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LAKE COUNTRY CO-OP AGRO TRUSTED ADVISOR QUICK HITTER
Straight Cutting Your Canola
These past few years, the industry has seen a variety of new traits bred into canola seed varieties. We are bombarded with a variety of terms including “Pod Shatter”, “Harvest Max”, and “Late Swath Potential”. Canola companies have their own specific breeding program that has produced varieties with these particular traits to give producers the option of delayed harvest and in turn, higher yield potential.
Straight cutting canola seems to be a growing trend, although it is not necessarily the answer for every operation. When considering straight cutting canola, there are a variety of factors that come into play, including:
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Field choice: Choosing the proper field is probably the most crucial. We want an even field with little topography changes to allow for the most even maturity possible throughout the field. This gives each plant an equal opportunity to fill as long as possible and to be harvested at the same time which should be dollars in our pocket.
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Start clean and stay clean: Ensuring a good preburn on our field gives our canola the chance to emerge at the same time and rate. Keeping it as clean as possible for as long as possible throughout the growing season means less competition for nutrients for our canola, allowing our crop to mature at a consistent rate across the field.
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Pre Harvest Management: There are different chemical control options to aid in ease of harvest. Both weed control and proper dry down of your crop are crucial for threshing ease through your combine. Heat LQ and Reglone are the most common choices for this stage, both offering different positives and negatives depending on your goals for the crop and environmental conditions at time of spraying. Talk to us for more information on these products and proper crop staging for spray timing.
Straight cutting canola is not the only option these traits offer our growers. At harvest time, it gives them the opportunity to manage which fields are harvested at what time, depending on the unlimited environmental conditions that may arise. It also gives producers the ability to swath later. When choosing your varieties to seed based on maturity, this can help in making the decision in the fall which fields to swath first and which can be left longer. If environmental conditions are not favorable to swath a certain field, then you have time to leave it longer in the field and there is less stress waiting to get into the field. In an industry where a lot of our outcome is out of our control, it is nice to have options. Give your Lake Country Co-op Agronomist a call to talk about these options and find out what may be a good fit for your operation.
To learn more, contact your Lake Country Co-op Grow Team Member. Published August 2021, Lauren.