Keep Your Wheels On The Road

Navigating roads can be a challenge, especially with today’s larger equipment.

About 13 percent of farm related fatalities across Canada are traffic related. Most car drivers are not familiar with sharing the road, placing more onus on equipment drivers.

Follow Provincial Equipment Transportation Rules

It is important to not only review rules about safe transport of equipment on the road, but to regularly review safe practices with family members and employees.  Consult provincial equipment transportation rules like this Ontario one (https://bit.ly/2stQbiv), or in Manitoba (https://bit.ly/2lXU1R0).

Learn More

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture also has a great webinar recording on the topic here:

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Winter wheat planting is off to a slow start in Ontario owing to the delayed harvest of beans.

Growers are, however, keen to plant more wheat and make adjustments, including broadcast seeding into standing soybeans and adjusting seeding rates. Wheat after hay or wheat has a high risk of Take-all disease. Wheat after silage should also be avoided due to fusarium risk. Where broadcast seeding, bump seeding rates to 2.5 million seeds/ac just as leaf drop begins. Agricorp also needs to inspect these fields this fall.

Here more tips on wheat planting with Wheat Pete’s Word On Real Agriculture:

https://bit.ly/2m4PCLZ

Sept 16-21 commemorates the discovery of phosphorus 350 yeas ago.

In conjuction with this week, two leading Cdn researchers have reviewed 100’s of ‘P” research reports and issued a new report that looks at gaps in knowledge and priorities for P research.

4R Management of Phosphorus Fertilizer in the Northern Great Plains:
A Review of the Scientific Literature

Funded by Fertilizer Canada

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Get more on managing P with these podcasts:

• Managing Soils For Phosphorus (Successful Farming)
• Why Phosphorus is Leaving the Farm and What to Do About it (No-Till Farmer)

2019’s weather has been less than kind to many crops, resulting in a lot of unevenness in crop stage. Some fields appear as if there were different crops in one field, making it difficult for farmers to make the decision when to swath or harvest.

Drone imagery is a valuable tool to help assess the percentage of the field that is ready for harvest.

The most widely used NDVI index is ideally suited for this purpose – the lower the index, the closer that part of the field is to the ripening stage.  Then by ground proofing the different index values (colour zones) in the field image to the crop stage, growers can better quantify the overall maturity and have more confidence in harvest timing.

Wheat Variety plot NDVI image

Every year brings its share of troublesome weeds, and the fall is the best time to control perennial and winter annual weeds.

There are 5 main benefits of a fall weed control program.

1. Control of perennial weeds like Canada Thistle, quack grass and perennial sow thistle is best with a pre-harvest application when these weeds are actively growing and translocating nutrients to the roots. 
2. As a pre-harvest aid to crop and weed dry down, improving harvest timing and grain sample quality. 
3. Control of winter annuals including chickweed, stinkweed, narrow leaf hawk’s-beard with a later post-harvest application, as these weeds germinate long after harvest, and even after a frost. Fall is also the best time to control dandelions
4. Reduce populations of troublesome weeds & crop volunteers. In the Prairies, over 60% of wild oats have group 1 resistance. Aid in controlling spread of weeds like water hemp, [...]

Many farmers often like to estimate soybean yield late in the season. Ideally, the closer the beans are to maturity, the better the estimate will be.

The traditional approach to estimating yield by the formula (pods/acre X seeds)/pod /(seeds/lb.)/(lbs. per bushel) is time consuming and tedious. There is a simpler approach that is based on counts in 1/10000th of an acre, by measuring 21 inches of row for any row width.

Follow the instruction in this Purdue University article:

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