With summer rapidly turning into autumn, Kim Jo Calder has harvested most of the strip trials at the Emo Research Station and started preparing her data samples.
Only the hemp for grain production, soybean, and pasture trials remained unfinished as of Monday.
Calder said she was “squaring up the ranges” at the station, and preparing to spray the plots with ‘Round-up’ before plowing them up for the winter.
“We pretty much have everything in,” she said. “Our plot work is all in here and we’ve started processing it. The next step is the cleaning.”
Calder’s trial samples will be sent to the University of Guelph for analysis. But even though all her work has to be mailed off by the end of September, she won’t get the results back until sometime next spring.
“I don’t have any concrete data,” she noted. “But I actually do think the grain yields are down. I know because we had such poor germination in the spring.
“But forage yields are doing well,” she added, noting those at the research station were higher than average.
Meanwhile, more rain is still needed to maintain the pasture levels into October, Calder remarked.
“There are cracks out there if they get a little wider, I could lose the front tire of the tractor in them,” she said, noting some farmers’ pastures already have dried up entirely.
“Guys are starting to feed hay now,” she continued. “Even though we’ve got so much hay, it will get scary if we have to start feeding it [to livestock] two months early.”
The dry conditions the last month also made it very hard for district farmers to plow up their fields before winter sets in, Calder said.
“Another rain would break it up a bit,” she noted.