Yield busters: Farmer directed research of
products and practices Prairie farmers are being introduced to an unprecedented amount of new
products and practices claiming to increase their profitability; however,
relatively slim margins limit how much growers can invest into crops and
still remain profitable. Furthermore, many new products currently marketed
fall outside of what has been traditionally recommended and used on the
Prairies and, frequently, third-party data is not available to help growers
determine which may be worth investing in. In response to this realization
and a desire to become more active in setting research priorities, IHARF
Director’s conceived a project in February 2011 which was eventually
named ‘Yield-Busters’. The idea was simply to initiate a few
trials each year to evaluate specific products or practices, with the
topics chosen by participating producers and agronomists. The process
involved canvassing individuals within the agricultural community &
challenging them to present their top few agronomic questions. All ideas
put forward were considered with the final selections based on what was:
important to growers, practical and relatively straight-forward to evaluate
and has not already been extensively tested in Western Canada. The first
two trials were established in 2010 to investigate 1) micronutrient seed
dressing effects on establishment and yield of various crops and 2) the
effects of fungicide on flax yield. Both of these trials continued in
2011 with a third trial initiated to evaluate canola yield response to
various fungicide applications. Moving forward, we will continue to initiate
new trials each year while phasing out older trials after two or three
years, depending on the quantity of data available and conclusiveness
of the results. While Yield-Buster’s cannot possibly address every
question put forward, it is one small step intended to get farmers more
actively involved in agricultural research and to initiate timely and
practical third-party research trials which may not otherwise be funded.
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