There’s a lot of talk in ag circles today about soil health. Several farmers are looking beyond current soil practices to what can be done to make their soil sustainable in the long run.
This is nothing new to Josh Fankhauser. His family has been using practices to build soil health on their southern Alberta mixed farm as long as he can remember. As a fourth-generation producer, he’s carrying on that tradition, which started with the mini-dust bowl conditions of the 1980s.
“The land was blowing away (from soil erosion),” he says.
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“(My dad and his brother-in-law) looked at each other and said, ‘This isn’t working anymore. If we keep doing this, we’re going to be in big trouble.’ They started no till in the early ’90s and just kept trying to improve.”
Today, Fankhauser — whose cash crops include a range of cereals, pulses, canola and sunflowers, plus his crucial cow-calf herd, which grazes many of his cover crops — uses virtually every soil strengthening tool or practice under the sun. The soil gives back in return, he says.
“We found the more you baby the soil, the more production you get and the more stable your systems are. If we can improve a little bit more, we can make a little bit more money (and then repeat).”
Don’t confuse soil health with soil fertility
Soil health can mean different things to different producers, says Gurbir Dhillon, a researcher with Farming Smarter in Lethbridge, Alta. It ultimately depends on the attributes producers need from the soil.
However, don’t confuse it with soil fertility, he says. Soil fertility is primarily concerned with nutrient capability and the soil’s physical capacity to grow a good crop. It doesn’t consider the chemical, physical and biological attributes of the soil — which, if not properly balanced, can create a host of ills including erosion, compaction, water loss and insufficient water infiltration into the roots.
“You want all of them (chemical, physical and biological attributes) to be functioning well and integrating well together to provide the functions we need in the soils,” says Dhillon.
Stripper header great for residue
A big part of soil health management is leaving sufficient residue on the soil, which in turn conserves water, builds soil structure, cycles nutrients and feeds helpful organisms in the soil. One of the Fankhauser family’s earliest forays into preserving residue was their purchase of a Shelbourne stripper header. Stripper headers lift grain into the combine, leaving everything else behind in the field.
Like most new equipment and practices, the stripper header introduced its own learning curve, says Fankhauser.
“I think the biggest thing was learning how to seed into those high residue situations. The stripper header itself is very simple — it makes your combine move much faster and you burn way less fuel. There is a whole pile of advantages to it but you do have problems when you have to seed through (the residue).”
Intercropping strengthens soil
Intercropping essentially means planting two crops simultaneously on the same farmland. On the Canadian Prairies, pulse crops are frequently used in intercropping systems. Some of Fankhauser’s common intercrops include pea-mustard and chickpea-flax.
“Intercropping can … reduce soil erosion by providing a vegetative cover on the bare surface and improve soil health attributes such as aggregation, infiltration, nutrient cycling and microbial activity through diverse and extensive root systems actively growing in soils,” says Dhillon.
Fankhauser went into intercropping “in a big way” a few years ago, usually by seeding species of pulses and grasses together. He found this provided a better “anchor” than planting straight pulses.
“I wasn’t happy with the results of using pulses alone. If you get a few dry years with straight pulse stubble, there’s none of that soil armour or — as they call it in soil health circles — cover. Even in a no-till situation, we’ve seen land blow after a year of a very poor pulse crop. We basically had to get more carbon in the system. Then we started intercropping and it made the peas stand better.”
The improved soil moisture capacity gained through intercropping has allowed him to experiment — and succeed — with a host of higher value pulses, including chickpeas and green lentils that don’t typically grow in his area.
Fankhauser credits this in part to the wider variety of residue intercropping offers. “It’s not just one kind of residue — it doesn’t all just break down at the same time,” he says. “That’s the problem with pulses — the residue breaks down really, really quickly.”
Good cover crops depend on species selection
Winter cereals are a big part of the producer’s cover crop strategy. “They’ve been very good to us, especially for the residue,” he says.
They present some challenges, though. With one of the shortest winter growing seasons on the Prairies, Fankhauser says most cover crops must be planted at least by the end of September to get a jump on the early winter conditions. Fankhauser tries to bypass this problem with species selection.
“You have to pick a species that can take the fall,” he says.
“I like a lot of the ryegrasses because they can take a good 10 days of the brutal cold stuff that will usually kill flax. They kind of go dormant, but once it warms up again in late October or even mid-October they just start regrowing until there’s so little daylight they can’t grow a lot.”
His goal is to clear the cover crop by Christmas and start feeding his cows stockpiled feed in the spring.
Fankhauser’s cows play a crucial role in his cover cropping system, to the point where he can’t imagine planting them without having the cattle there to consume them, in turn benefiting both enterprises.
“If you don’t have cows, you’ll work a lot harder,” he says.
“The nice part about cows is they can eat cover crops. You can justify the extra expense (from relay cropping). With the cattle, we can get that back fairly quickly and very easily and multiply that investment.”
Herbicide selection crucial in relay cropping
Relay cropping is similar to intercropping but instead of planting two crops simultaneously, the second crop is planted closer to the harvest of the first.
“Relay cropping provides a great alternative for utilizing the shoulder growing seasons and maintaining a continuous vegetative cover with cover crops,” says Dhillon.
Fankhauser does a herbicide application on his cash crop before seeding his cover, a notorious risk in relay cropping systems. When possible, the trick is to find pairs of species that share the same herbicide registration, he says.
“Some growers choose to use a Clearfield canola, then they can plant peas with canola and use the same chemistries as monocrop peas. We use a lot of Edge as it is registered on both pulses and brassicas. It works well in our mustard-pea combo.”
You must be careful, though. “Broadleaf weeds present more of a challenge because there are some limits on herbicide options,” says Fankhauser.
Start small
The producer’s No. 1 piece of advice to fellow farmers interested in these methods is to start small and experiment. Fankhauser regularly has 40- to 80-acre trials on his land where he tries out various intercrop and relay crop combinations.
“There are no real agronomic formulas for these — you kind of look at everything. We get a feel for it and just fine-tune the system.”
Growers must be particularly mindful when attempting intercropping, he says. “You have to make sure you can separate the two (crops). There are lots of combos that sound really good but if you can’t separate them easily it’s going to cause you a lot of issues.”
