Darren Sander, owner and operations of Crop Aid Nutrion Ltd. at his company's booth at Ag in Motion.

New soil treatment targets saline patches in fields

A Saskatchewan company’s product focuses on water flow through the soil, offering an alternative to gypsum and organic amendments

Crop Aid SS is a Saskatchewan-made spray that’s intended to help farmers manage saline soils by leaching salts away from the root zone.





alberta farmland and wind turbines

Benchmarking soil health in Alberta

Researchers at the Chinook Applied Research Association’s Soil Health Lab have adapted a soil health assessment from Cornell University to evaluate Alberta soils

Part 2 of 2: New analyses provide test results with handy scores that assess soil using a simple format, and make it easy for Alberta farmers to spot where an intervention or practice change might have the biggest effect.

alberta farmland and wind turbines

Measuring the components of healthy soil in Alberta

Part 1 of 2: Soil health more than just its chemical properties, according to the Alberta Soil Health Benchmark Report

The data Prairie farmers get from chemical analysis of soils are necessary to develop a field fertility program — but as an Alberta program shows, those data don’t tell the whole story needed to assess soil health.






Trying to keep up: Soil science seminars can feel like a firehose of information, but somewhere in the complexity, there’s a story waiting to be told. PHOTO: Don Norman

Decoding the science behind the story

Reporter’s Notebook: The more I do this, the more familiar the terms become

Some days my job becomes a bit like codebreaking: I have to take the specialist language of science and translate it into something useful, not just readable.