December 2009 Archives

I don't have a Blackberry or anything like it, yet, but some of you already do. The problem is that many websites are just not set up to read easily from a Blackberry. If you have a Blackberry, have you found sites that are Blackberry friendly? Please let me know and I'll share them here on the blog.

Speaking of useful gadgets, I like flipping through Popular Science when I go the library. The latest issue has the "100 best innovations of the year." One of them is a Motorola HX1 phone headset that hooks on your ear. I've seen these phones before, but what makes HX1 special, besides being hands free, is an "ultra-sensitive microphone that listens just for waves conducted through the jawbone," the article says. If you're in a noisy place, the person on the other end of the line can hear your voice clearly.

I asked Duane Bartok, the Esterhazy, Sask., farmer and inventor who won our trip to Agritechnica in Hannover, Germany, to write a short review of his highlights. The article will appear on page 4 of the January 11 Grainews, but I'm going to give away the surprise right now. Lucky you.

Duane's highlight was an invention by David Carbis, who farms in Cornwall, England. Carbis created a one-man post pounder. Out of all the thousands and thousands of new things displayed at Agritechnica, Duane latched onto a product that isn't even in commercial production. I can see why he liked it.

The pounder attaches to the bucket of a tractor and works off both the loader hydraulics and the rear remotes. You loop the hoses under the tractor and to the front. The pounder holds 30 to 40 posts in a rack. They drop one at a time into the hydraulic pounder, which you position with the bucket controls. As you back to the next post position, the pounder also spools out an appropriate length of fencing wire (or mesh.)

You can't buy one of these pounders just yet. Carbis has patented his invention and is looking for a manufacturer.

Farmers Weekly article

U.K. farm magazine Farmers Weekly had an article on Carbis and his invention in last week's issue. The photos are also from Farmers Weekly.

I've included a few paragraphs from near the beginning of Mick Roberts' article.These paragraph explain why Carbis decided to create his invention. I think many of you will relate to this experience.

...

Mr Carbis, who farms with wife Pam at their 100ha (250-acre) Trenona Farm at Ruan High Lanes, Cornwall, usually works on his own. So when it comes to fencing he has, in the past, had to overcome the difficulties of accomplishing alone what is essentially a two-man task.

“I started by putting the posts in by hand with a sledge hammer, which was slow and exhausting work. Then I borrowed a manual post basher, which was even worse,” he explains. “After I got fed up with that I used a contractor who operated a post knocker on the tractor while I placed and held the stakes in position.”

He soon realised this wasn’t the answer either. He was not only paying for extra labour, but it remained a laborious job. David also admits to cutting corners to speed up the work by operating the post basher’s valve with one hand while holding the stake in place with the other. “I knew this wasn’t the safest thing to do, but securing the stake with the chains on the post basher just took too long,” he confesses.

He thought there had to be an easier, safer and better way and set himself the task of designing something to do the job. In common with all great inventions the result is a machine that carries out a highly complex series of operations using very simple mechanisms. The really ingenious part of the design is how David uses a combination of gravity, hydraulics and simple trip mechanisms to run the machine, which takes less than a minute to knock in a post.

We got word out of Copenhagen yesterday that Canada has signed on with a number of other countries, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, in a collaboration to research ways to reduce greenhouse gas emission from agriculture. Click here to read more about the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases.

If we're going to improve farming practices to reduce emissions and reduce nitrogen losses, for example, it would help to know which practices provide the largest benefit for the lowest cost meanwhile maintaining the productivity of the land. This global project is a great idea.

Then today my colleagues and I had a meeting with Novozymes BioAg (formerly Philom Bios). Trevor Thiessen, president of Novozymes BioAg, was talking about the large investment his company is making in research. Target products are herbicides, insecticides and fungicides derived from naturally-occuring microorganisms and compounds. The company has two new products already available to farmers: Met52, a bioinsecticide, is registered in Eastern Canada for fruit and vegetable crops, and Taegro, a biofungicide, will launch in California this year. One long-term target for the company, Thiessen says, is for nitrogen and phosphorus fixing "biofertility" products for legume AND non-legume crops.

Thiessen noted that many companies, including Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, are looking at the same "bio" solutions to pest management in particular.

"Companies are putting more money into ag-chem research than ever before," Thiessen says.

"Biotech is on its next wave of innovation," he adds. "In the past three or four years we've seen renewed energy in biotech for crops."

Farmersgolf, invented in the Netherlands, creates a golf course in and around your farmyard, extending into the pasture if you wish. The club is a wooden shoe on a stick and the ball is a like a small soccer ball. You don’t need groomed greens, just a few holes and flags placed here and there.

Doug Hennigar has one of only three (for now) Farmersgolf franchises in Canada. Hennigar runs a farmers market in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, and uses Farmersgolf to strengthen his agritourism draw. The photo came from him.

You don’t need to buy more land for this. “You take what you’ve got and manipulate the course around it,” Hennigar says. “Some courses in Holland play right through buildings.” A true Farmersgolf course has 10 holes.

Over the winter, many farm families brainstorm new ideas to make money off their land. Farmersgolf is one of many. If you've got good agritourism or other business-building ideas you'd like to share, please email me and I'll share them with other readers. Maybe you've done something on your own farm and you don't mind talking about it. Or maybe you've visited a farm that's doing something you think others should try.

I got two emails recently with pointers and tips you may find important. The first one came from the federal government's AgriInvest program. This is the program where you make a deposit, which represents a percentage of your sales, and the government will match your deposit. You can withdraw this money at any time. Mark Sloane and Andrew DeRuyck will have some pointers for you in their column in the January 11 Grainews. In the meantime, here are some important deadline reminders.

AgriInvest deadlines

Earlier this fall, farmers received a 2008 AgriInvest Deposit Notice with information on your maximum matchable deposit, how to make a deposit in order to have the government contribution deposited to a participant’s account, and how to access funds from the AgriInvest account.

You must make a deposit to receive the matching government contribution, and you have 90 days from the date of their 2008 AgriInvest Deposit Notice to make a deposit. The deposit deadline is located in the top right hand corner of the Deposit Notice and on the tear off portion of the form.

If your deposit is not received by the deadline indicated on your Deposit Notice, you will not receive 2008 AgriInvest benefits.

If you have not applied: The deadline to submit an AgriInvest form is September 30, 2009. Applications postmarked after September 30, 2009 up to and including December 31, 2009 will be subject to a five per cent per month reduction in the maximum matchable deposit. Applications postmarked after December 31, 2009 will not be accepted. Applications are available through the AgriInvest website or by calling the administration toll free at 1-866-367-8506. Call this same number if you have any other questions.

Tax tips from H&R Block

You might find a few useful reminders among these tips, which I've lifted verbatim from the H&R Block news release.

• Home Renovation Tax Credit: The deadline is January 31, 2010. Canadian home and condo owners can get up to $1,350 back on lasting or integral renovations. If you are going to do it yourself, make sure you buy your materials before the deadline. If you hiring a contractor, be sure the work is completed before the deadline.

• Review your stock portfolio. The markets did gain some ground in 2009 but many people are still facing capital losses on their investments. It is a smart strategy to review your portfolio before the year end to see if you can find a tax advantage in taking a loss or cashing in a gain. Capital losses can be carried back three years or carried forward indefinitely.

• Employment Insurance (EI) Benefits: Stats Canada estimates more than 800,000 Canadians collected EI this year. For taxpayers collecting EI, they may want to review their tax obligations before the end of the year. In most cases, EI only withholds 10 percent back for tax purposes which is less than the lowest tax bracket. If the taxpayer collecting EI earned any other income in 2009, they could be facing a tax bill when they prepare their return next year.

• Saving for Higher Education: With tuition costs rising, many parents and grandparents want to take advantage of the government’s Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG). You must make a contribution to your child’s Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) before December 31. The lifetime RESP contribution limit is $50,000 with no annual contribution limit. CESG matching contribution per year has been increased from $400 to $500.

• Pooling medical expenses: If you have an expensive trip to the dentist coming up, you may want to consult a calendar. Medical expenses can be claimed in any 12-month period ending in 2009 so it could be beneficial to try to fit known medical expenses into the same 12-month period in order to maximize your claim. You don’t actually have to go to the dentist but if you have an outstanding amount, try to pay the bill by the end of the year. Remember, medical expenses are reduced by a percentage of your income. So the greater their dollar value, the likelier it will be that you can make a claim.

• Making a difference: If you want to claim a charitable donation on your 2009 tax return, you have to make it before December 31. If you have already made more than $200 in donations in 2009 it will also be worth a 29 percent federal credit instead of the 15 percent for donations under $200. The good news is that now you can donate publicly-listed securities to registered charities or private foundations without being subject to capital gain taxes.

• Moving to start a job in a different province? Check the provincial tax rates before deciding the moving day. You are subject to provincial tax in the province where you reside on December 31. So if there is a substantial difference in the tax rates, you may want to either speed up or defer the move.

• Getting married? You file your taxes based on your marital status on December 31. So if you want to claim your new spouse as a dependent on your 2009 return, you can claim them for the full year even if you are married on New Year’s Eve. Just make sure you say your vows before midnight. 

Dave Franzen, soil specialist with North Dakota State University's Extension Service, wrote a clever fertilizer-themed version of Charles Dicken's "A Christmas Carol." It's a fun read, with an important message. The gist is that farmers are still applying urea on to snow, and its a big waste of time and money. The urea runs off in the spring before the soil thaws and can absorb it. NDSU studies show a huge drop in wheat yield and protein levels when urea is applied on snow, versus applications into soil before freeze up in the fall or in the spring after the soils have thawed.

Watch for fertilizer best practices

With all the talk of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation at Copenhagen and everywhere else — with carbon-regulated Alberta leading the way — farmers will be encouraged (maybe financially rewarded) to pay closer attention to best management practices to reduce fertilizer losses and make more efficient use of their fertilizer investment. This is a good thing.

But it seems we're short on research to clearly show just what practices are best. A report from the International Fertilizer Industry Association, based in Paris, makes these points:

—There is debate regarding the mitigation potential of tillage measures. This is because assessing the net impact on GHG emissions requires comparing the impacts on both soil organic carbon, which is often biased by field measurements taken only in the top 30 cm of the soil profile, and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, which are highly variable over time. The balance of evidence does, however,point to a net benefit for suitable soil types, although more research may still aid our understanding in this area. Reducing tillage also gives indirect savings in terms of reducing on-farm fuel use and associated emissions.

—Agronomy measures are perhaps the most difficult mitigation practices to assess at present. Using catch crops, legumes and particular types of crop rotations could potentially reduce GHG emissions per hectare of cropland but can also impact on yields, potentially requiring additional land to be cultivated at great cost in terms of soil organic carbon losses. For example, the global warming potential of an intensive continuous corn crop may be 2-3 times higher, on a per hectare basis, than that of a conventionally-tilled corn-wheat-soybean rotati on, but produce only 63% of the net GHG emissions when compared on the basis of CO2 -equivalent per calorie of food yield. Therefore, more work is needed to compare net GHG emissions from different cropping systems over the long term and on a per unit of production basis.

Considering the source, IFA does lean toward a solution that favours getting more yield out of the same land rather than clearing more land to feed the growing population. That means more fertilizer use, and better yet, improved fertilizer use efficiency. Not applying urea onto to snow and having it wash away in spring, as NDSU reminds us, is a simple step in that direction.

I'm gathering information about how to achieve a target canola plant stand. With your airseeder or airdrill, you need to take a thousand-seed weight to set your metering system to achieve the target you want. Every canola seed lot has a different thousand-seed weight, and weights can vary widely. If you don't know the thousand seed weight, you could be putting on far too much or far too little seed to meet your plant stand target.

I'd love to get your thoughts about setting up a seeding system to achieve target plant stands. Do you bother to weigh seed? Why or why not? Please email me.

Row-crop planters are ideal for setting a target plant stand.

Cody Falk, part of the family that runs H. Fehr Co., a farm at Plum Coulee, Man., planted 1,000 acres of canola in 2009 with a John Deere 1790 CCS planter. He used a sugar beet disc in the planter’s seed singulating mechanism. Sugar beet seeds are small, so this disc also works well with large-sized canola seed — such as InVigor 5440 and 5030, the varieties that worked best for him. Falk says one canola seed variety, InVigor 5020, had smaller seeds that got stuck in cracks in the mechanism. “You could tighten up the mechanism to prevent this,” Falk says.

Why use a planter? The farm also has a John Deere disc drill, but it doesn’t work as well in their heavier clay land. Rather than buy another air drill to seed canola in the heavy land, Falk decided to try the planter. Canola goes in before corn and soybeans anyway, so the planter was available. It plants 15-inch or 30-inch rows, so Falk planted canola on 15-inch rows. He ran the planter himself because they’d never used it for canola before.

Important features to look for in a planter to handle canola is a vacuum-style singulator that sucks individual seeds — especially light-weight seeds — into the seed disc, and a hydraulic drive that can spin the disc fast enough to keep your seeding rate up.

The nice feature of a planter is that you can dial in the seed count per acre. Falk started with 200,000. That worked out to about five pounds per acre for the InVigor 5440 and 5030 hybrids. Soon after starting, he decided to dial that back to 100,000 to 150,000. Most of the canola went in closer to the lower count, which was around 2.5 pounds per acre. “There was zero difference in yield between the seeding rates,” Falk says.

With wider rows, he also says the canola seemed to swath better. He sprayed everything for disease, so he can’t say whether wider rows have an influence on disease. “I wished we had done a trial,” Falk says.

The drawback to the planter, Falk says, is that you have to make another pass to apply the fertilizer needed for canola. He floated granular on ahead of time. You could use a liquid kit to set up a planter for one-pass seeding and fertilizing, he says.

Galen Weston, head of Loblaw Companies, which includes Real Canadian Superstore, spoke last week at a meeting for Ontario's Agriculture Adaptation Council. His topic was long-term food production trends. You won't find anything in his speech that will make you change your production practices for 2010, but you'll find it an interesting look forward. Click here to read the report from the Guelph Mercury.

         Email me if you have a comment.

You can sign up for the Canadian Wheat Board’s new WeatherFarm website for free and tap into current weather information from any of the 700 WeatherBug stations across the Prairies. WeatherBug stations provide key measurements for spraying decisions and pest management. These include temperature, humidity and wind direction and speed.

Once you sign up and log on, you can set the home page to show data from the station nearest your farm. At the top left, find “Home Location” and click on “change” to pick the one you want. To see current and historical data from any site, just click that location on the map.

WeatherFarm also has live data maps, including Doppler Radar so you can see systems coming in.

A box at the top right gives weather warnings. You can customize these warnings to alert you if, for example, wind speed reaches a certain level. 

Under the Crop Management tab, you’ll find maps showing accumulated growing degree days, freeze severity, and prediction models for fusarium, sclerotina and wheat midge.

While at the site, you can also get historical data from each station, commodity prices (updated every 10 minutes), and news feeds from www.agcanada.com and www.producer.com.

What you need

The system is designed for PC computers and works best with Internet Explorer 7.0 and up or Firefox. A Mac format will be coming soon. If you have questions about setting up your site and getting the most out of it, start with “Frequently asked questions” under the Help tab at the top of the website.

You don’t need a high-speed Internet connection to view the website, but you do need high-speed if you want to set up your own station.

Get your own station

Most of the 700 stations are on farms. Farmers buy these stations to give them accurate and handy weather data for their own farms. Some bigger farms have more than one. If your nearest station is only a few miles away, you may feel you don’t need your own. When you phone to buy one, the CWB will alert you if a station is already close to your farm. “But in a lot of cases that doesn’t stop them. They want data from their own farm,” says Alison Sass, CWB’s WeatherFarm contact person. “From the CWB’s point of view, it’s good to have redundancy. If one station goes down, the other station nearby is still working.”

Stations cost $1,750, which includes installation by a qualified technician and five-year warranty. Power comes from solar and battery, so you can put them anywhere. It feeds information directly into your computer. To order one, email Alison Sass. 

If you order one now, you’ll be near the top of the list to have one set up before seeding, Sass says. Stations mounted on building can be put up in winter. But it’s hard to pound a pole three-feet into frozen ground to set up a field-located station in winter, she says.

Allis Chalmers fans — yes, they still exist and they even have a website — are upset by AGCO's plan to end its orange AGCO-brand line of equipment. In a letter to AGCO North America dealers, the company shared its plan to go forward with Massey Ferguson, Challenger and Gleaner brands only. To anyone but blindly loyal orange fans, this seems like a wise move. The company was offering three brands with minor differences in their actual product line, particularly for tractors and haying equipment. You will still be able to get the same tractors, balers, etc., but only in red or yellow.

I plan to talk with an AGCO rep on Thursday or Friday this week, once the announcement is "official." If you have a question you'd like me to ask, please send to me by email.