Focus on soybeans - Where to find information on soybean varieties for your farm

Friday, February 29, 2008

Soybeans are an important part of a cropping rotation with wheat and corn in intensively farmed areas of Ontario.

With high speed Internet more widely available in Ontario, Better Farming has broken from an eight-year tradition by publishing this year's soybean variety chart on the
Internet. The chart will be available at the Better Farming's website
(www.betterfarming.com). Adobe Acrobat Reader, a program freely available on the Internet and easily downloaded, is required to read it.

The 2008 soybean variety chart is a service to our readers provided by the editorial staff at Better Farming. The list of new varieties was developed by asking known distributors for names and information about varieties available for the first time. Not all distributors responded and not all had new varieties available in 2008. In some cases, seed is available on a limited basis only.

The varieties are arranged by corn heat unit area so that you, the reader, can easily find the new varieties suitable for your farm. Details about special traits, resistance to weedsprays or to certain diseases, as well as expectations of potential yields, were provided by the breeder or distributor.

Some additional information about how these varieties might perform on your farm is available on the Ontario Oil and Protein Seed Crop Committee's website at http://www.gosoy.ca/index.php and the latest report can be obtained there.

In early February, Chicago prices were at record levels, just shy of US$11 per bushel. At the same time, Statistics Canada reported that, as of Dec. 31, Canadian soybean stocks were at 1.7 million tonnes, which was 928,000 tonnes or 34 per cent lower than a year below. That's because farmers favoured corn last year. "It's hard to know what to make of these numbers," says Horst Bohner, a soybean crop specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

"This year is going to be critical," Bohner says. "The real crunch will come next fall if we don't plant a lot of soybeans" this spring. Sometimes fields planted to fall wheat become victim to winter kill and are torn up in the spring and planted to soybeans. But it's far too early to speculate about that scenario, he says. BF