Canola Community Connections – June 9

Send in your flea beetle damage pics – Justin Pahara, an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) scientist at Lethbridge, would appreciate flea beetle damage scouting photos to help test their ability to accurately analyze images for defoliation. “With the help of producers, our team at AAFC hope that the wide variety of canola leaf images from different geographic regions with different image backgrounds (tilled soil vs. no-till) in wet and dry conditions, on sunny and cloudy days etc will be a good start to creating an artificial intelligence-based software tool that makes objective crop damage assessments possible and simple,” says Pahara. Please send your flea beetle scouting photos to justin.pahara@canada.ca if you can assist in this citizen science effort. When you email photos in, please use the email subject “Canola damage pics.”

Soil health assessment project – Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan are looking for growers to participate in a soil health assessment project. The project, conducted by Kate Congreves and Zelalem Taye, aims to develop a soil health testing protocol and online tool tailored to Saskatchewan’s climate and major soil zones. This summer, they will collect soil samples from volunteer farmer fields across Saskatchewan and record general crop management information for each field. Confidentiality of farmers information is maintained and no reference to specific farms will be made public. Farmers are encouraged to register here to participate in the project. They can also sign up by sending an email to this address: zmt059@mail.usask.ca.