The month of July always brings more than warm weather and growing crops in west central Saskatchewan. It also brings the beginning of the crop tour season. Field days and plot tours give producers and other industry folks a chance to see the varieties companies have in their portfolios, as well as the opportunity to ask researchers and breeders questions.

Here at Emerge we have seeded both canola and soybean field strip trials south of Eston that have allowed us to showcase both crops and numerous varieties and production systems in the area, so customers could observe these varieties up close.

Canola has become a predominant crop in our customers’ field rotations and a key crop in terms of managing net returns on farm. We decided we wanted to help our customers better understand how canola genetics perform in our local environment, both the InVigor and Roundup Ready production systems, and what better way than having local field scale trial data.

The past couple of growing seasons we have seen soybean crops introduced onto grower’s farms for the first time. With the success of soybeans in Manitoba, many Saskatchewan farmers are wondering if they can grow this crop to the same degree. Until recently, most soybean varieties required too long of a growing season for our area, but in recent years new genetics have provided us with a portfolio of varieties that we feel may definitely be a fit in west central Saskatchewan. In our plot we planted 11 different soybean varieties all having different key strengths, maturities, and traits, which will allow us to compare each in determining what might be our best fit variety.

Our objective is to help our customers see how these varieties establish, how they tolerate our local climatic conditions, and to observe other performance factors such as standability, harvestability, and ultimately how these varieties yield.

Many of you have been through these plots or will get the chance to tour through them at some point this season. If you didn’t get a chance to come out to see the plots on one of our field days, feel free to stop by and/or talk to us about any results we have seen. These trials will all be taken to yield, which will be determined by a weigh wagon and the data will be available to you at either one of our locations or on our website at www.emerge.ag. Feel free to go through the data and contact us with any questions you may have.