Winter canola plating is underway in Kansas, but growers may be limited by several factors. Kansas State University, canola breeder Mike Stamm says that weather variability this time of year can be a deciding factor.
According to Stamm, “It really just depends on kind of the individual area, county, farmer, you know how his land is prep. You know, hopefully if the farmer is using tillage, she’s done that tillage early and maybe caught one of these sporadic showers on the ground to help settle it, and so then you’ve got a little bit of a nice crust on the soil and the moisture
could potentially be there. We don’t want overworked soil this time of the year, because again, the rains have been pretty variable across the state and so if you have an overly worked fluffy soil that’s not good for planting canola and we want more firm seed bed.”
Now for no-toll systems, Stamm suggests moving residue out of the seed row to avoid competition.
Moisture this time of year is key for a successful winter canola crop and that’s why Stamm says the best rotation is following after winter wheat.
“Winter wheat is really the easiest crop to follow because that land is readily available. Now some producers would like to follow an early corn and maybe it’s corn that’s been harvested wet for high moisture purposes or it’s corn that’s been harvested for silage,” he explains. “That gets a little bit more tricky because you can run into issues with herbicide plant back restrictions. For canola, you know, a lot of the commonly used herbicides in corn production have long plant back restrictions for canola, so that’s something we really have to take into consideration.”
Stamm says that following corn with canola is possible, but it takes more long-term planning and thought to be successful.
