Editor’s Note: Les Henry, the esteemed Prairie soil scientist and our longtime soils columnist, left us on June 14 at age 83. Up until the day before his passing, Les was working on and revising this column for the next (July 11) edition of Grainews. We’ll still have this on paper for you in a […] Read more
Where the canola was: a history of Saskatchewan yields by soil climatic zone
Whether by nature, nurture or both, yields jumped in several zones around the turn of this century
Zero till: how did it all happen?
Soils & Crops: In Saskatchewan, necessity was the mother of more than one invention
In March 1993 in Grainews there appeared a piece by a certain soils columnist titled “A Quiet Revolution in Crop Production.” It concluded that within the next two decades we’d see a revolution in the way we farmed. It came to pass much as predicted — but what made it happen was work in farm […] Read more
Water chemistry: a Coles Notes version
Soils & Crops: Conductivity and hardness of water samples show what you can use it for
First of all: readers who have Henry’s Handbook of Soil and Water can check out pages 124-125 for a detailed discussion of water chemistry, complete with calculations. Water is considered to be the universal solvent because it is capable of dissolving more substances than any other liquid. Therefore, one of the first things we might […] Read more
Nitrate down the well
Soils & Crops: If you move onto an old farmyard with an existing well, don’t drink the water without first getting it tested
This column has dealt with this topic several times over the decades we have been scribbling. Recent sources have raised the nitrate issue again. It deserves repeating once in a while, to make sure no more infants die from the blue-baby condition (methemoglobinemia). The link between nitrate-contaminated farmyard wells and blue-baby was first reported by […] Read more
A climate update for our neck of the woods
You'll want to keep your long underwear handy for the next several winters
I have been tinkering with climate data for about the past 15 years. Thanks to the folks at the Swift Current, Sask. federal ag research station, I now have complete monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1886 to 2023. That adds five years to my last summary, so we will now do the update. Weather […] Read more
Boyd Anderson’s life was a history of Prairie farming
Grainews columnists I have known, part 2 of a series
Let me first repeat the introduction to these columns. Grainews was first published by United Grain Growers, which was owned by farmers. The first editor, John Clark, recruited several farmers/ranchers to write regular columns that told it as it was “down on the farm.” Farmers writing for farmers was the idea. Boyd Anderson was a […] Read more
For peat’s sake: a picture story
Crops can be grown on shallow peat -- but there are very wrong ways to develop that land
Let us start with a mystery. Inga was raised on a farm near Loon Lake, Sask., west of Meadow Lake in the province’s northwest, so we have visited there many times in summer months. While driving Highway 26 north of Pine Cove nearby, I noticed what looked like peat sloughs. The trusty soil probe proved […] Read more
Precipitation cycles: When will the dry cycle end?
There's no way to predict from here what the 2024 growing season will provide
Many farmers in the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones of the Palliser Triangle have spent a few years now looking at the sky and hoping for rain. In some areas the snowmelt went straight to soil moisture and was a big factor in providing something for the trucker to do. But multiple years with […] Read more
Where the wheat was
Let's track 85 years of hard red spring wheat yields in Saskatchewan, by RM
The folks at Saskatchewan’s ministry of agriculture have produced a digital dashboard that has a complete record of wheat yields for each rural municipality all the way back to 1938. It is an Excel file, 20.5 MB in size, which means a lot of numbers. It’s very easy to select any RM in the province […] Read more
A hundred years of Prairie farmland prices
Don’t bet the farm on that much-anticipated easing of interest rates
Farmland prices continue to go up like a helium balloon, leading to speculation that it might continue and speculation in land as a commodity. In this piece we will look at a long history and provide some guesses about the future. Anyone who thinks they can actually predict the future is living in dreamland. Figure […] Read more
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
