Confident on Early Canola30-Jun-2014

AGRONOMISTS and farmers are confident the rapid early season growth of canola crops in low rainfall parts of Victoria and NSW due to the warm and wet autumn will end up putting extra grain in the bin at the end of the year. While the jury is out on the impact of having cereal crops at the stem elongation stage before the end of June, there is greater comfort that early canola crops will not be set up to fail due to its early maturity.

Rob Sonogan, Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) southern panel member, said the early start meant there were good acreages of canola planted in the Victorian Mallee.

He said these crops were setting a record-breaking pace, with the early April break and mild May meaning crops were already flowering in many areas.

“From a line north of Sea Lake, there’s a lot of canola that is already flowering, and that is not simply due to low nitrogen levels, which sometimes means canola will throw out an early flower, these are healthy crops,” Mr Sonogan said.

Nandaly farmer Jacko Kiley said he had canola that was beginning to flower.

He said he had top-dressed nitrogen and sulphur already at the rate of 55 kilograms a hectare of nitrogen fertiliser urea in May and 60kg/ha of sulphate of ammonia.

Mr Kiley said he had thought about another application of nitrogen, which the crop could easily take, but said he was concerned with flowers emerging it may now cut down flower numbers.

While he said he expected some pods would be burnt off by frosts due to the early flowering, he expected this to be more than compensated by the extra pods generated by a longer flowering period. His assessment was backed up by Mr Sonogan.

“You probably will lose the odd pod, but what our trial work with ultra-early sowing has found is that the plant will pod much deeper down, so there’s a lot more pods there.

“There will also be better oil levels.”

General manager at agronomy firm Agrivision, Kent Wooding, said the canola plants would simply flower until they ran out of moisture.
“Canola will just match the season, once it has got no moisture or a spell of hot weather it just stops flowering.”

He said growers with early canola would be at an advantage.

“In our trials, early sown canola has always gone the best in the Mallee, even with frost, as it is not as exposed to those spring heat events we can get.”
Simon Craig, research agronomist with Birchip Cropping Group (BCG) said the year presented a series of questions.

“There’s a few things we don’t really know, just with the flowering so early, we’ve done some trial work on it and we think it will be a good thing, but it really is unprecedented, so we’ll see what happens in practice.”

Queensland Country Life

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