The in-person conferences in Ridgetown, Waterloo and Kemptville, or the virtual option, will offer courses that elevate agricultural knowledge and foster province-wide collaboration among farmers, agronomists, researchers and agri-food professionals.

“Our goal is to make leading-edge research and agronomic expertise available to every farmer in Ontario — regardless of where they farm,” said Crosby Devitt, Grain Farmers of Ontario CEO. “The virtual and on-demand options make it easier than ever to stay connected and informed.”

Southwest Agricultural Conference (SWAC), Ridgetown Campus, University of Guelph, Jan. 6-7, 2026

Two days of expert insight, hands-on learning and networking featuring keynote speakers with “Under the Influence’s” Terry O’Reilly sharing Stories that Grow Trust, encouraging farmers to engage with the public through compelling storytelling and Dr. Jody Carrington with Reignite! a heartfelt appeal to reconnect, recharge, and rediscover passion and purpose.

Participants can choose between four one-hour concurrent sessions on agronomic and production, and a two-hour Sprayer Clinic offered twice daily by CASE IH and John Deere specialists.

January 6 offers a “Taste Ontario” event and tradeshow with the latest crop production innovations.

MidWest Agricultural Conference (MWAC) at RIM Park, Waterloo, Jan. 16, 2026

A full day of the latest field crop innovation and information, including interactive hot topic discussions for the 2026 growing season, such as Strip Till Show and Tell, Feeding the Soil and the Crop, I Robot, What’s happening, and are we ready?, along with networking opportunities and tradeshow.

Eastern Ontario Crop Conference (EOCC) at the Southgate Church in Kemptville, January 27, 2026

The EOCC emphasizes eastern Ontario issues such as Biocontrol Breakthroughs and New Pest Mysteries, From Stover to Stand, On-farm lessons for No Till soybeans after corn, and Record-Breaking Wheat: Learnings from the Great Lakes YEN, with two concurrent sessions per hour and a tradeshow for networking.

Each participant will have access to 50 on-demand recorded sessions from the SWAC, MWAC and the EOCC, along with selected live-streamed sessions from Ridgetown and Waterloo, until March 31, 2026.

Additionally, TEC Talk Tuesday, an interactive, topic-focused virtual discussion series with conference speakers, returns throughout January and February at 7:27 p.m., with recordings available after the fact.

“We’ve seen incredible success with the hybrid format,” said Rob Miller, Regional Technical Service Manager, BASF Canada. “Attendees value being able to learn in-person, network with peers, and then revisit sessions later online. That flexibility keeps the information accessible long after the conference ends.”

Registration for the in-person and virtual options can be found at Ontarioagconferences.ca or through the partnering conference’s websites at Ridgetown’s southwestagconference.ca, Waterloo’s heartlandsoilcrop.org/mwac or Kemptville’s www.eocc.eastontcropconference.ca.

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Amélie Gaudin has been following the results from long-term studies on rotational diversity since earning her PhD from the University of Guelph. In her presentation at the 2024 Southwest Agricultural Conference earlier this month, she provided insights from a variety of research studies in Ontario and across parts of the U.S.

Why it matters: Long-term research trials on crop rotation show yield stability benefits for corn.

The benefit of rotational diversity isn’t a new message, she noted, which is why the collaborative approach from sites in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and South Dakota, among others, was intriguing.

Diverse rotations can lower pest pressures, lower the use of synthetic inputs, increase nitrogen-use efficiency and improve soil health.

“However, diversifying rotations is still a complex thing to do on a farm,” conceded Gaudin, who is now an associate professor at the University of California Davis.

“The cost-revenues are really not straightforward because they’re context specific. The system will respond differently according to soil, climate and landscape but also depends on the farm systems, equipment and the markets.”

She cited research projects into crop rotation that began in 1980 and are still underway at the University of Guelph’s Elora Research Station. In the 40-plus year history, research has addressed the effects of tillage, rotational complexity and cover crops.

The replicated trials can provide insights into soil properties, carbon sequestration, greenhouse gasses, cost-revenue comparisons and nutrient management.

Not a simple process

Gaudin addressed rotation complexity and cover crop use with five different cropping scenarios:

1 crop = monocrop corn

2 crops = corn-soybeans or corn-alfalfa

3 crops = corn-soybeans-wheat or corn-oat-barley

3 crops + 1 cover crop = corn-soybean-wheat_{(RC) *}

3 crops + 2 cover crops = corn-oat_(RC)-barley_{(RC) *}

_*(RC) –under-seeded to red clover

“There’s a large amount of power in this long-term trial,” said Gaudin. “We can see time trends to inform the future, with yield benefits, input use or savings and others. We can look at productivity over time in a system that will be highly diversified.”

She recalled walking fields in 2012 – an extreme year for drought – and observed different levels of leaf-rolling from different rotations and tillage.

One slide from her presentation showed a side-to-side comparison of a field of no-till corn and a cover crop versus four crops in rotation with two cover crops. The yield benefit with the 30-year average was 600 kg/ha (9.6 bu./ac) with tillage and 420 kg/ha (6.8 bu./ac) no till.

But the yield benefit from those same systems in 2012 was 880 kg/ha (14 bu./ac) with tillage and 1,670 kg/ha (26 bu./ac) with no till.

“We should also realize that these conditions are going to become more normal,” said Gaudin. “The scientific community has (joined) together to write numerous reports to show that agriculture has to adapt to this new normal.”

Combined effort

Using data from nine U.S. sites and combining them with figures from Woodslee and Elora, Gaudin provided a better reflection of the benefits of diverse rotations. In 10 locations (minus one of the U.S. sites), the addition of a new crop in the rotation resulted in significant increases in yield, particularly at Woodslee, which recorded the highest jump.

“Over time, as we diversify rotation, we’re starting to look at expected benefits. The longer you diversify your cropping system, the more benefits in term of maize yield, both at Woodslee and Elora. Some of the differences in trials are linked to soil properties and the potential that soil health can have in these systems.”

Gaudin also studied the effect of rotational diversity on the risk of crop failure. From all 11 sites, a simple rotation at the Elora site showed an 18 per cent risk-probability of crop failure in a stressful year. But in a year with favourable growing conditions, a complex rotation at both Elora and Woodslee held a probability of greater than 20 per cent of having a bumper crop.

“What that shows is crop rotational diversity reduces the risk of crop failure and increases your opportunity to get good yields in maize when conditions are favourable,” said Gaudin.

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That’s easier said than done, considering the many factors around getting corn to emerge at the same time.

The Cook family of Mapleview Farms between London and St. Thomas have gone to great lengths to make simultaneous emergence consistent on their farms, and Jeff Cook told the SouthWest Agricultural Conference that they believe it is paying off.

Why it matters: Corn is 30 to 40 per cent of most farmers’ acreage and achieving consistent, profitable yield is important to farm financial health.

“Traditionally we think about seedbed preparation just before planting,” Cook said. “I think it starts the year before managing residue and doing fall tillage.”

He was part of the Real Corn Growers panel at SWAC that also included Mike Strang, from Exeter and Andrea and Adrian Donkers from Elora.

The Cooks run a Landoll vertical tillage disc in the spring to size and mix residue on a first pass. They then run a C-shank cultivator before the planter — always running the exact direction of the planter, on the same preset AB line, to avoid any tillage barrier to the planter running smoothly.

They’ll also sometimes use an S-tine cultivator, especially in years like 2019 when there was significant crust on the surface of the soil and the ground was wet underneath and not drying.

But it is on the planter itself where they’ve made a significant investment in making sure every row gets an equal shot at emergence.

They added an Aulari dry fertilizer box onto their new John Deere 24-row planter when they bought it in 2012. Measuring yield showed them there were compaction issues on the centre 12 rows. On some farms it was significant, on others it wasn’t, but they figured they were losing 10 bushels per acre in yield in the rows behind the tractor. In 2016, they invested in tracks for the planter. The Soucy tracks cover five times the ground area compared to tires.

They purchased a new planter in 2019 and it also has tracks. They did some plots where they tracked the yield from the wing rows and the centre rows and they came out within a bushel of each other.

“It’s intriguing stuff and just one year, but we will continue to do some trials,” says Cook. “We think these tracks are working pretty well for us in corn and other crops as well.”

The Cooks are also trying variable rate planting. Cook says it’s important to remain involved throughout the variable rate data and map creation process.

If you’re having someone off the farm complete the maps and they haven’t set foot on the farm, they won’t know the zones as someone does who works the land. They won’t know where tile has been added or fixed or lime applied.

He says even their fields that seem uniform show quite a bit of variability. They’ve had wins and losses on scripts, but Cook says they believe they have made $20 to $25 net profit by using variable rate planting on about 70 per cent of their acres.

Variable rate shows field variability

Mike Strang farms with his brother Jeff and together they heavily modified a Kinze planter they purchased to do, among other things, variable rate planting.

They also do a lot of strip till and plant their corn in twin rows on 30 inch centres.

They have modified their strip till unit so that they can apply variable rate MAP and potash.

They have been experimenting with variable rate planting – including mixing “racehorse” (for good land) and “workhorse” (for lower quality land) hybrids at different rates in the twin rows and also varying planting rate. Good yielding areas get 38,000 corn seeds per acre, but they decrease the rate to 32,000 in lower-yielding areas.

Strang says they still aren’t sure whether the variable rates make sense and will need more years of data to know for sure.

Manure is corn-yield power

Poultry manure is a key component of productive corn crops for Andrea and Adrian Donkers who farm about 4,800 acres in Wellington County.

Their poultry operations supply a healthy volume of manure.

“We use manure strategically as a fertility input,” said Andrea.

They run two large manure spreaders and can move large volumes. At $50 nutrient value per tonne, they believe it makes sense to move the poultry manure a distance.

Another important factor in the success of corn on the Donkers farm is their John Deere MaxEmerge 24-row planter with a Salford cart attached for dry fertilizer. When conditions are good, the planter has to move and move fast, says Andrea. It makes everything better. They’ve looked at data and speed of planting hasn’t affected their yields.

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Why it matters: Veteran agronomists say Ontario farmers must voluntarily adopt industry-driven 4R Nutrient Stewardship before more stringent and costly government regulations on nutrient runoff are introduced.

4R nutrient stewardship means applying the right fertilizer source at the right rate and time, and to the right place within the field. This concept has been formalized into a voluntary certification program — for certified crop advisers and ag-retailers — training them to find and document what steps can be taken to improve nutrient management on individual farms.

Farmers can work with a certified crop adviser to make their acres “4R certified” through a voluntary audit of field conditions and practices, followed by the enactment of practical, evidence-based nutrient management solutions.

Dale Cowan, senior agronomist and sales manager for AGRIS Co-operative and Wanstead Farmers Co-operative, and Stephanie Kowalski, agronomy lead for the Agronomy Company of Canada Ltd., are both involved in the 4R certification program. They say participation allows farmers to document what is being done to manage nutrients, and that documentation provides evidence that the industry is following through on stewardship efforts.

“We can do the verification documentation very easily with modern technology,” says Kowalski.

In a presentation given at the 2019 Southwest Agriculture Conference, both Cowan and Kowalski emphasized the importance of voluntarily participating in 4R Nutrient Stewardship. Nutrient management needs to be viewed through a social and environmental lens, not strictly an economic one, they said.

Current policy from the provincial government aims to reduce phosphorous loading into Lake Erie by 40 per cent. But that number, Cowan said, refers to the small amount of phosphorous being lost, not what’s being applied to Ontario’s fields. For farmers, that amounts to about 0.4 pounds of phosphorous, or 68 cents per acre.

“There’s actually zero economic incentive for you to do anything about your phosphorous… no strip-tiller is going to get paid at 68 cents an acre,” said Cowan.

The cost of inaction, however, will be high.

“Farming is an outdoor sport. We know things can change at the last minute, so there’s always a plan A and a plan B. We need to be able to make those decisions on a timely basis. The opposite of that are prescriptive regulations that tell us how to farm from afar,” said Cowan.

With similar programs being enacted in different American states, Ontario’s 4R initiative is actually based on an Ohio model. Cowan and Kowalski added the agricultural community needs to be ready for renewed discussions with the province and other regulatory bodies on nutrient loading reduction targets, and methods of achieving those targets. Policy discussions are, they said, set to begin again later in 2019.

“There’s lots of people with lots of ideas on how to reduce phosphorous runoff. We need to be at that table with some ideas,” Cowan said.

“If there’s another massive algae bloom next summer — game over.”

Flexibility key to success in Wisconsin

Farmer-led groups devise area-specific phosphorous control solutions

In the state of Wisconsin, farmer-led watershed groups have been a successful mechanism for tackling runoff issues. And according to Dennis Frame — a nutrient loss expert with extensive experience working with farmers to improve their environmental impact — it highlights how significant a difference adaptable, non-regulatory solutions can make.

“We’re entering an age with government that we’re going to have to start relying on people living on the land,” said Frame during a water quality session at at the Southwest Agricultural Conference.

“If everyone switches to what the solution is supposed to be, you’ll just change the problem.”

Wisconsin’s producer groups are so successful, Frame says, because their efforts are based off the specific resource concerns within their local watershed. Once geographically unique concerns are identified through localized research — by individuals like Frame and organizations like the University of Wisconsin — an outreach and education plan is enacted to help producers implement better practices.

Progress between farmers is anonymously tracked and compared as well, which Frame says makes the inherent competitiveness of farmers play a positive reinforcing role. Cost-share programs with local municipalities also help farmers within the watershed groups manage the cost of more significant phosphorous-loss investments.

“What you really have to know is — is it my farm? Will it show what I’m doing?” says Frame.

“If we make people competitive they’ll do the work.”

No such thing as zero

The ability for farmers to flexibly respond is even more important, Frame says, because nutrient runoff is a reality on all farms — regardless of how proactive the management strategy might be. Indeed, even woodlots and other uncultivated areas lose some phosphorous.

Even farmers who are trying to do everything in their power to prevent runoff, he says, almost invariably have at least one problem field.

Those employing a no-till system, for example, can develop soil stratification problems characterized by high phosphorous loss — yet with no soil or sediment movement. Cover crops are similarly not a magic solution, with many examples of fields that are always covered losing high levels of nutrients.

With zero loss not possible, Frame says the question is whether a benchmark — say losses of 2/3 of a pound per acre or less — can be achieved through proactive management. That means farmers need to know where they initially stand.

Calculating how a given field is performing can be achieved by measuring phosphorous levels in the nearest stream on a monthly basis. Multiple samples and good water flow are required to ensure an accurate picture.

Frame added it’s important to remember how significantly the technology used to measure nutrient loss has developed.

“The goals haven’t changed, but I tell everybody the expectations now are higher because our ability to measure performance has gotten really accurate. We’re getting criticized for phosphorous in parts per million, even less… we get into stuff that 20 or 30 years ago we didn’t even talk about,” Frame says.

“It’s actually kind of exciting that we can give this information to farmers because we can make huge improvements in water quality pretty quickly.”

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Speakers will share the latest on topics ranging from nutrient management to marketing, compaction to pest management, precision agriculture to maximizing yields.

A trade show is also scheduled.

Here are some general highlights:

Know your (weed) enemy

• As herbicide resistant weeds continue to proliferate and diversify, the Scoop on Resistance will cover lessons learned and strategies developed through five decades of resistance management.
• Talking Plants covers how plants themselves respond to weed pressures, with information from new research on how this can impact your farm.
• Learn the best ways to handle weeds in your most profitable commodity crop in Corn Weed Control.

Smarter predictions

• Wading Through the Weather sessions look at how the coming year will be affected by predicted climate trends, and the possible impacts of El Nino in the coming year.
• Review important agronomic lessons from 2018 and prepare for the next growing season with a panel of top agronomists in Nine for ’19.
• Attend Marketing Madness to get a handle on what prices and pressures will be in 2019.

Making new tech work

• Precision agriculture strategies can be costly, but they can also save you money. Making Precision Ag Pay experts illustrate where and how those strategies can be used to your financial benefit.
• Learn to interpret data-intensive soil maps and use them to make useful management decisions during Predictive Mapping.
• Satellites, Yields and Management discussions will provide a behind-the-scenes look at satellite imagery technology, and what it can do for your farm.

Be a virtual attendee

SWAC organizers are offering an expanded livestream option for this year’s event. Those unable to attend in person can remotely watch 28 different live and previously recorded sessions.

Registration is available until Dec. 7. See the Southwest Ag Conference website.

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Why it matters: Electricity prices in Ontario have risen by about 40 per cent since 2008. That means that electricity is now a significant cost of doing business. Ron MacDonald, an Ontario agriculture energy consultant with Wood PLC, says that businesses used to lump electricity in with water and other utilities when they thought about their costs. It needs separate attention now.

“You wouldn’t drive a truck down the road without basic metering,” said MacDonald. Just as a truck has a speedometer and a gas gauge, high-electricity draws on the farm should also be able to be monitored.

MacDonald, who spoke at the Southwest Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown, said there are three main levels of electricity use changes that can be made on farms, with different levels of cost for each type of change.

• The first is operational and it comes at virtually no cost. It involves looking at and adjusting controllers for more efficiency and managing staff in a way that makes energy efficiency a priority. Sometimes that’s just point out to staff that running a motor in a certain way is costly.
• The second is prescriptive – deliberate steps taken to change equipment, usually helped with easy-to-apply-for funding. An example is converting lighting to more energy efficient types.
• MacDonald calls the most intense search for electrical savings BTU or Joule mining. This level takes more investment and has more risk, but can also result in larger savings. This area usually includes some technical analysis. An auditor will look at something like a grain dryer, evaluate how much power it is currently using, then monitor it for a period of time. This can involve installing monitoring equipment on the farm. Install amp meters on all large loads greater than 25 hp, he suggests. Then the auditor can look at the alternatives. The challenge with something like a grain dryer is that a farmer will often say, “Let’s double the size of the dryer while we’re replacing it,” he said.

Being able to look at trends over a period of years is also valuable, although MacDonald says that farmer electricity records are often spotty.

There are simple ways that farmers can start looking at their energy usage. One of the best is to log onto their Hydro One account online. There, usage graphs for the account are provided over time. This doesn’t identify one or two energy hogs on the farm, but at least will show usage trends.

Examining processes on the farm is another way to find energy savings.

Do the easiest steps first, such as shifting energy users off peak usage, says John Van de Vegte, of OMAFRA at SWAC, before considering more expensive options such as generating your own power on the farm, although that may be an option.

MacDonald used the example of a five-horsepower loading motor for auger that runs 24 hours per day, 240 days per year, which comes out to about $3,500 per year at 10 cents kWh. Could it run 10 per cent fewer hours?

There’s also a 50-horsepower aerator fan motor that run 24 hours per day, but only for 7.5 days per year costing $700 per year at 10 cents per kWh. But because it’s running at peak demand time, it is costing more. Could it be turned off during peak demand and run at lower cost electricity periods?

Benchmark

Benchmark against your own operations and other similar operations, MacDonald said. Do you know your cost per tonne of wheat for electricity? Some farmers do, says MacDonald, but not many.

Other helpful areas to look at include:

• Deep grain probes will tell you exactly when grain needs to be aerated, versus using a “sniff test”;
• Programmable Logic Computers or PLCs help manage systems automatically, and can help to reduce electricity usage, but their purchase would be a decision based on more than just energy, as they are an operational management tool.
• Dust is a hidden sapper of energy.
• Conduct infrared surveys of electrical systems. Not only can they spot areas where energy isn’t being use efficiently, but they can also help prevent fires.
• Educate staff. If they don’t know what the costs are to their decisions on electricity use, they won’t be able to manage it.
• Have a look at the power factor rating on electricity bills. If it is under 90 per cent, then there’s money being lost.
• Rebuilt motors aren’t as efficient as new ones, so consider the future energy costs before deciding to rebuild a motor instead of buying a new one.

The post Start with easy steps to control electricity costs on farms appeared first on Farmtario.

Why does it matter? The capacity to apply nutrients variably across a crop field isn’t new, but it’s been difficult for farmers to see the justification of the cost of equipment and price for mapping. Profit mapping could change all of that. Think variability in terms of profit, not yield.

“This is the beginning of making precision farming more valuable for us,” said Dr. Clarence Swanton, a weed scientist at the University of Guelph, who has done research with profitability mapping.

He and Mike Wilson, a certified crop advisor and affiliate program lead with Veritas in Chatham, Ont., talked about the practical application of profitability mapping at the recent Southwest Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown.

Here’s how profitability mapping works on a farm:

• Take the data available for a farm: yield maps, fertility maps and as-applied input maps and tie them to the profit for each area including the price received for the crop.
• The profit layer is calculated by a computer program and shows the profitability down to specific areas of a field.
• As a result, the input decisions — seeding rate, fertilizer, chemicals — can be based on more than just yield and soil fertility, it can be based on decisions that have an impact on profit.
• Profitability also allows a farmer to “call B.S. on the scripts being produced for you. If it’s not performing how you want it to perform, ask them to change it,” Wilson said.

Each time corn is planted and harvested, the combine driver knows — both visually and from the yield monitor — that there are areas which don’t yield as well, Wilson said.

However, he said, the work they’ve been doing with profitability maps show there can be serious variability between high- and low-profit areas.

“There are areas that can net $400, but there are also areas that are losing $400 to $500 per acre.”

Seeing that $400 loss gets people’s attention, Wilson said. A loss that large can be hard to make up, but identifying areas where there’s a $40 loss can be helpful.

If fertility tests show levels are already healthy, then variable rate application can put less fertilizer or seed in that area where crops don’t grow as well.

The profitability maps help increase the bushels for every $1,000 spent by reducing the inputs per lower-productivity area.

A $400-loss area may have no solutions. It might make more sense to do something else with that land, Wilson said.

Same profit, more ecological diversity

Swanton agreed, saying profitability mapping could help balance ecosystems and profitability on farms.

He foresees a time when farmers will be able to tell when it makes sense to just plant a cover crop instead of a particular crop, because it is unprofitable. It could also tell a farmer when land, or parts of farms, make little sense to rent.

Swanton is excited about the idea that a farm could be just as profitable by enhancing yields in most profitable areas, then increase biodiversity by retiring or doing something else with unprofitable areas.

“Think of the public relations if we increase the biodiversity across our land,” he said.

— John Greig is a field editor for Glacier FarmMedia based at Ailsa Craig, Ont. Follow him at @jgreig on Twitter.

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Three agronomists gave an overview of the 2016 cropping season at the SouthWest Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown, outlining challenges and wins for the year.

Leanne Freitag, Cargill’s manager of agronomy for Ontario, outlined challenges with wheat, Steph Kowalski of Agronomy Advantage outlined soybean challenges and Russ Barker of DuPont Pioneer outlined the most unpredictable of 2016 crops: corn.

Ontario had record wheat yields, but that rapidly-growing wheat exposed some crop management gaps.

Freitag said she’s surprised at how many growers don’t apply sulphur on wheat, adding it’s simple to do and inexpensive.

“If you’re putting fertilizer on, make sure sulphur is in there,” she said. As the wheat grew rapidly towards a record yield, more sulphur deficiency symptoms showed up in the Ontario crop.

“Putting on 10-20 lbs. of sulphur is really important, and cheap to put on,” she said.

Where there’s a deficiency, the advantage can be 20 bushels of yield difference, she said. Watch the nitrogen to sulphur ratio: It should be 10:1 to 7:1.

Stripe rust was also an issue in wheat for the first time in memory. The disease overwintered further north than usual, Freitag said, and resulted in more damage than normal.

The greater prevalence of the disease showed which varieties of wheat are resistant and which are not. There is a significant difference, Freitag said, but cautioned not to base variety decisions only on resistance to stripe rust. Plant the best variety for your fields, and spray if required.

“Stripe rust is the biggest yield robber of any of the foliar diseases in wheat,” said Freitag. “It can take 50 per cent or more of your yield.”

Spray when symptoms are seen, she added. “Keeping the flag leaf clean is critical.”

The wheat crop came out of the soft winter with little winter kill, which likely helped the wheat put down roots deep enough that it was able to find enough moisture to pull through the dry summer. Altogether it resulted in a record wheat harvest.

Spider mites everywhere

Soybeans pulled through the summer drought in Ontario in most cases — but not for lack of trying by some insects.

Scouting is the best way to stay ahead of spider mites, Kowalski said. Treat the crop with timely spraying. Be careful what insecticide is used, however, as you don’t want to take out all the beneficial insects, along with the spider mites.

Weed control was a challenge for soybeans in 2016, as there often wasn’t enough moisture to activate pre-emergent herbicides. If the weather is hot and dry, spray early in the morning for systemic herbicides and in the evening for contact herbicides.

Fungicides made sense on soybeans, said Kowalski, as long as you got a timely rain. She says use the whole decisions tree on whether or not to spray fungicides. Don’t just not do it because of weather.

Barker said he worries about blanket recommendations to spray fungicides, due to potential resistance and other overuse issues. “It gives me the heebee-jeebees.”

Good base fertility was important to pulling soybeans through to good yield in 2016.

Unpredictable corn

There were times this growing season that Russ Barker just told farmers to stay out of their corn fields. The fields were just too depressing to visit. He also told them that the fields would yield better than they expected, and he was right about that.

A wise plant breeder once told him that cob size was a poor indicator of potential yield, he said. More important is the depth of kernels and kernel flex. The strongest hybrids will produce a deeper kernel late into the growing season.

“Remember that the growing season is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said.

The response of corn to fungicides is well documented — an average seven to eight bushels per acre advantage, he said. Each farmer has to determine if it makes sense economically on their farm.

Where it does make sense, he said, is on silage corn and corn fed to hogs, as the fungicide reduces mycotoxin load for hogs and dairy farmers need to maximize the quality of feed going into the feed bunk.

Two other unpredicted and especially frustrating problems appeared with the corn harvest last year. The first is the amount of Gibberella ear rot on corn, which surprised the industry by showing up in high levels of infection.

“We’re not a whole lot smarter on Gibberella. We still can’t predict it very well.”

Western bean cutworm (WBC) was also a larger issue as it overwintered further north than usual, and continued its long-term growth into new areas of the province.

The WBC was first seen in Ontario in 2008 and became economically significant in 2010, Freitag said. The problem in 2016 is that it appeared in fields where farmers had scouted and didn’t find egg masses.

“We can’t scout with a high level of assurance that it won’t be an issue,” she said. The industry has to sort out how to monitor for the pest, but the answer likely lies in paying closer attention to trap numbers.

Farmers need to make economic and risk assessment decisions on whether or not to spray for WBC, at least until better biotech solutions for control, such as the Viptera trait, are bred into more widely used hybrids.

— John Greig is a field editor for Glacier FarmMedia based at Ailsa Craig, Ont. Follow him at @jgreig on Twitter.

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