We should aim to leave the soil in as good or better condition than when it came under our care. That is the aim of any direct seeder. We have been direct seeding for the last five years and have been seeing many of the same benefits that the speakers before me have mentioned. The main benefit is that our farm has become more profitable once we were in direct seeding for a few years. Another important benefit we have experienced is less time on the field. On our seed farm, we have an average of about 400 seed pickups every May, which mainly occur "just in time". We are customer driven and will fit our schedule to fit that of our customer. This often relegates my time in the field into the early and late times of the day. When you combine this schedule with the reality of seeding an average of 29 varieties, then time saved in the field becomes very important. Being able to get good germination over a longer seeding window that direct seeding allows, is very important to us.
Approximately 75% of our customers either direct seed or seed in two passes with an airseeder. We have found it is important to be able to give advice on how our varieties perform under a direct seeding regime. We feel this first hand knowledge will benefit our customer in the varieties he chooses because he knows we also direct seed.
In the seed business, as in farming, vigourous germination is everything. All the inputs and management in the world won't help if you don't achieve germination. Seeding into heavy trash and cool ground will test the vigour of any seed. Shallow seeding and good seed to soil contact are big benefits. We have learned a few things about achieving vigorous seed lots. Things like cleaning peas at harvest leads to minimal mechanical damage and in addition, clean peas in storage won't heat. Swathing seed canola at 50% or more colour change, leads to mature round seed that has good snap out of the ground. Higher seeding rates lead to fewer stools, which lead to a greater percentage of mature, plump seed in the seed sample. Aeration fans and having temperature cables in your bins keep seed cool and viable. Correct sizing of the seed at cleaning eliminates a lot of vigour problems. 1000 kernel weights are important. All of our management is aimed at keeping weathering to a minimum on seed crops.
Why have seed growers been reluctant to direct seed? We feel the main reason is the fear of volunteering of other crops in the seed fields. No one likes to rogue off types out of fields. It is a lot easier walking the fields only once and only seeing a true type crop. Every seed grower wants to sell seed that approaches a 100% integrity in purity.
We have been working at creating a protocol that has worked at allowing us to minimize roguing and at the same time, allowed us the benefits of direct seeding. This includes using a four-year rotation on our heavier land (cereal, oilseed, cereal, pulse). Once we are seeding bread wheat in our four-year rotation, we stay with it every second year. Feed barley and CPS wheat is treated the same. We have found that mowing around our fields in early August keeps volunteers and bromegrass from getting into the combine on the outside round. Malting barley can be heavy harrowed after harvest and will usually volunteer out the following year, allowing us to seed a different cereal two years later. We have discovered that some wildoat herbicides will eliminate volunteer barley ver well. We always spray a cereal controlling herbicide on our oilseeds and pulses to control volunteer wheat and barley, even when we use a surface applied herbicide. If we need another field to grow a select or foundation cereal crop on, we will follow peas with flax to give us two years between our last cereal. We have just started using a seven-year rotation (alfalfa, alfalfa, RR canola, oats, pulse, foundation status cereal, smart canola underseeded with alfalfa) on our lighter land. This rotation has allowed us to include pedigreed oat production as well as a foundation status cereal. We have found that disc-type direct seeding machines fit in very well in coming out of alfalfa. We spray a litre of Roundup just before our second cut. We will go over the field in fall or right before seeding with a disc machine to put in nitrogen, sulfur, potash and one half the potassium. The disc machine lays in the Roundup Ready canola with good seed to soil contact. The field is left with a nice smooth finish and the mineralization process can continue slowly. We find that lighter land has a very delicate structure and one heavy tandem disc operation can undo years of work. We have found that lighter land has shown the largest gain in productivity due to rotation and direct seeding. we have at times exceeded the yield of our heavy clay loam soil in years with heavy disease pressure.
Sow thistle and Canada thistle control is an ongoing concern. Pre-harvest glyphosate control is not an option for a seed grower. We have been spraying our pulse and canola fields two to three days after combining with glyphosate. We have also been using Lontrel in some of our cereal and flax fields in-crop to minimize thistle infestation. We also come back with 2,4-D late in the fall for winter annual control. In spring, we have started to seed some of the early seeded cereal fields without a spring burnoff because of the good control we are getting in the fall.
When I look back five years and see how much our farming industry has changed, I can hardly believe it. What changes will the next five years bring? We know economics will continue to drive the practice of direct seeding. Will new genetically engineered crops become the norm? Will GPS and variable rate seeding become dominant? How will information services adapt to serve us better? Will microprocessors become more integrated into our management process? Will research have been done on seeding rates based on soil matter, soil moisture, crop types and soil zones? On our farm, we want to look at using pedigreed grasses in the aforementioned seven year rotation since quackgrass seems to be disappearing from our farm. Change is only good if it can be fit into the management package of the primary producer.
We do have a concern that the soil testing labs are not giving accurate recommendations for nitrogen on our direct seeded fields. We feel that their recommendations are too high and that the longer mineralization window one has in a direct seeded field releases more nitrogen than they estimate. The research on carbon sequestering should help answer this question. In the meantime, we will do some experimentation on nitrogen rates ourselves.
As seed companies bring in new technology, will wee as producers accept their legal rights to their property? Will we abuse the Plant Breeder Rights by "brown bagging"? This has been epidemic in the pulse and oilseed industry. Companies will react by going to hybrids, closed looped contracts or insert a terminator gene in their new varieties which will in effect, kill the germination. My final thought is that the use of the terminator or death gene will take away my worry of having rogues, off-types and sprouting in my seed crops and make my talk today redundant.