Projects you might want to see for yourself
Farming Smarter dislikes the slow spring keeping the crew from starting the over 90 projects, trials and demonstration plots they need to get in the ground this season. Some of them are continuing projects such as the hail recovery in peas, wheat and canola and the Mustard 21 trails.However, there are also some new exciting projects such as the publicly funded Deep Banding of Immobile Nutrients with SARDA. The project objective is to find whether placing nutrients once every three years at 5 to 6 inches will provide better results than current practice of shallow placed nutrients at annual seeding.
Other public projects include a specialty crop rotation project with Innotech Alberta, a flax variety trial, a flea beetle project with Dr. Hector Carcamo and some canola performance trials with the Canola Council of Canada. All in all, Farming Smarter has 20 publicly funded projects this year.
There are also some industry contract trials around nutrients, pesticides, agronomy and some variety trials. Manitoba Harvest, Canada's most successful hemp seed company, wants southern Alberta agronomy trials thisyear. Also BASF hired Farming Smarter for a few trials this year; which is a first for us.
We also have some projects still waiting on funding decisions.
- Precision pulses - precision planting of peas, soybean, lentils, dry beans etc.
- Field Tested - on-farm Precision Planting Canola trial
- Stubble Trouble - managing crop residue before and after dryland grain corn
- Canola 100 - stacking beneficial practices to go for maximum yield
- Canadian Western Amber Durum - advanced agronomy with irrigation, FHB strategies, fertility and PGRs
- Hemp Hearts Agronomy - optimum plant establishment through seeding dates and rates
We won't know about these for a couple of weeks yet.
So you can see that we want to get outside too and look forward to sharing our public project findings with people who come to our Learning Adventures.