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Sure Growth Solutions Inc. October Newsletter
Sure Growth Solutions Inc. is a group of professional consultants dedicated to helping growers utilize scarce resources. We strive to simplify, implement and support sustainable and profitable strategic growth of our progressive Ag partners.

Our Vision
We put our Client's needs & goals first to provide tailored precision strategies built on sound agronomy and innovative technologies supported by a passionate network of knowledgeable people. Our goal is to be the most valuable input on your farm.

Current Updates 

 With harvest beginning at the end of August, and winding down recently, September and October have been very busy at Sure Growth! This is one of our favourite times of the year because we get to see (and hear) how our grower's yields are! We are also looking ahead to 2021 and starting some fertility planning for fall banding. But mostly... the fall has been filled up with soil sampling!

 

GeoPard Agriculture
 
At Sure Growth our team is passionate about continuing to evaluate new tools, technology and practices that provide additional value to our clients and industry.  We are excited to announce our partnership with GeoPard Agriculture and their team of experts in the Canadian marketplace. We have been impressed with this software platform for its ease of use, unique tools, and analytics. Our clients and agronomist team have been impressed by accuracy of zone creation for variable rate applications for fertilizer and fungicide.  We look forward to collaborating with the expert team at GeoPard Agriculture to continue to build and offer new options and value to the market.
 
Soil Sampling 101 
As stated above, each fall we are busy with soil sampling! For those of you who don't know, we complete different kinds of soil sampling for different types of fertility plans. 
1 - Variable Rate
2 - Flat Rate 
 
Variable Rate
In this method, a field may have anywhere from two zones to 10 zones, depending on topography, soil type, plant productivity, or management goals! Each zone will require a minimum of 6 sample points in order to develop a good composite sample for the field.  For example:
Flat Rate
This sampling process is a bit less intensive. We simply obtain samples from a minimum of 8 points per field. These are obtained from "representative" areas of the field. The sample points are combined into composite samples for topsoil and subsoil. 
                        
Pod Drop vs Pod Shatter
Written by: Tyler Lefley

First off, I hope everyone has had a safe and successful harvest this year. Now I will dive in to a major issue that has popped up throughout the region this year… pod shatter and pod drop. Notice how I kept those two terms separate? That’s right, these are two separate anomalies that should not be grouped together. However, I will mention that we are not seeing any pod drop resistant varieties out in the marketplace; likely because swathing makes any variety pod drop resistant.
I am going to focus on pod shatter here because of the popularity with straight cut varieties.
Understanding pod shatter is simple. When a pod reaches physiological maturity, it will shatter when the external force exceeds the strength of the silique. So, the question canola breeders were initially faced with was how to select for a stronger cell wall without compromising other important agronomic traits (namely yield). Interestingly enough that sounds a lot like the problem with lodging resistance when breeding cereals; the main focus is to increase the strength of the supporting structure which is well known in plant physiology to be associated with carbohydrates. If you think about how we manage lodging in our cereal crops by hammering down potash and copper with escalating yield targets, zoning in on fertility is simple because everyone has compromised their K requirement in favor of getting the right amount of nitrogen in the ground at one point in their career. Having said that, it’s important to remember that insufficient fertility combined with environmental factors may compromise the pod shatter trait in your canola.
Although fertility is one of many factors affecting pod shatter, the major instigators of pod shatter are the four I have listed below – 3 are weather related, and a simple windy day at full maturity is a given I don’t need to dive into.

Frost
I saw some early frost damage this year and a few weeks later those patches of white seen from the highway was what was left of the septum.  If a plant isn’t completely dried down when a frost occurs, wait 48 hours to assess the damage and decide to swath or let the crop stand.  

Insects
If you have a fair amount of feeding damage from seed pod weevils, berthas, or diamondbacks then you will have predisposition to pod shatter given the pod has already been damaged.

Hail
The big white combine. Hail will simply pummel the pods wide open or off the plant.

Disease
Premature wilting of the plant is a tell-tale sign of a weakened plant that is also now exposed to the increased risk of weather events causing weakened pods to shatter.

Now, back to canola breeding! Invigor L140P was an industry game changer when it rolled out around 2014-2015 and Bayer began their marketing campaigns to sell the swather and buy their pod shatter canola trait (pod shatter being classified and patented as a verifiable trait is something that should also be taken note of here). With Bayer having a marketable trait, other seed companies began rolling out their versions of pod shatter resistance. This resulted in multiple shatter resistant varieties out on the market with each company having their own approach to obtaining and measuring the reductions in pod shatter. Now when everyone gets their seed guide for purchasing canola seed in the fall, this has resulted in a buyer beware situation because there is no universal method for assessing pod shatter resistance that is economical for the registration committee. The scientific way of assessment is time consuming and expensive which would call for increasing the cost of registration further reducing competition in the seed market because the big corporations are the only ones that can pay up. That is not really something we want, so it has come down to educating growers through extension about the good, bad, and the ugly of the varieties and their traits.
 
Upcoming Events/Training Opportunities  
  • TBD!
 
If you have something interesting that you would like to share with other growers and our team in our monthly newsletter, please feel free to let us know! You can email Viktor at viktor@suregrowth.ca or reach him at the office at 1-306-743-2721.
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Sure Growth Inc. · Box 618 · Langenburg, SK S0A2A0 · Canada

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