We have been hard at work over the last few months trying to get everything together to launch out new Sure Growth Website! Be sure to head there and check it out and let us know what you think!

Sure Growth will be at Precision Ag - Space Age Technology for Today. Your opportunity to gain a better understanding of the Precision Ag Industry.

Agenda
THURSDAY, MARCH 7th, 2019
8:30 am  Registration
8:50 am  Introduction
9:00 am Variable Rate Technology - Improving on Farm Efficiencies
              - John Deere
              - Farmers Edge 
              - Decisive 
              - Sure Growth Solutions 
             - AgraTactics Agronomy
             - Crop Pro

10:30 am Dr. Alan Moulin, AAFC "Field Scale Management Zones & Variable Rate N Fertility in Canola"
11:15 am Tools to Aid in Scouting - Making Efficient Use of Scouting Time 
              - Decisive
              - Corteva
              - Field View
              - Farmers Edge
              - Sure Growth Solutions 

12:30pm Lunch

1:30pm Data Management - Making your Data Work for You
             - Field View
             - Farmers Edge 
             - AgraTactics Agronomy
             - Sure Growth Solutions 
             - John Deere
             - Decisive

3:15pm Michael Raine, Editor Western Producer - Technology - Where will it take Farms and Farming?
4:00pm Evaluation & Wrap Up

Location: St. Mary's Cultural Centre
240 Wellington Avenue, Yorkton, SK

To Register by Monday, March 4th, 2019 at 1(306)786-1531
Cost $15/Person

Current Updates!
The Sure Growth Team has been hard at work, getting Crop Plans ready for this spring! Inbetween our hour's planning, we have also continued taking in as many valuable conferences as possible. The Sure Growth team focused mainly on Soil Health and Sustainability conferences this month, as we feel that this is a hot topic that growers are going to be looking for more information on going forward. We want to do our best to provide our growers with as many solutions as possible. 

Elemental Sulfur for Sulfur Management is something that Elston Solberg with Earth Dirt Soil has been advocating about for years. 
Sulfur is a plant nutrient that is required by every crop, every year. It is also one of our lowest cost crop nutrients. Did you know that if you put Nitrogen on Sulfur deficient soils, your yield and crop quality will decrease, and your disease presence and pressure will increase? Elston says this is a conversation that is not had enough in Agriculture. Elemental Sulfur is a solution for producers that allows you to apply multiple years of sulfur in one application, allowing you to focus on other important nutrients in your soils knowing your crop has all the sulfur it needs. 

Elemental sulfur builds a sulfur "bank" in the soil. Plant tissues can accumulate S when it is available in excess of needs, however, the plant does not have the ability to mobilize extra sulfate to younger tissues if there is a shortage of supply in the soil. ES allows you to have a steady drip supply of sulfur to your crop throughout the season, helping to prevent sulfur deficiencies from occurring. 

So, as Terry says, "WHACK IT ON! And then forget about it!"

Get in touch with the Sure Growth team if you are interested in learning more about Elemental Sulfur and if it may be a fit for your farm!
 

Justin was able to attend a holistic management conference. He didn’t know exactly what to expect going in but saw that some of the topics were soil health so decided to attend. Holistic Management is a very interesting way of managing the land with the potential for very high profit per acre returns on small parcels of land. HM may not scale very well to 10000-acre farms but their practices, principles, and results are hard to argue against. Justin would loosely define Holistic Management as producing a product with techniques that mimic nature but he is interested in doing more research to find a more scientific definition. There were many examples and testimonials given to improve the soil health with livestock management and grazing principles. There was also a presenter that tied a few cover crop techniques together for me as well. After taking in the entire conference, my takeaways are:

There's a lot more to soil health that we can learn from different management.

We’ve always known that manure as fertilizer does wonderful things to the soil. HM managers are experts at managing manure and it is a shame that there is not better access to this resource in conventional agriculture. Learning to leverage this tool better could be very valuable to growers.

There are different ways to manage water. One presenter managing hay land and rotational grazing actually showed an example of putting sloughs back into production. This way he could easily manage rotational grazing on this specific property. This is the first example of putting sloughs back into production that Justin came across in a long time. "I know it doesn’t pertain to much of what we are trying to do in conventional grain farming. It was just a funny story that I thought I would share."

Justin really appreciated everyone who spoke about selling their products for a premium and their marketing techniques. More or less selling your story with your product and not being afraid to set ridiculous prices. There is a market out there for everything and if you sell your story, it sounds like there is always somebody that will pay a premium for a story that matches the value of the company, or their consumers.  One example that stuck out in his mind was an HM managed a farm near Russell was able to sell his sheep’s wool into a niche market and get 4x his normal return. The market was more stable and he was in control over his price. This could be a nice place for every producer out there, no matter what form of agriculture from which they are involved.    

All and all, Justin attended this conference to learn what he could about soil health and to network with other producers. We are all trying to do the same thing and no one is right or wrong on their way to better management. It’s just a different way of doing the job. Ranchers have been intercropping different grasses managing their pastures for years. Intercropping is quite new to broadacre agriculture and we can learn a lot from pasture managers. Justin also found they have a bit of a head start in cover crops. He agreed with the science of keeping something growing on the land at all, times feeding the microbes and mitochondria in the soil. High Mitochondria populations in the soil help transport nutrients up, down and side to side in the soil managing nutrient stratification in different ways. The same thing for feeding microbes in the soil. Generally speaking, microbes in the soil break down our macro fertilizers and convert them to a plant available form in soil solution faster. We would just have to learn which cropping systems would work best and how to manage weeds and disease in the long term with rotation. "I know a lot of us would have a hard time driving past a green field at the end of October. I don’t think conventional agriculture can adapt very many holistic management practices but the few tools we can pick up would be easy to implement."

If anyone has any questions, Justin can do my best to answer them while the conference is fresh in my head. At Sure Growth, we are going to continue to learn what we can from outside the box management techniques. We are planning on sending people to Winnipeg for an upcoming conference on soil health and regenerative agriculture if time allows. Stay tuned for more informational updates to come.

AgroEcology and the Economics of Organics
Terry and Justin were able to take in the Sustainable grain Conference in Winnipeg a few weeks ago.
 
The conference was tailored towards organic management practices and, some long over-due, real-world organic agronomy research. Joel Williams was the main agronomic presenter over the two-day event and he gave us a taste of the biological world. The soil system is incredibly complex and Joel gave us a breakdown on what is and could be happening to the soil as you transition your land to organic. Joel spoke mostly about soil microbes, fungi -bacteria relationship, OM, Carbon, crop roots and what’s actually happening. He also went over soil tests, tissue tests and tried to connect a few dots for some of the produces in the room.

The room was full of organic producers talking about how they transitioned their land, in addition to sharing their knowledge on the business side of organic production, managing cash crops, rotation, and green manure. It was very enlightening to hear these top-level producers talk about their best monument practices. Justin was sitting with a producer that also sold tillage equipment that was very high tech. It mimicked a weed seeker but with an iron instead of herbicide.

As well as organic proception talk, we also heard presentations about organic markets. They spoke to some of their trials and tribulations trying to sell grain around the world and different countries and the difference in legislation for organic production makes it difficult to compete in some world markets. The economics were very interesting, however, would have never guessed that the cost of production from an organic production standpoint could be 10% to 20% higher than conventional. It made perfect sense at the end of the meeting.

This seminar also had two or three producer panels where every producer had the opportunity to explain and defend their management practices. A lot of attention was paid to managing your transition from conventional to organic, production issues and many other aspects. It was neat to see how each producer managed the same problem differently with their own ingenuity. 

"I know I have a new found respect for organic production and will be paying close attention to different techniques going forward on how we can improve our soil health to maximize yield." - Justin Cleaver
 

Justin just got back from attending the Soil summit Management and Sustainability conference in Saskatoon put on by TopCrop. This was a pretty decent one-day event packed full of a little bit of everything. Mostly every speaker had reverent information for the industry and farmers alike. David Lobb presented an interesting case of soil erosion. He talked about how different techniques eroded the soil more than others and argued the case that more research needs to be done in these areas. David went on to say that vertical tillage machines don’t move very much dirt but do make it possible for soil erosion to take place which was counter-intuitive at first but made more sense as the presentation went on. All and all David had some interesting data to share.

There was a presentation of high yielding spring wheat management which was interesting to take in. They talked about different management techniques across southern Manitoba. They focused on Nitrogen for the presentation and did not offer too much information of P, K, S, and micros which was interesting to me. The agronomic part of his presentation was lacking a bit from my point of view but they did verify the nitrogen uptake levels that we have been using for years.

We had a presentation on the nature of manure, it’s application and impacts on crops and soils. This was a really good presentation that went into many different types of manure, application methods and their benefits to the soil. They also spoke to the greenhouse gas emissions part of the manure equation which was unique to me. I’ve never had to opportunity to take in a manure talk accompanied by the greenhouse gas equation. It was refreshing to put pros and cons in the same presentation. 

Marla Riekman spoke about Wet/dry soil problems: compaction, salinity and what needs to be done. She spent a lot of time talking about the wet conditions in Manitoba over the last few years and how they are seeing compaction problems really get out of hand. There hasn’t been much of a dry cycle to crack the soil up and allow water to infiltrate down to depth. She also talked about the benefits and risks of ripping the soil. The data suggested that the payback difficult to justify an expensive ripping pass. 

Derek Axten presented about intercropping insights that he has learned on his farm. Derek was an animated speaker and very knowledgeable on the subject. Anyone curious about intercropping should make a point to take in a presentation from Derek. He was showing what worked and what didn’t work on his farm over the last couple of years. He validated the chickpeas – flax rotation. In fact, he seemed to intercrop everything with flax. It was very interesting on how Derek adapted his equipment for intercropping. Ordering the right drill to be able to move the seed hoses around to be able to seed different crops on opposing openers and change them back again. He had some fantastic slides on residue management/rotation and integrating stripper headers onto the farm. Derek also talked about the challenges and opportunities separating/cleaning his seed.  

Bobbi Helgason from the U of S talked about Management practices that promote beneficial soil and plant microorganisms in cropping systems. I’ve been to a few presentations about soil health in the past weeks and you pick up a little more from each presenter. Bobbi did a great job speaking to current soil testing technologies to try and measure soil health. She went on to explain how good and poor different methods are for measuring soil health and the populations of microorganisms in the soil. She didn’t get into the fungi – bacterial relationship as much as I would have expected her to. She simply explained that the fungi – bacteria relationship is closer related to the amount of tillage on the field than any other factor. The overall message was that intercropping and cover cropping was more important to soil health. Always having something growing on the soil surface from spring thaw to the winter freeze. These management techniques make sense on paper but require a different mindset in conventional agriculture. I happen to agree with the practice and theory of always having something growing on the land but I still haven’t seen concrete yield data numbers and ROI calculations. All of the presenters are still in the early years of their research. It was fantastic to have Bobbi and Derek present after each other but there may have been a benefit for them to present together or be a part of a round table discussion where they could answer producer questions rather than a canned presentation.

Corry Willness from Crop Pro consulting closed off the day. Corry’s presentation was about swat maps fertility and mapping out salinity problems. He went into Rx seed maps a little bit but presented no conclusive date which has been our experience with Rx seeding rates as well. It would be nice to see a government research study completed in Rx seeding for small grains on the prairies. I have my own theories and opinions for what will work for a base layer to calculate your Rx seeding rates but more on that later when we have better data to work from.
 

Watch Trimble Ag Software's December 2018 webinar for tips on how to easily track and effectively leverage farm data to make year-round decisions in your operation. Hear advice for overcoming the common pain points farmers run into when it comes to tracking farm data, including managing variability, piecing multiple systems together, and dealing with increased regulation.