August 2009 Archives

Canola breeders go to great lengths to protect the purity of their genetic lines, but once seed production starts at the field level, it's almost impossible to prevent pollen from entering the field from other places. You will get some surprises.

Farmers across the Prairies have experiences with Roundup Ready canola in their fields — even if they've never grown Roundup Ready canola before. As one reader told me, lots of farmers used straight glyphosate to spray out poor Clearfield and InVigor canola fields only to find a significant number of plants also carry the RR gene and were not controlled.

This week, Linda Nielsen, who farms near Starbuck, Man., sent this photo of her son, Erik, beside two rogue canola plants. They are nearly six feet tall and "stick out like sore thumbs" in a field of four-foot tall canola. They are throughout the field at counts of two or three per acre, Linda says. So you know they came with the seed.

A local agronomist figures they're probably winter canola plants. They're immature and she expects that at harvest, the seeds will be so green, they'll just turn to mush and blow out the back of the combine.

She says it would be neat to somehow segregate the plants, let them mature and save the seeds to plant for next year — just to see what she gets.

Do you have any strange experiences with impure seed? Comment on this blog or send me an email. I'd like to hear about them.

I wrote about the MiniBatt hand-held combine in the July-August issue of Grainews.   It saves you the trouble of driving your combine into a field to take a sample for testing. You put MiniBatt in the truck and drive from field to field taking quick samples of standing crop.

After reading the article, Bill Schultz of Lintlaw, Sask., phoned to say that a Saskatchewan company has been making a similar tool for years. Brehon Agrisystems has made its portable combine, called Simpler Sampler, since 1981. Schultz bought a used one at an auction sale 15 years ago for $90. He uses it to sample all his cereal crops.

Simpler Sampler takes swathed crop. If you're straight combining, just cut off a few stems and stick the heads into the mini combine. Brehon has a video on the website so you can see how it works.

As the website says, "Handfuls of crop are fed into the threshing chamber and are simultaneously threshed and cleaned; the clean grain is collected, and the chaff is expelled. The straw is discarded and the process is then repeated. Five to ten minutes are required, depending on conditions, to thresh enough grain for moisture testers. This time is very dependent on the operator, since most of the required time is in obtaining the sample handfuls from the swath, with the actual threshing time minimal."

For more information or to order one, call Brehon's Saskatoon office at 306-933-2655 or email Shane Hiltz. 

Schultz's low-tech canola sampling

Bill Schultz doesn't use his Simpler Sampler for canola, Instead he puts a scoop shovel under the swath and then tramples the swath to release the seeds. "You get a good representative sample," he says, "and you'll be surprised how clean it is." You can't get much more low-tech than that. Thanks for the tip, Bill.

By the way, Bill says it has been too wet to put up hay this year. Sure, they've cut some and baled some in his area, but farmers are seeing bales heat on them because they won't dry out. Grain crops are looking good, but they're late. Sounds typical.

Last week I wrote a blog about a bunch of farmers bringing their Versatile tractors together for a meet. Les Kletke, a Manitoba farm writer and public speaker, drove down to see the event, which was at the Arth family farm near Cayuga, North Dakota.

Les says over 250 farmers turned out, many of them bringing their own tractors. The event had 58 Versatile tractors, representing every series built — including a restored Model 100 that bares serial number "20."

The first picture is of Jim Brendt who farms near Cayuga. He grows 1,400 acres of wheat, corn and soybeans. He bought this 850 used and says he "just loves the classic old tractor," Les says.

Brendt is painting and restoring it "but it works on the farm everyday, and that is the great thing about these tractors, they work every day."

Thanks Les for sending along the photos.

In case you were wondering, I've been away for the past 11 days. I was on a family vacation visiting my wife's grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Toronto and area, and then my wife's sister and her family in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

Chambersburg is a small city in farm country. It was founded in 1764 and in its centennial year Confederate soldiers burned it to the ground in the U.S. Civil War. It's about 25 miles from Gettysburg, where 53,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in a four-day battle from July 1-4, 1763.

We drove down from Toronto through the heart of Pennsylvania on two-lane highways the whole way. The forest is thick, the hills are big — many descents and ascents of 1,000 feet — and the highway runs through every small town. The speed limit switched from 55 to 45 to 35 to 25 every mile or so. The brakes and transmission on my rental car got a work out. It was the hardest eight-hour drive of my life and my kids — who are four and seven — didn't sleep a minute of it. Now we can say we've "seen" the state.

         On one outing, we went to Lancaster County, where the Amish have turned their car-less lifestyle into a booming tourism business. The boys and I rode a horse-drawn buggy — with 10 other tourists — through back roads and cornfields while our guide, Jesse, explained a little about the lifestyle. Amish don't believe is using cars, and some of them still harvest corn with horse-drawn one-row combines. Some will use a combine.

Jesse's son wanted to buy a car AND use a combine. For this privilege he had to convert to Mennonite, Jesse told me, which is like dropping down a tier, I guess.

On the buggy ride, we spotted a six-horse team of Belgians pulling a liquid manure tank and spreader. The team was shoulder to shoulder, making for an impressive sight. The tank looked to be around 1,500 gallons.

The main crops in Amish country are corn and hay, all for feed. Pretty much every farm is a dairy. Jesse says they typically get five cuts of alfalfa per year and corn yields are well into the 200-bushel-per-acre range. Jesse said that one eight-acre parcel in 2006 yielded 311. To get those yields, they do top up manure fertilizer with synthetic fertilizer, Jesse says.

Because this land is so productive, it also sells for a premium. Jesse's 80-acre farm would sell for $1.5 million in this market. Add that to the tourism dollars, and it seems the Amish are sitting on a goldmine. I paid $10 for the wagon ride. My kids paid $5 each. The company had at least six buggies — as part of a restaurant, gift shop, hotel and museum complex called Plain & Fancy — running non-stop. We had eight adults and five kids on ours, for revenue of $105. At two trips per hour, you can do the math.

The two-lane Highway 30 leading into the village of Bird-in-Hand was jammed with traffic, crawling along at less than 5 mph. We pulled into a gas station a mile from our destination because the kids desperately had to pee. I asked the attendant if she knew another route because "there must have be an accident or construction ahead." She gave me a better route, but shook her head when I said there must be a problem. "It's like this all the time," she said.

I have to say the day left me a bit cold. I liked the buggy ride, but the rest was too weird. Joining the masses to gawk at the Amish and their beards, straw hats and antiquated lifestyle is odd. If you're Amish, what do you do? You either move to rural Manitoba, like some of the Amish of Ontario did. Or you grin and bear it, and suck the tourists for as much money as you can get from them. It's win win.

Here are some photos making the email rounds. I got them from my father-in-law, who got them from a friend in Southern Ontario. These guys aren't even involved in farming, but anyone would find these amazing.

The intro to the email says: "Near  Medicine Hat after a windstorm last week. The bales weigh 1,600 pounds and some rolled 5 miles."

Do you know if these are legit? Do you know who took them? They're spectacular, but as my father-in-law's friend says, a person can do anything with Photoshop these days. Comment above or email me if you have any details to add.

Adam Reid, marketing manager for Versatile tractors, sent me a note about a gathering of Versatile tractor lovers — with their tractors — this weekend, August 21 and 22, at the farm of Mike and Jesse Arth of Cayuga, North Dakota. Cayuga is in the southeast corner of the state.

Adam writes: "Back in March or April, a group of farmers were talking about Versatile and they realized that they had several different models among them. They decided to get the tractors together for some photos and that has turned into the event this weekend. They are expecting 35 to 40 old Versatiles, almost one from every year of production."

The local dealer in Hankinson, North Dakota, will bring new models to display. If you'd like a road trip to take your mind off the poor harvest weather, the Arth farm is 5.5 miles north of Cayuga on the paved road.

The contact for this specific event is Jesse Arth at jarth_77@hotmail.com or 701-680-1761.