This methodology was developed and first used commercially at Cornell in 2006, incorporating chemical, physical and biological properties to gauge soil health. Since then, this technique for measuring a comprehensive mix of indicators of soil health has been modified to fit locations around the world.

As the soil health lab manager at the Chinook Applied Research Association in Oyen, Alta., Zavala received the green light to modify Cornell’s technique for Alberta conditions, developing the Alberta Soil Health Benchmark.

“I learned from them everything I needed to put together here,” says Zavala.

Grading on the curve

The Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health technique and the Alberta Soil Health Benchmark analysis provide test results with handy scores that assess soil using a familiar format — a score from 1 to 100. As well, colour codes make it easy to spot where an intervention or practice change might have the biggest effect.

Zavala and her research team developed scores for each measure based on data collected from 2018 to 2023. During that period, 11 of the 12 applied research and forage associations across Alberta collected soil samples for this project.

Using these results, they calculated the mean and standard deviation based on a standard normal distribution for each test result. Then a scoring curve was developed for each indicator. These scoring curves enable the lab to provide test results that show where your soil fits relative to other soil in Alberta. After analyzing the data, Zavala developed separate scoring curves for coarse, medium and fine soil across the province.

As an example, through these tests, the average soil respiration rate in Alberta was found to be 1.22 mg CO₂ per gram of dry-weight soil. If your soil’s test result is 1.22, your score will be 50 out of 100, right in the middle. If your score is above average, you’ll get a score above 50.

Using these curves, each test result has been converted to a score from one to 100, with 100 being the best. Then each test result is colour-coded for convenience. From worst to best, the scores and colours are:

• under 20: red, very low
• 20-40: orange, low
• 40-60: yellow, medium
• 60-80: green, high
• >80: blue, very high

With the colour-coding system, users can quickly see their biggest soil problems and consider potential solutions. Measurements shown in red are constraints, areas where improvement may increase soil health and ultimately yield. Measures in green and blue are areas where growers can sleep easy at night.

A curve for every test

For most soil health indicators, more is better. A higher test result means a healthier soil and a better score. In these cases, curves are generally shaped like the curve in Figure 1.

For some indicators, such as the amount of manganese or iron in the soil, a lower test result is better. As you can see in Figure 2, curves for indicators where smaller results are better are drawn in the opposite direction, so lower test results bring higher scores.

Sometimes the best test result is in the middle. These cases are shown in Figure 3 as an optimum curve. Soil pH is an example of a measurement in this category. Test results that are very high or very low would return a low score. A score in the middle of these extremes would be in the green zone (high, meaning “good”).

The Alberta scoring curves will change over time. As more soil tests are done, the new data will be built into the scoring curves so farmers can have more accurate results.

Meanwhile in Saskatchewan

To the east, a team led by Kate Congreves, a professor in the department of plant science at the University of Saskatchewan, is working on a Saskatchewan Soil Health Assessment Protocol that includes scoring functions similar to those developed for the Alberta Soil Health Benchmark.

There are subtle differences in this protocol. Rather than creating scores based on smaller regions of the province, the Saskatchewan protocol is developing scoring curves by soil type: brown, dark brown and black. Saskatchewan researchers noted that soil class generally influenced most soil characteristics.

For example, the Saskatchewan report mentions soil organic carbon. Generally, a soil organic carbon of three per cent would be a “good” score in Saskatchewan. But in Saskatchewan’s black soil zone, soil organic carbon levels tend to be higher. In the black soil zone, a soil organic carbon of three per cent would rate as “poor,” with a score between 20 and 40 on the scale of one to 100.

And the rest of the country?

In the spring of 2024, the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry released a report on soil, “Critical Ground: Why Soil is Essential to Canada’s Economic, Environmental, Human, and Social Health.”

This report includes 25 recommendations, the first of which is that soil be designated as a strategic national asset. Many other recommendations centre on encouraging soil stewardship, using tools like tax credits and carbon markets.

There are many ways to evaluate soil. This report recommends that the federal and provincial governments develop a consensus on how to measure, report and verify soil health.

Zavala would like to see comprehensive soil health testing in place across the country.

“If the government doesn’t see the importance of what we have done in Alberta and look in more detail at how beneficial this can be, we aren’t going to understand what’s happening in our soil,” she says.

“We need to see the soil in a different way.”

The post Benchmarking soil health in Alberta appeared first on Grainews.

“The first question I ask when I’m speaking to farmers is, ‘How many of you have done soil testing?’” says Yamily Zavala, soil health lab manager and soil health and crop management specialist at the Chinook Applied Research Association, Oyen, Alta.

Most farmers in the room raise their hands when she asks this, but when Zavala pushes them further, she finds that most have had an analysis of their soil’s chemical properties. These tests usually analyze micro- and macronutrients, pH, organic matter, electrical conductivity (to indicate salinity) and cation exchange capacity (to indicate the soil’s ability to hold nutrients).

This information is necessary to develop a fertility program, but, Zavala says, it’s far from the whole story.

“Soil is not just chemicals. Soil is not just minerals. Soil is holistic. It’s alive.”

The Chinook Applied Research Association’s Soil Health Lab has been testing soil from across Alberta using three categories of soil properties: chemical, physical and biological.

With more than 4,000 soil samples analyzed between 2018 and 2024, the association’s Alberta Soil Health Benchmark Report includes benchmarks and scoring systems that can provide Alberta growers with comprehensive reports on their soil health in an easy-to-use format.

What is “healthy”?

There isn’t one standard, simple definition of “healthy” soil. Most definitions mention the soil environment and how efficiently the soil cycles nutrients. Almost all definitions use “healthy soil” and “quality soil” interchangeably.

The concept of soil health goes beyond measuring the chemicals and nutrients in the soil and includes how the whole soil ecosystem is functioning.

One common indicator of soil health measures the amount of living microbes in soil. This is soil organic matter, the percentage of soil made up of plant and animal material. Soil organic matter is the basic building block of productive soils, holding the soil together and making soil’s biological functions possible.

We know that a higher percentage of soil organic matter is better. But how much is enough? What other components of soil affect soil organic matter?

What can we measure (besides soil organic matter) to get a good picture of trends, and analyze differences?

Three components of soil health

The theory behind the Alberta Soil Health Benchmark is that healthy soil has three general components. These are the chemical and fertility properties, the physical properties and the soil’s biological properties, such as soil organic matter.

The physical properties describe the inherent character of the soil. Indicators include soil texture, compaction, water infiltration, bulk density (an indicator of soil compaction) and soil wet aggregate stability.

Growers can change some of these physical properties over time through management changes. Other physical characteristics are permanent. Physical properties can constrain soil health and crop yield.

Improving the soil’s physical properties can also improve some of the chemical indicators, the soil organic matter, and other biological indicators. Zavala describes this as “building a really nice house for the biology.”

The third part of the Alberta Soil Health Benchmark evaluation is the biological component.

Zavala sees all three of these components as important and necessary for soil health, but she sees biology as “at the top.” Organic matter in the soil is what allows the soil to function as an ecosystem. The living organisms in the soil are dynamic, changing all the time.

When all three of these components are robust, Zavala says, “that’s what I call the healthy soil.”

Together, all three types of measures provide a snapshot of the health of the soil. With repeated, consistent tests, changes in these measurements will indicate where farm management is improving or depleting soil health.

Measuring biological health

Soil organic matter is a key indicator for measuring soil’s biological health. Soil organic matter is measured by drying the soil, weighing it and then heating it to a temperature that will burn off the organic matter. The remaining soil is re-weighed; the difference in weight is the organic matter. The measure is provided as a percentage of the total soil mass.

The soil organic matter includes many living organisms. Some of the smallest are bacteria and fungi. These produce their own secondary metabolites and digestive enzymes, they absorb pieces of plant residue, and they release nutrients that plants can use.

Among farmers and agronomists, nitrogen-fixing bacteria such as rhizobium are probably the most popular creatures in this category. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia, a form of nitrogen that can be converted into plant-available nitrogen.

Protozoans in the soil are generally larger than bacteria and fungi and can move themselves through the thin film of water in the soil. They’re single-celled, but typically bigger than bacteria and fungi. They often consume bacteria, and sometimes fungi. This group of microbes (living organisms too small to see without a microscope) includes flagellates, amoeba and ciliates.

Nematodes are the largest microbes in our soil. They have multiple cells and can consume bacteria, fungi and protozoa. Most nematodes are beneficial to soil health, but some are agricultural pests that take nutrients from plants, such as cereal cyst nematodes. A diverse group of nematodes in the soil is thought to indicate a healthier soil.

Measuring soil organic matter measures the amount of life in the soil. Other tests examine what that life is actually doing under there.

Soil respiration is a measurement that captures a snapshot of the organisms’ metabolic activity. Soil respiration is measured by air-drying soil, rewetting it, putting it in an airtight container, and then measuring the amount of CO₂ produced by the rewetted soil. Results are provided as mg of CO₂ per gram of dry-weight soil.

When the microbes are more active, they release more CO₂. Some ways growers can increase soil respiration include adding more organic material to the soil, adding manure or cover crops, or diversifying crops. Too much tillage can lower the soil respiration rate.

Active carbon measures the share of soil organic matter that can serve as an immediate food source for living organisms — decomposed matter that plants can consume quickly. A high active carbon test result means the microbes have enough food and are producing matter useful to plants.

Active carbon is measured by adding purple potassium permanganate to the soil. Active carbon causes the purple solution to lose its colour. The amount of active carbon in the soil correlates to the amount of colour change. Active carbon is a useful early indicator of changes to soil health. This test will show the effects of a management change sooner than changes to soil organic matter measurements.

The post Measuring the components of healthy soil in Alberta appeared first on Grainews.

One of the first steps to improving water-holding capacity is understanding what factors control it. Jeff Schoenau, a University of Saskatchewan soil scientist, said two key soil properties play the biggest roles.

The basics

“Water holding capacity of the soil is very much influenced by two things: the organic matter content and the texture, which is the percentage of sand, silt and clay,” said Schoenau. “If a soil has more organic matter and it has more clay, that’s going to increase the available water-holding capacity.”

Clay content, while important, can’t be changed, he explained. A foot of moist clay soil will hold two inches of available water, whereas if it’s a foot of moist sandy soil, it will only hold an inch, or even less if it has a very high sand content.

But water-holding capacity isn’t the whole story. Moisture conservation isn’t just about keeping water in the soil; it’s also about getting water into the soil, or infiltration.

“Things that influence infiltration, like having a surface residue, help promote water entry,” said Schoenau. “We also think about evaporative losses. If we don’t have standing stubble there, that increases the wind speed at the soil surface, and that increases the evaporation.”

He noted that Prairie farmers’ long-standing conservation practices have already helped, contributing to increased water holding capacity, improved infiltration and good soil structure.

“You have a good distribution of pores holding water and some that also hold air to make sure that the soil isn’t flooded or saturated,” he said.

Matching problems to products

While Schoenau focused on the fundamentals, Karthikeyan Narayanan, technical director with Cropland Analytics, zeroed in on how to identify problems and match them with solutions. Cropland Analytics didn’t have a booth at Ag in Motion this year, but we caught up with him at the Annelida Soil Solutions booth, one of the firms his company partners with.

Cropland Analytics operates a fully outfitted, professional lab in Tofield, Alta., testing the biological, physical and chemical aspects of soil.

“The idea behind the lab is to identify the properties of the soil and to understand what’s inhibiting any of those water-holding capacities of the soil as a whole,” said Narayanan. “We do have products, and we do have solutions, but until we identify what the soil needs, it’s going to be very hard to promote one product.”

The business model for Cropland Analytics is based on partnerships with soil amendment companies. His main partners are Annelida and Johnson’s Regenerative.

“They have the solutions that align with what we find in our labs,” said Narayanan. “Ultimately, the farmer needs a solution, and that’s why we align with companies who can provide that solution.”

The partnerships represent a three-way street between Cropland, their partners and the farmer. And Narayanan insists the farmers are the big winners.

“With every test we’ve done and every recommendation we provided, our response rate is over 98 per cent. And that’s on-farm,” he said.

But while Cropland Analytics mainly recommends the products of their partners, an arm of their company is also developing products. Cropland Solutions focuses on developing products while keeping the lab independent to avoid conflicts of interest. The team is actively researching calcium-based products, addressing a common issue with gypsum: limited availability.

Narayanan pointed to one product they’ve designed that he says can boost calcium availability by 400–500 per cent. The product is applied directly in the furrow, targeting only the row rather than trying to amend the entire field. This approach keeps costs low — under $50 per acre. The product aims to improve the rhizosphere while enhancing water infiltration, root growth, phosphorus availability and overall biological activity. He says farmers are seeing immediate benefits, almost as if nitrogen had been added.

Farmers come first

But Narayanan said the main goal is not to sell products. It’s to help farmers. It’s a consultative process more than anything, and if one of his partners doesn’t have a solution, he’ll recommend a third party.

“If I don’t have a solution, but a competitor does, it’s always good if it benefits the farmer,” he said. “As long as they’re doing certain parts of the Annelida, Johnson’s, or Cropland program, it’s fine.”

Narayanan said that many of the water-holding issues he’s called to address fall into the same broad categories identified by Schoenau: soil texture and infiltration.

He noted that sandy soils benefit from organic matter to help retain moisture, while clay soils may hold water but not release it readily to plants. Infiltration problems, he said, can be worsened when fine-textured soils disperse during rainfall, leading to surface sealing, clogged pores and increased runoff.

“So, you have more water runoff from the field than infiltration through the field,” he said.

High tillage or elevated sodium levels can make this worse, though calcium amendments can improve soil structure and help water move into the profile.

While too much tillage harms infiltration, the opposite extreme — continuous no-till — can create its own problem: compaction. Without tillage to break it up, compacted layers can persist and build over time, restricting root growth and water movement. Narayanan said lowering tire pressures by six or seven pounds per square inch can cut that compaction by as much as 15 to 20 per cent.

In his view, farmer awareness and management practices are just as important as any product he or his partners sell.

“There’s no way we can keep amending the soil if the farmer is using bad practices in the field,” he said. “If you want to get out of the hole, you have to stop digging first.”

Cover cropping debate

When asked about other methods for improving water holding capacity, like cover cropping, Narayanan said that while cover cropping will, over time, improve water holding capacity, farmers who are concerned about the water holding capacity of their soils are likely in dry areas — and adding extra mouths to feed when water is scarce isn’t the best idea.

“It’s not growing the cover crop as a problem. It’s about the water,” said Narayanan. “If your water rainfall is low, then what’s going to happen is your cover crop is going to pull that moisture out. So, the following crop won’t have that subsoil moisture.”

Not so fast, said Karlah Rudolph, president of SaskSoil, a farmer-led group promoting soil health and conservation in Saskatchewan.

“I’m in southwestern Saskatchewan, and I do not find that there is an issue with having a cover, even though we’ve been in five years of drought,” she said.

Rudolph farms with her family in Gravelbourg and south of Gull Lake, Sask., combining annual crops with forage and pasture. Her soil science background helped her see the role of cover crops and living roots in protecting soil structure and improving infiltration.

Because of those dry conditions, Rudolph has been closely examining whether cover cropping can work in southwestern Saskatchewan and she planted some crops on her farm to get some answers.

On one of her fields, she’s planted a monocrop system of red lentils.

“There wasn’t a thing growing on it in the spring. It’s as naked as can be,” she said. “I’m observing some visible wind erosion. I’m not very happy about that, but there’s absolutely no competition for the water.”

On another field, she had a hard red spring wheat crop that was underseeded with a low rate of Italian ryegrass and a low rate of sainfoin.

“Sainfoin is a perennial, and it came up in the spring. The Italian ryegrass overwintered, so I had roots at two depths. I had fibrous roots from the Italian ryegrass closer to the surface, and then I had this deep taproot from the sainfoin that was going down at depth.

On the red lentil field, she found that the moisture was closer to the surface, about two inches down. But when she dug where the Italian ryegrass had been planted, the ryegrass had used the water at the surface, and the moisture had moved further down the soil profile. But not by much, she said maybe an inch, and it was much wetter than the moisture level on lentils.

“The snow catch offered by high residue and a high infiltration rate far outweighs the issue of weed competition when it comes to moisture conservation,” she said.

Measuring the moisture

At their Ag in Motion booth, SaskSoil displayed a simple infiltration test kit consisting of a six-inch tube, a bottle of water, a roll of plastic wrap, a wooden block and a stopwatch — it’s exactly the kind of practical, low-cost, MacGyvered innovation you’d expect to see from a farmer-led, DIY group like SaskSoil.

However, just across the lane, Kyle Henderson, business manager for Crop Intelligence, offered a more high-tech option for understanding what’s going on beneath the surface — one perhaps more suitable for those gadget-loving farmers.

“This moisture probe goes one meter into the ground,” said Henderson.

Installed right after seeding, the probe reads initial soil moisture from 100 cm up to 10 cm depth. Combined with rainfall data from a weather station, the system calculates “water-driven yield potential” — how many bushels a crop can produce per inch of available water.

Farmers can also monitor infiltration in real time.

“If you get an inch of rain, does it actually equate to an inch of soil moisture?” Henderson said.

The tool’s data can help identify whether a soil’s holding capacity is limiting yields and guide management decisions throughout the season.

Shared success

From cover-cropping, conservation tillage and residue management to targeted amendments and soil monitoring, improving water-holding capacity is a multi-pronged effort. And for Narayanan, it’s also about the bigger picture.

“At the end of the day, as long as the farmer wins, the entire industry wins,” he said. “We can’t be shortsighted in our approach.”

The post Farmers weigh strategies to boost soils’ water-holding capacity appeared first on Grainews.

Announced May 12, the initiative pairs ag-input platform AgList with soil microbiome analytics firm Biome Makers, to introduce a new “badge”-type system signalling when products have undergone independent, science-based testing.

AgList, a brand-new platform launched in January 2025, lets farmers and agronomists browse a curated database of biological inputs. Users can endorse products they’ve had success with, helping others make informed decisions based on shared experiences. The company describes itself as “Yelp for agriculture” — but without the negative reviews.

Biome Makers is a global ag-tech company specializing in soil biology founded in 2015 by biotech entrepreneurs Alberto Acedo and Adrián Ferrero. Its flagship platform, BeCrop, analyzes the functional potential of soil microbial communities in the lab. BeCrop Trials builds on that foundation by measuring how specific inputs affect the soil microbiome under real-world field conditions.

Biome Makers is the first company to contribute field trial data to AgList. Products tested through BeCrop Trials now feature a BeCrop badge on AgList, indicating they’ve undergone independent, science-based evaluation using DNA-based soil analysis.

Building trust

“This partnership is all about increasing transparency and building trust,” says Tyler Nuss, co-founder of AgList. “Our goal is to help the industry cut through the noise, and Biome Makers’ science-first approach gives credibility to the products that earn their badge.”

BeCrop Trials measure changes in the soil microbiome after a product is applied. While the badge doesn’t validate efficacy, it signals the product has been through third-party field trials. Trial results are also published on AgList to further transparency.

“When a user of the platform sees the BeCrop logo, it’s an indication the company has run field trials with BeCrop to understand how their product is impacting the soil microbiome,” says Sunny Kaercher, business development manager at Biome Makers. “It’s an invitation for the grower to review the results.”

The challenge for biologicals

The move comes at a time when biologicals — agricultural inputs derived from living organisms or natural materials — are under growing scrutiny. Interest is rising, but so are questions about how well these products work and how they work at all.

Biologicals face a unique challenge, according to Oleg Yakhin, lead author of a 2017 global review of biostimulants published in Frontiers in Plant Science. Unlike conventional inputs, they often lack a clearly defined mode of action, complicating regulation and product comparisons.

“There are few products for which a specific biochemical target site and known mode of action has been identified,” Yakhin notes.

He also points out that products can come from a wide range of sources — bacteria, fungi, seaweed and more — and that varied manufacturing processes add further complexity. That diversity makes it difficult to group products or predict performance.

Despite these hurdles, he argued that proof of safety and efficacy — regardless of whether the mechanism is fully understood — is essential for broader acceptance.

While Yakhin’s review focuses on biostimulants, the same issues apply across the biologicals category: unclear mechanisms, inconsistent results and limited standardization remain persistent challenges for researchers, companies and growers alike.

Addressing the challenge

Those are exactly the kinds of issues the BeCrop Trials aim to address.

Kaercher says Biome Makers’ lab capabilities allow them to map biological function in the soil — providing over 50 different biological metrics. Depending on trial design, data on yield, fertility, and even plant tissue can be layered in.

“What our technology really enables is an exploration of what a product is doing biologically and whether that’s tied to a measurable effect like yield gain,” she explains.

Biological products are often complex formulations involving multiple species and materials, and their effectiveness depends heavily on environmental conditions. Factors such as soil type, moisture, climate and crop all influence outcomes — but that nuance is often lost. As a result, stories about the failures of biologicals circulate widely among farmers.

“We hear from folks all the time, ‘Yeah, we’ve used biologicals. They didn’t do anything,’” Kaercher says, adding that this perception often stems from unrealistic expectations or a mismatch between the product and the field’s biological needs.

“It’s often a function of the law of diminishing returns,” she says. “If a soil is already sufficient in any given biological function — like nitrogen cycling — then adding a nitrogen-mobilizing bacteria isn’t going to deliver a return on investment.”

That’s why understanding baseline soil biology is essential. Kaercher says soil testing upfront can lead to smarter product recommendations — and, in some cases, show no input is needed at all. In those rare cases where it’s determined yield can’t be improved with a biological, that too should be viewed as a win for the farm.

Modern agriculture often judges the success of an input based on yield alone, and as a result, BeCrop spends a lot of energy focusing on products to increase yield. But yield is not always the most relevant metric.

“Farmers could also be focused on building soil health, sequestering carbon or increasing biodiversity. Those are all metrics we can measure and help predict in our recommendations,” Kaercher says.

Looking ahead

Yakhin’s review also highlights a lack of well-structured field trials and limited communication of results as key barriers to commercial development and grower confidence. The AgList/Biome Makers partnership may help close that gap, bringing third-party trial data directly to a platform farmers already use.

Looking ahead, Kaercher sees an expanding role for soil diagnostics in shaping not only input decisions but overall farm strategy. Properly deployed, biologicals could reduce irrigation needs, cut fungicide use or even enable the soil’s natural defences to manage pathogens.

Whether this partnership will be enough to shift industry skepticism remains to be seen. But as interest in biologicals continues to grow, Kaercher says the need for clearer data and smarter recommendations is more urgent than ever.

“We’re providing real data on what these products are doing,” she says. “The smarter we get as an industry about how to prescribe them, the more success we’ll see.”

The post Demystifying biological inputs appeared first on Grainews.

“When we level we normally need two machines, the first one to move the soil and the other machine to finalize (the surface) with a grader, with precision,” says Pascal Bedard, owner of Block Distribution, the Canadian distributor for Lacasse equipment.

“The peculiarity of the Pro-Level 16XL is it’s two machines in one. There is a lot of precision with the blade fixed, and it can carry a lot of soil in the rear bucket. This is a unique product. There is nothing else on the market that does both jobs. There are a lot of other soil carriers, but they’re not as precise.”

The Pro-level 16XL takes a 16-foot cut. It rides on eight rear-mounted wheels that are designed to allow large soil clumps and rocks to pass freely, for smoother, more stable tracking. With wheels at the rear, the hitch weight increases, boosting traction for the tractor. The bottom of the bucket has a rounded design, allowing soil to roll out more efficiently.

The scraper may also take less power to pull: the company claims the Pro-Level 16XL has a lower horsepower requirement than other designs, making it more fuel-efficient. The company says fuel savings can exceed 20 per cent, compared to competitors’ models, with demand as low as 30 litres per hour.

The company says those fuel savings come from the machine design, which uses a fixed blade relative to the scraper and a pivoting accumulation bucket positioned above the blade. The soil collected in the bucket is supported by wheels rather than dragged in front of the blade.

However, the Pro-level 16XL will still need a minimum of 400 horses up front to handle it.

Bedard says there really isn’t any other machine on the market that can directly compete with this unit’s capabilities, due to its ability to carry a large soil payload and still provide a very precise, graded finish.

“I have no direct competition,” he says.

The Pro-Level can be equipped with eight high-flotation tires as an option, although those would add $22,000 to the $99,500 base price of the unit.

Lacasse Machinerie is a small company that has been building products at Saint-Agapit, southwest of Quebec City, for about 10 years.

In that time, Bedard says, it has gained a reputation as a a high-quality manufacturer. He works exclusively marketing its equipment. If need be, Lacasse can customize a machine to precisely meet any buyer’s requirements.

“We are a small manufacturer at Lacasse,” Bedard says, “so we can easily customize product to the specific needs of the customer.”

The company has been building land levellers for almost a decade, he adds, and the Pro-Level 16XL includes a number of design updates that result from those years of field experience.

The company builds six different models in its Pro Level line, with cutting widths from 14 to 20 feet and capacities from six to 30 cubic metres.

The post Lacasse aims for both power and precision with new large scraper appeared first on Grainews.

A field with adequate fertility doesn’t necessarily equate to adequate plant nutrition, SGS Crop Science manager and agronomist Jack Legg told Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement’s Microsmart Deep Dive presentation in Kingston.

Soil tests assess the potential availability of nutrients under optimal conditions. In contrast, tissue tests indicate the actual uptake under variable field conditions.

“Non-limiting in the soil is where you want to be, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the crop is utilizing it efficiently,” Legg says. “Tissue samples tend to be reactionary. People see a deficiency; they want to confirm it. They send in the tissue.”

“We don’t really want to see deficiencies,” he says. “We want to test before things go deficient.”

Tissue tests are a proactive nutrient management tool that identifies “hidden hunger” before it escalates into a critical issue, he says.

Chris Roelands, president of Honeyland Ag Services, says soil sampling should follow the same schedule, ideally in the fall when soil moisture is sufficient, to provide comparable results on nutrient availability year over year.

“Soil testing is still the base of where everything starts, right?” he says, adding it’s the soil reserve baseline to inform needed inputs.

In general, soil testing in the fall provides ideal moisture levels for probing ease and nutrient accuracy.

Weather and soil moisture

Soil scientist Rigas Karamanos notes research from the Saskatchewan Soil Testing and Enviro-Test Laboratories indicates weather and soil moisture influence soil pH during the growing season. As the pH changes, which can be significant with soil moisture, the availability of nutrients also shifts. For example, potassium tends to bind to clay under drier conditions.

However, Roelands cautions, three aspects — genetics, environment and management (G.E.M.) — can affect how plants convert soil nutrients.

“Soil moisture, temperature, or whether it’s something related to management, can be what changes what we see in our plant tissue test versus what we’re seeing in our soil test,” Roelands says.

For example, manganese availability and uptake are more efficient in compacted, saturated and anaerobic conditions — but those are terrible for other nutrient uptake.

The soil and tissue tests of V10 corn at about six feet tall show that, on average, potassium levels in the soil and tissue concentration rose in unison. However, a closer look at individual field sites showed soil sites with a less-than-desirable 60 ppm level of K had plants with decent levels. Where plants tested poorly for potassium, the soil levels were decent.

This is where G.E.M. comes into play, to provide answers on why that’s happening, Roelands says.

Legg says tissue testing throughout the growing season provides unique insights into the plant’s current needs at the juvenile, mid-season and flowering or silking stages, to inform how to mitigate immediate issues and plan for the following season.

“The basic rule of thumb is to test as much, as frequently and as intensively as you’re willing to pay for obviously and willing to manage,” Legg suggests. “Starting with one or two tissues in a crop a year is a good starting point. Weekly is very interesting, but it’s a heck of a lot of data and a lot of work.”

Easy rules

There are a few easy rules to follow to ensure the best bang for your buck with tissue samples. The first is leaf quantity. Corn leaves are probably the easiest, but Legg suggests a third- to half-full paper lunch bag for other crops.

“When we dry that down, that only leaves us with a few grams of dried material,” he says. “One little soybean trifoliate is not enough to test.”

Due to nutrient mobility, the ideal sample is the most recent fully developed leaf, usually a few down from the top, wrapped in paper instead of plastic to avoid slimy samples.

Identifying the growth stage is important, he adds. “The critical values are usually tied to a physiological age, usually when the plant is under stress like flowering or silking. Make sure you label them appropriately.”

If selecting tissue samples for a v3 corn plant (which is rare), pull the entire plant cut at grade without roots, Legg says. Select the most recently collared leaf at the vegetative stage and the ear leaf at tasselling. Wheat follows a similar vein, with soybean requiring the most recently mature trifoliate throughout the season.

He encourages producers to provide a clean sample, cutting it as low as possible without soil contamination, which provides biased results.

“Folks think micronutrients are less important,” he says. “They’re essential nutrients required for that whole plant life cycle, but in much smaller quantities.”

We’ve managed without fertilizing micronutrients for decades, he says, but it’s becoming a soil management focal point.

He suggests farmers try check and zero strip trials with varying rates to test the payback on their farms, noting a pound of zinc and manganese costs about $4, while a pound of boron is slightly more expensive, at $7.25.

Fertilizers can increase manganese levels over time, he says, but application is crucial. Applying a foliar treatment to symptomatic soybeans, for example, is a quick fix, but fertilizing the leaves does not enhance soil fertility.

“The bottom line is, in general, if your (zinc and manganese) index value is greater than 15 ppm, you have enough nutrients,” Legg says. “(A boron level of) 0.5 p.p.m. is considered low, and 1.0 ppm is considered high.”

The post Taking the mystery out of soil and tissue tests appeared first on Grainews.

“I’m not going to say that herbicides don’t work because there are quite a few herbicide options still to manage volunteer canola,” says Charles Geddes, a research scientist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at Lethbridge. “But when we talk about weed management, it’s really all about integrating those herbicide programs with other cultural factors.” 

Geddes speaks from experience: he currently leads the AAFC Weed Ecology and Cropping Systems Research program, which monitors herbicide-resistant weeds across the Prairies. And in the early 2010s, his PhD work at the University of Manitoba was specifically focused on controlling volunteer canola in soybeans. 

Volunteer canola was a big issue at the time — especially in Manitoba, where soybean acres were on the rise because short-season cultivars had emerged that could thrive in the province. The challenge arose because these new soybean varieties, like canola, were genetically modified to be resistant to the same herbicides. 

“Farmers who had already been growing canola were starting to adopt soybeans, and volunteer canola was coming back as a difficult-to-control weed in those soybean crops,” Geddes says. 

As a result, a lot of emphasis was placed on developing strategies to manage the problem — and one of the strategies Geddes looked at was targeting the seed bank. 

“The easiest way to do that is through some form of physical disturbance, whether it’s tillage or harrowing,” he says. 

Anyone who grows canola knows there will be a certain amount of seed loss. Whether it’s seed being lost ahead of the combine, at the header, or being blown out of the back of the combine because of the way the combine is set, some seed loss is to be expected. 

Geddes notes surveys on the Prairies revealed seed losses of up to 5,000 seeds per square metre. Canola seeds have a unique ability to enter ‘secondary dormancy’ under the right conditions, such as warmer temperatures and dry soil. This dormancy allows the seeds to persist longer in the soil seed bank. 

“We can typically see volunteer canola sticking around for at least two to three years,” he says. 

Fall harrowing 

So, beginning in 2013, Geddes, along with his research partner and study co-author Rob Gulden, set up research plots across southern Manitoba, at Carman, Howden and Melita, to test the effectiveness of soil disturbance on the volunteer canola seed bank. 

They studied how both the timing and type of soil disturbance impacted the seed bank. In terms of soil disturbance, they looked at harrowing and tandem disc compared to a zero-till control. In terms of timing, they ran the two soil disturbance methods immediately following harvest, one month after harvest, and the following year, just before spring seeding. 

“What we found was that if you can disturb that soil as soon after canola harvest as possible, it goes a long way to helping to deplete the seed bank going into the next growing season,” Geddes says. 

The research found early soil disturbance enhanced seed-to-soil contact for seeds lost during harvest. With sufficient moisture, the seeds germinated, and winterkill did the rest. The results were a little less pronounced a month after harvest, and negligible pre-seeding. 

The type of soil disturbance didn’t seem to matter. Both methods performed equally well compared with the no-till control.

READ MORE: How to keep last year’s canola out of your beans

“What that means is that even if we’re in more of a no-till or a min-till environment, we can get away with a bit of a lighter disturbance,” said Geddes. “It’s just enough to promote that seed-to-soil contact in the fall.” 

Published in 2017, Geddes’ work was one of the earlier studies to look down these paths for control of volunteer canola in soybeans — but its findings still stand today as farmers continue to grapple with volunteers. 

The changing face of volunteer management 

For the past 20 years, volunteer canola has risen in the rankings of problem weeds. Geddes says recent surveys have placed volunteer canola in the top two or three most abundant weeds in the Prairie provinces. 

“It’s different than some of the other herbicide-resistant weeds because volunteer canola resistance was actually purposefully selected through genetic modification,” he says. And while those genetics have improved weed management in canola production, because its seeds can persist in the soil for so long, they tend to come back to haunt farmers. 

Crop rotation and sequencing 

As a result, Geddes says crop rotation has become a critical tool in volunteer canola management. 

“If we’re growing tight crop rotations that are only two to three years in length, it’s not a surprise that voluntary canola will be one of the more abundant weeds to manage,” he says. “So having enough of those crops between canola rotations to manage those volunteer canola populations is quite important.” 

As mentioned, few, if any, farmers think chemistry alone will help them control volunteer canola. 

“With a herbicide-only program, combined with short or non-diverse rotations, it’s pretty difficult to keep the issue under control,” Geddes says. “If they are practicing tight rotations, they quickly learn that the issue can show up, and you really do need those break crops in there to manage it effectively.” 

The order in which to plant rotations is also important. For example, with voluntary canola being particularly difficult to manage in soybeans, it would make sense to put a cereal between canola and soybean crops, so you have at least a one-year break. 

“Those volunteers will be reduced going into your soybean crop already, because you’ve had enough time since your last canola crop.” 

Crowd it out 

Because canola was bred to be a relatively competitive crop, voluntary canola acts as a relatively competitive weed. So, in terms of cultural weed management, it makes the most sense to apply those strategies early in the growing season. 

“It does get up and out of the ground quickly,” Geddes says. “So it’s really that early season they want to target to get as competitive a crop as early as possible.” 

The post The evolving fight against volunteer canola  appeared first on Grainews.

Although the research was conducted in Prince Edward Island, some say there may be applications for Western Canada as well — including potential as highly-nutritious cattle feed.

Two Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientists — Adam Foster and Harini Aiyer, with the AAFC research farm in Harrington, P.E.I. — wanted to see how eight cover crops would impact fusarium crown and root rot in barley and soybean, two crops targeted by the fungal diseases. They planted them a year prior to barley and soybean.

Sorghum sudangrass stood out by a large margin, the researchers say. Per an AAFC release, “Alfalfa and brown mustard were good at reducing fusarium crown and root rot in barley and phacelia was good for soybean, but sorghum sudangrass was the best for both barley and soybean.”

This, the researchers say, suggests sorghum may be “recruiting” beneficial microorganisms in the soil microbiome — the collection of beneficial and harmful microorganism communities in the soil — which suppress the development of these diseases.

“Beneficial organisms we observed were fungi like clonostachys, trichoderma and isaria species that may have beneficial anti-fungal and anti-insect activity,” Foster and Aiyer wrote in a joint email.

“(They) were present at higher levels in the soil the year after growing SSG compared to unmanaged fields.”

‘Quite sensitive’

But how would it perform in Western Canada? Kevin Elmy, a Saskatchewan-based agrologist and the mind behind Cover Crops Canada, says the grass tends to grow best in the southern regions of the Prairies.

“We have been playing around with sorghum sudan since 2000,” Elmy said via email.

“It brings a lot of benefits in a mix: biomass, strong root structure, a quick-growing warm-season grass, high plant sugar content.

“Where we use it is in polycrop mixtures, usually mixing with species like Japanese millet, annual clovers, Italian ryegrass or winter triticale, phacelia, and sunflowers.”

It grows well under irrigation, he says.

“With sorghum sudan being grown in irrigation areas with good heat, it can be used as a one-cut system if they can handle or a multiple-cut system. ”

While sorghum sudangrass sports a number of benefits, it has a few characteristics that might give growers cause for pause. For one, the stems can be high-moisture, so drydown can be challenging, especially with the fast regrowth, Elmy says.

“Seed can be costly, production is hampered by cool or dry conditions and when under stress can produce prussic acid toxic to grazing animals.”

Its maturity also tends to be on the late side, he says.

That said, Elmy rates its palatability as “extremely high.” Also, the prussic acid issue can be minimized by leaving stubble where it won’t hurt the grazing cattle, he says.

“It can be grazed, preferably leaving 18 inches of stubble, as that is where issues like prussic acid can accumulate.”

John Griffin, who ranches near the south-central Saskatchewan communities of Central Butte and Bridgeford, says prussic acid in sorghum doesn’t present a risk as long as grazing is done at the right time in the plant’s development.

“If you start grazing that before it gets about knee-height, then there is a risk of prussic acid poisoning,” Griffin says, adding that deer learn quickly to avoid the crop after becoming ill.

Although sorghum sudangrass may be a good crop in mixes, its height can vary dramatically from year to year, Elmy says.

“In 2000 our sorghum sudan grew 14 feet tall. In 2001, it struggled to get above my knees. 2000 was a warm year with good moisture. 2001 was cool and dry. Sorghum sudangrass is quite sensitive to growing conditions.”

Sorghum sudangrass is considered a warm season species, but Elmy doesn’t hold its drought tolerance in high regard, at least on the southern Prairies.

“The drought tolerance referred to in America’s Midwest is based on a ‘drought’ of 12 inches of rain. In areas with three inches of rain, other species should be considered.”

Griffin is a full-on sorghum enthusiast. Although he only planted sorghum sudangrass itself once under irrigation, he was immediately impressed with how well cattle digested the grass.

“The sorghum sudan that we grew was a 55-day maturity product and that variety was a BMR [Brown Midrib sorghum] type, which we really liked. It has reduced lignin content, which makes for greater digestibility in a ruminant.”

Today Griffin eschews sorghum Sudan in favour of a male sterile cultivar of the plant that does not produce male flowers and subsequently no seed.

”All the photosynthate goes into the cells of the plant, which increases sugar content and digestible carbohydrates,” he says.

“And really, that’s what you want for a ruminant. You don’t really want a lot of grain because the risk of acidosis is ever-present.”

Griffin’s sorghum seems made for cattle. Wildlife in his area, such as deer, give it a pass, he says.

Mammals aren’t the only ones that turn up their nose at sorghum. Grasshoppers also give it a wide berth, Griffin says.

Sorghum tends to play dead under heat stress but can come roaring back with some moisture, he said.

“Sorghum has this unique ability that, because it’s a C4 crop, it can sustain high degrees of heat — a lot better than corn, even — and it’ll just sit there.

“You think it’s dead or it’s not going to grow or whatever, but it doesn’t turn brown and look like a dead plant like a barley or a C3 crop would, but it’ll just sit there and wait, and then when it gets rain, it grows.

(Both crops and weeds in Western Canada are divided into C3 and C4 categories based on the way they use carbon dioxide.)

“It still needs water like any other crop does but it has the ability to sustain periods of drought and not kill it, where a lot of our C3 crops just die or they go to early maturity and they’re just stunted.”

‘Everything got better’

Although mainly focused on the feeding benefits of sorghum, Griffin is well aware of its impact on his soil fertility.

“This year we didn’t have to add any fertilizer to our sorghum crop and I would suspect it’s at least six tonnes of dry matter per acre.

“Keeping the cattle on the field, it just creates this nutrient cycle. In ’21 our soil organic matter was 2.2 per cent and May of this year it was 5.1 per cent organic matter. So that made a big difference in terms of sequestering carbon into the soil. Our pH dropped from 7.5 to 6.6. Our mineralizable nitrogen increased by 90 pounds.”

His phosphorus levels were also higher, despite living in an area where P is in short supply.

“Potassium was higher, sulphur content of the soil was higher, copper was higher. Everything got better. By having the cattle on the landscape and not having to use synthetic fertilizers, the feeding method that we’re employing makes a big difference on the bottom line as well.”

The post Sorghum sudangrass may help soil beat back diseases appeared first on Grainews.

We can defer to Les himself on the details of his life and career, as he wrote his own obituary, which you’ll see beside his final Grainews column on pages 20-21, and he even offered up a music suggestion from the Chairman of the Board for the occasion. (We’ll pause here for a second while you call that up.)

If you’d like to hear some of Les’s advice in his own voice, check out his address to University of Saskatchewan ag and veterinary students at their spring convocation two years ago, when the U of S conferred an honorary doctor of laws degree on him. (That’s also up on YouTube. When you get there, scroll ahead to about the 46-minute mark.) I won’t repeat it all here, but he did emphasize lifelong learning as an ongoing objective, not just for the graduates but for all of us. “You don’t need to think that when you step out of here, the learning ends,” he said. “Anytime you think you know it all, it’s time to hang up your soil probe, or your scalpel.”

Many thanks to you, Les, for a lifetime seeing to it that we all kept learning.

Soil under study

I’d have been interested to know what Les would have made of the new report from Canada’s standing Senate committee on agriculture and forestry. The Senate gets a bad rap — not all that undeserved, as it often seems the Chamber of Sober Second Thought is more the Chamber of Patronage Appointments or the Chamber of Black-Belt-Level Partisan Bickering — but the upper chamber can and does produce good reading, and “Critical Ground: Why Soil is Essential to Canada’s Economic, Environmental, Human, and Social Health” is no exception.

The title isn’t quite as nuanced as the report itself, which goes a long way to acknowledge improvements in soil management and farming practices since Herb Sparrow’s previous 1984 Senate report, “Soil at Risk: Canada’s Eroding Future.” But it does caution those improvements have “masked the effect of continued soil degradation and loss of agricultural land in every region of Canada” to climate change, ever-more-frequent extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and fires, continued urbanization and “misread outcomes of soil management practices.”

The new report’s often-quoted summary line is “We do not have another 40 years to protect and conserve soil. We must act now.” Being a national-level report, it also offers up a long list of high-altitude recommendations on what sorts of actions the federal government can take. And being an ag committee report, its recommendations also lean heavily on federal agriculture policy and supports for initiatives at the farm level.

But the trick is, as the new report’s authors acknowledge they were repeatedly told, “a ‘one-size-fits-all-approach’ to soil health does not work and that policymakers must consider regional differences.” Even one of the report’s federal-level recommendations — that Ottawa bring back the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), with eyes on sustainable farming, erosion prevention and, of course, shelterbelting — calls for the revival of a regional agency.

As Les’s column on canola yields shows us, soils differ wildly even within the confines of agricultural Saskatchewan — and even more so across Canada. To its immense credit, the report breaks down the strengths, weaknesses and challenges facing Canadian soils on a region-by-region basis, looking not just at the Prairies but at B.C., central Canada, the Maritimes, Indigenous lands, forested regions, the territories — and, under unique threat from climate change, our country’s potentially impermanent permafrost and the carbon lurking therein.

As disparate as Canada’s soils are, though, we can’t afford not to consider them at the national level. Naming a national soils advocate, as the report recommends, would help, as would the “development of a consensus on how to measure, report and verify soil health” and the creation of a national soils database, with data to be collected “at different points in time to adequately measure change over time” and, ultimately, “an annual report on soil health for the country.”

In other words, while specific problems call for us all to act regionally, it’s also time to start gathering and sharing the data we need to think nationally.

Meanwhile, we’re always interested in your thoughts on the matter(s). Assuming this report doesn’t just go to gather fine particulate soils on the shelf, what sorts of help do you need for your land? What would you like to see from a PFRA 2.0, if that were ever to happen? Drop us a line.

The post Editor’s Rant: Thanks, Les appeared first on Grainews.

“We had an extremely warm winter with lower-than-normal precipitation in most areas,” says Trevor Hadwen, agroclimate specialist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. “We were a little worried going into the spring, for sure. But this has calmed us down.”

While the wet spring created difficulties in seeding in a few fields, most producers across the Prairies have their fields seeded with sufficient topsoil moisture to get the crop off to a decent start.

After years of having to adapt to drought, though, what does this shift to wetter growing conditions look like for dryland Prairie farmers?

Soil management strategies

Ken Panchuk, a provincial soils specialist for Saskatchewan’s ministry of agriculture, says for the most part, big-picture soil management strategies won’t change much for dryland farmers in his province. Strategies such as no-till and regenerative farming are widespread and excellent at managing water in dry or wet conditions.

But in a province like Manitoba, where there is a little less uniformity in soil management strategies, the situation can differ from one farm to another.

“It may depend a little bit on what the soil management strategy has been on those fields,” says Marla Riekman, a soil management specialist for Manitoba Agriculture. “If soils have good structure and haven’t been over-tilled, they may be soaking up and using some of this water a little better, because they may have an easier time infiltrating that water deeper into the soil profile.”

But producers who have structural issues, where water doesn’t move down into the soil profile as easily, may find themselves struggling with problems such as soil compaction this year.

“Now that we have a bit of moisture, the soil particles can slide over each other a little bit easier. This is where soils can be at a higher risk of things like compaction associated with field activity,” she says. “We tend to see more ponding in those compacted areas of the field.”

Obviously, avoiding field activity is impossible, but Riekman says farmers finding themselves in that position should start thinking about basic concepts for mitigating compaction.

“We want to make sure that we’re thinking about things like properly ballasted tractors, making sure our tractor tires are at their rated pressures, and making sure that we’re limiting some of the weight of the equipment where we can,” she says. And if these conditions carry into the fall, farmers should try to reduce the amount of random traffic crossing the fields with equipment such as grain carts.

Managing salinity

Riekman stresses that salinity issues don’t go away during wetter periods; they just hide.

During dry years, salinity tends to get worse because there is more evaporation than precipitation, which results in insufficient water moving down to wash the salts down into the root zone. Because of this, the water moves upward (through processes like capillary rise), bringing salts toward the surface, where they often show up visibly with that bathtub ring effect.

“Now that we’ve moved into some wetter periods, we start to see the salinity become diluted at the surface, or hidden,” Riekman says. “So we may have a temporary reprieve.”

But even in a wet cycle like this, if the rains continue and the water table rises close to the surface, the salts will rise with the water table and begin to show up again.

“Salinity is always cycling; it comes along with wet and dry periods,” Riekman says.

Paradoxically, Riekman says years like this, when the problem seemingly goes away, are often the best time to start managing salinity.

“If you have areas where you want to establish a salt-tolerant forage during those dry years, it can be very difficult; the soil is just too dry at the surface. When you have a bit of moisture, you may have better luck,” she says.

Weed control strategies

Weed control is another undertaking that changes under wetter conditions.

“Right now, producers are focused on watching the flushes of weeds coming,” Panchuk says. “When you have frequent showers, that’s a recipe for getting the next flush of weeds established.”

The big question producers and extension specialists like Panchuk will have to address is which weeds are developing and at what density, so they can determine the correct control products to use.

“Because weeds are competing for moisture and nutrients, you don’t want to let the weeds get too far advanced,” Panchuk says. “If this generous raining pattern that we have becomes a drier bias, then producers will need every drop of moisture that was conserved earlier in the growing season to bring the crop to maturity.”

The timing is also critical.

“We’ve got the longest days of the growing season upon us right now, so take every opportunity to get as much growth occurring as possible to get canopy cover,” Panchuk advises. “Once the canopy covers the field, then the crop would have a competitive edge over any new germinating weeds.”

Think about insurance

As we head into a wetter summer with high temperatures expected, farmers may also want to make sure hail insurance is updated. While this moisture is definitely a good-news story for farmers, there’s a literal black cloud attached to it: an increased risk of severe storms.

“One of the key components of getting storm events is moisture,” Hadwen says. “If we have moisture available on the surface and we get some heat, that will breed thunderstorm activity.”

The number of hail events has been relatively low during the dry years, but that appears set to change this year, he says.

“We will likely get larger and more storm events than we have had in recent years.”

Not out of the woods yet

While the moisture the Prairies have received this spring has recharged the water table, Hadwen said it’s a bit too early to declare the drought over — although that day appears close in Manitoba.

“We’re not quite out of the woods in some parts of the Prairie region,” Hadwen warns. “The rain is going to solve the immediate moisture needs, but it still takes a long time for the pastures to fully recover, and it also takes a long time for water supplies and groundwater to fully recover.”

Manitoba is a little bit different from the rest of the Prairies at this point, he adds.

“Manitoba has received the most moisture. The province received about 200 millimetres of precipitation in the central region, all the way from Winnipeg over to Brandon.”

This is typical for Manitoba, he says, because the province tends to have a wetter climate, but in recent years, southern Manitoba has been in a significant drought in terms of moisture deficit levels.

There is little concern for Manitoba in terms of moisture deficits, Hadwen says; in fact, the province has pretty much recovered. The only area of concern is the province’s northwest, which has received a little less precipitation than the rest of Manitoba.

“Last year, we had some very dry conditions compared to what we would normally get,” Hadwen says, adding that timely rains, as well as conditions cooler than the rest of the Prairies, helped.

“But this year, that 200 millimetres for that central southern portion of the province is excellent for soil moisture, though probably a little too much for some areas,” he says. “That is starting to percolate and really recharge those subsoils.”

In Saskatchewan, Hadwen says, precipitation ranged from just over 100 mm around the Regina area to a maximum of about 150 mm in the area west of Saskatoon.

But nevertheless, the drought prognosis is almost as good for Saskatchewan as it is for Manitoba, with only a small pocket in the agricultural area in the northwest with any significant drought risk.

“In that western region of the province — Kindersley, Leader, and even all the way up to the North Battleford area — it has been a little bit drier,” Hadwen says. “They’re recovering, but just not at the rate that we need. They were certainly in a much larger deficit going into the year. So we still have some concerns. But again, we’re seeing tremendous improvement.”

Most of Alberta received rainfall in the 100- to 125-mm range, and as a result, the province is a little bit worse off in terms of drought. One area that seems to be missing most of the rainfall so far is Alberta’s Peace region, but Hadwen says that region doesn’t normally get the bulk of its rain until late June or early July.

“That central region of the province has a little bit of what we call that D2, or severe drought category, and a little bit of D1, which is moderate,” Hadwen says. “But the reality is that those areas were the D3s or D4s last month, so we’ve seen improvement throughout the Prairie region.”

Unlike Manitoba, the subsoil is not fully recharged in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

“We have the moisture in that top root zone that will really get us through that spring period, but we really need moisture to percolate down and recharge levels further down,” Hadwen says. “We’re going to need continued rain this season. We don’t have those deeper moisture levels to really rely on.”

Precipitation models aren’t telling forecasters much for the coming months, he says, but there is some reason for optimism from the meteorologist maxim, “Rain begets rain and drought begets drought.”

“It’s a cyclical thing,” Hadwen says. “You need that moisture that we’ve received to break the drought. Now that we’ve got the moisture in the system, we will continue to get some big rainfall events until that moisture dries out.”

Hadwen also points to a significant moisture deficit in the three- to five-year period.

“We have fixed the moisture deficit for most regions in the one-year timeframe. But over the three-year timeframe, we’re still seeing pretty big deficits,” he says. “So we’re still not fully out of the drought.”

The post Moving from dry to wet appeared first on Grainews.