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Camrose, Alberta | I have 180 acres of canola left. I would guess that 75% or better is combined in the area.
Yes there seems to be lots of ergot this year, mine doesn't have any. I am not hearing of any grade loss due to midge damage, lots of wheat was sprayed in this area. I was hoping to see some damage from midge, then I would know that spraying was the right decision.
The cereal crops yielded very well, no doubt the highest we have ever had on our farm. I expected big things from the canola after we finished the cereals. Although the canola yields were good, but not exceptional. InVigor 5020 was 49, 56, 62 bu/ac, Canterra 1841 was 34 and 40-45 (my best guess, not finished yet). Take the yields with a grain of salt. I find calibrating the yield monitor (9860 STS) tricky in canola, its close when you compare it to bin bushells, but you get paid it tonnes. Until the recent rain most of the canola was coming off between 5-7% moisture and when its dry its harder to get a clean sample (more chaff than I would like). When I was hauling out some canola I found that a 1750 bu bin filled to the top was only holding about 1500 bu net by weight (50 lb/bu). Over-dry canola has been a problem for me in the past three years, I don't like to think about how much weight in water I haven't been able to sell as canola.
I am not trying to sound like I am complaining about the canola yeilds, but in 2005 on my best piece of land (150 acres) I had an InVigor 5020 crop net yield out at 60 bu/ac and the same piece this year was 56 bu/ac and it was 40 ac of 5440, 20 ac of 8440 and 90 ac of 5020. Both the 5440 and 8440 strips yielded about 3-4 bu better than the 5020, so the 5020 alone probably did 53 bu/ac. Now I would rate 2008 to be a better growing year than 2005 since we had more rain in '08 and it came at better times (for once we didn't comepletely dryout in July). Even when you compare 2008 to 2007, '08 was a better year than '07, but the yields where roughly the same. All years had roughly the same agronomics, perhaps as the years have progressed and we have seen what these varieties are capable of we have put more into the inputs.
The only thing I can think of that cost us some yield loss in the canola is we had a frost of -1 and -1.2 on Sept. 1 and 2. I think it possibly hurt the seeds in the side branches that wheren't as advanced, this caused some smaller shrivelled seeds which I can see in the sample. Another possibility is Aug. 18 or 19 it was 35 deg Celcius and it seemed to "sunburn" the canola and it really started to ripen from there and swathing came about a week earlier than normal. | |
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Dekalb Canola Growers
