Determining Green Seed Levels

Aug 26, 2011

Determining Green Seed Levels

With uneven maturity and later canola crops, this will be another year to watch green counts. Here are some tips to follow when testing for green seed:

Rather than start up the combine to take a sample, insert a scoop shovel underneath the swath and use your hands to thresh pods near ground level into the shovel. These plants will have cured more slowly and if any plants have higher green counts, it will be these ones.
Collect the seeds, put them into 100- or 500-count test strips and roll them out.
Do a few strips and come up with an average. Five green seeds out of 500 represents 1% green.
Repeat this a few times through the field, making sure to check hillsides and flats rather than hill tops and field edges, which tend to be thinner and more advanced.
If this sampling suggests that the green seed levels are low enough to harvest, then collect a sample with the combine. Be sure it is a representative sample for the field. This year with uneven maturity throughout fields this may require harvesting several swaths across the field to get a good composite sample. Be sure to confirm your assessment of the grade with your planned delivery point before harvesting significant quantities of the crop.

Source: Canola Council of Canada

Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.