Category: Agronomy Updates

Number of plants per unit area (plant population), multiplied by the number of pods per plant, times the number of seeds per pod, and finally the individual seed size (thousand-seed weight). Seven to nine plants per square food provides the starting point for higher yields. Lower plant populations can also achieve high yields, but seed…

Jamie Larsen, research scientist and dry bean vreeder for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at the Harrow Research and Development Centre, noticed potato leaf hoopers in the plots at Morden. He mentioned that due to our warming climate, potato leaf hoppers are being found in places they hadn’t been seen before. In Ontario, the economic threshold…

Field pea harvest is on and there’s an understandable emphasis on speed and throughput. Challenging weather at harvest can make this crop a nightmare to put through the combine. Most find it a finicky crop to harvest even when the weather cooperates. So we all want to get done fast but, in our haste, we…

Here’s another item we featured two weeks ago that bears repeating. We now have some areas of the province where soybean fields have been showing wilting symptoms for at least the last two weeks and that always puts us on guard. Add the fact that soybean aphids have become a problem on some fields and…

It might seem out of place to be talking about growth staging guides in August. Field pea harvest has started and some dry bean crops have already been undercut. But, there are a lot of important pre-harvest operational timings to consider in relation to a successful harvest and we get a a lot of questions…

We really thought we were done talking about soybean aphids for this year. Reports of aphids had been spotty at best and we hadn’t seen a field close to being in trouble and requiring an insecticide pass. We thought the soybeans were going to win this race across the province, even though it was getting…

Soybeans are flowering and pod filling and we have had some reports of fields with increasing populations of soybean aphids although still under economic threshold levels. This means we need to keep scouting since our crop is most at risk while it’s building our yield. Soybeans are most vulnerable to yield loss during the R1…

When we published this information four weeks ago, we hadn’t heard of any grasshopper defoliation concerns. We were just being proactive. But now we are getting reports of a few fields that had high enough defoliation levels due to grasshopper feeding to warrant control measures. Being that our crops are pod filling, this is when…

We’re entering that time of year when soybean stem diseases become more noticeable which is also, not surprisingly, when they are having the greatest impact on yield. Let’s take a quick look at the diseases we are most concerned about right now in southern Manitoba. White Mold (Sclerotinia) White mould can cause two to five…