Canola fields

Chrisgoesflying

Chrisgoesflying

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Chrisgoesflying
I don’t farm so know nothing about this stuff. I do know milk comes from cows, but it pretty much stops there when it comes to farming knowledge.

As a child I lived in the country. We always had a lot of canola fields around. Great to play hide and seek in as a child lol. If I remember correctly, the farmer harvested the canola when they were green and lush towards the end of the summer.

I then moved to the city and lived pretty urban for over ten years.

Last year, I moved back out to the country where once again, there a lots of canola fields. They were green and lush about two weeks ago and I was expecting that the farmer would harvest them then. Now, they’re yellow, brittle and look just plain burned and still haven’t been harvested. Anyone here with farming experience know what happened?
 
he's probably the same guy that let's his plane rot on the ramp instead of selling it. "I know what I got"
 
eman1200 said:
he's probably the same guy that let's his plane rot on the ramp instead of selling it. "I know what I got"
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Okay, so it’s definitely not normal. I thought maybe my memory is wrong and canola isn’t harvested when green and lush. The farmer did harvest all the other stuff (not sure what the exact plants were - I think it’s what bread is made out of?) but left the canola out to burn in the sun and heat.
 
Chrisgoesflying said:
Okay, so it’s definitely not normal. I thought maybe my memory is wrong and canola isn’t harvested when green and lush. The farmer did harvest all the other stuff (not sure what the exact plants were - I think it’s what bread is made out of?) but left the canola out to burn in the sun and heat.
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oh no, please don't mistake my comment for any knowledge whatsoever about canola or farming. I have no idea. I'm just spewing garbage like I always do.
 
Chrisgoesflying said:
I don’t farm so know nothing about this stuff. I do know milk comes from cows, but it pretty much stops there when it comes to farming knowledge.

As a child I lived in the country. We always had a lot of canola fields around. Great to play hide and seek in as a child lol. If I remember correctly, the farmer harvested the canola when they were green and lush towards the end of the summer.

I then moved to the city and lived pretty urban for over ten years.

Last year, I moved back out to the country where once again, there a lots of canola fields. They were green and lush about two weeks ago and I was expecting that the farmer would harvest them then. Now, they’re yellow, brittle and look just plain burned and still haven’t been harvested. Anyone here with farming experience know what happened?
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Often times crops like beans are grown for the purpose of plowing them under to help rejuvenate the soil. Beans are cheap and easy to grow and they grab nitrogen and other nutrients out of the air. Plowing them under not only releases that nitrogen into the soil but adds organic matter as the plant decomposes.

But I don't know if that is what this farmer is doing.
 
Chrisgoesflying said:
The farmer did harvest all the other stuff (not sure what the exact plants were - I think it’s what bread is made out of?)
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That would be wheat.

Or occasionally rye or oats or some other grain. But almost certainly wheat.

We didn't grow canola, but it's not one of the main nitrogen-fixing species I'd expect to be plowed under on purpose.
 
Canola is generally cut green w/a swather, allowed to dry in the windrow, then combined using a special pickup head. If it's still standing and dried down, he'll never get it harvested as the seed shatters easily and will fall on the ground before getting into the combine.
 
Hang 4 said:
The name “canola” derives from the phrase “Canadian oilseed low in acid.”.
I used to be called rapeseed, which had some marketing challenges.
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I had no idea.

Mxfarm said:
Canola is generally cut green w/a swather, allowed to dry in the windrow, then combined using a special pickup head. If it's still standing and dried down, he'll never get it harvested as the seed shatters easily and will fall on the ground before getting into the combine.
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It's definitely dried down. I took one sprout and opened it up and the seeds inside are black and hard as rock.
 
Not much canola here in the Tulsa area, but the soybean and summer wheat crop has had a rough go in our area due to very little rain over the past 6 weeks or so. Lots of hay being baled over the past few weeks, but I'm not sure what the market looks like since many ranchers are sending their cattle to market early with feed/hay prices skyrocketing. Used to see a lot of canola up in ND and into the Alberta province of Canada.
 
According to Wikipedia, rapeseed can be grown as a cover crop or for bees.
 
Chrisgoesflying said:
I had no idea.



It's definitely dried down. I took one sprout and opened it up and the seeds inside are black and hard as rock.
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Could have been some insurance $$ involved. Kinda silly to get to that point, and not harvest it.
 
SoonerAviator said:
rough go in our area due to very little rain over the past 6 weeks
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Not the past six weeks but I would say the last three weeks were very dry and hot (high 80s low 90s) with more of the same in the coming weeks in the forecast up here in Canada (at least southern SK). Having said that, before that, summer felt like it was rather wet and cool compared to past years and the canola looked good not long ago. Maybe it was a priority issue? Wheat and canola got ready for harvest at the same time and wheat was the more lucrative crop to harvest, hence the canola burned out?
 
Canola production might go up next year a lot as that is one of the bigger crops in Ukraine, which is also a really major producer of sunflower oil.
 
Canola and wheat and almost every other such crop has to be dry before being combined or it will just gum up the separating machinery in the combine and jam everything up. Been there, seen that. I retired four years ago, and a couple years ago I drove a farmer's tractor, towing the grain cart, to take the load off the combine when it got full and drive over to the trucks and auger the stuff into them.

Farming has become high-tech. These were John Deere machines, both with 560 hp JD V8s. Full of computers and some fancy control stuff. Gross weight of the tractor and cart was about 155,000 pounds. Big stuff. And yet fingertip control in an airconditioned cab.
 
The canola hasn't been harvested here yet and it's pretty brown. In my experience that's been fairly typical. It may depend on what it's being grown for, whether for seed or for production. I don't know.
 
Let it rot in the field. :)

Canola oil and I do not get along. Works like Exlax.
 
Maybe ruined by fungus or something? So lowest priority?
 
Sounds like the farmer from your memory was, as someone else mentioned, swathing it when green and then picking it up with a pickup head on the combine after it dried down. What you're seeing now is probably someone that isn't swathing ahead of time and is cutting it standing dry. Also as someone else mentioned, the seed needs to be dry for the combine to be able to remove the seed from its hull and to be safely stored - roughly 10% moisture, which is pretty darn dry (for reference, corn is usually stored at around 15% moisture, but can be harvested at over 20% moisture and dried down to storage moisture after harvest).
 
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I used to work with farmers in a high Canola-producing area of Canada in the late 80's.
The fields were blindingly brilliant yellow once flowered - very beautiful.
On each of my return trips, it was grown less and less til the last trip I saw none.
I was told near the end of the Canola boom, what ever that was about, it was planted each year with hope that the price would hold, or rebound - but it did not...so any one farmer might abandon their efforts and simply plough it under, as the potential income was less than the cost of harvest/shipping/storage.
Such is the insane stock market-style business that is farming; the potential downside scared me enough to never consider it.
 
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Let'sgoflying! said:
I used to work with farmers in a high Canola-producing area of Canada in the late 80's.
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I wonder if that's changed, because they're planting more and more canola where I live. When I first moved here 19 years ago, there was none. Now it's all over, displacing wheat and pulses.
 
judypilot said:
I wonder if that's changed, because they're planting more and more canola where I live. When I first moved here 19 years ago, there was none. Now it's all over, displacing wheat and pulses.
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pulses? Is that a typo or does it really mean something. I'm not being snarky
 
Ask Farmer @Jim K . He knows everything.

They grew some canola in Germany where we lived. Made the fields a bright yellow. Mixed well with all the asparagus fields.
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
Ask Farmer @Jim K . He knows everything.

They grew some canola in Germany where we lived. Made the fields a bright yellow. Mixed well with all the asparagus fields.
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They do love their spargel in Germany. We had it at least once a day over there.
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
Ask Farmer @Jim K . He knows everything.

They grew some canola in Germany where we lived. Made the fields a bright yellow. Mixed well with all the asparagus fields.
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I don't know anything about canola, except that they used to call it rapeseed. Turns out "rape oil" is a harder sell than "canola oil".
 
Jim K said:
I don't know anything about canola, except that they used to call it rapeseed. Turns out "rape oil" is a harder sell than "canola oil".
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Depends on your target market, I guess...
 
This is about all I get to use my Ag Econ degree for these days so I will toss out an answer.

Canola is not a crop as @Hang 4 mentioned, its a product derived from Rapeseed (the crop in reference). As with most grain or seed crops, moisture is important for long term storage. Too much moisture (over 16% in Wheat, I never sold, graded or shipped rapeseed when I worked on in the industry, so I cannot give precise numbers, but the issues are similar), means the product could rot or mildew in silo. Too little (under about 10% in wheat) and the product becomes brittle leading to negative impacts from handling and lower grades of product (and therefore values).

In an ideal world, you can let the crop dry in the field until it gets to that target range, but we don't live in an ideal world. So driers exist that allow harvests to be dried to target temp after the fact. These are basically massive propane heaters, and they are very expensive to run (but cheaper than letting crops rot in the field).

In the case of the green rapeseed that was harvested, there are 2 possibilities. 1) Weather ran the risk of making it harder, or impossible to harvest later, so it was harvested and dried at a high expense or 2) it was an "early" harvest that was decided by a local oil processor (basically the oil processor had a lull in supply, so they took the "wet" seed to process), the moisture would not matter as much because it would not be stored if it was going direct to the processor.

In the case of the drying (or burned as you described), this is seed that will be stored so, if weather permits, the plants will be left in the field to reduce in moisture until the seed is under a target moisture so it can be harvested, dried if required, and shipped or stored long term.
 
Dennis McKim said:
When legumes are harvested for their seed (usually dried), they are called “pulses.” Lentils would be a common example.
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Lentils and garbanzo beans are big here. Don't feel bad, @luvflyin. I never heard the term, either, until I moved here, which was when I was in my early 50s. And I grew up in a ranching family.
 
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