LUARS Summer Tour 2019

Area producers have generally accorded priority to evaluation of new high yielding crop varieties and nutrient management practices at the research station. They have always encouraged us to try new crops/and other new crop management practices. You will see that focus in our research plots at LUARS during our annual summer tour this month.

New Crop Varieties:

You will see 24 varieties of spring wheat. Except three check varieties all are new; a mixture of CPSR Canadian Prairie Spring Red, CWRS Canada Western Red Spring and HRSW Hard Red Spring wheat. Prosper, Minnedosa, Raven (Good Fusarium Tolerance!) and Prevail belong to the last category. It was hard to find new varieties of barley and oats this year. You will see a new malting barley variety AAC Goldman (two row) that is reported to have a desirable combination of agronomic, malting quality, and disease resistance traits including low deoxynivalenol content. We have two new oat varieties ORe 3541M and ORe 3542M that are known to have a consistent, high grain quality with a larger percentage of plump seeds, which is important to millers.

We will show you 7 new varieties of peas - 4 yellow and 3 green, ~15 new soybean varieties, two varieties of lentils (CDC Impulse CL and CDC Lima), 20 varieties/biotypes of flax, and one variety each of edible beans (AAC Scotty), Liberty Canola (L234 PC – early maturity, pod shatter reduction and very strong resistance to Club Root), RR canola (PV 585 GC) and mustard (AAC Brown 120 - Brown mustard).

Nutrient Management Practices:

This year we are comparing a relatively new N fertilizer - Urea Super Granules (SuperU®) at high rates of N application (0, 90, 180, 270 and 360 kg N/ha) with urea and urea + ESN on canola. SuperU®, a beautiful light blue coloured fertilizer, is an N-TEGRATION™ Technology which means the power to protect nitrogen is uniformly integrated within every single granule. It uses urease and nitrification inhibitors to minimize N losses. Research conducted elsewhere has shown that SuperU® could enhance nitrogen efficiency and optimize crop yields. We are in the third year of comparing Gypsum and ammonium sulphate as source of sulphur (S) for canola production and in the second year for evaluating seed row placement of Gypsum vis-à-vis ammonium sulphate (pre seeding broadcast application) as sources of S in a cropping system experiment involving barley, canola and peas, effect of N and S to optimize yield and quality of malting barley and fish waste as a source of N for spring wheat production. In addition, we are comparing lime and Gypsum for Galega production, working on nutrient management for high yield and long term persistence of Galega and have initiated two new experiments on lentils to find out their optimum N, P, K and S requirements.

Other Research:

We are comparing 5 forage legumes (alfalfa, Galega, red clover, trefoil and sainfoin) in a single experiment and trying to work out the best practices for establishing Galega (helping it to overcome weed completion in its establishment stage). We will also show you two perennial cereals (Kernza and Ace 1 perennial rye), RR alfalfa varieties, MasterGraze corn and some other new forage crops.

Two of our new employees, Siayo Yang Intern and Ruoxi Xia Technician, will join Blaine Tomeck, six Summer Interns (MSc students from the Faculty of NRM, LU) and myself to welcome you on our Annual Summer Tour. We are looking forward to seeing you at LUARS soon!