Soil conditions ideal for canola seeding

With June quickly approaching, farmers will be working with a condensed timeline for spring seeding.

Justine Cornelsen is the Agronomic and Regulatory Services Manager with BrettYoung.

"As for canola seeding, we're still middle of May to end of May, which is ideal timing to get canola into the ground," she said. "We are going to be moving into hopefully some warmer soil types....Looking further ahead we will have some warm soils. We've got plenty of moisture this year, so really, once you can get out there and get the canola out it's going to come up pretty quick and hopefully grow through that susceptible window for flea beetle feeding."

She was asked about canola seeding rates.

"We have the moisture this year, which is what we were missing last year, so that germination, if the seed is placed at the appropriate level, should be fairly good. We're going to be going into warm, wet soils so targeting that five to eight plants per square food should still be the goal and the priority. When we move to something like broadcasting, that's where you're going to probably up those rates to ensure that you're going to get in between that five to eight plants. If you've been taking appropriate survivability measures each year to understand your scenario and your farming operation, you're able to really tailor those rates and make adjustments. Like every year with canola seed, we see wide variation in seed size, so that is something that all companies are really pushing growers to focus on that and tailoring those seeding rates to make sure you are hitting that target plant population in the end."

Cornelsen notes it's important for farmers to hit that target depth for canola seed in that half an inch to an inch range.

She says herbicide applications may be a challenge this spring due to the late seeding, adding there hasn't been a lot of pre-seed herbicide applications.