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We reached out to Dave Losh, the Oregon State statistician who did a ton of work on this report, to see if he had some unpublished insight on bluegrass acreage in the region but he is not yet available.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.