Friday Crop Report on a Thursday!

[bucket]

Interesting that you bring up cover crops. I was watching Welker farms most recent video. They are harvesting their best wheat of the year which is yielding 25 bushels to the acre. It is yielding about double of their other crops because it is on land that was chem fallowed last year. In most years moisture is our limiting factor for yield! It seems to me cover crops will simply exacerbate that problem. Any thoughts?

Cover crops need moisture to do what they have to do. I have tried tillage radish and noticed where the ground had moisture they did ok...Where I needed them to grow and limited moisture...SFA.

[Herc]

We are done. Finished in August. That should be an indication of how good the crops were.....

Time to load the sprayer up or I might have a second cut in November....

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Barley is mostly wrapped up in our area and has lots of green lines behind CASE GLEANER NH CLASS AND DEERE. In our case, we swath then picked up lots of loss at pickup and light seeds out the back that with 5 inches of rain did grow. Stuff that is in the swath is ****ed and stuff standing has new growth coming so hard it's not even funny. Look at your stubble and you will see that a shoot is coming off the root. Yep it will be green before we know it.

So, MF and Versatile for the win?

I drove by an early harvested barley field yesterday, tidy row of solid green mat behind the combines. Decent tall crop. Not sure how anyone could afford to throw that much over at these prices. I can't actually confirm that the combines were green though...

[tubs]

My crops are maybe 60 percent of normal. The guys that protilled last fall or spring paid a big price this year for that work and last year it was the right thing to do. We are still very dry we had about 20 mm of rain in august. We are about 60 percent done.

[Rinker]

We are 60% done harvest. All cereals and pulses done. Averaged 40% normal bushel. just canola left, All in swaths. Like others stated canola stubble is flowering again. Absolutely bizarre. 3 inches of rain all growing season and almost 5 inches in the last 3 weeks. Pastures are loving it!

[beaverdam]

So, MF and Versatile for the win?

I drove by an early harvested barley field yesterday, tidy row of solid green mat behind the combines. Decent tall crop. Not sure how anyone could afford to throw that much over at these prices. I can't actually confirm that the combines were green though...

Just wondering if the green strips of volunteer barley could be the result of thin light barley blown out the back. Thin lighter seeds can still germinate.

[WiltonRanch]

Cover crops work in corn country or places lots of rain where they work the ground and fear losing soil or having nutrients runoff into water bodies. Up here we don’t get that kind of moisture, use that much fertility, nor work the ground like that. I really don’t see an advantage to them, and I have tried them to some extent with fall rye or sweetclover underseeded with a forage crop, with varying degrees of success. The best luck was sweetclover and barley for greenfeed. It was a wet year, and I did this on a solonetzic field. Didn’t use any herbicide except for preseed glyphosate. Cut for greenfeed, and allowed clover to grow 6” following year before seeding barley into it. Sprayed with roundup a week after. Wasn’t a weed in the barley, and wild oats were suppressed for 2 years after that. It was wet and it worked. I’ve seen the same done when on the dry side and the clover doesn’t do anything. Only real advantage to covers is if you have livestock to graze them and cycle those nutrients faster. I’ve often thought if you were to seed a quarter to fall rye, barley, oats, and maybe a legume and graze it as later summer pasture. Aside from packing the piss out of the ground, you get a sort of fallow break where 80% gets recycled as poop, something is growing too. All good if it rains though.

[furrowtickler]

Cover crops work in corn country or places lots of rain where they work the ground and fear losing soil or having nutrients runoff into water bodies. Up here we don’t get that kind of moisture, use that much fertility, nor work the ground like that. I really don’t see an advantage to them, and I have tried them to some extent with fall rye or sweetclover underseeded with a forage crop, with varying degrees of success. The best luck was sweetclover and barley for greenfeed. It was a wet year, and I did this on a solonetzic field. Didn’t use any herbicide except for preseed glyphosate. Cut for greenfeed, and allowed clover to grow 6” following year before seeding barley into it. Sprayed with roundup a week after. Wasn’t a weed in the barley, and wild oats were suppressed for 2 years after that. It was wet and it worked. I’ve seen the same done when on the dry side and the clover doesn’t do anything. Only real advantage to covers is if you have livestock to graze them and cycle those nutrients faster. I’ve often thought if you were to seed a quarter to fall rye, barley, oats, and maybe a legume and graze it as later summer pasture. Aside from packing the piss out of the ground, you get a sort of fallow break where 80% gets recycled as poop, something is growing too. All good if it rains though.

An excellent overview of where , when and how cover crops fit in 90% of western Canada 👍👍.
By someone who actually understands and experience.
Not blindly b/s propaganda from eco terrorists promoting Gabe Browns farming practices on every acre in the world as the saviour to climate change
Thanks Wilton for calling as it is 👍

[Sheepwheat]

An excellent overview of where , when and how cover crops fit in 90% of western Canada 👍👍.
By someone who actually understands and experience.
Not blindly b/s propaganda from eco terrorists promoting Gabe Browns farming practices on every acre in the world as the saviour to climate change
Thanks Wilton for calling as it is 👍

Yep. Not everyone has animals, or wants animals.
Some areas might have growing season, but no moisture.
Other areas have moisture, but lack growing season.

I like what Gabe is doing. But it just won’t work everywhere as claimed IMO. I watch a guy, Greg Judy on YouTube. Excellent cattleman/shepherd. But he is in Missouri. What he has working for him there, is impossible here, namely not ever feeding his animals grain, and rarely hay. His winter is about three days and a few inches of snow. His February looks like may here.

Frustrating.

[WiltonRanch]

An excellent overview of where , when and how cover crops fit in 90% of western Canada 👍👍.
By someone who actually understands and experience.
Not blindly b/s propaganda from eco terrorists promoting Gabe Browns farming practices on every acre in the world as the saviour to climate change
Thanks Wilton for calling as it is 👍

Gabe mines the soil. It’s just at a slower rate by grazing and using covers to make use of nutrient cycling. Immobile nutrient levels do not get replenished from the sky or spontaneously appear in the soil. I by no means am an expert about this stuff but I think enough through it to come to the conclusion any of these sorts of guys have some relevant points and things to take away but you have to think about how you adapt to your conditions. So many of these hucksters peddling cover crop/grazing blends that simply do piss all except cost the poor schlump a bunch of money when they could’ve seeded whatever crap they had in the bin and got the same results. Cow calf and stocker business is a low margin game at times and getting sucked into these schemes is all too common. I have enough friends with cows who’ve had wrecks with this crap. I hate to be a negative resistant to new ideas person but at the end of the day I call bs when someone comes out with any of it. I might try a bit to give it a fair shake but at the end they’re usually bs.