When our ancestors broke the prairie sod in the Palliser triangle there was no local wood for building houses. Timothy Eaton and his T. Eaton Co. Ltd. to the rescue. The T. Eaton Catalogue was the shopping center for isolated Prairie farms. In 1910 the T. Eaton Co. Ltd. Winnipeg Catalogue provided the first offering […] Read more
Catalogue houses: the Foursquare house
Ordered by mail and delivered by train, catalogue houses helped settle the Prairies
Combines I have known, Part 3
In the third part of an ongoing series on combines, Les Henry goes for the green paint
This is No. 3 in an occasional series on combines. When completed, the series will span the 63 years that I have spent running combines. Some years just a few hours, but a bit in each of the years. The first piece included a bit about a Case K2 combine. I did not have an […] Read more
Cover crops and green manure
In the Palliser Triangle, cover crops aren’t the answer in a dry cycle
The current interest in soil health issues has expanded our thinking and spawned much research and new farm-scale work with many new-to-us plant species. Cover crops are planted in the non-commercial season to add diversity to the mix and juice up the soil organisms that go along with the different plants. In wet years, cover […] Read more
Water monitoring: dull but necessary
Keeping track of all of the numbers is still necessary for decision making
Long-term monitoring of agricultural and environmental conditions and practices has been an important function of government agencies. It has been my experience in recent years that a lot of important monitoring functions have been reduced in scope or discontinued. In this column, I’ll describe a few examples of good monitoring and show the importance of […] Read more
Carbon: the mega plant nutrient
Nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon dioxide? CO2 is at the heart of crop production
When teaching about plant nutrition the first step was to list the various categories of nutrients starting with major nutrients and ending with the micros. For this piece I’ll reverse the order and start with micros. The typical nutrients Micronutrients: Micronutrients are required in small amounts and not often added as a fertilizer. But when […] Read more
Sask. farm income and land prices
Land prices are rising but “this time it’s different.” Or is it?
Over the past decade or so I have gathered up data on wheat and land prices in Saskatchewan and converted them to current dollars. That way, we can better judge how we are doing compared to our ancestors. History has a way of repeating itself, so a look back can suggest what might return. I […] Read more
Horse pasture soil salinity: beware of new ground
Land has been left in grass for a reason. And sometimes this reason is salinity
In the mid to late 1970s soil salinity was the biggest issue on many Prairie farms. The hue and cry was that we would soon have little land left to farm. Some said salinity was increasing by 10 per cent per year but I never bought into that number. From 1975 to 1980 we held […] Read more
Finally, the well went dry
Do you know where your water table is, and what it will offer this year?
At my Dundurn farm I now have three years of records of the water table level in my asparagus crop in the yard and at two locations in the annual cropped field. Now, you may wonder why I would bother you with asparagus data. I use my asparagus patch as a surrogate for perennial forage […] Read more
Pasture water quality for cows
Make sure you know your water quality before you turn the cows out
Most of my articles about slough water have dealt with water in the sprayer and what it might do to herbicide results. But bad pasture water that killed 200 cows in southern Saskatchewan last summer has sharpened the focus on water for stock. Spring is nigh, so cowboys should be sure they know what their […] Read more
Precision ag Step 1: soil maps
The most important part of precision agriculture is the soil maps of your fields
My first work on precision agriculture was actually in the 1960s and colleagues had been doing work on the idea before that. Back then it was all about identifying specific soil profile types in a field and trying to determine if their variable properties could be managed differently. Some things were clear: 1. Leached (white […] Read more
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
