For the week of May 5th – 12th
We had a good week of seeding. All three drills were going in cereals – makes it a little more challenging for logistics as you are not able to seed as many acres on a full cart for cereals as you do canola. We used to start seeding canola as early as possible, so in the fall we could stagger the maturity – that made it a lot easier for swathing, as timing is critical. If you swath it too early you sacrifice yield, but if you swath it too late you risk the pods shattering and losses can be significant. With pod shatter resistance bred into our canola varieties it has allowed us to switch to straight cutting all our canola – which then allows us to delay canola seeding a week. The earlier seeded canola is more at risk to mid-May frost, and always seems to be more susceptible to flea beetle pressure.
We like to get our Malt barley in first – it is earlier maturing and allows us to start harvest earlier. The more harvesting we can get done in August the better. Days are longer and warmer. It allows us to start drying earlier as well, so we can get the barley dried before we start into wheat. We also like to get our oats in earlier – with restrictions on using preharvest glyphosate as a desiccant, it takes a lot longer for the straw to dry down naturally. Then we get into our wheat.
As of right now, we are 43% complete! All the malt barley is planted, as well as the oats. We have two drills going in wheat and one has switched into canola. Early this week we will switch another drill to canola, and hopefully by end of the week the last drill will finish the wheat and we can flip into into canola as well.
Conditions are really starting to dry out. With all the snow that we had, who would have thought that by the second week in May we would be looking to the sky already for moisture! We had some significant wind last week as well – wind gusts approaching 80 km/hr – with temperatures in the high 20’s to low 30’s. We are still able to get the seed into moisture, but we will need some rain soon in order to achieve uniform germination without stranding some seeds in dry ground.
