Manitoba farmer seeds canola with a planter

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.