Ensure you are ready to grow market-ready crops

Apr 04, 2024

Keep it Clean is inviting producers to attend its upcoming 2024 Product Advisory webinar.

The Keep it Clean Product Advisory Webinar will be held on Thursday, April 25, 2024.

The webinar will provide an overview of why crop protection products registered in Canada may cause marketing concerns for export markets, and how the Canadian grain industry is working together to mitigate these risks.

The webinar will also provide an overview of the 2024 Keep it Clean Product Advisory, covering the product and crop combinations that may cause market risks for cereals and pulses.

The presentation will wrap up with a discussion covering the importance of best practices for pesticide application throughout the growing season.

The following experts will be on hand to share more about the 2024 Product Advisory:

Krista Zuzak, Director of Crop Protection and Production, Cereals Canada;
Greg Bartley, Director of Crop Protection & Crop Quality, Pulse Canada; 
Ian Epp, Agronomy Specialist, Canola Council of Canada.

Keep it Clean recommends to growers that you always consult with your grain buyers before applying any products on the Product Advisory to keep yourcrops market-ready and export-friendly throughout the growing season.

Click here to learn more or to register for the event.

Keep it Clean notes that CEU credits are pending for CCAs.

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators