Conversation Between Robinhood02 and Stonewall

We use 35 foot belt headers on our combines. We only have manual tilts for cutting the rice that grows on levees, but we do have autosteer on our combines for harvesting beans.(we don't plant the bean levees, and smooth them out before harvest) Since we're just getting started, the field behind my house still has bean stubble on it, so I'll take some pictures and post a thread showing each step in the rice growing process.

LOL by the end of Oct we usually have more than a foot of snow, we like to be done by mid sept because after that it could start snowing anytime, yes the land rolls quite a bit so the expensive combines have laser sights that read the ground height at each end of the header and auto tilt the header so that you don't hit the ground. we run 30-40 foot straight cut headers, most of us do straight cut now a days so we don't have to swath (windrow) our crops, except for canola. Not one person irrigates up here, we just put it in the ground and let the rain do the work but most of us do zero till to conserve spring moisture in the ground, Alberta is about 1200 miles long and 450 miles wide so it is a big province and the further you get south is where the irrigation is, just not up here. I live close to the oldest town in western canada called Fort Vermilion it is about 250 yrs old and was first founded during the Hudsons Bay fur trade. my mother is from North Dakota and my dad from here.

Our growing season down here starts about now, the we usually start rice harvest late August-early September, but don't get done harvesting beans until the end of October and sometimes into early November. We try to get all the water drained off the fields for harvest, but sometimes the weather won't let us. Being that it's so flat down here, a couple inch rain will fill all the ditches and back up the water into the fields. We run Goodyear R2 rice and cane dual tires on most of our equipment, but a few have R1.5s. Rice is our cash crop, we just grow soybeans for the rotation so we don't sap all the minerals from the ground. Good hybrid rice will yield 175-200 bu/ac, and good soybeans yield 65 bu/ac on the high end. We have also grown medium grain that yeilded 200 bu/ac. Do y'all farm on rolling hills like the pictures I've seen and harvest with tilted combines to stay level on hillsides? Do y'all irrigate your crops or just put them in the ground and let nature do it?

our growing season for most crops is only from middle of may and we harvest about mid sept but our days are very long. it doesn't get dark till 1 in the morning and is getting light again by about 3:30 am ,so only 2.5 hours of darkness in the summertime, talk about good bush parties LOL, lots of beer and girls LOL
ahhh crop share, so you do flood your feilds, so do you harvest while the fields are flooded ?? we grow as much canola as possible because it gets the best price, then wheat. the Barley and oats is just for rotateing but it grows good, barley about 110 bsh/ac ,oats about 120 bsh/ac, wheat 65 bsh/ac and canola about 60 bsh/ac

That's what the landlord wants.(they obviously aren't our favorite landlords lol) The way we rent the ground is we get 75 percent of the harvested crop, and the landlord gets 25 percent.(I believe this is right, my dad handles all of that) As far as fertilize, I just spread it LOL I don't really know what we put out but I think we put around 250 lb/ac out. In case you missed it on my profile, I'm only 16 and haven't learned everything about it yet.(I plan on a career in engineering anyway) It's really cool to learn about how y'all farm up there, how long is your growing season?

LOL, we don't farm rice like the Chinese. We build levees that are about 3 feet high on the to sort of staristep from the top elevation of the fields to the bottoms. (The ground elevation in our area doesn't vary more that 10 feet.) We have wells at the high points in the fields that pump water up about 60-100 feet from the aquifer below us. Once the rice gets big enough, we put a permanent flood on it until it matures and is ready for harvest. I couldn't find a good example of midseason rice growing on Google Earth, but if you look just to the East of the coordinates I gave you for our HQ, and move the slider to say 9/2009, you can see us harvesting rice. Yes, it is white table rice.(although recently there has been a market for medium grain so we've been growing some of that)

yup im somewhere in the 3000 acre area, a mid size farm up here, why would you have to take your crops to the land owner ??, we just pay rent to the land owner about $15 per acre, and yup there is a sawmill and an OSB plant just a bit south of town, ill be doing mostly canola this yr and a bit of oats and a couple hundred peas
eh i heard you guys throw the fertilizer down pretty heavy down there is that right ?? if i throw 100 lb/ac down of 46-0-0 im puting about right any more and it's like throwing it away, we have goose hunters come up every yr from AZ and Ca to hunt geese for a couple weeks each fall and that is what they said but they wern't farmers ,

feed peas are peas grown specificaly for feeding cattle, 2000 acres of rice ??? i didn't see any rice paties LOL how the heck do you grow rice on dry ground ?? so you talkin white table rice ??

We farm about 4000 acres, rotated roughly half soybeans and half rice. Looks like y'all have a big sawmill up there in your town. What exactly are "feed peas"?

actual acres i dont actually know, but i farm 21 quarters, and you ??