November 30, 2010

Agronomist Notes

G’day mates,

We landed in Brisbane on Monday morning to a warm welcome from our host Tim Neale. The flight was long but good and the eleven of us managed to avoid being detained at customs. We travelled two hours west to a small city called Toowoomba where we’ll be staying until Friday. We have a packed itinerary of farm tours and producer meetings.

Tuesday was our first day on tour and we visited three farms that’ve been using controlled traffic for 13 to 15 years. We asked them what the biggest benefits were of controlled traffic and they all said they’ve doubled sorghum yields using the system. The area we’re visiting is called the Darling Downs and is some of the best soil Australia has to offer. The soils are heavy, black clay with very little slope and high intensity rainfall. They’ve had their normal annual rainfall in the last three months and it is very wet here.

In this issue, I’ll show you some of the controlled traffic machinery set ups from the farms we’ve visited. Also, I’ll discuss an integrated pest management system that I think could fit well Alberta and save producers thousands in insecticide costs. Talk to you again next week from Down Under.

Russell Taylor, a 13-year veteran of controlled traffic farming

Our first stop was Russell Taylor, a young farmer in his 40’s who plants 3,500 acres of sorghum, corn, chickpeas, wheat and dryland cotton. In the early days, Russell started with a 2m CTF system, which means 6.34 ft from centre to centre tire on the planter and sprayer. He chose a 2m system because no modifications had to be made to his equipment. The problem with the 2m CTF system came to light when the custom harvesters, which have 3m spacing, left visible wheel tracks outside the 2m tram lines. Russell could see the visual difference in the crop grown in the combine tracks and knew that he had to move to a 3m system. From there he modified his equipment to fit on a 3m (9.51ft) system that allowed all equipment to travel on the same tram lines. He has a 30ft drill, 90ft sprayer and 30ft header on the combine.

The JD 8330 shown in the pictures is on 120in centres. Russell had to remove the axels and send them into to a local engineering firm called CNC engineering. They extended the axels for $10,000, a good value. Farmers from the U.S., like Clay Mitchell, have sent axels over to be extended.

During our time with Russell (pictured here in the foreground) he mentioned a few important points. First, don’t think CTF has to be expensive and that you need to buy new equipment to set things up. He said to use what you have and make modifications along the way. The biggest change to equipment was axel widths on the tractor and air cart. The rest of his equipment came naturally with 120in centres. Secondly, his yields have doubled with sorghum, though he hasn’t seen the same impact on his winter crops like wheat, chickpeas and barley. Their growing season for winter crops is the opposite of ours. We each plant at the same time but the Aussies get darker and cooler, while we get warmer with more daylight. I’m hoping our summer crops have the same yield doubling that he’s seen with his. Lastly, Russell made a great point on CTF, saying, the worse the soil the bigger the benefit. It excites me to think that we may have a solution to help manage some of our poorer soils and make them productive.

I enjoyed Russell’s take on CTF as we share the same 30ft system with 120in centres. After talking with others from the area that day, it seems like controlled traffic farming is the norm and conventional farming is a thing of the past. I can hardly wait for next spring! SL

Wade Bidstrup runs a very unique 4m CTF system

We met up for a short visit with another young farmer named Wade Bidstrup. He farms cotton, sorghum, wheat, chickpeas and mung beans. At the time he was busy side dressing urea on 3 to 4-leaf cotton. The reason we visited Wade was to see his 4m (40 ft) CTF system which is probably one of the only ones in the world. His planter is 40ft wide, sprayer is 120ft and header is 40ft as well. The axel width on all equipment is 4m or 12.68ft.

The pictures you see here are of a Challenger MT 765B set up on 4m spacing towing a toolbar for side dressing urea on cotton. You can’t purchase these machines and modify them yourself; they’re a special order from the factory with the John Deere T series and the Challenger MT track machines.

The biggest problem with a 4m CTF system, according to long time CTF consultant Tim Neale, is that you’re limited to just two tractors, the JD T series and the CAT MT series. Also, transport becomes difficult and you almost need a pilot truck to take it down the road. If you don’t mind using a pilot truck and having only two options for tractors, a 4m system can work well. Wade currently doesn’t have a grain cart to handle the wide system, so he pulls off to unload into the grain cart instead of unloading on the go.

What I actually found to be the most interesting on Wades farm was the idea behind side dressing after planting. With CTF and RTK guidance, we could band urea into winter wheat, which is more efficient. We could also do the same in a wet year. If we applied our typical 80 to 100 lbs of N/ac then topped up with another 40 lbs/N/ac after significant rainfall before the end of June, we could easily get on the field and take advantage of protein gains and increased yield potential. SL

Rob Taylor modified combine tire widths to improve his 3m CTF system

We stopped by veteran CTF’s Rob Taylor to look at his system. He has a similar set up to Russell but has made some modifications to the tires on his JD 9600 combine.

He wanted to narrow in the tire widths so he wasn’t giving up as much area to tram lines so he sent the rims away to be cut, downsized and rewelded to fit a 500mm width or 20.8in (most combine tires run on 30in width).

The cost of the modification was $2,500 per rim and $2,500 per tire for a total of $10,000 to set up the combine on 20.8in tire widths. Rob runs the tire pressure at 40 psi giving a load rating of 20,000 lbs per tire! Even with the added stress of over inflation and heavy weight on the tire, Rob has had the same set of tires on that 9600 for ten years. Not a bad investment and one we may look into for ourselves down the road.

In our CTF system, if we include combine wheel tracks, we’re giving up 16.6% to tram lines. If we were to down size to 20.8in rubber, we would be giving up just 13.3% of the field to tram lines. I think we should take a serious look at changing tire sizes if we can do the work ourselves. SL

Integrated Area Wide Pest Management Strategy

Three years ago, I made a conscious choice to double the industry recommended insect threshold levels in canola because I was tired of falling into a cycle of spraying insecticides every year. I felt that if we could build up the beneficial insects enough, they could do the work for us instead of spending $12 an acre and annihilating every living thing. The most concerning pest in our area is lygus bugs and to a smaller extent, cabbage seedpod weevils. Since I decided to double the insect threshold levels, I’ve cut back the amount of insecticide I recommend by 90%! Only a handful of fields out of 8,000 acres each year need spraying and the number keeps dropping.

Yesterday I came across a strategy used by cotton growers here in the Darling Downs. A few years ago both grain growers and cotton growers came together to implement a strategy called Integrated Area Wide Management. It was a system that asked growers to reduce the amount of insecticide they use, spray softer insecticides that are less harmful to beneficial insects and plant small areas of refuge crops that encouraged beneficial insect breeding. Before they began this project, some people were already using this strategy, but unfortunately if their neighbor didn’t follow the same, insect pest would continue to thrive and move in from neighboring fields.

Once the plan was in place, it turned out to be a huge success. With so many refuge crops in the area, and more attention paid to the types of insecticides used they were able to reduce insecticide use dramatically. Beneficial insects thrived and started to work for producers in the area and spraying for pests became less and less frequent.