Agronomist Notes

The last seven days have been rain free, allowing producers to the east to really get the acres covered. Some just started last Saturday and still find it too wet! Alternatively, my clients to the west will be finished seeding by the end of the week or sooner.

Mitch, Sam and I have been fabricating and modifying the last touches on the air drill, 4WD and sprayer. Nothing like starting the year with an entirely new lineup of equipment and technology! Thankfully the rain has given us some extra time and we’re just finally going but not without hurdles to jump along the way of which I’ll explain later.

This week we’ll discuss some inter-row seeding success stories and I’ll give you an example of precision placement and talk about the benefits of proper seed placement. I’ll talk about our controlled traffic project and last, pass along a made in Aussie solution to land rolling and spraying at the same time. We’ll finish with fundamental and technical grain market news.

Agronomy

Inter-row seeding success stories

Using RTK guidance is considered the only way to properly inter-row seed because its signal will give the repeatability needed to seed between the rows consistently, year after year. However, I’ve heard two reports from producers beginning to inter-row seed this year and they’re telling a different story. Both seeding units are equipped with John Deere GS2 receivers which give about four-inch accuracy for around $800 per year and seed inter-row about 70 to 80% of the time. Not perfect, but not bad for a low cost solution. 

The comments I’ve heard so far are that there is less draft, the drill pulls easier, fewer issues with residue or straw piling up and the stubble rows have prevented soil throwing on to the front shank rows. To set up an inter-row pattern on each field, you need only find your line and nudge your GPS so the shanks begin to seed inter-row. After that, the pass to pass accuracy with a GS2 or OmniStar HP signal is all you need. SL

Precision seed placement pays dividends

You likely all know by now that I prefer air drills with on-row depth control versus conventional hoe drills where seed depth is set in one or two places across the entire drill. How many times have we said “that’s good enough” because the seed placement is anywhere from one inch to a half inch and we simply can’t improve the accuracy.

I was out to see our neighbor Pete at Starland Colony who just bought a JD 1870 Conserva Pak to see what kind of job it would do in heavy clay soil. The canola in the photos was seeded April 25th. Notice the seed placement; the depth varies less than ¼ inch across each row with each seed being placed no more than ¾ inches deep. Very impressive for clay soil! I saw quite a few lumps and clods from the deep fertilizer knife bringing up moist soil so it’s a good thing that the V-shaped packer just presses the seed into the side of the furrow and not over top of the furrow like every other regular hoe drill.

In the end these fields will emerge faster and require less energy to push through the ground compared to a conventional hoe drill like a JD 1830. I’ve seen it before and I know Pete will see quicker emergence, stronger root systems, faster maturity and higher yields simply through accurate seed placement. I can’t wait to see the side by side trials! SL

Controlled traffic begins at our place

We finally got going on the weekend after some warp speed fabricating on the last of our modifications. The ground has dried up enough on our gumbo that we could start on Saturday but a few hiccups delayed us. This shouldn’t be a surprise after the number of modifications we made. A wiser Steve cautions his readers that converting farming systems is not for the faint of heart.

Our first hurdle was discovered during our test pass. The offset drill hitch and tank hitch were running true but the air tank tires were running 12 inches of the tramline. One 3/8ths adjustment to the alignment and we were back on track, literally. The second hurdle was air in the hydraulic lines. We couldn’t get the wings on the drill to go down the last 5/8ths of an inch because of an air lock. During my trouble shooting research, I heard that Concord drills are infamously difficult to purge and we totally agree. It’s a very painful process. It took two days of problem solving. The issue was completely resolved after we spent more time leveling the drill. My father-in-law talked to a 25-year veteran Concord drill service man yesterday and he said we would never be able to downsize a 40-foot unit to a 30-foot due to the parallel hydraulic system. He also said if we could make it work he’d buy it from us! Well buddy, I hope you’ve got a big cheque book.

The third and smaller hurdle (not to mention learning auto steer at midnight) will be the timing of our post seed herbicide application. We plan on setting up the tramline pattern with the drill so we won’t veer off course with the sprayer. If we choose to spray first, we could easily drift off the tramline by a foot or two, especially since I’ll be running a pull-type 90-foot suspended boom sprayer the first time.

Now that we’re up and running, I’m even more excited at the prospects of controlled traffic farming on our farm. We’ve had 4 to 5 inches of moisture this spring, the heavy clay ground is wet and compaction is everywhere! But to be honest, we (that is, my entire family) will breathe a deep sigh of relief when seeding is finished- it’s been a long long haul to get to where we are today. I guess Rome wasn’t built in a day, either. SL

Double seeding rows adjacent to the tramlines

We’re doing an experiment this year on our canola. The welder is warm and there’s no time like the present. What will we attempt? To double seed the rows on either side of the tramline and leave the tramline itself unseeded and unfertilized. In fact, we pulled the openers off the shanks inside the tram line. (We plan to put the openers back on once we switch to wheat and barley.) I realize there may be some weed issues in the tracks but we do have RR canola and Liberty canola. If we have to do a second or third pass then I guess that’s the price of this experiment.

The modifications were simple, but then I’m not a welder or fabricator; my brother-in-law Mitch made it look easy. He designed the Y-shaped double seed tube distributor you see in the photo which fits right into the seed boot. With 32 seed tubes on 28 openers, he had to make 4 double up Y-shaped seed distributors to fit on either side of the tramline.

The goal of double seeding on each side of the tramline is to create more plant competition to try and increase maturity. With no crop in the tramline, the adjacent rows will have additional moisture, nutrients and sunlight so each side might take longer to mature and stay green. This could cause some maturity issues at harvest if not addressed. We could seed the tramlines but hey, why not try a 400 acre plot and see how we go? SL

Editor’s note: Any careless overtone here is likely due to dehydration, bruised knuckles and acetylene fumes.

Made in Aussie solution combines sprayer with land roller

Leave it to an Aussie to come up with something like this. Maybe you’ve heard about a combine towing a square baler to roll up nasty annual ryegrass in one pass. How about a monster machine that rolls land and sprays residual herbicides at the same time?

The roller you see here is 60 ft wide and built to run on tramlines for controlled traffic farming. It has spray nozzles mounted directly behind the roller at 20” spacing. The roller and sprayer combination is designed to roll land after seeding peas and apply an IMI herbicide like Odyssey in one pass. This farm typically seeded their peas, land rolled and then went back with their JD 4930 and sprayed. This solution allowed them to save one pass with the sprayer and continue driving down with their 60-foot centered tramlines.  

It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t use this technology to spray a post-seeding glyphosate application. It’s not very often we can apply a pre-seed because there is very little growing. As for a post-seed application, this might be the ticket if you can roll your land just before ground break and apply your IMI herbicide at the same time. Could save you a few bucks in machinery costs and labour. SL

Market News

Technical Analysis

Canola: November futures. The short and long term trend is up.
HRS Wheat: December futures. The short and the long term trend is down.
Corn: December futures. The short and long term trends are down.
Soybeans: November futures. The short term trend is down and long term trend is up.
Canadian Dollar: June futures. The short term trend is up and the long trend is down.
US Dollar Index: June futures. The short term trend is down and the long term trend is up.