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Tag Archives soil moisture

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

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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

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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
les henry's soil moisture map 2023
Columns, Crops

A new year, a new soil moisture map

Let's take a Prairie-wide view of soil moisture at freeze-up in 2023

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To make a soil moisture map, you need to understand the soil moisture constants: saturation, field capacity, wilting point and plant-available water. Saturation (Sat) is when all soil pores are filled with water — in other words, the water table. Until recently we did not consider the water table to be high enough to provide […] Read more
A chickpea and flax intercrop mix on Colin Rosengren’s farm at Midale, Sask.
Columns, Crops

Cover crops: enough already

The benefits are often 'blown up' while the challenges are understated

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Cover crops is a topic with a lot of ink spilled in many farm publications in recent years. Some scribblers seem to imply that a farmer is a laggard and an environmental hazard if she/he is not using cover crops on a regular basis. Cover crops actually include a wide variety of cropping sequences, and […] Read more
Herbicide carry-over concerns on the Prairies
Columns

Herbicide carry-over concerns on the Prairies

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The 2023 growing season was drier and warmer than normal resulting in lower-than-normal crop yields over much of the Prairies. The worst affected areas are in the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones. Figure 1 shows an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada map of soil moisture conditions across the Prairies at the end of July 2023. […] Read more
File photo of a wheat harvest in Kazakhstan. (Yerbolat Shadrakhov/iStock/Getty Images)
Crops, Markets, Spring Wheat

Less wheat expected in Kazakhstan in 2023-24, despite same acres

Soil moisture loss expected in wheat-growing regions

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MarketsFarm — As the 2022-23 crop year in Kazakhstan begins to wind down, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) attaché in the country’s capital of Astana estimated its wheat production at 16.4 million tonnes. Should that forecast hold, the attaché’s report noted it would be the largest wheat harvest since 2017-18. However, going into the […] Read more
Drought expands across western Prairies
Crops, Weather

Drought expands across western Prairies

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MarketsFarm — Drought conditions expanded across Alberta and Saskatchewan in October, with very little precipitation across the agricultural regions of the two provinces since August. That’s according to the latest Canadian Drought Monitor from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, as of Oct. 31. At the end of that month, 72 per cent of the Prairie region […] Read more
(Jacek_Sopotnicki/iStock/Getty Images)
Crops, Weather

Alberta harvest in home stretch as province dries up

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MarketsFarm — As harvest progress in Alberta remained well ahead of the five-year average, soil moisture levels in the province continued to dwindle. With a gain of 12 points on the week, Alberta Financial Services Corp. (AFSC) estimated 87.6 per cent of the major crops were harvested. While that’s slightly below this time last year, […] Read more
(Government of Alberta via Flickr)
Crops, Weather

Alberta seeding ahead of five-year average

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MarketsFarm — While spring planting in Alberta is 12.2 per cent complete overall there’s a disparity between the south and the rest of the province. Also, the pace was 2.6 points above the five-year average, but 5.2 behind last year. As of Tuesday, Alberta Agriculture found seeding in the south was at 36.5 per cent […] Read more

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