Jeff Melchior

Jeff Melchior

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Jeff Melchior is a reporter for Glacier FarmMedia publications. He grew up on a mixed farm in northern Alberta until the age of twelve and spent his teenage years and beyond in rural southern Alberta around the city of Lethbridge. Jeff has decades’ worth of experience writing for the broad agricultural industry in addition to community-based publications. He has a Communication Arts diploma from Lethbridge College (now Lethbridge Polytechnic) and is a two-time winner of Canadian Farm Writers Federation awards.

Stories by Jeff Melchior

This trial conducted by Farming Smarter’s Field Tested Program on a farm near Coaldale, Alta. compared the performance of a precision planter to an air seeder when planting canola. Stakes were used to identify which treatment was applied in each pass. That way, when the research team came back later, they could match the results to the treatment. Manager Lewis Baarda is pictured reviewing equipment calibration and seed rate protocols on his cellphone prior to the next pass.
Crops

Are on-farm trials a fit for your operation?

Testing something on the farm isn’t the same as conducting a scientifically valid field-scale trial

By
Glacier FarmMedia – We’re hearing more and more about producers conducting their own on-farm trials to sharpen their management decisions. And it makes sense. Before committing to a practice, product, […] Read more
Chemistry professor Maria DeRosa was looking for a better way to target drugs in human medicine when she realized her technique could be used in a fertilizer coating that would only release the nutrient when a plant needed it.
Crops

When the plant speaks, nutrients listen

Canadian researcher may have found a radically new way to fertilize crops

By
Glacier FarmMedia – It sounds like science fiction, but some day there may be a fertilizer that only activates once the plant tells it to. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s […] Read more
It’s critical to slash the amount of energy needed to produce nitrogen fertilizer — and quantum computing and artificial intelligence could do that within five years by revolutionizing the chemical process used to make N, says Teo Laino, manager of IBM Research Zurich.
News

A fertilizer revolution is on the horizon

IBM says it will produce a breakthrough within five years that will greatly lower the energy needed to make nitrogen

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As fledgling technology goes, quantum computing sounds as science fiction as it gets. But if IBM fulfills a bold promise it made in September, crop producers will see the fruits […] Read more
The GrainViz imaging sensors (the black device) magnetically attach to the inside bin wall. A 24-sensor array provides 3D imaging, revealing the moisture content of every bushel in the bin.
Crops

Is 3D grain bin monitoring tech for you?

Electromagnetic imaging is pricey but the technology can reveal hot spots anywhere in a bin

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Three-dimensional bin monitoring is one of the more talked-about new ag technologies. Proponents of this type of grain monitoring — more formally called three-dimensional electromagnetic imaging or 3D EMI — […] Read more