How would you rate your canola yield

I agree swman, I always take it with a grain of salt when guys further south of me think they have heavy land. I dont think most guys even know the composition of there soils for that matter especially if its rented land. Osbourne clay is one of the nastiest clay soils to work with while my red river loam is really nice to seed into. Both are heavy clay soils but osbourne clay soils tip the scale as the heaviest. The crop insurance letter system is really not a great indicator of soil health.
The osborne clays have a really poor water infiltration rate while my light red river loam absorbs water much easier so yes the guys who say there lighter land may produce more it is more a matter of water holding capacity due to less compaction of the hard pan underneath, thus allowing more infiltration than runoff.
Try an experiment, get a coffee can and cut the bottom end off. than push it into the ground about an inch. Than poor about 750 ml of water which is roughly equal to an inch of rain. Than time how long it takes to absorb. Next take another 750 ml and pour it into the coffee can. Time the absorbing rate again. If you have good soil it will absorb the second inch in 2-4 minutes. My osborne clay couldnt handle the second inch and took more than 30 minutes to obsorb. More rain , and it just gets worse so the lesson is to get the soils healthier with more cover crops or getting more life into the soil after you harvest your crop till freeze up. easier said than done.
I am told deep ripping or tile drainage or only temporary fixes. This year that f land or osbourne clay zero tilled with a cover crop of oats growing till freeze up last fall yielded 39 bu acre while the neighbours salford disc field yielded 10 bushel canola. Funny thing his field looked even until the winds came and sheared off the canola. in the end his just ran out of moisture.

We have a wealth of information now on conservation tillage and if this drought persists it might change the way we think about growing crops. I know , the guys out west this common practice already.

I am trying zero tillage on those osborne clay soils to try and get more organic matter and carbon back into the sub soils instead of cultivating and making the hard pan even harder. The myth of zero tillage turning your soil hard is (pardon my expression) horse $hit. Its the opposite and anyone thinking its damaging their soil obviously is not doing regenerative soil practices right.

Dandelions are easy, just give them 2L of gly and a shot of express.

GR kochia on the other hand...

Finished harvest last night and for the year we've had I'm ecstatic with the canola yields. My thinking is that sincr the breeding programs have been pushing for more varieties to suit the south that there's a bit of heat/drought tolerance bred into these newer lines.

Everything goes through the cart and our canola averaged (drum roll please 😄) just shy of 30. Actually only a third of the acres were less than 30 with one field really dragging down the average. Huge seeds from the mid August rain really contributed to the yield.

A note of interest, I was watching Mike Mitchell's youtube yesterday and he was turning canola that was hot, he said it tested 7.5 when they combined it!! I have small bins and no monitors and don't usually have trouble at that moisture level but I was keeping an eye on it this year and some was warmer than it should have been, it was 7.5 at the elevator too (I hauled it in, so now no worries). KEEP CHECKING YOUR BINS is the bottom line here.

Have heard of quite a bit in this area starting to heat. We had some getting warm so shipped it out a month ago, still have a bin of dad’s, have moved it a couple times and it seems to be keeping good, will pull a load out next week. He wants to keep it until January so he can defer it to 2023, wish I had that problem! lol, he’s pretty much retired so it’s mostly a game for him now. One guy at Viterra said one day he had a sample that would have been easier to count the seeds that weren’t heated. Yikes. We very seldom store canola, just fin the risk is too high. Sell it, pay bills, and sleep easy.

Ours was swathed for 3 weeks with 3" of rain, so green count was 0. 22 and 25' swaths. I am hearing that 40' swaths don't dry because not enough air movement is possible so the bottom stays green, kind of like the beaver huts that make combining a bit more interesting, they are generally as green as when they were cut. I think it was binned in a 22-25 degree range, so should be good.
ADM told me a few years ago when straight cut was starting to be the rage that they had never seen so much heating trouble, coincidence?

Well I know I sure don't have air of any sort on every bin, nor the fans to get onto bins I even do have in a short amount of time either so I know the feeling. What bites guys up here is if the canola comes off earlier in the fall then normal and we happen to have a run of unusually hot weather which does two things, the canola becomes dry sooner in a swath and its coming off hot. Later in the fall the days tend to be cool and even if the canola comes off barely dry its much cooler and has probably sat in a swath for over a month. For example this fall different evenings I would have canola coming off colder then the chart for the grain tester and that happens to work in ones favour to plunk into a non aerated bin. Not to mention that our nights are probably cooler on average then southern Sask/Manitoba so when fans are turned on it has a better chance of cooling to a lower temp.