This is my last day with Grainews. I'm off to the Canola Council of Canada to help with an agronomy communication project. I'll still be writing and I'll still be talking to Western Canadian farmers. Who knows, I might even have a blog again.

Lyndsey Smith is your new Grainews editor. Lee Hart is still field editor in Calgary. And Scott Garvey is now the machinery editor. Lyndsey, Lee and Scott make a great team.

        I had a great time with Grainews. I think it's the best farm paper in Canada, and I really appreciated the story ideas and constructive feedback that readers sent in. Of all the papers I've worked for, Grainews has the best two-way relationship with its readers. It made me feel like I was doing something useful. And that's a good feeling. Thank you.

In dry regions of the Prairies in 2009, some drills had trouble penetrating into moisture. Many openers just skidded along the surface in some places. Ron Settler of Lucky Lake, Sask., wrote the following article for Grainews, which will appear in an upcoming issue. I'd like to include some of your ideas along with the article. So if you have advice on how to improve drill penetration in dry soils, please send me an email or comment on this blog site.

Here is Ron's article. Read it for inspiration:

We were sitting in the shade at an auction eating pie on a hot June day last spring. The auctioneer was selling something that none of us were interested in, so pie and coffee took the centre stage. The conversation turned to seeding and how well various types of seeding implements worked. A farmer from the next town said that out west in the Kindersley area it was so dry last spring that some air drills couldn’t penetrate the hard dry soil. They just scuffled over the hard spots and left the seed too close to the top.

We were lucky enough in our area to have some moisture to soften up things a bit before the seeding process, but I know how those in the drier areas farmers felt. Back in the ‘80s when it was deadly dry in our area we were seeding with a Cockshutt 225 discer pulled behind the John Deere R. As per usual, I had the oldest equipment in the area. Both the discer and the tractor were made in the ‘50s.

The crop insurance man, a nice older gentleman from a nearby town, came out to look at the poor germination and pointed out part of the problem. He had had discers like this one many years back. When it was dry, they were a bit on the light side and didn’t have enough weight to penetrate down to the moisture, he said. Sure enough, you could tell exactly on which round we filled the seeder box. The germination was better when the drill was heavy with a full seed box, then germination got poorer and poorer as the seed box emptied. I can’t remember the yield that year, but it wasn’t much. In ‘88 our best field of wheat on summerfallow went eight or nine bushels to the acre. Something to do with lack of rain.

So how do you seed your crop and how well does it penetrate when it’s dry? I’m definitely not an expert on newer seeding apparatus. Most of them are big, fold up and costs more money than I have to spend — that’s my total knowledge of newer seeding implements. But the auction sale conversation got me thinking about the subject.

We finally parked the old discers and now have a set of Versatile 2200 hoe drills. These are pretty heavy units, weighing 17,000 pounds for 35 feet, plus you can put in 105 bushels of seed and fertilizer. That adds up to around 23,000 pounds fully loaded, or about 650 pounds per foot full and 480 pounds empty. Once you get that weight on the hoes, it’s pretty hard for them not to go into the ground. But I’ve even seem them skid over a real hard spot.

Someone told me you can tell a good seeding implement in a dry year. He said anything will do a good job in a year with the right amount of moisture, but it takes a dry year to tell if it’s doing the job properly. With air drills that won’t go in the dry ground, what could you do to help the penetration? 

—Could you change the points on the unit for better penetration?

—How does speed affect the penetration? 

—Does working on an angle help?

I know if it’s dry and hard, you could work it up ahead of the drill, but if it’s too dry it might just blow away, too. Plus, most of us have gone away from a bunch of field work before you seed, so we haven’t budgeted the time for the job in our busy spring schedules. 

I hope it’s not dry this coming year, but if it is, hopefully this article has got you thinking about what you could do if you have trouble getting those little seeds down to the moisture. It would be really nice if you could share those constructive thoughts with the readers. There’s lots of knowledge out there and we’re all in this fun game of farming together. If you’ve got some ideas — let’s hear them. Send the editor an email.

Grainews readers are familiar with Elaine Froese and Andy Sirski and their popular columns. If you'd like to hear them in person, here are some dates and locations where they'll be speaking over the next few weeks.

Elaine Froese

Elaine will speaking at three Farm Leadership Council workshops over the next few weeks. The topic is "Who gets the farm and when?" Locations and dates are Kenosee, Sask. on February 24, Wetaskiwin, Alta. on March 1 and Taber, Alta. on March 2. Go to www.wflc.ca for more details.

Andy Sirski

Andy will be High River, Alta. on February 24 speaking at a Foothills Forage and Grazing Association workshop. MNP will start the day with a one-hour presentation on farm risk management, then Andy will take over for the rest of the day, talking about off-farm investing, farm transfer and risk management. The workshop starts at 9:30 at Highwood Memorial Centre, 128 5th Ave. W. Please register by Febuary 19. Price is $30 for members, $40 for non members, and that includes lunch. Call 1-403-652-4900 to register.

On March 9, Andy and Mike Jubinville will be in Canora, Sask. with the Canora Agricultural Society. The event starts at 8:30 at the Rainbow Hall. You are asked to register early. Call 1-306-563-6337.

Richard Elenko, who farms north of Biggar, Sask., phoned to correct a point I made in my page 1 article on grain vacs in the January 25 issue. I wrote that you could use a grain vac to condition a bin of canola, sucking from the bottom and putting grain back on top of the same bin. Richard says that procedure will turn over the core of the bin, but it won’t condition grain along the sides. He says the physics of grain bin unloading is that the top grain comes out first. Within minutes, you’ll be cycling the same grain over and over again. He confirmed this again this fall when he put 300 bushels of just-dried canola into the top of a 4,000-bushel bin, then asked his hired man to take out a load to see if the rest of the bin was conditioned and in good shape. “Within five minutes, the canola coming out the bottom was the warm stuff that we’d just put in the top,” Richard says. 

Richard says the grain vac is a great tool for conditioning canola, but the best plan is to take from one bin and dump into a separate bin. Thank you very much for the call Richard. If anyone has other grain vac tips to share, please email me.

Marianne Stamm from Jarvie, Alta., is working on an article for Grainews about liquid fertilizer. A company in her area had a workshop recently about the benefits of liquid fertilizer, and Marianne's article will share some of the highlights.

Here is a teaser:

—With dry fertilizer it is difficult to get all the nutrients to every seed. Especially the prills of P are spaced fairly far apart, simply because there isn’t as much P in a blend. You just won’t get P prills to every seed. With liquid fertilizer you get every nutrient to every seed all the time because every drop of the blend has every nutrient in the same strength.

—Only in liquid fertilizer can you get all three forms of N – nitrate nitrogen, ammonium nitrogen and urea. The three different forms release their nutrients at different times, so that the plant has some N available from the first moment on until maturity. 

—With liquid fertilizer it is possible to put more nutrition closer to the seed than with dry. 

—With liquid, one-pass farmers can seed far more acres at a time before having to fill again. 

—Liquid fertilizer is easy to store and handle. There aren’t any safety concerns as with anhydrous ammonia. You just need to have a few tanks to keep a supply handy in spring.

I'd like to get your thoughts. Do you agree with these arguments in favour of liquid fertilizer? Are these benefits enough to overcome the extra cost? Please email me.

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."