Behind the Lines - January 2014

Thursday, January 2, 2014

One might call this "hands-on ag tech training, 'take two.'"

Back in 2007, Better Farming featured a couple of teenagers from central Huron who were taking the Specialist High Skills Major in agriculture at their local high school in Clinton. This month's cover story by Dave Pink looks at where these teenagers, others, and the agricultural program they took part in, have gone in the years since. It so happens that the young men gracing our cover back in 2007, Seaforth's Kyle DeCorte and Lucknow's Matt Van Osch, have made good use of what they learned.

Matt farms with his family and operates equipment for his local co-op. Kyle is equally busy at the home farm. A custom harvesting business pulls and combines 1,000 acres of edible beans for nearby Hensall Co-op and Kyle admits to spending in excess of 100 hours plowing in the last week of November alone, trying to beat winter's early onset. Coincidentally, that same week, while speaking at the Ontario Federation of Agriculture convention, Premier and Agriculture Minister Kathleen Wynne had high words of praise for the Specialist High Skills Major, so the program seems likely to have a bright future.

Not happy with the roads in your municipality? You aren't alone. With larger discontinuous acreages and more custom farming, equipment operators are spending more and more time on gravel and asphalt. Sharing with non-agricultural traffic has always been an uneasy affair, but it's getting less easy with larger farm equipment, faster moving cars, and also roads that aren't built to handle that kind of traffic. Staff writer Mary Baxter found that raising roads to meet provincial guidelines sometimes results in narrower roadways with little or no shoulders; a recipe for disaster. She also found that the concerns are province-wide. That story starts on page 20.

The more we know about crop production, the more questions seem to arise. For example, soil testing helps improve yields, but do you actually sacrifice yield if you don't maintain soil fertility at high levels? In this issue, Keith Reid has the answer in his regular Seedbed column beginning on page 40.

Market forecasts are causing many producers to consider abandoning normal crop rotations and in some cases leading them to plant the same crop that they grew last year again in the same field this year. So how much yield-loss will occur and what can be done to mitigate the loss? Pat Lynch has some answers in this month's The Lynch File on page 38.

And still on the theme of crop questions, we received a larger than usual number of responses to the December installment of our popular Crop Scene Investigation series. If your soil has high organic levels, you will be especially interested in the correct answer, which appears on page 36.

And finally, if you like new technology, whether or not you are a dairy farmer, you might enjoy this month's dairy section beginning on page 44. We profile a robot that milks cows in traditional tie-stall operations. As far as we know, these robots don't exist in Ontario right now, so we went to Quebec to see firsthand how things are working out. BF

ROBERT IRWIN & DON STONEMAN