Cold mornings, wide weather swings, and plenty of field activity set the tone for this week’s Wheat Pete’s Word. From early spring opportunities in southwestern Ontario to stark regional contrasts and agronomy insights, Peter Johnson covers a lot of ground—along with a few practical tips growers can put to use right away.
This episode leans into timely management decisions, including sulphur applications, nitrogen strategies, and even how to handle overwintered corn. There’s also a mix of agronomy research, equipment observations, and weather-related challenges shaping spring 2026.
Have a question you’d like Wheat Pete to address or some field results to send in? Agree/disagree with something he’s said? Leave him a message at 1-888-746-3311, send him a tweet (@wheatpete), or email him at [email protected].
Here’s what you’ll hear in this week’s episode:
- Weather realities: “Be less wrong” mindset highlights limits of forecasting tools and agronomy decisions
- Check out Monday's episode of The Agronomists here
- Spring opportunities: Cold mornings enable sulphur application, tillage, and delayed corn harvest progress
- Overwintered corn: Leaving windward rows as snow fence reduces lodging and harvest losses
- Market note: Incremental grain sales encouraged amid recent price strength and ongoing uncertainty
- Drone applications: Impressive fertilizer spread uniformity at lower rates, especially for sulphur
- Residue management: New combine tech uses sensors to improve spread pattern consistency
- Extreme weather south: Rapid temperature swings raise concerns for wheat and early soybeans
- Nebraska wildfires: Loss of grazing acres could impact herd rebuilding and future beef supply
- Regional contrasts: Deep snow persists in northern areas, delaying frost seeding and fieldwork
- Snow-melting tech: Drone-applied products show potential for earlier planting in select conditions
- Spring tillage insight: Dry subsoil conditions explain excellent seedbed formation despite surface moisture
- Soil compaction: Frozen ground reduces but does not eliminate compaction risk under heavy equipment
- Wheat nitrogen timing: Early applications under 50 lb/ac seen as low risk in current conditions
- Starter fertilizer: Limited economic return from adding liquid alongside dry in most corn systems
- Fertility planning: Cutting back possible on some nutrients, but major reductions carry yield risk
- Soybean research: Seed singulation matters more at low seeding rates below 90,000 seeds/acre
- Wheat varieties: Leaf and tiller angle influence performance depending on planting timing and management
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This Sweet Pete's Word podcast is brought to you by Syngenta and Vibrance Quatro Seed Treatment. Your cereals can get a lot done when they're the first one up. Get healthy roots, faster emergence and consistently strong plant stands with Vibrance Quattro and the rooting power of Vibrance. Vibrance Quatro is a fungicide only solution for consistently excellent protection from a broad range of seed and soil borne diseases giving you stronger, faster plant stands.
Good day and welcome to Wheat Pete's Word here on Real agriculture for Wednesday, March 25th on this episode of the Word. Opportunities. I love this time of year. I think this is three or four times I've started with Opportunities. That's just so cool. Then holy weather. I mean Ontario weather is one thing, but further south look out after that agronomy answers. And at the end if I have some time, some cool stuff that I have learned over the last week. Let's go. Ah yes. So a great agronomist on Monday night, again, if you didn't catch it, was all about the weather and a quote from Jonathan Zettler, an excellent agronomist in Northern Huron South. Bruce. Bruce. And when it comes to weather and using weather tools and weather predictions, his comment was we are just trying to be less wrong, not 100% right. You just go oh my gosh, talk about being bang on when it comes to that type of stuff. It's pretty much the way agronomy is as well. And on opportunities. Yes, these cold mornings have been just such a great opportunity to get stuff done. Whether it is getting sulphur on wheat and canola and hay, or whether it's been doing some tillage you didn't get done last fall or combining corn. All of that stuff is going on. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. But just some tremendous opportunities here in southwestern Ontario. Not everywhere. By the way, had a great conversation with Brad there the other day about corn being left out. And there's a lot more corn from my travels throughout Ontario left out in the winter of 2026 than I realised or than normal. And more and more growers are saying, yeah, you know, drying costs, energy costs, leave it out, I save that drying cost. But the one thing that I think we have to get better at if we're going to do this, and I think lots of growers could have done this last last fall because a lot of growers said it's moisture, I'm going to leave it out. If you leave the outside four rows along the windward side of that field and combine the next, whatever it is, whatever your header is, 12 rows, 16 rows, 24 rows, something like that. Then the four rows that you leave act as a snow fence and we get the big drift of snow where we've already combined the corn and we don't get this big area of flat corn. As I've been driving through the countryside, I see it so many times where the first 30 rows of corn is just a nightmare. It's flat. It's going to be a disaster to combine. You're going to miss a bunch. We're going to have volunteer corn like crazy in the soybeans, which is, you know, another herbicide pass potentially. So I will try to remember to talk about and maybe somebody can help me remember next fall. But if you're gonna leave corn out, this, this snow fence concept really works well. And it's intriguing because in many of these fields, that first three, four rows are standing perfectly and then it's the next 24 or whatever rows that have gone down. And so it just proves that that snow fence effect works. And we have done this over the years. We know it works. So, so there's a note. Just from that perspective, one other quick note before I move on marketing. I try to stay out of the marketing world, I really do because I'm a terrible marketer, but man, I don't know if markets are going to go up or go down. And I keep going back to the comment that Pete Archer made. You know, the day you make a sale, you know you're going to be wrong. Either tomorrow you say I should have sold more or tomorrow you say I shouldn't have sold any. But, but it's been a long time since we could get, you know, 6:20 for corn, a bushel, something like that, like new crop prices. If this is the worst you do to make an incremental sale right now on corn, soy and wheat, it's just hard for me to think that's all wrong. But anyway, do your own marketing. I just want to make sure that people pay attention because there has been a decent little run up. And yeah, I know there's lots of, lots of uncertainty out there, but that is a note on the drone issue. Adam tweeting out that once again, the drones from a spread pattern, Adam actually went out and we did this last year, last summer at the Elgin Soil and Crop and we were very impressed with the spread accuracy of the drone seeding or pardon me, spreading fertiliser. And that really is a bit astounding. But one of the things about the drone that I think is kind of counterintuitive almost or maybe makes it work better, is that with the drone instead of with the airflow, you know, saying, well, we got to get up to 125 pounds because we can't put on less than 125 pounds with our airflow fertiliser, spreader and have it work well with the drone. It's the other way, man. We don't want to go over £60 if we can help it, because we just got to fill that thing and fill that thing. And so when you're looking at products early in the spring, we're trying to get the sulphur on the wheat crop that's the focus or on the canola crop, it just low rates probably are enough. 75, 80 pounds of dry ammonium sulphate works and in the trials, very impressed with the uniformity of application out of the drone, which is a surprise. But a couple of things that are good about it. One, it doesn't matter how, what the field is. Two, you're at a lower application rate, which, you know, given economics today is probably the right place to be. And we're getting the good spread pattern. All of those things are a win from that perspective. While I'm talking about spread patterns, I whine and complain about combines and not being able to spread residue. Right. And so my good friend Dave sends me a link where he asked Grok about that, right, artificial intelligence. And so now on the case, IH and New Holland combines, you go to the upper end spread pattern, they have radar sensors, two of them, one on each side of the combine, that sense how far that residue is being spread and automatically adjust the residue spread at the back of the combine. Now, that residue spread still has to be able to go 60ft if you have a 60 foot header. And that would take some doing, but at least, at least there is some hope out there for getting that job done. Right. All right, I want to move on and just mention quickly the heat dome further south. So Carl talking with Carl this morning, we said a friend in Iowa told him that they went from 90 degrees Fahrenheit to 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the same week. That from a Celsius standpoint is plus 32 to minus 15 in the same week. And yeah, that it just huge swings. By the way, there is some frozen corn. When you get further south, some of the corn did get frozen off. I don't think it's going to hurt it much because that corn, the growing point was still below ground, so I'm not real worried about it. I wonder about early planted soybeans through that region. I haven't seen any pictures on Twitter to tell me that there's big issues. But yeah, some concerns as well as I talked about last week about what that would do to the wheat crop where, where that growing point where the head is further up in the stem. Too early to tell from that perspective. I haven't heard big issues. But yeah, she's, she's wild out there. Further south on that note, fires. So grass fires through Nebraska have destroyed at least 750,000 acres of feed for their cattle herd. And I did not realise, but Nebraska is the second largest cattle state. That 750,000 acres of feed represents feeding about 40,000 cows. Now you do the math on that and that's basically 20 acres per cow. And us in Ontario would say, how do you need 20 acres per cow? But it's dry land. And we would also say, well, but wait a minute, that's early. That, that shouldn't really be that big a deal. No, because they do look at that, that early growth and the, the overwintering growth, man, that is, that is feed for those cattle. So wildfires through the grasslands of Nebraska really could reduce how much the cowherd gets rebuilt in that state. And that may have an impact down the road on cattle prices and on beef prices. Just kind of interesting how all that comes together. Meanwhile, Aubert in Quebec and Paul in northern Ontario both saying, pete, you're talking about getting stuff done and that's awesome, but man, there is just too much snow. Aubert saying, they can't even put red clover on yet. It's just too much small snow. And Paul saying, we still have like 4 foot, 5 foot deep snowbanks. Yep, just Ontario is a big problem province and lots of differences north to south at Quebec as well. And that just, just shows you that what Pete talks about for southwestern Ontario. Yeah, further south, they're ahead of it. Further north, they're behind it. That's just life. William sending me a really cool video from Japan where they are using a snow melting agent. They put it on with a drone, another use for a drone to melt the snow so they can get out there and plant vegetables early. And in the picture, I'm pretty sure it was lettuce they were planting. And William saying, wow, could we use that technology? Is that a thought process? Particularly in winter wheat where we get the icing where we get the ponding. Put that on, melt the ice. Well, okay, William, maybe the problem is where we have the ice. If we melt it, does it stay melted or does it refreeze? Because the water would have to be gone underneath. I'm less convinced that it would work there. I do think, though, that if you had snow and you wanted to frost seed spring cereals and you could melt that snow a bit earlier, especially maybe along the fence row where we get the deeper banks of snow so that we could get that frost seed, that frost seed done, I think that would be kind of a cool thought process. So there's some technology I hadn't really thought about on the tillage front. Now, this is phenomenally interesting to me. So Brett is out there. We had a great discussion about disc grip or moldboard plough in the spring. And both Greg Stewart and I would say we think moldboard plough is better if you can get it done early. Brett says, pete, the moldboard's put away. I can hook onto the disc gripper. You know, it's way easier. We're just going to go do that. On the frost the other morning they went out, or, pardon me, the other evening it got cold enough. At night they went out with that disc gripper and Brett sent me videos. Unbelievable. The soil is coming up mealy and beautiful and there was enough frost that the tractor was not compacting a lot. It's just borderline in a few spots. But, yeah, working really beautiful. Meanwhile, Gerard in Bruce county and Ryan in Lambton county, both saying that it's getting dry. Like, we can see dust flying in the afternoon on a sunny day. Ryan putting on red clover on dry soil. Gerard thinking he can put on ammonium sulphate on dry soil. And it really got me to thinking, like, how is it that that spring tillage, even now, Brett was not going deep. But why is it that it's coming up mealy? And if you think about it, 10 inches of snow is the equivalent of 1 inch of rain. Yes, we had some snow, but the snow melted reasonably slow. And all winter long, we. We don't really have a lot of moisture going down there. So we get a chance for that subsoil to drain through that water goes down and recharges the water table. And so that soil gets relatively dry. Maybe that's one of the reasons why winter wheat survives the winter pretty well here because it hates wet feet under the snow. It's often reasonably dry when that 10 inches of snow melts over a week. And think, oh, it's muddy at the surface. Well, yeah, it's a little mucky at the surface, but that's only one inch of rain or whatever your depth of snow was in the fields. To get more than 10 inches is sort of kind of unusual. So yeah, I think that those early spring soil conditions just are better at depth than we expect them to be. And I think that's because we haven't had the 3 inch pounding rains to actually really re wet things. That's kind of an interesting thought process. On that note, Lester saying, hey Peter, am I compacting my soil? I'm putting manure on my hay field on frozen ground. It's barely carrying, but I'm going to spring plough that we're going to plant. I think you said corn. Am I compacting it? Well, yeah. So the bottom line is anytime you drive over the soil, you're going to compact it. But if there's frost there, you spread that load out. You do do less compaction if you have really heavy equipment. I mean, we, we saw during the, the soil compaction day just outside of Brantford where that surface soil was super dry. What we did was we sort of transferred that to deeper in the soil. We didn't compact the super dry stuff. So I think that's true. We don't compact the frozen stuff. We do still cause compaction underneath that because something has to carry the weight. But we do spread that load out over a much bigger area. So are you doing some compaction? Yes, but much less than as if you were driving through there when that soil was, was wet. Roland saying, okay, Peter Roland's at St. Mary's and his question is around nitrogen on wheat. So he's been out on the frost, he's been putting on his sulphur, 75 pounds of ammonium sulphate. But we're back to this, this challenge of that's a low rate of ammonium sulphate. Plus he uses his main shot of nitrogen as 28% later April, something like that. And he has trouble getting enough 28% on to put the big shot of nitrogen. So he adds 75 pounds of urea with his 75 pounds of AM. Then the spreader works really well because you have enough volume to do that. Now the spread pattern because urea is a different density than ammonium sulphate. So that would be maybe a little bit of an issue. But his real question is that too much nitrogen at this time of year. And my answer is that I always say 50 pounds of actual nitrogen is sort of the upper limit this early, the chances of losing that nitrogen at a 50 pound rate are reasonably small. First off, urea, it doesn't immediately blow away and you're probably going to get some rainfall to incorporate that. It takes some time for the urea to transform to nitrate, which was the form that would be in the soil where we could see some loss if the soil stays warm and wet for an extended period of time. But right now it's certainly not warm and so that, that process is likely to be very slow. So are you putting some nitrogen at a little higher risk than later on? Yes you are, but that is a very low risk. I don't think you're doing it wrong if that makes the system work. But I would not go over 50 pounds of nitrogen. Jesse at Listwell saying, okay Peter, I have dry fertiliser on my corn planter. I'm wondering about adding liquid. Like is there a yield advantage to add liquid to the dry? So Jesse, great question. And we go back to this whole concept about relay fertiliser. When that corn seed first germinates, if you have liquid right with the seed, it, it has to hit that fertiliser so it, it's got it immediately. And then it takes a few days, right, a week or so to get that fertiliser or pardon me, to get the roots growing out into the two by two band. And so now we've got kind of that one two punch. Is there a benefit? We've done tonnes of trials on this and yes, the benefit can occur. It's more likely to occur if you have very low test soils. But typically it's from 0 to 7 bushels per acre and you kind of say okay, wait a minute, seven bushels per acre and six dollar a bushel corn, less drying or transportation, the other cost. So, so you know, we net out maybe $6, pardon me, $5 a bushel. So seven bushels, five bucks, $35 an acre. The liquid fertiliser, by the time we put it on the planter, we buy the product, it's probably going to cost us $35 an acre. It's sort of a wash. So is there a potential benefit? And by the way, seven bushels is the upper end. The average would be much less than that, something in that three bushel range. So does it work? Can it work? The answer is yes. Does it make you money if you have a two by two already on the planter? Probably not. Jamie saying, Peter, I've got no fertiliser purchased. I blew that. I Sort of looked at it last fall and I said, man, these high fertiliser prices, they just have to come down. Well, you know, Jamie, we've hit a black swan. How would you know that? So don't beat yourself up for not pre buying the fertiliser. Some years, you know, high fall fertiliser prices reduce demand and we end up with low fertiliser prices or lower fertiliser prices in the spring isn't going to work that way this year, I don't think. Dean. Also saying no need for phosphorus on medium or pardon me, on high, medium to high soil test phosphorus levels at the end of the day, Jamie and Dean, do we cut back a little bit maybe? We've had this discussion again and again. If you have good base fertility, you cut back on your phosphorus, your potash, your magnesium, if you're putting it on your micronutrients, all of those things. We've talked about that enough. With nitrogen you can cut back a little. We typically tend to put on 15, 20 pounds more nitrogen than we really need because when you do short yourself, you know it. And so you could cut back that nitrogen a little bit, but you simply can't cut back a tonne. It just, that's, I mean, last year, last year, did you waste money on fertiliser because you just wanted to waste money? The answer is I don't think so. So, yeah, maybe the fertiliser prices are higher, but I think you just have to basically stay the course. Hey, a couple of cool things just to end up with it. I'm going to actually get to the end of the list, Paul. I'm going to get to, to the end of the list. So I don't need to two word episodes a week from Auburn University in Alabama. They're doing some soybean seed singulation trials and there's some other. Missouri is starting to do this as well. But, but Auburn did it last year, so they have one year of data. So really thin data set. Don't take this to the bank yet, but I think it's really cool. What they found was that soybean seed singulation doesn't matter if you're at high seeding rates. Right. If you're at 140, 160, 180,000 seeds per acre. But if you get down under 90,000 or 80,000 seeds per acre, then seed singulation starts to make a big difference. And we'll wait and see what, what more data says, but I think that that makes perfect Sense. Right. It's kind of cool. And one of those interesting thought processes. Here's one other thing that came out of Manny Singh, Eric Olson's Dennis Pennington Michigan State University on wheat varieties. So we talked about leaf architecture and corn lots. I've talked about the leaf architecture in wheat as well. And what we really find, what they found in Michigan is that the leaf angle, whether it's droopy or erect, is easily predicted by tiller angle at the base of the plant. So we think we can measure that. And what they found is that you don't want to plant an erect type late because if you plant it late just because it's so erect, we don't get full canopy coverage or full canopy development, so we don't intercept the sunlight as well. And if you're going to plant late, you really want to plant a droopy leafed variety or a wider tiller angle. We don't have good data on this here in Ontario yet, but is a really interesting concept. By the way, the opposite is also true. If you're going to plant super early and you're really going to manage that crop, then erect leaf varieties tend to do better. And I wonder. So I come back now to, to my good friend Tyler asking me why in their trials that Branson, this ancient variety, Branson, continues to do well. Well, guess what? Branson is an erect leaf variety. And Tyler, on your heavy clay, I would have thought droopy varieties would do better. But if you're planting timely and you're a high management grower, which I know you are, then maybe that erect leaf variety just responds better than we would expect. So kind of an interesting thought process. It's going to be really hard to use that information because when you buy your wheat seed, you don't really know if you're going to plant early or late. But on the other hand, you do have a pretty good idea of what happens on average. And maybe you get some erect and some droopy and you plant the erect first and you plant the droopy last because that's what the data says you should do. And with that, that's it, that's all. On behalf of the team here at Real Agriculture, this is Wheat Pete with the word for Wednesday, March 25th. Dang. The next word will be in April. Hey, keep leaving the messages in the comments. I love it. And we'll talk to you again next week. See you then.
This Sweet Pete's Word podcast is brought to you by Syngenta and Vibrance. Quatro seed treatment. Your cereals can get a lot done when they're the first one up. Get healthy roots, faster emergence and consistently strong plant stands with Vibrance Quattro and the rooting power of Vibrance. Vibrance Quattro is a fungicide only solution for consistently excellent protection from a broad range of seed and soil borne diseases, giving you stronger, faster plant stems.