Woodstock, Ont. | Sept. 10-12, 2024 87 Promotional Supplement Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show September 2024 This has been a challenging year so far. Every day and everything about the cropping process has been a challenge. Most of us are totally disgusted with the crops, and how they looked in the first week of July. Some corn was only three feet high, and not a good colour. It had endured too much water. But as the month continued we got rains that seemed to help the plants grow, and grow they did. Lots of fields had corn 12 feet tall on the good spots, and two feet or less, on the poorer spots in the same field. Perhaps the first thought, is to get more tile, to get rid of the wet. But is that thinking with a “LEVEL HEAD”. I’m thinking not. Let’s look at this year as a learning year. Mother Nature is showing us, and possibly teaching us, what is coming. Teaching where and what we have to fix on our farms, and especially in the fields where water is damaging our crops. The seasons are changing, the climate is changing, and there are more heavy rains and hotter days. We as farm owners, cannot afford to grow poor crops. So, we fix what we can fix, and adapt in places that we can adapt. In most cases we must fix the wet ground and water pooling, that is damaging our cropping area. My suggestion is land leveling a process of smoothing out the knolls in the field, or better yet LAND FORMING. This process is smoothing out the soil from the high areas and maximizing the low area/wet spot that keeps killing the crops. Improving the overall surface water efficiency. Talking from personal experience, we had a field that grew good crops, but there was a small section that for 40 plus years grew nothing but cattails. We LAND FORMED the whole field. This moved soil around and filled in that hole and other less obvious areas in the field. That area was much lower, and making it level with the field around it, took some time. It wasn’t just the wet hole, but the area that sloped into the hole, that wasn’t growing well. The quarter acre pool of water, affected about 1.7 acres of the cropping field. Today the whole field looks good. There are no drowned-out spots, and for this year that is good. The tile drainage is good. But a lot of the tile is not working because the water cannot get through the compaction zone created this year by our equipment. This is where LAND FORMING is a bonus. The water is not sitting, the top ground is not holding a whole lot of water. If the land is drier, then maybe the equipment will not create the same density of compaction. I have said in past articles that we must micro-manage our decisions. For every action there is a reaction, or a result of that action. Land Forming is not for everyone. Some fields with high elevation changes, or lands with very shallow soil depths, may not have the same options as those with favourable semi flat land. Land Sculpting takes some level-headed thinking, and may not be for everyone. But based on a year like this year, Land Forming is a profitable solution to improve cropping. Land forming is the moving of soil in a pre-calculated pattern that allows water to quickly drain off the fields surface, and not sit or pool for eight plus hours, killing the plants. Land leveling is the smoothing out of highs and lows in the field caused by previous years cropping practices like dead furrows from a field plow. In some cases, you may be able to find someone with the equipment required to land level for you. The process is still early in adoption so you may need your own equipment. Land Forming may require the purchasing of equipment. There are only a few systems that we see that will work for this process. You will need a box blade with hydraulic lift and lower, and hydraulic tilt of the blade. The blade can be any size width from 8 to 30 feet. The tractor must be able to pull the blade and soil. We are currently using a 10 foot wide box blade made by S. Houle Mfg. This size allows us to demo the blade, taking it short distances down the road and to easily load and float the blade further away. You will need a Trimble TMX-2050 display or newer. This is a programmable monitor in the tractor cab, running a Field Level 2 land forming software program. The system works well. Water management on your farms starts with the need to improve the managing of the water on your fields. This also requires the processing of some ‘level thinking’! For help in processing your field data numbers and for more information contact GPS Ontario at 613-489-2932. GROW MORE WITH LESS by MORLEY WALLACE GPS Ontario See us at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show Lot: N-462 LAND LEVELING, WATER MANAGEMENT AND LEVEL HEADED THINKING Office: 613-489-2932 | TF: 613-489-2932 | www.gpsontario.ca 6558 3rd Line Road South, North Gower, Ontario Morley J. Wallace Mobile 613-229-6375 Morley@gpsontario.ca Jordan J. Wallace Mobile 613-327-6377 Jordan@gpsontario.ca N-462
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