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Better Farming
February 2017
BEYOND
THE
BARN
A 'sweet' market
opportunity
A new commodity may be on the
horizon for those producers looking
for another crop to add to their
operation. The recently-formed
Ontario Innovative Sugarbeet
Processors Cooperative
(OISPC)
may soon be looking for farmers to
grow more sugar beets for biochemi-
cal purposes.
Ontario producers currently grow
10,000 acres of these beets. The
harvested crop is shipped to the
Michigan Sugar Company
, accord-
ing to
Mark Lumley
, president of the
OISPC. Lumley is also chairman of
the
Ontario Sugar Beet Growers’ As-
sociation
(OSGA) and a farmer.
Producers in Lambton and Kent
counties harvest some of North
America’s highest sugar beet yields, a
November OSGA release said. These
beets also have some of the highest
sugar content in the industry.
An economic study by the OSGA,
the
Bio-Industrial Process Research
Centre
and
Western Sarnia-
Lambton Research Park
found it
feasible to re-establish a southern
Ontario supply chain and process the
crop here, too.
“We’re now onto the next stage – a
more comprehensive, detailed study
looking into engineering a sugar
plant, the sugar process and the cost,”
said Lumley. “We are hypothesizing
we will need 30,000 acres.”
Why should producers grow sugar
beets, according to Lumley?
“It’s a higher value crop – more
profitable than corn, soybeans and
wheat,” he said. “There’s over 100
farmers growing
them.”
BF
Your soybeans may be overachiev-
ers to a fault, according to a new
study by researchers at the
University of Illinois
.
Scientists found that soybean
varieties typically produce more
leaves than necessary – at the cost
of yield.
Researchers removed one-third
of emerging leaves on the plants
and found yields were boosted by 8
per cent, according to a release.
They predicted the yield rise
stemmed from increased sunlight to
lower leaves, reduced water demand
and more efficient use of plant
resources.
Malcolm Morrison
, crop
physiologist and research scientist
for
Agriculture and Agri-Food
Canada
, has also studied this topic
by removing lower leaves on
soybean plants.
“We could remove two-thirds of
the leaf tissue without significantly
reducing yield,” he said.
Soybeans used to be a wide row
crop. Now, they are grown in
narrow rows and the lower plant
tissue often sits in shade from the
thick canopy. “Seventy per cent of
the light falling on a soybean
canopy is intercepted by just the top
30 centimetres of the crop,” leaving
less light for the leaves below,
Morrison said.
“The perfect solution would be
to program the bottom leaves to die
off as the light level dropped and
the canopy closed.”
Morrison has experimented with
different row widths, as well as leaf
shapes, to increase light penetra-
tion. At this stage, however, he has
not yet made a direct and signifi-
cant correlation with yield increases
in soybeans.
The study was published in the
journal
Global Change Biology
in
November.
BF
Are extra leaves robbing your yield?
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