La Grande Nutrien Ag Solutions

Winter is back in La Grande! Looks like those guys might have been right. Here's hoping we can rebuild a good portion of the snow pack over the next few weeks.  Some interesting grass seed news has been released in the last week or so. The USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) published the 2018 Oregon Grass Seed Forecast report last week.  As a brief summary of the report, Annual Ryegrass and Tall Fescue (turf and forage) acreages are up while Perennial Ryegrass is down slightly.  For those of us in the NE corner of the state of Oregon bluegrass is conspicuously absent from the report. We reached out to Dave Losh, the Oregon State statistician who did a ton of work on this report, to see if he had some unpublished insight on bluegrass acreage in the region but he is not yet available. We'll update you if we learn more. There's a couple other reports from USDA NASS you may find pertinent for the PNW (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska). Both

The La Grande branch of Crop Production Services is one location in the world's largest supplier of crop inputs and services, Nutrien.  We reported the news here around the first of the year when the merger of Agrium and Potash Corp finalized.  Being a part of the largest global agricultural company of its kind comes with some perks. We have a big voice in the world on topics like sustainability, safety, agronomic practices, and the reputation growers and suppliers carry in our society. One of the biggest conversations surrounding agriculture in our time is long term food supply.  How will "we," the farmers of the world, continue to feed an ever growing global population with the increasing challenges of urban sprawl, local regulations, water quality and supply, environmental concerns, and the rhetoric surrounding plant breeding and genetics. Public opinion is not insignificant and Nutrien is actively engaging the conversation in creative ways. Benjamin Franklin

It's been a mild winter. That might be an understatement.  Is it Spring yet? Do we wait for the calendar to agree? What should we expect for the fertilizer and fungicide seasons? How about insect pest winter survival? These are all questions we're watching and 2018 should keep us all on our toes. Here's a link to an interesting resource. The Seasonal Climate Forecast February-April 2018 is a collaboration between meteorologists from the Oregon Department of Agriculture and Oregon Department of Forestry. Take a look, there's a lot of information there and ton of other links. Snow packs are down but this report indicates some recovery is still to come. In other words, winter's not over yet. But, a forecast is a forecast not a guarantee and sometimes we have to move on something when we get a window.  Keep talking with your CPS Fieldman to plan upcoming spring applications and formulate timing strategies.

Welcome to 2018! & Happy New Year from all of us at La Grande, CPS. It's a new year and that means a lot of things. There's a sense of a fresh start, goals and plans and dreams and high hopes. We're already lying to ourselves about losing weight and exercise.  For us at CPS it also means the completion of a merger of two leading, global Ag companies to create one of the largest agricultural companies in the world and we are a part of it all. Agrium and PotashCorp finalized the "merger of equals" January 1st and began operations as one entity,  Nutrien , on January 2nd .   Here at La Grande we will still operate in local mindset with local people, local expertise, and a focus on local success for our growers. While CPS has been connected on a global scale for some time now, this means we're tapped into something on a scale the industry has never seen. It's the start of something big and that means a big future with big opportunities for our

Here's a look at the program for the 2017 77th annual Seed League. This is a big event for seed growers in Oregon. Once again CPS has shown full support for the markets our customers depend on by taking the top Program Sponsor spot. If you make it out be sure to stop by and say hi. See ya there!  

Thanksgiving finds its roots in a 1621 harvest festival held by the Pilgrims in the New World to celebrate, after several difficult years, an abundant harvest. It was observed as a national holiday off and on following a proclamation by George Washington in 1789. Thanksgiving Day became an official federal holiday in 1863 with full support in both Houses of Congress and a decree by Abraham Lincoln.  That's a brief official history but what Thanksgiving has always boiled down to is pause. It is intended as a day to reflect and, as the name implies, give thanks both for abundance and the simple good things in life.  It's ironic that we tend to flit around frantically preparing a massive meal a fussing over the table arrangement on a holiday with an underlying purpose of pause and reflection. But feasting is not something we do well as a society. A consumption driven culture tends to miss the difference between overeating and feasting.  We'd like to encourage you