51 Ate Today?Thank a Farmer. Better Farming | November 2023 using insecticides at planting. e Corteva Agriscience-Pioneer booth had a lot of good information. ey are gearing up their Enlist E3 soybean line and will drop the Roundup Ready 2 Xtend lines by 2025. e Enlist varieties have improved SDS, SCN and brown stem rot genetic resistance. ey believe that the Enlist system allows better control of many weeds including waterhemp, which appears to be spreading quickly across Ontario. Corteva is also introducing Vorceed corn hybrids, which have improved genetic traits, including RNAi genetics, to control corn rootworm. e RNAi gene trait is the same as the RNAi trait from Bayer-DEKALB but it’s the other traits that make it di erent from DEKALB’s o erings. I dropped in to the DLF site. DLF had bought the Corteva alfalfa breeding program. At their site, they featured legumes, grasses and corn hybrids. eir new orchard grass is Captur, which addresses some of the issues with orchard grass. Traditionally, orchard grass heads too early. It yields great but when in a mix, it’s earliness is detrimental to alfalfa, and older orchard grass varieties have leaf disease issues. is newer variety is later to head, about 20 per cent higher yielding than check varieties and less disease. While I spent time at the various crop protection booths, I had a common thought: spraying wheat to protect against Fusarium is part of the culture of growing winter wheat. It’s the practice that has the highest acceptance rate of any fungicide spraying in Ontario’s eld crops. Even in a year when Fusarium is not a problem, I was reminded of Dr. Dave Hooker’s research that showed that even in a dry year, there is an economical bene t to spraying at wheat pollination time. I asked about spraying corn with fungicides. e companies I asked assured me they had lots of eld side-by-sides. ere is concern that tar spot was starting to get worse this year. One company said they knew a number of farmers who sprayed twice for tar spot once they saw it start to develop in September. One rep said, “I hope there is no bene t to the second application.” e threat for most corn growers this year is Gibberella and the possibility of high DON levels in the grain. I’m concerned about DON in grain but also in silage. I asked the folks at the feed testing labs if many customers were getting their corn silage checked for DON and they said no. ey said not enough feed advisors were asking for this routine test. I mentioned that I had seen high DON levels too o en in corn silage and every corn silage sample should be tested for DON. ey agreed and told me to spread the message. Discovery Farm highlights Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show has introduced Discovery Farm. It’s something you will hear more about in the future. Farmers visit tillage demo. Fertilizer spreader demo. Forage harvest demo. crops: the lynch fileS
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