Another week of dry weather, with harvest now on the horizon. Rain would still be beneficial for the later planted crops – help to fill and add weight. Forecast still is not very favorable for moisture.
Our earlier planted 6-row barley is getting close to ready for harvest. We will likely try it early next week. The first field we planted is also one of the driest fields, so it is maturing at an accelerated rate compared to the other fields.
As mentioned before, we have 4 weather stations located across our farm. The stations have a multitude of sensors (temperature, humidity, wind, leaf wetness, rain) along with soil probes. The soil probes are 1 meter deep.
Below are some photos of our moisture probes. There are 6 sensors from between 10cm level all the way down to the 100cm level. As the roots go down to each sensor – the line starts to get wiggly as the roots draw moisture. You can see the roots have reached the 70cm level on all the probes and started to draw from the 100cm level on some as well.
When it rains you can see how far down the moisture was able to reach. You can also tell what the moisture holding capacity is at each depth by watching how the sensors reacts after a rain. At the start of June almost all the sensors were close to our maximum water capacity – and that has been what has allowed us to produce what we have. Thankfully we were sitting with good moisture levels right through to the 1 meter depth. There’s a lot of areas in Western Canada that were not as fortunate…
