There seems to be a constant barrage of media comment about agriculture by folks who have little contact with real farms and little formal training in an agriculture faculty or school.
Much of the discourse talks about sustainable agriculture, resiliency, regenerative agriculture and particularly soil health. There is not much detail about what the terms mean but the theme is that farmers should be doing “IT,” whatever “IT” is.
Grainews story: Soil Armour
Read Also
Good news, bad news for fungicides meant to fight stem rot in canola
A report shows overall insensitivity of sclerotinia to three fungicide groups hasn’t changed in a big way between 2010 and 2024 — but shows some sclerotinia populations have been discovered with elevated insensitivity to all three.
Before we delve into the topic, I encourage readers to first check out the front-page article of the Aug. 23, 2022, issue of Grainews called “Armour Up!” It is by Lee Hart who is a field editor with Grainews.
Google “Lee Hart Grainews armour up” and it will pop up. Lee’s article talks about the farm of Tim and Diane Nerbas near Waseca, Sask. That immediately caught my attention since I have known Tim and Diane for all of the 30-plus years they have been building up the farm and, particularly, their soil improvement.
Tim was an agrologist with the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association (SSCA) for several years. The SSCA was the lead agency that worked on and promoted zero-till farming when it was in its infancy. The organization had spring field days demonstrating zero-till equipment that drew huge crowds from far and wide. Tim’s wife, Diane, was a Bullock, and I have known the Bullock family for many decades.
Tim’s account of his conversion to zero till is anecdotal without specific data on soil organic matter but a generous dose of common sense.
Tim uses a zero-till seeder with the precision that allows the current crop to be seeded between the rows of the previous crop. A picture is better than 1,000 words and the picture of a young canola crop neatly placed between the 12-inch-high wheat stubble from last year says it all. The wheat stubble will have caught snow to help provide better germination for the shallow-seeded canola and shelters the canola from wind.
The Nerbas farm near Waseca does have low-relief, eroded knolls. Tim dealt with that by applying manure to the knolls and doing bale grazing. The improvement in crop yields over time was obvious.
Almost all of the farm has been zero till for 30-plus years. Recent new land was acquired. The improvement in soil structure of long-term zero till was obvious. The seeder pulled harder in the new land.
Sustainable agriculture
The first time I heard the word sustainable was near the end of the hallowed wheat-fallow rotation in Saskatchewan. A prominent Eston, Sask., farmer from the clay belt said the old half-and-half rotation was not sustainable. On windy spring days dirt in the air was common. As a kid, I remember the ditches filling with topsoil in the spring.
However, a lot of farmers did very well for many years with the low-cost, low-input farming. Seed the summerfallow, spend the summer with a cultivator keeping the summerfallow clean, harvest the crop and off to Arizona for the winter. My eldest sister and husband spent 25-plus winters in Arizona.
The drought years of the 1980s brought that to an end. Many farmers got off their seeders on a windy day, went to their houses and said, “There has to be a better way.” Zero-till and continuous cropping was that better way. Most of the zero-till drills were designed and prototypes built in farm workshops.
What constitutes sustainable on a specific farm depends on what soil climatic zone it is in and what is feasible for that area. Sustainable is a very fuzzy term some relate to reduced chemical and fertilizer input, tending to the organic side, but few define what they really mean.
Regenerative agriculture
Regenerative agriculture is real but only for a defined situation. That situation usually involves livestock, often with small paddock rotational mob grazing in a stand that has a very diverse range of plants.
The paddock is grazed down and at the same time the manure is spread by direct deposit by the animals. It is more about perennial pastures than annual crops. In a whole farm situation, the annual cropping and intensive grazing can be rotated.
Cover cropping
Cover cropping is probably the most confusing of the fuzzy thinking. However, full-season cover cropping is a viable option in high rainfall areas.
Kevin Elmy, a student of mine eons ago, has coined the term “cocktail cover crops.” He was raised on a seed farm specializing in oats at Saltcoats, Sask., southeast of Yorkton.
When he started looking at diversification of plant species that have soil improvement traits, Tillage Radish was one of the early ones, but he quickly expanded to many species and got into the seed business through a partner.
I have watched with much interest the progression but took note of the fact that Saltcoats is in the Moist Black soil climatic zone where droughts are rare. Last year was a setback but 2022 came back with rain.
Cover cropping — shoulder season
Shoulder season cover cropping means seeding the cover crop after the main crop is harvested. The idea is to keep the soil biology active with the plant roots of the cover crop. However, in the Palliser Triangle (Brown and Dark Brown soil zones of Saskatchewan and Alberta) it is a non-starter.
There are very few years where the main crop is off in time to seed a cover crop. And, the fall season, especially September, is when we hope for rain to replenish part of the soil moisture needed for next year’s crop. Volunteer crops and weeds could provide growth some years, but that is usually dealt with by glyphosate to save the moisture for next year’s crop.
Soil productivity, soil quality and soil health
In my early days in research, we did work on soil productivity. We quickly realized we had to separate the nature and nurture parts of the equation.
In Canada, the feds spent some years looking at a “soil quality” index but that soon petered out. The buzzword now is soil health. That term is in a different category. There is the Soil Health Institute with headquarters in Morrisville, N.C. It has a large professional staff and is well funded. It has done much good work around the science of soil health.
Many other academic units also study soil health, and the main theme is the diversity of microbial life as measured by DNA profiles. They have been searching for soil tests that can define a healthy soil. Locally, I have often asked why they do not document the earthworms. One of the early definitions of soil health in the U.K. was the presence of a viable earthworm population.
Soil health: very late-breaking news
On Aug. 12, 2022, the Soil Health Institute (SHI) released a report announcing the recommended measurements for assessing soil health. According to the press release, the Soil Health Institute found that many measurements are effective for assessing soil health from a research perspective.
“While this is good news for the science, we also wanted to identify a minimum suite of measurements that is practical and affordable for all land managers,” said Cristine Morgan, chief scientific officer of SHI. “So, we also evaluated these measurements through the lens of cost, practicality, availability, redundancy and other filters,” she said in the press release.
Based on the results, SHI recommends a minimal suite of three measurements to be widely applied across North America (and likely beyond), according to the report. Those measurements include: 1) soil organic carbon concentration, 2) carbon mineralization potential and 3) aggregate stability.
That report was a huge breath of fresh air. When the studies were only academic, my comment was, “So what — what about the farmer?” The very recent Soil Health Institute report dealt with that question.
One size does not fit all
When talking about sustainability, cover cropping and soil health, the application has to be on a regional soil climatic zone basis. What applies in the corn/soybean area of Eastern Canada and the corn belt of the U.S. Midwest has no application to the Palliser Triangle, which covers a big chunk of the grain acres of Saskatchewan.
