BLACKIE, Alta. – James Palin says the window of opportunity is what it’s all about in farming. By fitting exactly into the seeding window, farmers can reduce weed problems through the growing season and reduce risk when harvest comes around.
“A late seeded crop is a late maturing crop,” said Palin, who farms near Blackie.
“The later your seed goes into the ground, the greater your chances of frost, fall rain and snow. All these things impact grade. That’s why an investment in seeding equipment is so important.”
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Palin thinks a high performance drill should be considered as a risk management tool. In 2005, he bought four such tools: brand-new 60-foot Horsch Anderson seed drills. The result was better than expected.
“We always like to get the whole 10,000 acres seeded in a two week period, usually by mid-May,” he said.
“If we can do that, we know we have a good chance for high yield and high grades. This year, we had it wrapped up in nine working days.”
In previous years, Palin used a two-pass system: the first one for fertilizer and the second for seed. However, that sometimes prevented him from getting everything done before the seeding window passed.
“In the past few years, the weather hasn’t co-operated, so we had to start looking at single-pass. For us, single-pass is really a hedge against the weather. For me, those four drills are like insurance.”
The new drills are part of Palin’s weed control strategy. He said a lot of growers in his area have put peas into their rotation so they can start seeding in mid-April and then move into cereals once the peas are in the ground. Palin sticks with canola, wheat, barley and a little flax.
“We don’t grow a lot of pulses on our farm, so our whole rationale is different,” he said.
“Instead of planting peas in April, we sit and wait as long as we can for the weeds to come up, usually around the end of April. We give them a full litre of Roundup for a pre-seed burn, then get in there and seed it fast. The quicker we can get the drills on and off the field, the bigger jump our crops have over the next bunch of weeds.”
Palin said he has had good success with this weed control program. He has cleaner crops throughout the summer and has been able to cut back on wild oat chemicals because he applies the burn just ahead of the drill.
“Quackgrass has always been a big problem in this area; our late-April spray timing has given us very good quack control, just as long as we can keep the high clearance sprayers a step ahead of the drills,” he said.
“Now that we have four drills all running single-pass, we might start catching up with the sprayers. That will prompt some upgrades in our spraying operation. Another thing we noticed this spring with the Horsch Anderson drills: they leave a wide row between the seeds rows where it doesn’t turn the soil over. That vacant strip doesn’t warm up as quickly, so the crops get an extra jump on weed seeds.”
Feeding the four big drills was no easy task in 2005. They devoured seed and fertilizer faster than the supply line could handle. To compound that problem, wet conditions kept the super-Bs out of the fields and the drills had to drive over to the field edge for filling.
“We’re looking at getting one of Kevin’s (Anderson) Terra Tender carts for 2006,” Palin said.
“We’ve done the calculations and I figure that if everything is well co-ordinated, well timed and well positioned, we can get by with just one Terra Tender. But that will be nip and tuck; not much leeway for problems.”
If he can get the supply line working as well as the drills, Palin figures he can gain more than 100 acres per day on each drill.
“We know this is true because one of the drills went over to Kindersley where we also farm 1,200 acres. That drill was doing 450 acres per day, with a dedicated truck to keep the drill filled. There was no wasted time. On our seeding operation here, we were only averaging 320 acres most days because we had to drive the drills out to the edge for filling. By next year we should do 450 acres per day or more on each drill.”
He said drill performance isn’t a problem because the seeding is done at 11 km-h.
“Once we have a Tender, we may do half fills at times, just to keep the drills moving. I don’t like to see a drill sitting still with an empty tank.”
Palin’s fields are spread out and because he runs his own fertilizer plant, he tries to keep all four drills working in the same location to simplify blending and trucking.
He had considered a 24 hour a day seeding system with two shifts and only two drills.
Instead, he opted for a single shift workday with four drills. When conditions are right, the workday runs from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Once the supply line bottleneck is straightened out, he will be able to seed the entire 10,000 acres in a few days.
“If you’ve got just two drills and one goes down, now you’re putting the whole load on the remaining one drill and that’s going to make it difficult to hit your seeding window. Plus, you need twice as many people to run 24 hours a day and that’s a hard problem to solve.”
Manpower was one of the reasons for the single shift workday and also part of the reason for switching from a two-pass system to single-pass.
“Going to a single-pass helps the labour situation somewhat, even though it only cuts a couple weeks off the front end of the season. It still takes a lot of people to get a crop into the ground on time.”
He said the difficult task of finding people to work on Alberta farms, which are drawn away to attractive jobs in the oil industry, is influencing how producers manage their farms.
He employs one person at the fertilizer plant and has two full-time truck drivers running four super-Bs. When a driver gets back to the yard with an empty truck, he has a full truck waiting to head out again. Even with two trucks always on the move, Palin said they are pressed to the limit.
In the field he has four operators on the drills plus a person to help load the drills. There’s another person on the rock picker who can be called in to help if needed. Two more people operate the two high clearance sprayers. Palin said keeping the whole operation running smoothly keeps him hopping.
His view of the harvest window is much like his view of the seeding window: it’s a small opening.
“Late August is the best harvest in our area. September is often wet, crappy weather. We start to lose grade if we still have crop in the field in September.
“And that all goes back to your seeding window. If you want to hit the harvest window, then you’ve got to make sure you hit your seeding window back in May.”
Ideally, Palin thinks the crop should be growing by Victoria Day and safe in the bin by Labour Day. His idea of investing in machinery as an insurance policy against the weather follows through to harvest. Palin has four Lexion 590 combines because he wants to make sure his seeding and growing seasons are not jeopardized in the final week of August.
“Basically, we use money to manage risk. We invest in iron to make sure the crop has every possible advantage over the weather. We use money from last year’s crop to manage risk on next year’s crop. We could farm this same land with smaller equipment or older equipment, but our risk would be so much higher.”
