Lee’s job is to speak out on behalf of young farmers, and to ensure they grow into a positive force in these trying times for agriculture.

So what can she point to that millennial farmers are doing well at? Should we be worried about the “participation ribbon” generation that has their faces always glued to their phones?

CG: What kind of farm do you have, Danielle? Is it just you there on a daily basis?

Lee: I farm with my mom, my grandpa, and my younger brother. Mom and I primarily do all the farm work. We used to be a dairy farm but now we do beef cattle, and sheep, and we put up our own hay as well. We farm west of Calgary, in the area known as Spring Banks, so we are quite close to the city limits.

CG: What’s that like, farming so close to Calgary?

Lee: A lot of the farms around us are disappearing and a lot of the land isn’t being sold for agriculture purposes anymore. But our farm has been here for 105 years and I’m proud to be the fourth generation on this farm. I love being close to the city and having those amenities. Living close to a big urban centre, our family is also big on helping educate people about where their food comes from. I think that’s important, especially when you live this close to an urban centre.

CG: Sounds like the best of both worlds. Does it change how you farm compared to the average farm in Alberta?

Lee: In terms of farms in Alberta, we are probably pretty small. We don’t put up any grain, so all of our land is either in pasture or hay for our beef cattle and sheep. And we sell some hay to the equine market.

CG: That will keep you busy in the summers! Why did you decide to squeeze in the CYFF too?

Lee: Especially in our area, there are not very many other young farmers around. So, I started going to Alberta Young Farmers and Ranchers events, and that gave me the opportunity to go to the Canadian Young Farmer Forum conference. You were learning, but you were also building a network of young farmers across Canada. It was a different learning experience from university, but much more practical I think.

CG: Oh, so you fall right in with those statistics that say millennials are the most highly educated generation yet! With a university education, why would you or any other millennial choose a career in agriculture?

Lee: There are so many other opportunities out there, but the agriculture industry itself has so many great opportunities too. I think showcasing those opportunities is something we really have to do. We focus so much on the negatives that we sometimes forget to focus on the positives.

CG: Do you think that’s something millennial farmers in particular should be doing?

Lee: Showcasing the opportunities in agriculture is a challenge for all of us, but I think that since millennials are the future of the industry, it’s going to impact us even more.

Whether or not we can use certain products on crops, or medications for animals, and withdrawal periods, and things like that. I really think it’s going to impact our generation, and the next generation coming down more so.

CG: Do you think this is because this generation truly evaluates their own success that much differently, or is this a way out of competing with those bigger farmers? Millennials are the “participation ribbon” generation after all.

Lee: I look at a lot of young farmers out there, and they are busting their butts to get where they are. They are not the ones sitting on the couch! Even though there are challenges, those unknowns, and machinery breaks, and things happen, they still get up the next day and are working their butts off.

Young farmers are dedicated and they love what they do. They know that it’s not always easy, it’s not a 9-5 job, there are going to be long hours and frustrations, but they’re willing to take that risk and go for it.

And all farmers love to brag “I’m getting this many bushels,” or “this much for that calf,” or “this cow is producing this much milk.” With social media we can give people a virtual pat on the back, with just a “like” on a Facebook picture of their wonderful crop. I think sometimes they need to get that validation… but it’s not a ribbon. I wouldn’t say you purposely think that’s what you’re doing when you “like” somebody’s picture. It makes them feel good; it makes them want to strive to get better.

As young farmers, everybody posts all the good things that they’re doing. They’re proud of what they are doing and I think it’s important to have that pride in what you’re doing.

CG: So, is that all young farmers are really using social media for? Bragging?

Lee: Because there is less agriculture, there is maybe less community than there used to be when my mom was growing up. During all my schooling in Calgary, typically, I was the only farm kid. There were so few 4-H clubs. It’s sometimes hard to have that social life balance as a farmer and it doesn’t matter what farm they are from, young farmers are all facing the same issues. I have friends I might not see as often as I’d like in person, but I keep in touch through texting or online. So, I think we are more connected nowadays than even 20 years ago.

It’s easy to send out a message or a tweet or a text on what the weather is doing, or how crops are, and learn about all different sorts of crops and how they’re grown, by being friends with people on social media.

I think that it’s a challenge for our industry too, being so much more social. So many of our customers, being that much more removed from farming, we need to show the great things we are doing and showcase the agriculture in a positive light. I think people, in a lot of cases, maybe undervalue what farmers do. I guess that’s our culture because food is always there, we are never wanting for food, and always have that choice to go to the grocery store and have fresh food on the shelf.

So I don’t really see it as just doing it to, you know, promote myself. You’re doing it for the betterment of the agriculture industry as a whole, is how I see it.

With more social media stories on farming, hopefully people start to, maybe, give a little bit more credit to all the hard work that farmers do put in.

CG: What other differences do you see between our generation and the ones before us?

Lee: The first CYFF conference I went to was in 2010 and there weren’t many women. I mean there were, but comparatively, it was probably 25 per cent women, much less than the guys. And now at our conferences I’m going to say it’s almost 50/50. Even our board this year is half women and half men. I guess there were a few years where I was the only girl, or only female, on our board of eight. Maybe two or three of the guys that were on the board did have families with kids. But mostly, the female farmers were at home looking after the kids.

CG: That does seem to be in line with a growing female demographic among farmers in general. Are there other things you notice about this generation of farmers?

Lee: Farmers nowadays, seeing what their grandparents went through… the struggles and the sacrifices that they made… when I look at young farmers today, I think that some of them aren’t prepared to make those sacrifices. They take time to look after themselves a little better than maybe the previous generations did. Mental health is something that we’ve focused on the last couple of conferences because we’ve noticed that there are so many things young farmers have going on and, if we don’t take care of ourselves, it’s really going to affect us in the future.

I think sometimes our generation has done a bit better job of time management and realizing what they’re good at and, if they’re not good at something, hiring that out instead.

Also, I think that sometimes our younger farmers are more willing to try growing different crops that we didn’t care about 20 years ago, growing that different crop to hopefully find that niche in the market because they can’t compete with a huge grain farm. And because they can’t maybe be the biggest farmer, instead of “how many acres” you’re farming, which used to be the measure of your farm, it’s “what are you growing,” “how are you growing it” nowadays. I think that’s a big difference.

The post The millennial question appeared first on Country Guide.

Clearly, this sounds too good to be true, so I went to Jennifer Moss, the author of Unlocking Happiness at Work. She’s also the co-founder of “Plasticity Labs,” a company based in Kitchener, Ont., that is committed to building happier workforces.

If anyone is convinced that happiness is a realistic, measurable, profitable goal, it’s Moss.

More and more of her business clients are convinced as well, and below, Moss tells us what she tells them about why “authentic happiness strategies” generate better business.

I’m hoping she’ll also shed some light on one puzzle, as you’ll see in my first question.

Q. We thought you were going to talk to us about happiness, so what is this “plasticity” all about? Is this like some sort of manufacturing?

Moss: The term “plasticity” is actually based in neuro­sciences, where neuroplasticity refers to the way repeated behaviours actually hardwire your brain for certain skills. It’s why we can talk about skills as something that can be trained.

That’s not just what they call “hard skills,” like your ability to run a machine or develop code for computers. We’re talking about the ability for you to build up gratitude, mindfulness, all the traits that lead to happiness, by repeating intentional actions.

This is how we get habits, which are really the part about neuroplasticity that we focus on, and why we named the company Plasticity Labs.

Q. So neuroplasticity offers advantages over other approaches for building a more efficient organization?

Moss: We’re looking at people being the engines of our organizations.

Until now, I don’t think we really understood the value of human capital, or understood why understanding the performance of our people is actually quite critical.

If you look back at companies like Toyota and their way of thinking about how to improve processes, it’s all based on looking at tiny, ever-smaller chunks of the process, and then reviewing, assessing, tweaking them based on knowledge as it is gathered.

I agree productivity is important, but understanding that we have to make small changes in our habits in order to achieve broader change is taking the same concept that we would attach to building a product and putting it to work around our people.

Our people need to be valued more than the other things in our organizations.

We need to spend more time understanding how to improve their experience. Then what will come out of that is a more engaged, higher-performing, better-producing collective.

Q. How about an example so I can see how this might actually work on a day-to-day basis?

Moss: You can do very simple things that some people are going to be uncomfortable with it at first, but are extremely valuable.

A lot of research in positive psychology has gone into activities surrounding gratitude. For instance, before they go to sleep at night, it’s good for people to write down three things that they are grateful for, and they could do the same thing before they start their shift during the day.

We have gratitude walls where people put up sticky notes. This quite significantly impacts productivity, engagement and relationships.

For those that are out there selling seed or anything else, they will increase sales by up to 40 per cent in year two if they just practice these “Three Things of Gratitude.”

People will also catch more errors. If you’re out in a field and you have to be extremely alert, this improves your alertness by 20 per cent. It also reduces procrastination. There are so many huge benefits from doing very simple things like being grateful.

Don’t try to complicate it.

Q. So how do we know what tactics to focus on in order to increase the happiness of our people? Is it mainly about keeping little miscommunications, misunderstandings and mistakes from building up in the wrong way?

Moss: Well, it ebbs and flows.

Analyze what makes “your secret sauce” and then get back that thing that makes you feel motivated faster after you’ve suffered a setback.

As another example, it helps to understand what someone feels grateful for.

If someone says they really love seeing the movies on Tuesday with their wife, well, handing over two tickets to the movies, those are kind things that are simple, but practical and very easy to implement.

It’s quite amazing what you can do for someone when you just listen to what really matters to them.

Q. How do I assess the “company culture” of my farm and what is going to improve it?

Moss: Google used to hire with the assumption that people were going to leave. Now, they’re looking to hire you for life. So, I think they’re a good example. They put a lot of effort into not just thinking about perks like massages at the desk, but really looking at key components that make the highest-performing teams.

What they found in 180 groups across four years is that what makes a difference is “conversational turn taking” and “being kind.”

Often really strong leaders have an intuition as to where the gaps are, but we have the benefit of technology and data now to do assessments that ask what is motivational and what builds happiness for your specific team, and then create programming based on that.

Over time, we have learned you could have one farm that is motivated by one way of thinking, and then one farm that is completely motivated by something else. Even just from gender and age, it varies.

Q. So how does this fit in with happiness? Many readers may be skeptical about trying to make everyone on the farm happier. What would you say to someone who isn’t convinced that being more mindful of company culture actually can improve the bottom line?

Moss: Something very special about the agriculture industry, in general, is gut intuition. There are some really good people likely doing these things because they have a gut feeling about it.

So take that gut instinct a little bit further. Bridge all of the awesome things that you already do intuitively so that you can just give yourself a five or 10 per cent edge. It can mean a small increase in productivity, but also people showing up to work more engaged, loving what they do, being more passionate, and you get to laugh more, get to enjoy your job more, because your people are improving your experience.

And understand that being mindful is science. It’s real, it’s valuable, and it’s also very tangible.

Q. As a farmer, I find it’s very natural to do business with people, rather than always focus on products or services. Is being more people-oriented what makes me and other farmers happy at work?

Moss: Relationship is so paramount to general enjoyment of life, and if we have general enjoyment of life, we tend to have overall enthusiasm, passion, and enjoyment of work… even just thinking, “I’m really glad I have this job,” makes you enjoy what you’re doing more. A person is also more likely to enjoy their job and stay there if they have a friend at work. Coming into work and having one person that you feel you have physiological safety with helps to retain that person 50 per cent longer.

They’re all very simple things that folks in agriculture likely “get,” because they are a human business. And, in an industry that’s been around for a very, very long time, that human element is probably deeply embedded in the culture.

The post C’mon, get happy! appeared first on Country Guide.

How many of the candidates would be in their early 30s? Or in their 20s?

And how many of those young directors would you vote for? Or would you dismiss them all as “untested,” and refuse to vote for anyone without grey hair?

What makes the question so interesting is that it’s the same issue many farmers are wrestling with at home.

Can we trust the young generation to make more of the decisions around here? Can we trust them to be leaders?

It turns out, however, that some farm organizations are refusing to look at it as a simple yes-or-no question. They’re asking: What can we do to grow the capability of young directors?

And there may be lessons for all of us in how they’re trying to do it.

Boards once dominated by the old boys club are seeking new, young candidates on purpose, with perhaps no better example of how they’re doing it than the Future Leaders Development program that emerged in Ontario three years ago as a collaboration supported by Holstein Canada, Dairy Farmers of Ontario, CanWest DHI, and EastGen. Last year the program expanded to Western Canada too.

Participants get three intensive days of instruction on the roles and responsibilities of being a board director. And already, participants have gone on to fill three positions on the DHI board, as well as another three positions at EastGen.

The results are better than anyone had originally hoped, says Neil Petreny, general manager for CanWest DHI.

“Personally, I’m surprised with how quickly we’ve gotten payback,” he admits. “I think that’s just fantastic they’re willing to contribute. That’s telling me that at least the people that were selected up front really did have the interest.”

You have to wonder, if these individuals were the sort who should have been pursuing board positions all along, why was there a need for a recruitment and training program? Petreny answers by tellimg me many young people seem to have misconceptions about what it means to sit on a board.

“For young people, without the experience or exposure, it sounds fancy, it’s threatening, ‘I don’t know as much as others or what is policy about’ … but those are things that you don’t learn in school, you only learn through experience,” he says.

Young farmers are signalling their interest, and Petreny reports that he is detecting a drop in average delegate age when he attends Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario meetings.

It’s fortunate timing. “We’ve got fewer and fewer people all the time,” Petreny says.

Too often directors are selected because they’ve got spare time on their hands, and Petreny says he’s also seen people end up on boards just because they bred a good cow once, or their grandfather made a name for the family, not because that individual was the best person for the job.

“If you want future leaders that have skills and ability,” he insists, “you don’t want to just teach people who have time now.”

At CanWest DHI, they’ve recently gone so far as to develop a director succession policy to define what getting the best person for the job really looks like. It specifies how vacancies will be advertised, how applications will be solicited, and what the requirements will be for candidate screening. It will include a skills matrix of the existing board so they can express a preference for candidates who strengthen collective weaknesses.

Endorsed candidates will still be required to run in a general election, but it’s their best strategy for getting the best individuals on board, not just people who have a surplus of free time.

“You don’t want a whole board of 70-year-olds, and you don’t want a whole board of 20-year-olds either,” he says. “It takes a blend of both experience, and to some degree, inexperience. You want a variety of skillsets and personalities, because that interpersonal dynamic is so important in what makes an organization successful, not just the knowledge and experience.”

Getting that right blend to include young directors isn’t so easily done in every organization, according to Jason Reid. He’s been looking for company on the younger side of the table at Beef Farmers of Ontario, the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, and the Young Cattlemen’s Council. And regularly, he gets the “don’t have time” response.

It isn’t that Reid doesn’t understand how many demands a young farmer is likely to have on their time. He and his wife, Trudy, have roughly 300 acres in Thunder Bay, Ont., where they raise roughly 40 cow-calf pairs, 50 to 70 backgrounding cattle and 300 ewes along with two young daughters. He also works as a relief milker, transports livestock, and helps out at the local abattoir.

But he can’t really fathom how so many young farmers bow out of positions he’s flying nearly everywhere to fill, because he believes he owes that to the industry.

“When we were starting out in 2003, we couldn’t afford anything; we worked 200 acres, I had a 30-horse tractor, and when the hay needed cutting, somebody cut it, when the hay needed baling, they dropped a baler off. We have a rake that somebody just left here. At the end of the year, there was no custom-work bill,” he recalls. “I can never, ever, afford to pay back my community for what they have done to get us started. So we made a decision that, we can’t pay them back, but we can help build the community better… and when the next young person comes along, we are morally obligated to help them.”

Granted, folks aren’t waiving bills for young farmers who are just getting started all over the place. But Reid’s point is everyone has been given something. It may have been just a small scholarship, or even a retail discount that you get as a perk for some farm association membership you have. “And if you really think of what the industry has given to you, aren’t we all kind of obligated a little to put a bit back into it?”

For those who don’t want to do the job because they feel no moral obligation, then consider doing it for an important lesson in business, he says.

If you’re so busy working that you truly don’t have time for anything else, or if no one else is willing to work for as little money as you are to get the job done, then consider it a warning sign for your business, Reid urges.

“Farmers and farm families should not be subsidizing the food that we eat by their spouses’ off-farm income,” Reid says. “We need to get our heads wrapped around the idea that you need to be able to pay somebody to do the work that you’re doing while you’re gone.”

Reid believes in the theory that any truly successful farm business should be capable of running for a year without any one key individual physically being there to do the work required. He doesn’t personally know any farmers who would even want to go on a year-long vacation like that, and he acknowledges that his farm certainly isn’t there, but he believes it’s a goal worth aspiring to.

“You shouldn’t be tied to the farm to the point where you are the only one who can do it,” Reid says. “Sitting on a board and going to Guelph for two or four or eight days a month, whatever it might be, shouldn’t be an issue.”

Clearly, Reid doesn’t buy the argument that maybe folks who truly are that strapped for time are best left off the board. He’s really enthusiastic about the results of the Cattlemen’s Young Leaders (CYL) Mentorship Program that was launched by the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association in July 2010. The young people coming to the Young Cattlemen’s Council are individuals to really keep an eye on, he assures me, and he predicts that the way our industry currently tackles issues would be very different if these folks were running our lobby organizations.

“I think we would be 100 times more successful if we came to politicians with 20- to 30-year-old directors, than with 60- to 70-year-old directors,” Reid says.

If it were up to him, every farm organization in the country would have a sunset clause. But Rob Scott, the current chair of the Ontario Sheep Marketing Association (OSMA) and someone admired by Jason Reid for having proven himself to be good at what he does, isn’t sure he’d go that far.

Of course, no one wants to discourage the next generation from getting involved, Scott explains, but he agrees with Petreny that there is a lot about the job which can only be learned through experience. Scott says it would have been extremely difficult for him at a younger age to have operated his farm successfully, helped by his wife Joanne and son Matt, and still managed to do what he felt was necessary for the OSMA this past year.

Their family farm near Brantford, Ont., is a 300-ewe flock which expanded to include a large feedlot operation not long ago. Meanwhile, since Scott became chair in 2015, the OSMA has withdrawn from the Canadian Sheep Federation and then collaborated with the Alberta Lamb Producers and the Federation des producteurs d’agneaux et moutons du Quebec to form the National Sheep Network.

“Obviously, you want to see younger people getting involved, but if I look back on my life there is a reason why there are older people at the political advocacy level,” he says. “I’m away 100 to 120 days a year because that’s what it takes. The biggest factor in my case is that I have my son working on the farm with me, so that I can get away to do this stuff.”

Which is an important distinction Scott insists is worth repeating, both within the industry but also outside of the industry. As Reid pointed out, politicians need to see a future in farming. So when you’re applauding the merits of a new risk management program, you could be the one to say it’s made you more confident in pursuing your future farm career or you can explain how it has allowed you to bring your son on to the family farm full-time now.

“I often tell people, I’m not a chairman, I’m a farmer,” Scott says. “But more importantly, I’m not just a producer; I’m the father of a producer. That’s my biggest drive.”

There was nothing wrong with being young, pigheaded, working two jobs, and waking up every morning excited about this farm you were building, he chuckles, but that’s also when marketing boards and governments were just things that were getting in your way. “As you get older, you realize, the world is run by people who show up,” Scott says. “I remember one time being so excited about an issue, I was so worked up that when I got the opportunity to stand up in front of a crowd, I froze. I kicked myself for weeks, and that carried on until someone taught me how to breathe.”

Young people who want to lead have to prove they can be effective. With all of the young politicians currently in office, Scott believes young farmers have opportunities to build a role in bridging with governments. Good social skills will carry them a long way, he says.

“I went right from high school, to working in a blue-collar, off-farm job where I ran a crew, to all of a sudden sitting at a board table, and I tell you, that was hard,” he admits.

Scott has often wondered if public speaking and financial reporting would have come easier to him if he’d gone to university. “I learned to compensate because, although I didn’t have the academic skills behind me, I did have the social skills from the trade field to delegate.”

If experience has taught him anything, he says, it’s that learning to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone will produce the most rewarding changes in your life.

The post Young farmers are on board and looking ahead appeared first on Country Guide.

So Country Guide asked top ag journalists from across the country to interview farmers who excel at change, taking their farms in very different directions with an eye to finding their best opportunities.

Their stories start with our January 2017 issue and will continue through the winter. As you’ll see, our Change Makers are inspiring and insightful, and they are also gritty and determined. They’re young and old, from small and large operations, managing crops and livestock.

These farmers push the boundaries, find solutions, and change negatives into positives, and they fill us with optimism for the future of agriculture.

Drive on.

Elgin Craig’s farming career began with change. His parents, William and Dorothy Craig, had started Craigcrest Holsteins in 1950 near Brampton, within sight of Toronto. Then, 26 years later, when Elgin and his brother David joined the business, the family picked up and moved an hour west near the town of Arthur.

The move made the Craigs one of the first families to leave the Brampton area, with his parents seeing the move as an opportunity to slow down and escape the city on their own terms.

Now, Elgin and wife Joan have been wrestling with similar questions about their own career paths. But, in keeping with growing numbers of farmers across the country, their decisions are proving radically different.

For Elgin and Joan, this isn’t a time for stepping aside as much as it’s a time to find new farming ventures into which they can invest their passion and all the knowledge they have accumulated through their decades of experience.

But for a moment, let’s get back to that original move to Arthur, because it was also a chance to upgrade. “The buildings were terrible, the fencerows were wide and thick, and land in Arthur was cheap,” Elgin recalls. “Our parents helped us start, but they didn’t give it to us. David and I started out with an income-sharing agreement, then after four years we developed a partnership, and within 10 years we started a company.”

At the new location the farm thrived, emerging as a leader in production, earning Gold Seal Awards from the Dairy Farmers of Ontario for an entire decade, along with major wins at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair and World Dairy Expo.

Their cattle received multiple All-Canadian and All-American nominations, and the “Craigcrest” prefix earned international recognition through Craigcrest Rubies Gold Rejoice, a heifer that won both Junior Champion at the World Dairy Expo and Reserve Junior Champion at the Royal in 2010, later placing first again as a Senior two-year-old at both the World Dairy Expo and the Royal.

Perhaps most telling are the farm’s three Master Breeder Shields. The first was shared by William and both sons in 1987, then by David and Elgin in 1997, and finally by Elgin and Joan in 2013.

For a farm to earn three Master Breeder Shields is rare in Canada, but it’s even more unusual for this award to be presented to different owners each time.

It suggests this family knows how to excel through changes that it undertakes deliberately and strategically.

Elgin says he and his brother always talked about the changes they could see having an impact on their business, and since David was five years older, it wasn’t a surprise when he felt ready to retire from farming first.

“We always thought about it, we knew where we were going,” Elgin says. “We actually booked one year before we had the sale. The market was good and it’s all about timing; in 2001, we had the second-highest herd dispersal in Canada.”

Herd dispersals for the purpose of dissolving a business partnership aren’t always so amicable, but to the Craigs, the decision to sell the business made good sense to everyone.

The only thing the brothers didn’t sell was the land, and Elgin and Joan continued to farm. “When BSE came along, I’d had a nice business selling animals to the U.S.,” Elgin says. “We got caught with 120 heifers.”

Having survived 24 per cent interest rates in the ’80s with his brother, Elgin had learned long before the BSE crisis that breeding good cattle in a well-managed business pays a lot of mortgage. “I’d gone to college, taken economics and all that, but those realities certainly molded my mind around the economics of farming,” he says, “A lot of people got doom and gloom, but I knew the only way to get out was to buy quota and milk our way out.”

It was a decision Joan could get behind wholeheartedly.

“When you talk about being proactive for change, I think you have to look at what makes sense ahead of you,” she says. “Life is full of so many changes, some you’re ready for, and some are unexpected.”

Joan talks of how she grew up on a beef and cash crop farm, but her heart was in teaching. She took a few years away from her career when their kids, Stephanie and James, were little, and helped on the farm throughout all the years that Elgin and David farmed together.

“I would help host international guests, fill in on weekends, help with advertising… I often say I was like a cheerleader,” she says. “When I look back now, I realize how important those roles were. They are part of farm success.”

The couple decided together to get back into dairy. “Although Joan had her own career in which she kept advancing, some of those attributes that she had really helped us in farming,” he says. “Sometimes when you’re always doing something, you can’t see the trees for the forest. She looks at it with a different set of eyes, and that positivity, even on the worst days, was one of the great things.”

BSE was devastating. Elgin says and it was a terrible time for a lot of farmers when fresh cows were selling for $175. However, he says it had also been difficult to manage the challenges of high interest rates back in the ’80s. Instead, they’ve always chosen to find the positives in even the negative things that happen in life. “You can decide to conquer that challenge, and embrace the changes that are necessary,” Elgin says he has learned, “and when you start looking at some of those challenges, there is always an opportunity, though it may not be immediate.”

After one year off, Elgin and Joan were back in the dairy business. “I think what’s important is that we set goals,” Joan says.

As a couple, they sat down together in 2003 and settled on five sets of goals for their new venture together. “One of them was to be able to show at the World Dairy Expo — and we did,” Joan says. “And then, another was to work on a Master Breeder shield — and we did that too.”

Then they saw another opportunity. For the first time since BSE, October 2014 brought good cattle prices. “There were Americans in Canada looking to buy cattle,” Elgin says, “and our dollar had started to come down.” In June of that year Joan had retired from teaching and Elgin was starting to feel the demands of managing the herd more keenly as he got older.

At what may have seemed like the peak of all their successes, Joan and Elgin had another herd dispersal sale in October 2014.

“We took about six months to rest, we did a little bit of traveling, had a nice chance to be able to talk about things, and what we wanted to do,” Joan says. “Neither of us really liked the word retiring. We feel like we’re pretty young and we were always changing within our careers, and kind of prepared ourselves for change.”

Elgin still loved dairy cows and Joan knew her husband had incredible knowledge in cattle. He had always been very good at explaining the various aspects of the dairy business and encouraged her questions. In 2015 they sat down to write out a list of what they wanted to do next, plus a very long list of the things they didn’t want to do, which eliminated a lot of options.

“I don’t care what career you’re in, it’s not easy to leave that career,” Elgin says, “and all I ever wanted to do was to farm. But, there comes a point in your career where you need something new, something different that keeps you young and your thinking vital.”

Today, Elgin credits his brother with introducing them to the breed of beef cattle they now have on their farm. “The idea came over a family dinner,” he recalls. “I really did miss cattle. We threw the breed names out and my brother said, ‘There is a breed called Speckle Park; I don’t know much about them, but they win all these carcass competitions.’ I’ve been in the animal industry all my life and I’d never heard of it. Neither had Joan, so, the two of us got on Google.”

Joan says she found it fascinating that Speckle Park was only the second breed of beef cattle in Canada to be granted distinct breed status, and that women had played a major role in the beginning of the breed.

“There are so many impressive qualities, including the animal’s temperament, meat quality, maternal abilities, the fact that they finish well on grass, and that they are quite beautiful to look at,” she says.

They watched a sale online. They posted a message to Facebook that they wanted to see some herds and, to their surprise, they received some invitations. They flew to Alberta and visited ranches there and in Sask­atchewan. They also attended the Canadian Speckle Park 2015 annual meeting. They took the Environmental Farm Plan course and a traceability course together, and followed that with a biosecurity course.

“Even though we’ve been married for awhile and farming for quite awhile, this really is the first time we’ve been figuring things out together on a daily basis,” Joan admits.

Elgin and Joan made the decision to develop a purebred and commercial Speckle Park herd. So far they’ve grown their herd to include 80 cattle. They’ve also decided to renovate their 40-year-old dairy barn to handle cattle in entirely new ways. “We have learned so much and we find it exciting,” Elgin says. “There is not a lot of data, no genomic evaluations and it is in herd records that management decisions are made.”

They find themselves embracing the changes required for new technology, a different breeding program, and different cattle management systems for hous­ing and rotational pasture management. They know that mastering it all will be important to their future success, and they remain undeterred.

Explains Joan, “I think you build confidence that you can adapt to change when you practice it.”

This article originally appeared as ‘The next big step’ in the January 2017 issue of Country Guide.

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The growing popularity of cover crops among grain farmers may have come at just the right time for cattle farmers who are sitting around their kitchen tables this fall, discussing culling options.

It isn’t all roses. Without knowing just what the feed value might be that’s locked in those covers, many livestock producers may not want to risk introducing their herd to such novel feedstuffs. Similarly, many crop producers are equally hesitant to disturb the soil rehabilitation process, which is why they planted the covers in the first place, and many of these farmers have neither the equipment nor the forage-harvesting experience to bring these blended crops to market.

But the popularity of grazing cover crops in Western Canada may offer solutions to both groups of farmers in the East. Although it’s far from a common practice, there is a buzz about grazing cover crops both for the improvement of your soils and as a means to reduce winter feeding costs.

Some researchers have been hearing anecdotes and chasing scientific evidence for a year or more. For instance, Nora Paulovich of the North Peace Applied Research Association in Alberta says it’s been about three or four years for her.

Paulovich says that for years, farmers have been operating under the assumption that if you’re planting more than one crop, some plants will naturally rob the nutrients and moisture that the other crop needs from the soil. But what she’s seen in her crop garden is that this really doesn’t seem to be true, and there are actually beneficial relationships between many species which give rise to improved performance on all accounts, particularly in extreme weather conditions.

“We had an extremely dry year last year, nothing grew well, and we had lots of grasshoppers,” Paulovich offers as an example, “but some of our producers had cover crop mixes that did do very well. One fellow had a diverse mix he seeded the same day right next to a monoculture triticale. The triticale looked horrible, grasshoppers moved in and ate most of it, but the cocktail mix right adjacent was amazing.”

Cocktail blends seem to kick-start soil microbes, which then dine and take up more nutrients more efficiently than in monocultures, Paulovich says. No one blend is clearly triumphing over others as far as she can tell, and everyone is still experimenting to find what they like best, but Paulovich says they do find that aiming to include a cool-season grass species, a cool-season broadleaf, a warm-season grass, and a warm-season broadleaf is a good place to start.

“The ryegrasses are fantastic,” Paulovich says as she starts to tick through a mental list of species they’ve worked with. “I’m not a huge fan of sorghumgrass. Crimson clover is doing well, the hairy vetch is absolutely awesome, and the cows really do like millet. Our brassicas and kale are doing well. Buckwheat turned out to be an awesome crop this year. We are thinking about maybe cutting back the spring oats seeding rate; it is taking over a bit.”

This year they seeded between 30 and 40 pounds per acre of oats in their blend and she figures they’ll cut that back to five or 10 pounds per acre after watching it canopy over other young seedlings way too soon in the growing season. She says they also put 20 to 25 pounds of forage peas in with that, as well as other species of brassicas which she recommends keeping below one pound per acre. Other species added to her trials this year include hairy vetch, millet, sunflower, kale, sorghum-sudan, bursting clover, crimson clover, italian rye, tillage radish and grazing turnips.

Learning all she can at work helps with the learning curve at home, where Paulovich raises cattle with her husband and kids.

“It’s fun to go out there and see what the cows go for first,” she says. Last year was very dry, so she admits they let the cows take the pasture down more than she would have liked at first. “If you have a good year, mob graze so that they leave quite a bit behind and tramp that into the ground,” she suggests.

Building organic matter

Over in Rivers, Man., another farmer doing a lot of his own grazing research is Clayton Robins. Unlike Paulovich, Robins is very focused on studying the impact of very specific plant species on cattle nutrition so he’s grazing his commercial herd on tetraploid italian ryegrass, aurora festuloliumn (a hybrid between ryegrass and fescue), chicory and plantain.

If his soils weren’t so saline, he says, he would grow red clover too but instead he’s getting better results from sweet clover, yellow blossom, and hairy vetch. “We also tried some brassicas this year, some of the hybrid brassicas out of New Zealand and were very disappointed in them,” Robins says. “There is a lot of canola, so fleabeetles are naturally very high and few plants survived.”

In designing his blend, Robins targets at least 50 per cent grass in his final stands. That’s hard to achieve, he admits, but it offers the highest level of sugar to the cattle and he says it’s a slow-release energy that rivals green barley. Going into all that lush pasture, it’s important to manage intake moisture by providing a dry feed source, a very good-quality hay or straw. “One of the things I learned early on is the tipping point seems to be 17 or 18 per cent dry matter in a growing plant,” he explains. “Once you’re below that, you’re going to run into digestive upsets and intake issues.”

Like so many farmers, Robins seeds his forages under oats and fababeans. “Then we put it up as a round bale and we leave the bales in the field,” he says. It’s a time-savings advantage, bringing the cattle back to graze the same fields later. “We strip graze, just take the plastic off as we reach those bales, and provide two bales a day for a herd of 35 cows.”

In addition to producing a highly digestible feed, Robins says he’s found that another advantage of focusing specifically on high-sugar-producing plants for feed is that these plants also produce a lot of sugar in the roots to drive soil biology. As a result, he’s building organic matter extremely fast in his soil and he also says he’s seen huge improvements in water infiltration this year, compared to four or five years before he got started with these cover crops. “Places in the field where water would normally lay, where we couldn’t have walked let alone get a tractor by, we took the main crop off and the surface of the soil wasn’t even sticky.”

A second look

Meanwhile, Dr. Bart Lardner, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and active researcher with the Western Beef Development Centre, offers some sober thought.

“If we’re improving soil this much, yes, I totally agree we need to do rotational cropping to improve organic matter and retain nitrogen, it’s a good thing,” Lardner says, “but let’s huddle down and do some research.”

Lardner isn’t contesting any of the work completed by Paulovich or Robins, but he says there are individuals in the industry who make claims he’d like to put to the test next year. There isn’t any silver bullet that’s going to work for everyone, he believes. In times of drought, farmers’ backs are particularly up against a wall and he sympathizes. “You, as a producer, have to look at all these different options and then figure out which one will work in your environment.” Use your common sense, he urges.

Before you ever start feeding, take samples pre-graze. Remember though that the sample is a subsample for your whole field, and if your results seem suspiciously high or low, test twice. Look for the protein score, fibre levels, energy, ADF and NDF, and then check with specialists to make sure you can balance the nutritive value of those forages according to the needs of your animals.

Lardner says research on grazing alternatives seems cyclical in popularity. “About 15 years ago, turnip was all the rage,” he recalls.

The Western Beef Development Centre has several fact sheets as a result, many of which take feed costs into account. Some of these novel seeds may be high priced, so these valuations of some of the more conventional grazing options could be worth taking into consideration, he says.

Lastly, Lardner advises producers to monitor and manage for nitrates, just as they usually would during any ‘shock environment.’ “I’ve grazed one per cent nitrate cautiously, without any negative issues in terms of animal issues in the past,” he says, but he also notes that gestating animals are not the same as young stock, which would be different again from dry cows.

“Don’t treat it like you put your cows out for summer pasture,” Lardner says. “You have a new system out there. Limit graze and move the wire every four days.”

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Then, as crops headed toward harvest, the concern grew even bigger.

“A lot of the chemistries are water activated, so they didn’t activate to a large degree, or they activated late,” says Neil Batchelor, who covers central and southwestern Ontario for Sevita International. “Your old friends, lamb’s quarters, ragweed, and sow thistle, they’re all out there.”

But most worrisome in IP beans, of course, is Eastern black nightshade. “Night­shade that never got picked up to begin with could be fairly advanced. It likes to hide. It really takes that good, earnest scouting program to identify it and get it taken care of,” Batchelor says.

Farther east on the Ontario-Quebec border, where Andrew Hodges farms and works for Ceresco, the abundance of lamb’s quarters is troubling. It seems to him that too much Pinnacle was sold this year to make sense of what he’s seeing in the field. “It was dry, so the plant shuts down and doesn’t absorb as well. Maybe when they sprayed it was too hot?” he muses. “Or is it because of resistance?”

On average, Hodges estimates farmers in this region probably applied 2-1/2 passes of herbicide control. Where producers were chasing grasses, they may have gone over with as many as five passes. “On a year like this, I would say grass is harder to control,” he says.

Still farther east, Hodges’ colleagues tell him Quebec farmers saw the same issues all the way to Saint-Hyacinthe. In the spring, Eragon seemed to work tremendously, but in the fall, it didn’t seem to be holding on against horsetail and does a very poor job on large grass. “I used Fierce on my own soybeans this year and the only issue I had was ragweed escapes on tilled ground,” says Hodges. “On no-tilled ground, I had no escapes.” Trying to get a handle on escapes with Reflex, and a whole lot of water, seemed to be the best thing to do on the tilled ground.

The only IP bean growers who also tilled and still got away with minimum field passes this year seem to be farming on Prince Edward Island, where IP production has been on the rise for the last five years. Harry VandenBroek, of Atlantic Soy Corp in Belle River, says cold weather in June and early July held the crop back at first, but the beans do appear to have capitalized on timely rains. Even though triazine-resistant weeds have found their way to the Island, most growers appear to have had good success using a pre-emergent program this year.

However, VandenBroek credits the weed control to more than fortunate weather conditions. Many of the weed control products he recalls farmers relying on when he worked in Ontario, such as Pursuit, aren’t options for potato growers because of long-lasting soil residues. So farmers on the Island have become avid about crop rotation, growing their beans after potatoes, which often follow hay crops originally under-seeded to cereals.

“When they’re following potatoes, they have pretty good grass control,” VandenBroek explains. Many growers will then apply a product like Valtera, strictly for pre-emerge broadleaf control. If for some reason they do have to go to a post-emerge, they’re most likely to use Basagran + Pinnacle + Assure. “There are some issues here with mustard and goldenrod,” he says.

Where perennial weeds are a recurring issue, and the predominant practice is conventional or minimum tillage as it is in P.E.I., Barry Gordon of AgVise, an independent crop consulting company based near Hensall, Ont., strongly recommends controlling weeds in the fall. Gordon scouts for farmers who both till and no till a lot of IP beans and he’s seeing a lot of perennial sow thistle this year.

“We aren’t going to do any good spraying Roundup on a frozen sow thistle plant,” Gordon says, “so I think that it’s critical to just about follow the combine with the sprayer, and maybe put a bit of a cocktail together like Roundup + Banvel + 2,4-D to get perennial weeds under control.”

In a no-till scenario, come back in the spring a week before planting with Roundup and even consider including a broadleaf program, Gordon suggests. “Sometimes when you put that on a week before you plant, there is a better opportunity to get moisture to activate it than there is after you plant.”

When it comes to achieving good weed control, Gordon says it’s been his experience that both no till and any kind of tillage can be a challenge. Getting those perennial weeds out before bringing in a plow can make a big difference, and sometimes he’ll see better control in those fields. “This year my guys who were on conventional tillage and who incorporated their herbicide into soil moisture seemed to have better control,” Gordon observes. “We had some great success with incorporating Boundary and Broad­strike; the only disadvantage is we can’t put Authority in when we incorporate.”

Having said that, Gordon has seen better weed control in a no-till system than conventional tillage many times before. “Conventional tillage will let the soil dry out, and if you don’t get a rain, it takes more water to activate fluffy ground than when you have solid ground,” he says.

Another critical piece of advice in 2016 was to scout 18 to 24 days after plant­ing, no matter how dry it was in the region. “That’s when we seem to have an opportunity to get weeds under control, when they are small and actively growing,” Gordon explains. “If I wait until I see a green patch in a field for escapes, I’m too late.”

Gordon says the cost of poor scouting during this time period is often an infestation of lamb’s quarters because, once they grow beyond an inch-and-a-half tall, it’s a real scramble to get any kind of effective cleanup program.

Scout early, scout often (meaning at least once a week), and seriously consider a third-party agronomy service for IP fields, advises Batchelor. “It’s pretty rare that those kinds of services don’t pay for themselves,” he comments. The professional advisers know which pattern weeds to flag early, allowing the opportunity to head off really prolific ones like ragweed and fleabane, for example. Later on, if they find a little volunteer corn coming up, “well, you pay the grandkids 25 cents an ear,” he chuckles.

Batchelor supports many of the same pearls of wisdom put forward by other agronomists, particularly the importance of adhering to crop rotation and chemistry rotation plans, but he also believes IP bean farmers would be wise to make use of multi-species cover crops as well.

“It makes sense to me in terms of the more variable root structures you have in the soil, and as a strong capture of a greater variety of nutrients that can be retained in the top eight inches,” Batch­elor explains. “There is a lot more work to be done on it, but I can hardly wait to see what comes of that.” Instead of new chemistry, for him it’s easier to get excited about the potential contributions that cover crops can make to weed suppression. “Look at the ‘new’ chemistries that are coming out. Dicamba? How long has Dicamba been around? 2,4-D?”

Gordon, who started his career in the chemistry business, is equally dismayed by the apparent lack of progress in the IP market. But he’s not surprised either. “It’s almost like a new family of chemistry has to come on to the marketplace,” he says. “But there isn’t significant volume to offer a payback for the manufacturing company to bring it out.”

The fact is trying to control a broadleaf in a broadleaf crop will always be challenging using a chemical product, Gordon says. “We don’t have strong products as there are in say, wheat or corn. We never have, probably never will.”

This article was published in the October 2016 issue of the Soybean Guide.

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Undoubtedly, however, both are questioning if their strategy was the right way to go this time.

And because of 2016’s dry growing season, this may be exactly the right year to push those questions as hard as you can.

Mike Strang, who cash crops with his father Keith and brother Geoff near Exeter, Ont., admits they certainly had their own questions about their split application strategy during the spring, even though they are variable-rate veterans.

Strang recalls his dad always sidedressing anhydrous ammonia. Then, when the younger Strang became part of the farm more than a decade ago, they added a rate controller, and then came zone and pre-sidedress nitrate testing as a basis for variable-rate application.

“Then, when we went to strip till, putting more nitrogen up front didn’t work so well because you were getting the pre-plant nitrogen in the soil test,” Strang explains. “So we looked for another system and (that) brought us to the AgLeader OptRx last year.”

With new technology in their arsenal, the application strategy this spring involved applying 50 pounds per acre of nitrogen at planting with their strip-till machine, then Y-dropping in another 60 pounds per acre around the six-leaf stage, followed by a variable-rate pass using OptRx sensing and Y-drop dispensing technology when the corn reached about five feet tall.

Last year, the OptRx/Y-drop combo seemed worth the investment and extra time spent in the driver’s seat. This year, when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, it was harder to be so sure.

“We were really dry in June and I’m wondering if that first sidedress pass didn’t quite get into the corn crop,” Strang says. The crop never seemed to darken down, but stayed pale all the way through until the third nitrogen application.

Fortunately, after applying their late-season rate of anywhere from 60 to another 90 pounds per acre, Strang says they received two and three-quarter inches of rain. As far as he’s concerned, that was really critical timing.

“Later nitrogen available to the corn crop is probably better,” Strang now says. “I would even go later, but with our high clearance sprayer, if we get much taller than six feet we start breaking some of the corn.”

Yet he also knows that this might sound crazy to the neighbours.

Strang says they are one of only a few farmers in the neighbourhood using variable-rate application technology, and he can understand the appeal of one-pass strategies from a time management perspective. Still, most of the 1,000 acres of custom work he took on this year was done using his variable-rate setup and it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Hensall Co-op has outfitted three sprayers with Green­seekers.

Strang says they believe there are several good reasons to invest in the latest application devices.

“I didn’t like using anhydrous anymore. It almost killed me a couple times, and so I really wanted to move toward a 28 per cent liquid fertilizer. To get a decent-sized applicator, you’re looking at $40,000 and we bought a Y-drop system for less than $20,000,” Strang reports. “Year in and year out, with adequate rains, Y-drop versus a normal sidedress unit, yeah, there’s probably no difference. But for half the price of an applicator, I don’t see a downside to it.”

Strang says he also intuitively likes the idea of placing nitrogen right beside the corn rows so that it doesn’t take much rain before the plant gets access to it. Last year he thought he was being really smart by adding slow-release nitrogen to the mix and felt pretty good when the rains came. In hindsight, he should have gone in then and sidedressed anyway as soon as he started seeing yellow spots. This year’s lesson learned was not to trim the first application so much, so next year he’ll be back up to 80 or 100 pounds per acre pre-plant.

“We’re always learning,” Strang says. “But the benefit of splitting nitrogen is you can respond to weather challenges.”

Paul Raymer, of Practical Precision Inc. in Tavistock, Ont., says the Strang family really exemplifies the type of farm now moving to a split-nitrogen strategy. As one of the first companies to offer the GreenSeeker system to Ontario’s corn growers, he’s had the opportunity to observe early adopters of optical imaging share similar characteristics. Typically, they do belong to the younger generation of farmers and they show no fear of managing new technology. They also have a mindset that is more future focused and less inclined toward repeating what has worked in the past.

Raymer recalls how, in the early years, many farmers genuinely could not accept the concept that corn was capable of consuming nitrogen after the knee-high stage. So he also believes adopters of this technology are more comfortable with scientific literature related to plant physiology and nutrient uptake.

“It’s been a culture shift,” Raymer summarizes. “Probably one of the big momentum drivers to this split nitrogen movement has been the cost of inputs.”

When he first started in the business, Raymer says nitrogen prices were through the roof and interest in the product was very high. More recently, nitrogen has been fairly decently priced and, for a number of farmers out there, it’s just simpler to put a little extra on. The only thing he thinks will influence those individuals to stop this practice is another price spike or regulation, something he’s convinced is only a matter of time.

“Then there are the farmers looking at every dollar,” Raymer says. “Maybe they have limited acres. They want to maximize the productivity of every acre, as much as they can.”

Quite often, he says, they’ve observed some of the best results on highly manured ground. Since the technology was originally designed for conservation purposes by Oklahoma State University, it stands to reason that it’s well suited to identifying manure application inconsistencies. And although it’s not a silver bullet, Raymer says that on over 80 per cent of the fields the technology has more than paid for itself in either nitrogen savings or yield gains.

“We want to chase conservation, I think that’s good stewardship, and trying to leverage from what we gain naturally,” Raymer says. “But we may not pick up on what we’re really generating naturally until it exceeds the height capacity of our traditional nitrogen applicators.”

Raymer encourages growers to picture the growing life of a corn plant as having all the years of a human life compressed into one. “As soon as it gets into its adolescent years, its appetite is just going through the roof.” If that plant gets short-changed, it will never grow up to achieve its maximum potential, so identifying potential deficiencies and amending those properly with a little spoonfed nitrogen at this time, makes a lot of sense to him. “We’re really trying to maximize for the inputs that we’re putting into this somewhat expensive crop to grow,” Raymer says. “If nitrogen was stable in the soil, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

Echoing the very same sentiments is Paul Hermans, an agronomist for DuPont Pioneer in the eastern Ontario and Quebec area. However, the apparent behaviour of nitrogen in soils located outside of Ontario’s dominant corn growing region adds a twist to these ongoing conversations. He offers some recent Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association Y-drop trials, which were undertaken by the Ottawa, Lanark and Dundas chapters last year to evaluate split rates and timing, and which failed to produce any significant results in those areas.

“Conversely, in southern Ontario, at Pioneer we did some Y-drop trials and they got a bigger response,” he says. Hermans says too that he has found eastern Ontario soils tend to be able to cook up more nitrogen somehow, most likely out of the soil types and their organic matter. “In general I think we can produce more nitrogen out of our soils, so what happens there doesn’t always hold true for eastern Ontario,” he offers.

Which isn’t to suggest the new split nitrogen mindset is only being adopted in the southwest. Raymer says he’s seeing more and more farmers applying 60 to 70 per cent of their nitrogen as pre-plant broadcast, or broadcasting and putting some nitrogen through the planter, and then coming back to sidedress. He also believes relying on soil nitrate tests is now common practice.

To Raymer, it’s clear. If you aren’t actively looking for improvements to your nitrogen application strategy, he says, you’re leaving money on the table.

This article first appeared in the September 2016 issue of the Corn Guide.

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But what if you were a young farmer smart enough to realize this? Could you do something to put the odds back in your favour?

Across Canada, more farmers are trying to do just that. There’s a notable and growing appetite for mentorship in agriculture, and seasoned farm managers are responding to their call.

But is it paying off? Based on the people we talked to, not only can it work for the young farmers, it actually works for the mentors too, helping them on their home farms as much as it’s helping the incoming generation.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA) witnessed this law of unintended benefits very quickly after it launched its Cattlemen’s Young Leaders program in 2010. What started as a pilot in Alberta went national in 2011, and by this August, a total of 84 producers between the ages of 18 and 35 will have graduated.

Jolene Noble, the program co-ordinator, is expecting 60 to 75 applications again this year, yet she still finds it humbling just to read about the individuals coming into their program, even before they ever meet face to face.

“It’s just unreal what some of these people are doing at such a young age,” Noble says. “These are some very powerful young people.”

Meanwhile, however, Farm Management Canada had to give up its STEP UP program in 2013 when it couldn’t find matching dollars to trigger federal support under the Growing Forward suite of programs.

Making it work

Hand-picking the best mentors to partner with its formidable young candidates is more than one person can handle alone, so the CCA has set up a selection panel to get the job done right.

What’s impressive, however, is that when the panel sends out a feeler to see if their mentor might be interested in donating some time to help a young person learn new skills, the mentor almost always responds with a quick and resolute “Yes.”

Noble sees this as proof that people in the industry really are supportive of the youth. They don’t just talk the talk. They walk it too, turning down the opportunity only when they just cannot free up enough time to commit to making the relationship successful.

That’s even before they know what’s in it for them, Noble adds. They’re pleased and often a bit flattered to be asked, of course, but mostly they’re motivated by a sense of wanting to give back.

Even so, the mentors almost always begin to report that they’re getting some very real benefits from the process too. “I get a lot of feedback from the mentors saying that they get a lot from the program,” Noble says. “Some feel like they’re the ones getting mentored.”

Heather Watson, executive director for Farm Management Canada, says no one in her group had really predicted how appropriate the tagline of their STEP UP mentorship program would prove, with its emphasis on “where experience meets enthusiasm.”

Sometimes the established farmer had brought experience to their mentorship pairing and found that the younger partner provided the enthusiasm. This wasn’t unexpected. But then there have also been times it went the other way completely.

“Sometimes the new entrant or young farmer came with a bunch of new ideas or from another province and they had all this different experience to bring,” Watson explains, “and sometimes it wasn’t just the mentees bringing enthusiasm to the partnership, it was the mentors saying, ‘look how great this is,’ and were really inspiring.”

Watson says mentors themselves reported the experience often helped them establish new friendships and reduced the workload on their own operation, since the mentees would come live on the farm for at least eight weeks. More importantly though, she often heard that they had gained a fresh perspective on their current farm business management practices and were able to refine their own strategies during the teaching process.

“One of the big things was taking time for the mentorship, not just welcoming someone to the farm, put them in a corner and say, ‘get to work,’” Watson says. “It wasn’t just an add-on, it was a fundamental belief that they have a duty to pass on knowledge. They took it really seriously. The mentors who stood out really made a place for mentorship as part of their everyday activities on their farm.”

Keeping it real

That said, setting aside time as a mentor can be a significant challenge, warns Mary Lynn McPherson of Strive, a consulting firm. She has facilitated discussions among Ontario farmers in the past, specifically about mentorship, and most seem to agree that an ability to manage their time well is one of the things all great mentors have in common.

Really great mentors not only make room in their lives for their mentees, McPherson says, they also avoid distractions during these meetings.

“When you do get together, you want to be focused and have identified, in advance, an area of untapped potential that you are specifically working to improve on,” McPherson advises.

Making preparations in advance of meetings helps significantly. Watson, for instance, says their program required formal learning contracts between the mentor and the mentee to specifically define what the objectives of the relationship included.

“I don’t know if any other mentorship program goes that far,” Watson says. “We had to get serious because the industry doesn’t readily think of farm business management, especially when it comes to teaching how to farm.”

It’s like anything else, Watson says. If you don’t write it down, then it easily slips away in the day-to-day demands of running a business.

To be successful, she says, the mentorship plan needs to specifiy a time period for achieving specific objectives, describing the goals of the mentorship clearly, and outlining not only how they’ll be accomplished but also how progress will be measured.

“I like the idea of a formal mentorship because it keeps people accountable and it keeps the learning machine going,” Watson says. “It’s nice to learn bits and pieces along the way, but there’s no real goal in sight.”

Noble says that in their program, they don’t have a contract but they do have a road map. She hesitates to tell the program participants that they can’t deviate from their plan at all, because many young leaders don’t have the exposure or experience to know what they don’t know, and their goals will evolve as they learn, perhaps even including things that weren’t very visible at first, such as lobbying and policy-making.

Indeed, the CCA program wants mentees to have five learning objectives, but program participants are encouraged to choose only three of five learning objectives for themselves, and to allow two others to emerge through the advice of the mentor.

But Noble agrees it’s important for mentors to do more than just talk. She encourages everyone in her program to plan for site visits where the mentee can observe their mentor in action (since these program participants don’t move in, like STEP UP mentees did), in addition to attending conferences or seminars together which pertain to their shared interest, and arranging side meetings for the mentee with other individuals they know who have wisdom to offer the mentor perhaps can’t.

“Networking is huge,” Noble says. “What we really strive to do with our mentor selection committee is to open doors that they don’t know exist.”

That only works, however, if the younger partner is ready to walk through those open doors.

Ready to learn

Mentees who want to get the most out of their experiences need to check their pride at the door and focus on humility, Strive’s McPherson says. “Having a teachable spirit is one of the most important things,” she says. “You’re going to have mentors who will put out extra effort if they see their mentee is coming to them with a sense of being transparent and being willing to be human.”

“Fake it ’til you make it,” or, “never let them see you sweat” philosophies don’t make for great mentorships in her experience. A good mentee must be willing to confess that they’ve made mistakes and admit to needing help in order to improve.

Which isn’t to say you must take all the advice your mentor gives you. But don’t ignore all of it either.

“It’s important to demonstrate that you’ve heard and you’ve tried some suggestions,” says McPherson, as a way to keep the mentorship moving forward. If the relationship doesn’t sustain itself in the long term, it’s hard to say if it really ever was a true mentorship. “Mentorship is more than a one off,” she insists. “It develops when very technical conversations start moving into business management and more nuanced leadership questions over a sustained period of time.”

In other words, getting a little crop advice isn’t mentorship, but regular conversations about how to get along better with your boss, who’s also your father, might qualify. McPherson says learning to deal with these aspects of business, and life in general, are far more involved than simply having someone explain their planting practices. Mentoring an individual through these complexities requires talent, which is something many mentors learn the more they practise, and others come by it naturally.

“Some people just seem to have a lot of wisdom,” McPherson says. “Even if they haven’t mentored a lot of people, they’re just very wise in how they thoughtfully and intentionally engage in their interpersonal relationships.”

In essence, mentors help you learn those things that don’t often have clear directives to follow. This is how mentors are different than a business adviser or coach, although many people would use those labels interchangeably.

Watson says unlike these other advisers, a mentor looks beyond surface details and the “whats” of a farm, to the “why” and the “how” of an operation. “When you do these mentorships, you get this awesome story that fills in those blanks,” she says. “You need that context to fully understand what you’re seeing.”

Meanwhile in northern Ontario, RDÉE Ontario has secured funding to launch its own mentorship pilot project. It’s just not specific to agriculture. Pierre Tessier, the executive director, believes this program can do a lot of good for businesses with maybe one to nine employees because these entrepreneurs, like many farmers, are having to do everything themselves. Although they haven’t received any interest from farm business owners yet, Tessier would strongly encourage them to consider a mentorship outside of the agriculture industry.

“The key to mentorship is that it deals with the well-being of the individual as opposed to just looking at the technical aspect of running that particular business,” Tessier says. “You might find a person from the farm business who’s maybe retired, who’s gone all through the hoops of running a farm, so the empathy will be there and some of the knowledge but they will be limited by their own experience. Someone from another sector might say, “Hmm, interesting how you’re doing that, but you might want to try something a little different.”

Of course, this does depend on matching the right individuals, Tessier says. His best advice is to look for a person with the right skills and attributes, but who is also going to fit from a human relations standpoint. This really shouldn’t be overlooked, he says, because some of the most important exchanges in the partnership will be sensitive in nature.

“Sometimes people will tell you things you don’t want to hear, and the person being mentored has to accept that this will be an open relationship where things will be said that may not be pleasing all the time,” he advises.

Mentors with good bedside manner understand that the process is one where you’re building on the well-being of the person themselves, he explains. Ultimately it’s up to the mentee to come to terms with their own sense of who they are and how they should go about their business. No matter what their experience is in business, truly great mentors allow this process to unfold naturally.

The post Finding the right farm mentor appeared first on Country Guide.

Equipped with a 150-horsepower tractor and either a Hesston or New Holland large square baler, McDonald manages over 500 acres of hay with his cousin on their farm based in Winchester in eastern Ontario.

McDonald says they also keep busy baling hay and straw for several other farms in the area. But in recent years, they’ve been asked to bale soybean residue and corn stalks as well. In fact, he now has some customers who specifically ask for soybean straw.

“Soybean straw is always cheaper, so it doesn’t matter if there’s lots of wheat straw,” McDonald says. “If the soybean straw is cheaper than the wheat straw, people will buy it.” McDonald estimates the cost of soybean straw is about 30 percent less per bale. But it isn’t just the cost that has pushed his production beyond 2,000 to 3,000 bales annually, which is more than they can supply from their farm alone. “Some people prefer it not because of price, but because they say it’s more absorbent,” McDonald says. “One guy even says there’s fewer flies with soybean straw than regular straw.”

There’s no livestock on his farm, so McDonald can’t share any first-hand experience using soybean straw himself. But he’s very comfortable describing a high level of expertise in working with it in the field. Compared to other types of straw, McDonald says it’s relatively painless to harvest. “You pick your window and it’s the easiest thing to make,” he says Most of the time there’s no need to rake it. “Well, maybe the odd time you have to rake it, but I mean, if it’s going to rain for a week, who cares, just let it rain and whenever it dries up or freezes a bit, there’s usually a window.”

As the only crop residue he harvests in the fall, he finds the crop benefits from far less humidity in the air and starts off much drier than other straws. McDonald says soybean residue is consistently the driest thing he bales, normally reading less than 10 per cent on the moisture tester

“Frost at night seems to help dry it out,” he adds.

The other thing he likes about harvesting straw so late in the season is that there’s no longer a worry of weeds growing while it’s waiting for you to get around to harvesting. “It depends on the weather but it’s usually pretty clean in the fall, it’s just a patience thing,” McDonald says.

If there’s a downside to harvesting soybean straw though, it’s yield. “Taller beans yield better for sure; you might get four or five bales to the acre with the right combine, but if they’re short beans, and the wrong combine, you might only get one bale to the acre,” he says.

What kind of combine is the right kind for maximizing soybean straw? In McDonald’s opinion, it’s got nothing to do with paint.

“If a guy has a small head and the combine chews the stalks all up, it’s hard to pick up,” he says simply.

But even with the “the right combine,” McDonald says soybean straw isn’t a revenue generator for the cash-crop operation as much as it can be a cost saver for mixed operations in his area. Since fusarium tends to be so severe, most livestock operators will tell him they’re “growing straw” when they refer to a wheat field. “The wheat isn’t worth anything,” he says.

Jaime Grier runs a mixed operation an hour west of Darin McDonald at Lands-downe, and he normally relies on purchasing straw rather than sacrificing profitable soybean or corn acreage. That’s how he came to buy soybean straw from McDonald in 2014 for the first time, since straw from other sources was short and expensive.

“We started off just using it in the pack barn for the heifers, putting it through the bed chopper,” Grier says. “That worked so well that when we got low on wheat straw in the dairy barn, I started chopping it in the hay shed and taking it in chopped up.”

One day when he didn’t have time to chop it, he just tried shaking out a bale. “That worked, so we quit chopping it,” he says. It wasn’t as dusty using a fork in the dairy barn as it is running the bales through a bedding chopper, which is about as dusty as combining the soybeans in the first place, Grier says “I don’t think it looks as nice, but it seems to be fairly absorbent… it’s a little prickly, but the cows don’t seem to be uncomfortable.”

Grier had planned on baling some of his own soybean stubble this year, though McDonald warns it will cause more wear on the baler than cereal straw, though less damage than corn stalks. But Grier says he tried putting in some oats for a cover crop last year and now he finds himself with all the straw he could ask for, not to mention way more oats than a couple of pet horses are going to eat.

Ivan Peterson, who’s dairy farming not far from McDonald in the Osgoode area, says he started baling soybean straw after finding himself facing similar conundrums seven or eight years ago. “We don’t grow wheat, so we don’t have any other kind of straw, and we grow 600 to 700 acres of soybeans, so we have lots of soybean straw available to us.”

On average, most years you’d get one to three bales per acre of soybean straw yield. You’d also get somatic cell count (SCC) problems he says. “It’s not our preferred product, I can tell you that,” he warns. Only when they can’t get shavings do they use soybean stubble for bedding anymore. “Shavings are more absorbent and we seem to be able to get the somatic cell count better under control.”

Grier says that at his place, their somatic cell count is usually under 100,000 and it never changed when they started using the soybean straw or when they switched to oat straw. “But our cows have trainers and tail ties, so maybe that’s the difference,” he theorizes.

Peterson says he gave the soybean straw a chance first in his tiestall operation, and second in the new freestall barn with deep pack bedding stalls and robotic milking units. He agrees that management plays a big role in making soybean straw work on a dairy operation.

“When I milked by myself in the tie-stall, I was between 100,000 and 150,000 SCC all the time,” he says. Before investing in a robotic barn, he tried to keep his tie-stall facility operating by increasing from two milkings per day to three.

That meant hiring help, which also meant giving up some control on the milking process, and that’s when troubles with the SCC count started.

But for Peterson, using soybean straw for bedding up heifers doesn’t appear to negatively impact SCC, and he still sees it as a good fit for the operation. So, when shavings are hard to source, he can use soybean straw to get by, chopping 80 bales at a time, storing it under cover, then moving it by skid-steer on a weekly basis.

“You want to keep soybean straw stored inside because it will not keep outside,” Peterson emphasizes. “Those bales rot worse than anything.”

Next year, Peterson is hoping there will be 100 acres of wheat to harvest straw from and save at least some indoor storage space. But he isn’t planning to retire the soy straw completely either. “We’ll still use the soybean stubble,” he says, “there’s more money in selling straw.”

When late summer and early fall present a period of lower cash flow, Peter-son says wheat can generate some extra revenue and soybean straw can’t. Not that he’d consider selling soybean straw though. “It’s too valuable on the field for that,” he insists. “I would never sell it off my own farm.”

Jim Christie, who has a robotic milking operation on the other side of Toronto in Tara, Ont., isn’t sure soy straw offers that much value in the field. In his opinion there just seems to be so little volume. He’s become much more interested in canola residue after he started baling up soy straw. This was the first year he’s ever grown canola on the farm and he says it looks like he can get twice as much yield from canola as he did from the soybeans. Plus it comes off earlier, for more of a working window into the fall.

Although it’s too early to say how well it will work as bedding, when we spoke, Christie has already observed several advantages.

“You’d think canola would be a lot of stalk, but there’s a pile of pods,” he notes. “We’ve got a bunch of it big square baled and it chops really fine. Being hollow in the middle, it just shatters. Soybean stalks don’t; they stay like little wooden sticks.”

Unlike Peterson and Grier, Christie has to pay very close attention to bedding materials because his cows are housed on a compost pack. The materials he uses to feed that pack have changed, but the process remains the same. Every morning, that pack is deep ripped and levelled and every evening, it gets cultivated. Christie says that since they started bedding this way two years ago, they’ve tried using wheat straw and it didn’t decompose very well.

“Because of that waxy coating, even two weeks after you bed up with wheat straw, you can still pick it out of the compost pack,” Christie says. He still uses wheat straw for bedding up the dry cows, but since he had soybean straw for his heifer pack, he tried adding some of it in early on too. “The shredded soybean straw breaks down in a couple weeks and you can’t even pick it out,” he says. Now he’s applying what he’s learned to canola residue.

The trick to producing nice soft bedding is processing. “The first stuff we did, we put through the harvester,” Christie recalls, “but it didn’t break down as quick as sawdust.”

Last winter, they got a Bale Buster with fine screens. “More or less, instead of chopping it, you’re shredding it,” Christie said. “When you grab hold of it after it’s gone through, you don’t feel any of those stems, it’s nice and soft, and breaks down a lot quicker.”

Christie says he could rely completely on sawdust, which he has experimented with as part of the bedding mix, but he figures it costs five cents per pound with delivery. However, this spring he discovered recycled drywall only costs an estimated one and a half cents per pound, so it now accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the bedding mix.

All that lime keeps the cows nice and clean he says, which could partly explain why using soybean straw hasn’t had a negative effect on his SCC when other farmers have.

In Christie’s eyes, it remains an ongoing experiment on his farm as much as it is on any other operation that’s always searching for the perfect bedding solution.

This article first appeared in the February 2016 issue of Soybean Guide

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Based in the eastern end of the province, Scott Banks is an emerging-crops specialist for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs and he recalls that 2014 was a particularly bad year for white mould in his area.

“As a general rule across the east, white mould wasn’t anywhere near as bad in 2015 as the year before,” Banks says. “My experience has been, in eastern Ontario, we might get white mould one out of every four or five years but in western Ontario, they might get it one out of every nine years.”

The problem is, you never know if this year will be a bad year, and when one comes along, it isn’t quickly forgotten. “After 2014, a lot of guys were swearing off narrow rows and moving to lower populations,” Banks says.

Some farms get hit more often, which set the stage for regional research completed this past growing season by Paul Hermans, an agronomist for DuPont Pioneer in the Eastern Ontario and Quebec area.

Some of Hermans’ customers have experienced heavy mould pressure every year since 2012. His solution was to organize a multi-site study to assess what could reasonably be done to manage the issue for these farms that seem to have a perennial problem with the disease.

Working at 11 different locations in the region, Hermans designed a trial which tested field-length strips of Pioneer’s 91Y01 to check its response to planting date, seed population, row width and foliar fungicide treatment. Every treatment was replicated twice at each location and, to lend some consistency, all were put in with a Cash IH Early Riser 12/23 split row planter.

“This was so I could just shut the 30-inch row spacing and 15-inch row spacing on or off, to make it somewhat easy,” Hermans explains. “If I were to do the same thing with a drill, it’d be too big a plot.”

All the early plantings were completed before May 7 and late plantings were done 10 to 14 days after that. Planting population comparisons included 120,000 and 170,000 seeds per acre. He tested 15-inch row widths and 30-inch rows, and he used Acapela or Priaxor for his fungicide tests. Choosing 91Y01 for the trial wasn’t highly scientific, he says. Although it’s a bushier, branchier plant that performs fairly well in the 30-inch row trials that Pioneer conducts before bringing any product to market, Hermans estimates the white mould tolerance of this particular variety is about average. He mostly just picked it because it is the biggest seller in the area and well known.

“We stuck with one variety because it was all the same seed lot,” Hermans says. “If you look at the size of the trial and all the combinations, if we’d gone to two varieties we’d still be out harvesting those plots.”

There was no selection for high-risk mould environments or high-tolerance management practices. This was just a real field test, Hermans says. Most of the fields in the general area have some history of mould, but only one or two may have seen a manure application in recent history. Most locations were simply part of cash crop operations with good growth potential.

“They’re not what I would call low-yielding environments,” Hermans says.

It was no surprise to him that white mould was discovered again at several locations this year. But some of the trial results did surprise him. By full flower, it was hard to visually differentiate between canopy coverage of the two different row widths. At harvest, soybean yields were two bushels per acre higher in wider rows than the narrow ones. Although early planting improved yields overall, the difference between narrow and wide rows was mostly insignificant. Seeding rate also seemed to have little impact and the response to foliar fungicide was mostly similar between 15- and 30-inch rows as well.

“If you look at data from different areas across North America, they would always tell you 30 inches would not yield as much as a 15-inch row,” Hermans says. “I was most surprised by the 30-inch versus 15-inch row width outcome.”

There were a few factors in 2015 that may have contributed to these exceptional results, he theorizes. The first is that it simply was a tremendous soybean growing year in Eastern Ontario. “Soybean yields were up 15 to 20 per cent above average, which tends to favour a 30-inch row I think,” Hermans says.

That could explain why early planted stands only had an average yield advantage of 1.9 bushels per acre. Another critical consideration is the impact that a frost in late May might have had. “There was one grower who lost 30,000 to 50,000 plants per acre in that one particular field because of the frost, and the early planting dates provided 13 per cent lower stands than the second planting date overall, but you had some variance,” Hermans recalls. “I’m not sure I’d see similar results in another year.”

Hermans says he was also a little surprised by the significantly greater response to fungicide applications than the 1.6-bushel-per-acre response observed in 2013. This time, the average yield of fungicide-treated soybeans was 4.5 bushels per acre more than non-treated soybeans, and there was a positive yield response at nine out of 11 trial locations. Maybe previous fungicide trials which depended on only one application instead of the two recommended rates and timings used in this trial can account for this difference. Regardless of the reason, Hermans says he feels no need to repeat this part of the trial again in the coming year.

“I feel comfortable enough in the recommendations on the planting date and fungicides. I think we’ve done enough work there to show the value of planting early and fungicide control,” Hermans says. Next year he’s going to do a simple population trial across Ontario and Quebec to expand on the results of this year’s population comparison. “It’s a 50/50 split between the 120,000 and 170,000 populations, but I think you definitely have to look at lower seeding rates to help manage mould.”

A farmer’s input

Jon Daly, one of the farmers who participated in the trial, agrees that this is also an area of greater interest for him. If this trial proved anything to him, it was that there doesn’t seem to be any one “catch-all” population recommendation, and he’d be interested to see how lower populations would work for his operation.

“We’ve been planting 30-inch rows already for a number of years,” Daly says. “We’ve been running about 165,000 seeds to the acre normally, so I’m thinking we should try backing off on our populations and saving a bit of money on seed.”

Daly says he would also anticipate that it would contribute to white mould control too. “We do have white mould on our farm, but it’s not so big of an issue that I’m worried about it every year.” Daly says that because his crop rotation is mostly two years of corn, followed by one year of soybeans, his risk of white mould is already low.

“In 2009, we upgraded our corn planter and I didn’t want to buy another crazy-expensive machine to do the 300 acres of beans that we did,” Daly says. “We’ve liked 30-inch rows right from the get-go.”

For Daly, a trial that shows wide rows don’t necessarily demand yield sacrifices is music to his ears. He finds wide rows much easier to deal with, even if it does seem like some years he has to be out spraying from May to August. He’s curious to see just how much a lower planting population would have an impact on his whole system. With two years of corn trash to work through, Scott Banks says tillage practices need to be weighed into the equation too.

“We know you can get as good a yield with a lower population, as long as you’ve got decent soils and you get good establishment. That’s not a huge novelty,” Banks says. “But if you get into a rough seed bed, you have to start bumping up seeding rates. Err on the high side.”

Both Banks and Hermans agree that growers should always be cautious about basing their management decisions on one trial or one year’s worth of data. While Hermans’ results this past year are extremely interesting, Banks says there is a lot of data available which clearly suggests it really is an anomaly.

Other research

Horst Bohner, the soybean specialist for OMAFRA, will tell you the established soybean dogma is that if you go to wider rows, you will give up yield potential, which in turn is best mitigated by planting early. The academic community accepted that after many years of research. Still, any opportunity that could reduce seed costs is worth exploring, and so he shared his most recent effort to close yield gaps using a combination of management practices at the SouthWest Ag Conference in Ridgetown this past January.

By simply adding strip till to a no-till control in the last growing season in Elora, he could improve the yield of his 30-inch-row beans, where the seeding rate was 120,000 seeds per acre, to closely match the yield of 15-inch-row no-till beans, where the seeding rate was 170,000 seeds per acre. Going a little further, by banding phosphorus and potassium fertilizer in those strips, he was able to get a 3.9-bushel advantage over the 15-inch beans. He also tried applying a foliar fungicide with strip tillage and was rewarded with a 6.2-bushel increase over the 15-inch beans. When beans were grown in both 15- and 30-inch rows using strip tillage, the extra fertilizer, and a foliar fungicide, the wide row beans outyielded the narrow rows by two bushels.

That was really unexpected, but Bohner says in another trial location farther north at Bornholm, those same practices could not reproduce these results. At this site, even applying all three strategies could not improve wide row yields so they matched the no-tilled narrow-row beans, and the additional management practices only improved that advantage further with another 4.5-bushel increase.

“I don’t really buy into the story that you have to grow wide row beans to be able to get the benefit of some of the inputs,” Bohner told the audience. He understands the concept that if you grow wide row beans, they’ll have more opportunity to bush, and individual plants are potentially better fed through this strategy than in narrow rows, but he just can’t prove it consistently with evidence. Some varieties are indeed better than others, he confirms, but even when taking varieties into consideration there are still inconsistencies in performance. Says Bohner, “It may well work, but I don’t have good comparisons to show that it doesn’t work in narrow rows.”

This article originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of Soybean Guide

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