Excess moisture Root systems on soybeans are better able to cope with moisture, says crop adviser
Cortney Solonenko’s fields went from saturated to soaked to sopping this spring and summer as 250 millimetres of rain fell from May 1 to the middle of July.
More than 100 mm of that amount fell in late June and early July on Solonenko’s farm near Stornoway in eastern Saskatchewan, pushing his canola beyond the point of no return.
His soybeans, however, have weathered the storm.
“We’ve still got some standing water … (but) the soybeans are greening up and they’re coming right back,” said Solonenko, who planted 1,300 acres of beans this spring, up from 300 acres last year.
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“(I’m) definitely impressed by the way they handled the water.”
Solonenko’s canola has not coped with the excess moisture.
He said the crop is not bouncing back in low-lying spots where it steeped in water for days.
“We’ve got some (soybean) fields with canola right beside it, and wherever the water was sitting the canola is dead.”
Lionel Kaskiw, a Manitoba Agriculture farm production adviser in Souris, Man., said the situation is similar in western Manitoba.
Approximately 150 mm of rain drenched fields throughout the southwestern corner of the province in late June, but soybeans endured the difficult conditions.
“They are handling the moisture far better than most of the other crops. Their root system seem to be able to handle it better,” said Kaskiw, who added that water was still visible on some fields in the Souris area in mid-July.
He said canola planted in potholes and low spots is suffering.
“A canola plant … the stress causes it to want to go to seed. What happens is you get those canola plants bolting and they’re not really big enough to bolt yet,” he said.
“Some of the canola crop, it’s bolting and it’s only a foot tall right now.”
Hugh Earl, associate professor of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph, said corn is similar to canola.
The damage is often beyond repair when the cereal turns yellow from moisture stress.
“When you see that in corn, it’s not coming back. Corn simply won’t recover from that condition.”
Earl said he isn’t familiar with soybean physiology when it comes to moisture, particularly why the oilseed can cope with standing water.
However, he knows that soybeans can withstand a broader range of environmental conditions than other crops.
“(In Ontario), 2012 was a very dry year and we had near record soybean yields,” he said.
The story was the same in Manitoba in 2012. After two months of scorching weather in July and August, many soybean fields yielded 35 to 40 bushels per acre. Canola exposed to the same conditions yielded only 15 to 20 bu. per acre.
While soybeans are coping with this summer’s excess moisture, Kaskiw said a heat wave could complicate matters for growers in western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan.
“With all the moisture we’ve had, a lot of the plants haven’t rooted down very much. If we were to get a week of 30 degree weather, it’s going to dry that top two three inches,” he said.
“Even though we have tons of moisture, we could still see stress from plants having lack of moisture because the root systems have never had to go down.”
