Now We Know Why Pride Won't Give Us Credit

Here is a picture of a Pride plot in our area.  Pride does not like advertising which competitive hybrids are in their plots, so they hang a generic competitive sign on hybrids that are not Pride. The middle hybrid in the picture sure looks good.  Guess who it belongs to? 

P9623HR is written on the stake marking the plot. 

Now you know.  P9623HR is a new 2850 HU hybrid from Pioneer that looks like a real winner.  I don't need a sign to recognize it in the field because it is such a showy corn.  To complete the story, the hybrid on the left of the picture is DeKalb and the hybrid on the right is Pride.

Keep Your Paperwork in Order (corrected)

Upon publishing the previous post I realized some terms were incorrect.  Here is the corrected copy
Russ

I have never met a farmer yet who enjoys paperwork, but it is a necessary part of the job.  For those of you who have a current Nutrient Management Strategy, keeping records is required by the Nutrient Management Regulations in the province of Ontario.  This above picture is of one my nutrient management clients, Jeff Reijnen's dairy barn.
In Perth County this year, the Ministry of Environment's Ag Enforcement Officer, Glenn Ross, has been running a pilot project. He has been contacting and visiting all farm operators in the county with expiring Nutrient Management Strategies. Nutrient Management Strategies and Plans are effective for 5 years. At the end of each 5 year period the farm operation is required to renew their Nutrient Management Strategy with OMAFRA and if they are over 300 nutrient units they are also required to have an updated Nutrient Management Field Plan that covers their cropping plans for the next 5 years. This cropping plan must be kept on file at the farm. Glenn has been focusing on farms that filed Nutrient Management Plans with OMAFRA in 2005. These operations are now required to renew in 2010, unless they have filed subsequent strategies since 2005.  The primary purpose of the project is to ensure farm operations have registered, if necessary, with OMAFRA and also ensure Nutrient Management Strategies and Plans are updated.  This is a requirement of the regulation.
A secondary purpose is to evaluate the level of compliance amongst farmers in Perth County. Fortunately, he has found compliance levels are relatively high and his friendly personna has kept relations good between the Ministry of Environment, the farm operators and consultants like myself.  The project is continuing.
Clients in other counties have also noticed more activity by MOE staff.
The take home message is keep your strategies and field plans up to date and be mindful of the date of expiry of current strategies. I expect the compliance promotion efforts by MOE staff will continue.

Keep Your Paperwork in Order

I have never met a farmer yet who enjoys paperwork, but it is a necessary part of the job, especially if you are captured by the nutrient management regulations in the province of Ontario.  This is a picture of one my nutrient management clients, Jeff Reijnen's dairy barn.  In Perth County this year, the Ministry of Environment's Ag Enforcement Officer, Glenn Ross, has been running a pilot project.  He has been contacting and visiting all farm operators in the county with expiring Nutrient Management Strategies.  Our Nutrient Management regulations have a 5 year life cycle.  At the end of each 5 year period the farm operation is required to renew their Nutrient Management Strategy with OMAF and if they are over 300 nutrient units they are also required to have an updated Nutrient Management Field Plan that covers their cropping plans for the next 5 years.  This cropping plan must be kept on file at the farm.  Glenn has been focusing on farms that filed Nutrient Management Plans with OMAF in 2005.  These operations are now required to renew in 2010, unless they have filed subsequent strategies since 2005.

The purpose of Glenn's project is to find out the degree of compliance with the regulations in Perth County.  Fortunately, he has found compliance levels are relatively high and his friendly personna has kept relations good between the Ministry of Environment, the farm operators and consultants like myself.

Clients in other counties have also noticed more activity by MOE staff.  

The take home message is keep your strategies up to date and be mindful of the date of expiry of current strategies.  I expect the enforcement to continue.

Retarded Beans? Retarded Drills?

Have you seen soybean fields this year that look like this one?  I have, more than once.  Fields of drilled soybeans with good rows beside blank rows.  Seen mostly on conventional tillage, but also on a few reduced tillage fields.  You would swear the drill was starting to run empty.  

What happened?  There is only one answer.  Inconsistent seed depth placement between the seed openers on the drill.  I have not seen this same problem on any field planted with a row unit planter.  Conventional tilled loam and silt loam soils were tricky this spring.  They were extremely mellow and soft, mostly because these soils dried early and had no pounding spring rains to settle them down.  It was easy to get soybeans planted too deep and the drill was an enemy.  It is a real pain in the rear checking seed depth placement behind a drill. 

1.Depth placement is not consistent within the row.

2.Many of us do not have the patience to check every row.

3.Where in the field do you check? 

If you happened to check on a firm headland and thought things were fine, you would be badly fooled in the soft soil off the headland.  In fact, it was a year to pack the soil in front of the drill, not behind it.

Curtis Gartly and Ron Murrell sent me the following photos of soybeans that were planted too deep.  The field looked like the one above.  The customer referred to them as "retarded beans".

I have been in the agronomy arena for many years and 95% of corn emergence and growth problems are created by planting corn too shallow.  With soybeans, there is a much higher probability that the problem is caused by  planting too deep.  We can get away with planting corn 3'" deep in loamy seed beds and not be hurt.  BUT, we cannot get away with planting soybeans 3" deep.  They break their backs and fold up like an accordion.  Pioneer rates all of their varieties by length of hypocotyl.  The hypocotyl is what you see in the picture on the shovel.  It is the part of the bean that pushes the seed up through the soil.  Some varieties have longer hypocotyls than others.
These are the hypocotyl ratings of Pioneer varieties grown in this area.

90M40      Long
91M01      Medium
91Y20       Long
91M41      Short
91Y80       Long
91Y90       Medium

In other words, if you plant 91M41's you need to pay very close attention to seed depth.  90M40's on the other hand are a little more forgiving.  But no soybean variety emerges well from 3" deep.
Fortunately, soybeans do not penalize badly for weak stands and some folks will continue their sloppy practices.
Retarded beans?  Retarded drills?  An agronomist I know referred to drills once as "controlled spill devices".  He was exactly right. 



 

Are your beans yellow?

The most commonly asked question over the last week is "Why are my soybeans yellow? They looked fine the week before".  The first part of the answer to this question is quite simple.  Up until the soybean plant starts to initiate tri-foliates, it uses the reserves of the cotyledons for energy to supplement its needs.  Now those cotyledons are dried up, as in the picture below, and the plant has to get all its nutrition from it's root system.  The roots aren't quite ready to take the full load, so the plant turns yellow.

This yellow condition should only last a few days and if your beans turn dark in a week, there usually is not a big yield impact.  Some people would argue that this stress of losing the cotyledons is necessary for the rhozobia bacteria to start colonizing the roots and making nitrogen.

The second part of the answer to why beans turn yellow is more complicated.  Look closely at the picture below of a stand of soybeans planted the same day, same drill and same variety.

The left side of the picture is wheat stubble, fall chiseled, spring cultivated.  The right side is corn stubble, no fall tillage, 2 passes with a Salford RTS during the last week of April.  Why no yellow beans in the wheat stubble?  Their cotyledons have dried up the same as the beans in the corn stubble. The picture below is of two plants taken from this field.  The plant on the left is bigger with one more tri-foliate.  The nodulation on each plant is about the same.  Why the growth difference?

If we had to put it down to one thing it would be soil temperature.  The soil on the left is warmer because it has less residue covering the surface.  A 170 bushel corn crop leaves a lot of residue and keeps soils in place through the winter. But it also keeps soil from warming in the spring.  The extra tillage following wheat also leaves more air in the soil, which helps it warm quicker.  Will this have a yield impact?  We do know it won't be as great a difference as you may think, but we will let you know.   

My Neighbours Have Some Nice Crops

The growing season to date has been pretty good in the St Marys area, unless you are trying to make dry hay.  It does need to stop raining to allow field work to catch up and Cathy's gardening keeps getting interupted.  More rain forecasted for the weekend.  In the meantime, check out these stands from the area.  This Pioneer corn is good stuff.

These soybeans don't look too bad as well.

Are we smarter?

Dennis Berglund, a crop consultant from Minnesota recently reported on a weed survey conducted by University of Minnesota and North Dakota State University extension specialists.  They surveyed fields in Minnesota and eastern North Dakota.  In 10-40% of all fields they identified some form of glyphosate resistance within the weed spectrum that was present in these fields.

The three weeds most often identified were common ragweed, giant ragweed and waterhemp.

Common Ragweed
The lowest area had 10-30% of the fields with resistance, in the mid-Red River Valley
The highest area had 30-60% of the fields with resistance, in central MN
 
 

 
Giant Ragweed

30-95% of the fields showed resistance, in south-central MN
 
 

 
Waterhemp (a member of the pigweed family)
 
5-20% of the fields showed resistance near the corner of ND, SD and MN.
 
Scary numbers caused by
1. high concentration of RR crops
2. over reliance of glyphosate alone for weed control
 
In Ontario we have been through similar situations before. 
Triazine resistant lambsquarter and pigweed exploded in the 70's because we grew too much continuous corn and relied on atrazine for weed control. 
Group 2 resistant foxtail, ragweed, lambsquarter, pigweed, waterhemp and others showed up in the last decade where we relied too much on group 2 products such as Pursuit and Accent.  
 
Interestingly, atrazine and Pursuit are still effective herbicides when combined with other products, so all is not lost.  I think the Ontario farmer is smart enough to realize the way to keep glyphosate as an effective herbicide is to rotate crops and tank mix other herbicides with glyphosate to keep resistance from developing.
 
On the other hand we do have confirmed glyphosate resistant giant ragweed in Essex County. 
 
And a few growers are still lulled into thinking that glyphosate alone will solve all their troubles like the one below that Brian was asked to spray recently.
 
 

And I still hear too many of my chemical retailer friends talking about customers coming in after the crop is emerged with no herbicide applied, looking for the one cheap fix to take care of all their weeds.  We can do better.