Although Jon Wert has applied the Miller Chemical polymer pod coating to his canola since 2004, he is no longer certain he’s benefitting.
“The benefit was quite notable the first and second year,” said the farmer from New England, North Dakota.
“But in the last two years, I have not seen any difference at all. I have a neighbour who did not apply it last year (2007). He’s right next to a field of ours that we sprayed. We had a big wind storm, and after, we couldn’t see any difference in the two fields.”
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Wert thinks the polymer he has become skeptical about is not the same polymer he was originally happy with.
“Originally, the stuff Miller sold us was imported from Europe. It was called Spodnam, and I think it worked very well,” he said.
“The stuff they sell us now is made in North America and it’s called Biovital. It’s visually very different from the original stuff. The colour is quite different, for one thing. Is it any different from the original? I don’t know. But it makes a guy wonder.”
Wert said for the past three years he has applied the coating to all of his canola as insurance, but he’s now questioning that decision.
“It makes me wonder if we just wasted our money. So this year, I’m back to doing check strips again to see what I can learn,” he said.
“As for greens, we’ve eliminated our greens, too. But that happened eight years ago when we started straight cut combining. So we already had zero greens before Spodnam.”
It raises the question: is poly treatment necessary for straight combining on a regular basis or had Wert experienced a run of good luck before trying Spodnam?
Wert said that in 2005 and 2006, the North Dakota State University Experimental Station near Minot conducted Spodnam and Biovital trials in a number of growers’ fields in northern North Dakota.
He said those results did not support the general opinion of the polymer treatment.
The trials were conducted in randomly selected fields near Langdon, Rugby and Velva, N.D., and compared three treatments: swathing without pod treatment, straight cut without pod treatment and straight cut with Spodnam or Biovital poly pod treatment from Miller Chemical.
Because the trials were conducted in commercial fields with the growers’ regular equipment, the results should be close to real-world numbers.
Extreme weathered-out fields were not considered in the following data.
As with most grower real-time trials, the treated plots were 50 feet wide and more than 500 feet long and each field had three replicates. Shatter cards were used to collect and document shattering.
Untreated, swathed field plots averaged 48.3 bushels per acre. The untreated straight cut field plots averaged 50.9 bu. per acre. The poly-treated straight cut field plots averaged 50.2 bu. per acre.
Oil content in the untreated swathed plots averaged 44.6 percent. For the untreated straight cut, oil averaged 44.5 percent. In the poly-treated straight cut fields, oil content averaged 44.2 percent.
Total seed shatter loss at harvest averaged .88 bu. for swathing, .83 bushels for straight cut, without treatment, and .61 bushels for straight cut with poly treatment.
Greens data is available from only one field.
It documented 2.9 percent for swathing, 0.3 percent for straight cut without treatment and 0.6 percent for straight cut with poly pod coating.
