from Turkey? No way. Turkeys are exclusive to North America — Mexico, United States and Canada. There […] Read more
Every oil field in the world is simply a product of the diatoms in the world’s oceans.
Columns

The biology of oil and coal

A deep dive into their formation and uses

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Both oil and coal are the products of plain and simple plant photosynthesis. That is the chlorophyll in green diatoms, microscopic algae and green plants on land, which thrived hundreds of millions of years ago as they trapped the sun’s radiant light energy. These microscopic green algae in the world’s oceans took light energy from […] Read more
How to produce quality hay horse owners want to buy
Columns, Crops, Hay

How to produce quality hay horse owners want to buy

Taking crops off your hay land is much the same as cropping it to wheat or canola

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What is hay? Recent hamburger commercials keep referring to grass-fed beef. If you feed your cattle hay, are they still grass fed? All the year round, grass feeding occurs in very few areas of the world. In most of North America, hay is fed up to six or seven months of the year. Bison or […] Read more
I have seen pea crops combined in some years by the end of August or early September. What the smart farmer then does is heavy harrow the pea stubble and bury a few bushels per acre of peas that missed the combine. Under moist soil conditions, these peas will germinate and, in most instances, grow well into the end of October.
Columns, Crops

Let’s get real on cover crops

Let’s call them Prairie catch crops

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Cover crops have been much heralded as possible wonder fits for Canadian Prairie cropping systems. Sometimes they might fit. It really depends heavily on our most important nutrient of all — water — and the type of following crop you intend to grow. In many years of Prairie crop evaluations, it is no surprise that […] Read more

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