Salois: Now Is The Time To Think About That 2025 Wheat Crop

While a few fields of spring wheat remain across the Pacific Northwest, now is the time for wheat growers to think about the 2025 crop and harvest.

“So what leads to a good start?" asked Cat Salois, Director, Research and Technology Division with the McGregor Company. "Many people think of things like weed control, field preparation, picking the right varieties, setting ourselves up for success with the appropriate planting date.  But where my head goes to is developing resilience and our cropping strategies with things like how do we encourage vertical root development and early season vigor?”

Salois said dealing with the extreme weather swings here in the Northwest, either very warm years, or very cool, and then the extremes in moisture, either very wet, or very dry, makes it challenging to get the best yields year after year.  To try and address these variables, she says McGregor sourced biostimulants looking to help start the season strong, and keep that momentum going throughout the year.

“So, if you think about seed start Zeus, we had a seed start zinc, which is our micro fuse technology that provides a really," she said.  "Large dose of zinc that can be. We applied, we took the biostimulants that we developed to that screening process, added those to our seed start zinc and developed a product called Seed Start Zeus. So it combines that zinc with critical root building biostimulants that trigger that bigger vertical root development earlier on in the season and we get that nice, early season vigor that we see with zinc combined with that critical root building factor with that biostimulant component.”

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