Of all the changes Koch sees ahead for Canada’s agriculture sector, we asked her which one would prove the most important in 20 years. “What keeps me awake at night now will probably still keep me awake at night 20 years from now,” Koch says. “Policies and regulations.”

Today’s municipal, provincial, national and even international policies and regulations govern every part of our food chain, and changes to them can threaten farmers’ entire growing cycle, from inputs to sales, she says.

“Will we be allowed access to all of the technology that’s coming?” Koch asks. In the area of technology, change outpaces policies and regulations. We’ve gone beyond GMOs to questions about gene editing and novel traits. “There are exciting advancements underway,” she says.

Canada’s federal consultations have taken a science-based, open view to new technology, but environmental and green movements are pushing back. “That worries me,” Koch says. She points to Europe where, she says, “farmers have lost so many tools already.”

Policy and regulatory changes are probable in areas related to environmental protection and greenhouse gas emissions. “Climate and environmental policy is going to continue to evolve, making it more difficult for us to manoeuvre,” Koch says. Government directives could lower yields. For example, if use of synthetic fertilizer is limited, Koch asks, “Where does food security come from?”

Trade policy is also crucial. “We need to get our unique products into markets that need them, but will policy allow it?” Koch asks. Limiting access to foreign markets lowers marketing options and commodity prices. “I think the pendulum will swing back,” Koch says, “but we will still have those protectionist intentions in the world.”

When farmers’ production practices and marketing options are limited, farm profits suffer. This is at odds with the goal of sustainability, Koch says, which must include economic sustainability along with environmental and social sustainability.

Unintended consequences

Koch is watching consumers’ increasing concern about the “value” of food. Some consumers believe organic food has more value than conventionally grown food. Similarly, they may see plant protein as higher value than animal protein.

Although Koch says these views are misinformed, consumers privileged enough to be able to afford what they see as higher value food will make that choice with their grocery carts, and often try to encourage others to do the same.

When these consumers’ concerns are added to international pressure to limit climate change, Koch says, “We may see some UN regulations or policy signals that create a climate for governments to put in policies with unintended consequences.”

Some of these policies might limit access to seed and pest control technology, or encourage less meat consumption. This can result in higher prices for staple foods — an unintended consequence with a disproportionate impact on low-income countries. Policies that encourage limiting meat interfere with the history, culture and the lifestyle of some societies.

“Who are we to make these decisions?” Koch asks.

Public trust

Farmers need to make sure policymakers understand all the consequences of potential policies and regulations. To do this, Koch says, farmers need to be accountable to consumers and ready to explain “why we do what we do.”

With consumers on side, governments will feel empowered to impose policies and regulations that change farm practices, she fears.

Farmers also need to focus on continuous improvement and operate responsibly. “We need to have consumers trust that we are producing safe, nutritious, plentiful, affordable food.”

Consumers are demanding this, Koch says, “so we better figure out a way to communicate that.”

The need for consumers to trust farmers will still be with us in 20 years, Koch says. And political leaders will still be pressured to implement policies and regulations that limit farm practices to appease consumers and environmentalists. But even knowing this, Koch is still optimistic about the future of agriculture. “I hope 20 years from now we’re seen as the solution, not the problem.”

As the world’s population grows, Canada has the ability to provide food for more people. The question, Koch says, is “Will we be allowed to?”

The post Policies and regulations may be the biggest risk of all appeared first on Country Guide.

In Europe, the debate has another twist. There, farmers are also worried about rising ocean levels. Why?

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S., global sea levels have been on the rise during the last 25 years and are currently increasing by an average of about 3.1 mm per year.

Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but by 2100, it’s estimated that on average, global sea levels will be up anywhere from 0.2 to 2.0 metres, or eight to 80 inches.

A recent Natural Resources Canada report puts Canada’s coastal population at approximately 6.5 million people. In the U.S. almost 40 per cent live in coastal areas, and globally, eight of the world’s 10 largest cities are near a coast.

Sea levels add up to a direct and significant threat to low-lying coastal regions and to transportation, water, sewage and electrical infrastructure.

For farmers, the impact will also be felt away from those coastal areas, with higher sea levels pushing salt water flooding and storm surges farther inland, leading to salinization of the soil and water. That will directly affect soil quality.

Globally, according to the Salt Farm Foundation in the Netherlands, a leading global research centre and authority on saline farming, between 70 and 120 million hectares of coastal soils could be damaged, or, alternatively, could be kept producing.

The European Union (EU) is taking a proactive approach to addressing the issue in its North Sea region countries. Through a program called SalFar, researchers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom are looking at the salt tolerance of crops and at innovative methods of farming on saline soil.

The goal is to create awareness of salinization, offer farmers new ways to produce food, and help farmers create new business strategies for their farms.

For some European producers, farming in salty coastal soils is nothing new, so they’re leading the way by building opportunities to make their unique ecosystems work as part of their farming businesses.

In France, Yannick Frain’s sheep graze on the salt marshes surrounding the famed Mont Saint-Michel. One of the crops they consume is salicornia — also called samphire — that grows in the area, giving their meat a naturally salty flavour.

Salicornia is a spindly succulent with small, brine-flavoured leaves that can be used as a replacement for salt in a wide variety of foods and recipes.

Frain’s land on the bay is a mixture of polder (fields reclaimed from the sea in the 1850s when the dike was built) and salt flats where the tides — the second biggest in the world behind those found in Canada’s Bay of Fundy — still flood in daily.

He’s one of 30 sheep producers in the region who raise and sell the specialty salted meat, and he led the more than two-decades-long process for the unique product to achieve the EU’s AOP certification that guarantees origin and production standards.

“It’s a voluntary certification of quality where you have to accept audit and follow strict production standards,” he said in French during a visit to his farm, adding that half of the farmers in the region are now certified under the program.

That program, for example, sees lambs spend a minimum of 90 days on salt marsh pasture, reaching a market weight of 14 kilograms. Frain’s graze about 180 days, and weigh about 18 kilograms when they are marketed.

Opting for the official seal reduces fraud, improves marketing opportunities with restaurants, butchers and consumers, and perhaps most importantly, has doubled the price for local pré-salé (“pre-salted”) meat producers like Frain.

“Pré-salé is the most expensive lamb you can buy — it’s a product of exception and we can’t satisfy all the demand,” Frain said, adding he also markets both his own meat and that of local producers directly, giving better control over both product and profitability.

One kilogram of pré-salé sells for €35 (C$50) per kg in the local Normandy region and as much as €70 in Paris.

That compares to €12 (C$17) for French lamb produced without any kind of certification.

But although the salty sea is the foundation of his business, Frain also worries about the impact water will have on his future. He needs fresh water for his sheep — 10 litres per day per animal — which is currently trucked in from a source 50 km away.

“Water will be the problem in the future; it is what is hindering our growth,” he says. “I see on my land that sea water is rising and it will go over the dike if nothing is done.”

In the Netherlands, Hubrecht Janse is one of six farmers growing Salicornia commercially. He farms on land in the province of Zeeland that didn’t actually exist 40 years ago — at least, not above water.

In the early 1970s, the Dutch government built dikes and drained large sea areas in the region, creating new opportunities for farmers, including Janse’s grandfather, and they have worked hard to make the land productive for grass, sugar beets, potatoes and wheat.

“Our challenge is to get yield on saline soils so we use gypsum, cover crops and no till,” Janse said. “When my grandfather first started, the field was like low tide, and drainage water was gathered and pumped into the sea.”

But there’s a limit to how much and what can be grown on soils that remain salty, and the farm’s lowest fields are below sea level. Although protected by two dikes, they’re still at risk of salinization from lake water seepage.

That’s why Janse started looking for new opportunities and in 2006, grew his first plot of salicornia on just 500 square metres (0.12 acres).

Today, he harvests daily and sells it to supermarkets, restaurants and directly to consumers, as well as marketing salicornia cosmetic and food products from face and hand cream to vinegar, mustard and mayonnaise under his family’s own Zeeuws Zilt brand.

There can be issues due to fungi, mildew and pythium, which the crop is susceptible to — and to date, no crop protection products are approved for use in salicornia, which is irrigated and grown no till without rotation.

Janse, however, has worked closely with saline plant breeder Dr. Joost Bogemans and his company Serra Marris to develop the crop and establish its agronomics, and now also grows seeds for export.

They’re learning. But there’s more to do. “When all goes well,” said Janse, “we can harvest 15,000 kilograms per hectare per year, but sometimes you only get 8,000.”

The post Salty business appeared first on Country Guide.

Now, farmers need to make decisions on tillage practices, crop rotations, pest management, fertility, precision ag technology, soil health, genetics and a changing climate. And just to make it that much more challenging, each decision overlaps and alters the others in one form or another, almost always with an impact on the primary yardstick — yield.

Increasingly, growers are aware of those overlaps, with the realization that adding more nitrogen or phosphorus in one field could affect other nutrients, crop rotations or, unfortunately, pollution in nearby watercourses. One action can have many different effects.

The use of nutrient inhibitors and stabilizers is not new, as the presence of Agrotain and SuperU illustrates. But their mode of action is different from that of a product like Centuro, dubbed a “next-generation” nitrification inhibitor for the use of ammonia and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) fertilizers.

Centuro slows the nitrification process, increasing as much as threefold the time it takes for the conversion to ammonium and from there to nitrite and then nitrate. That enables growers to apply it two to three weeks earlier in the fall, protecting applied nitrogen in its ammonium form three times longer than without an inhibitor, thus optimizing the nutrients available for plant uptake. Because it reduces the potential for denitrification and the release of nitrous oxide, it also effectively lengthens the planting/seeding season.

The breakdown of urea or anhydrous to nitrite and then nitrate involves many biochemical reactions, most of them understood by growers, says Dr. Rigas Karamanos, senior agronomist with Koch Agronomic Services (Canada). But growers don’t need to grasp the complexity of those reactions, mediated by the ammonium monooxygenase (AMO) enzyme or that there are competitive and non-competitive reactions. It’s enough to know that Centuro works to boost nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) while minimizing environmental impact.

“It blocks ammonium monooxygenase from nitrifying ammonium and, as result, slows down the reaction,” says Karamanos, who’s well known as an authority on soil health interactions across Canada and particularly in the West. “It’s also the non-competitive inhibition in Centuro that temporarily inactivates the AMO. It’s a dual mechanism but the bottom line is that it slows down the nitrification reaction.”

That reduces below-ground nitrogen loss through denitrification or through the soil as leaching.

Centuro’s active ingredient is pronitridine, and multi-site research indicates nitrogen-use efficiency to be 25 per cent higher (based on 12 replicated third-party studies conducted in four U.S. states). Such enhancements enable lower nitrogen fertilizer rates while maintaining the highest yields possible.

The product is now available in Canada and should prove to be a useful addition to growers’ cropping plans and fertility programs, regardless of where they farm. According to Karamanos, the benefit from Centuro is crop-independent, and major western Canadian crops like wheat, barley and canola will be the obvious choices for growers to add Centuro to their fertility programs.

“And in Manitoba, for example, with the expanding corn acres, it’ll be an excellent addition to the anhydrous ammonia in the fall or side-dressing in season,” says Karamanos.

There’s also an anticipated benefit for potato growers in Western Canada, where Centuro is seen as an excellent candidate for crops under irrigation, particularly for those growers looking to explore fertigation as an option. Top-dressing the product is also a possibility.

Reducing leaching

Stabilizing fall-applied N will be a big benefit, yet there are scenarios where stabilizing with spring applications will pay off and it’s a more responsible thing to do. One way of approaching it is to differentiate from situations where a urease inhibitor would be more beneficial. So a product like Agrotain is going to be more beneficial in situations where a grower is surface-applying a urea-containing product in conditions that are conducive to volatilization losses.

From an Ontario perspective, Jake Munroe likes what he sees from Centuro and believes there is a potential to adjust its use to a spring application.

“Corn receives the highest rates of nitrogen and nitrogen represents one of the highest variable costs in corn production,” says Munroe, soil management specialist for field crops with Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). “It’s worth growers looking at any potential tool that they can use to maximize their return on investment from their nitrogen.”

The risk of volatilization increases when conditions are warmer, drier or with residue on the surface and Munroe says those are the scenarios where urease inhibitors have really proven themselves. Nitrification inhibitors are targeted, so they’re delaying the conversion of ammonium nitrogen, which is not subject to loss by leaching or denitrification. Stabilizing fall-applied N will be a big benefit, yet there are scenarios where stabilizing with spring applications will pay off and is a more responsible thing to do. One way of approaching it is to differentiate from situations where a urease inhibitor would be more beneficial. So a product like Agrotain is going to be more beneficial in situations where a grower is surface-applying a urea-containing product in conditions that are conducive to volatilization losses.

The risk of volatilization increases when conditions are warmer, drier or with residue on the surface, and Munroe says those are the scenarios where urease inhibitors have proven themselves. Nitrification inhibitors are targeted, so they’re delaying the conversion of ammonium nitrogen, which is not subject to loss by leaching or denitrification.

The two scenarios where Munroe believes a nitrification inhibitor might benefit would be on sandy soils that are prone to leaching — particularly if the grower is applying all of the nitrogen up front. In that instance, having that nitrogen stabilized by a product that inhibits nitrification can be beneficial, especially under wet weather where there’s an increased risk of leaching. The other scenario would be in heavier-textured soils and a scenario where corn is planted, all of the nitrogen goes on up front and the weather turns wet in June as temperatures start to climb.

“We can have significant losses from denitrification and lose the nitrate-nitrogen — as both nitrogen gas and nitrous oxide — which is a greenhouse gas,” explains Munroe.

Eye on the environment

The potential environmental benefits of products such as Centuro (as well as Agrotain, SuperU and Tribune) are garnering a lot of attention.

“What it really comes down to is that water quality targets are only going to be met by combining different tools and approaches,” says Munroe. “There is some research to indicate that nitrification inhibitors have been shown to reduce nitrous oxide emissions.

For Karamanos, the environmental benefits are every bit as important as those to nutrient efficiency, soil health and ultimately yield.

“We want to make sure that people understand that whatever we offer them is research-based,” he says. “When you have enhanced efficiency and you increase the plant uptake of nitrogen, you decrease the losses to the environment, so it’s an important component of these nitrogen stabilizers in maintaining environmental integrity.”

For more information on Centuro, go to kochagronomicservices.com.

The post In search of better N efficiency appeared first on Country Guide.

There are, of course, differing opinions about what farming will look like 10 years from now. Will farms be larger? Probably. Will weather be more unpredictable? Almost certainly. Will technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence and sensors make our farming easier and more efficient? That’s already happening.

In fact, many of the major trends these experts foresee are already underway and will continue to play out in the agricultural sector over the next decade and beyond.

We’ve spoken to leaders in areas including demographics, rural development, data management, climate, technology, agronomy, soil science, human resources and marketing, and it’s clear to them all that big changes are coming in agriculture, and they are going to make farming a different game very, very soon.

Country Guide will explore some of these changes and trends in greater depth in a series of upcoming articles about farming in 2030, but here’s a small taster of what you might see.

Climate, genetics and regenerative agriculture

Climate deniers will soon go the way of the dinosaurs as there’s global consensus that climate change is happening and it’s going to continue to have consequences such as more erratic and severe weather, changes to agricultural growing areas and expanded areas of adoption for some warmer-climate crops like corn and soybeans. Many feel that’s good news for Canada, which should be able to take advantage of warmer growing seasons if soils can be kept productive and crops developed through genetic advancements to overcome temporary, localized conditions and keep ahead of evolving resistant weeds, pests and diseases.

Soil scientists and many early-adopter farmers are also backing the growth of regenerative agriculture with its focuses on improving soil health through plant diversity using different cropping and livestock integration systems, and with its strategy of building up microbial populations to confer more resilience to the overall farm and make it more productive and sustainable. Regenerative, they say, is the only way forward for farming in the future, and will have benefits not just at the farm level but also environmentally and socially.

Scientists feel emerging genetic technologies have the potential to rapidly advance plant breeding and to produce crop varieties that are more resistant to climate and pest issues.

Until now, as well, farms have focused on expansion through getting more land, but in the future the focus will shift to producing more on the same or fewer acres, and again, regenerative agriculture, technology and innovation will have big roles to play.

Consumers, traceability and food security

The foundation of the ag pyramid will always be the consumer, and trends toward more plant-based diets and toward foods that are more nutritionally dense and flavourful will strengthen over the next decade. Consumers will also insist on knowing how their food is raised or grown. Traceability processes that focus on food production from farm to plate are already well established, and that’s only going to become more feasible and transparent as digitization and integration of primary agriculture and the rest of the value chain continues.

Food may soon carry a climate-friendly label and the global food industry will also be more concerned about food security than in the past.

Will there be more mouths to feed? It’s uncertain. Many believe we will see a rapidly burgeoning world population in 10 years and that agriculture will need to find ways to feed them, although others suggest fertility rates in many developed countries are already in decline (in some cases lower than replacement rate) and that the developing world is beginning to turn that corner too.

Robots and digitization

Technology is the fun area to speculate on as we see the current advances in things such as robotics (autonomous tractors and driverless cars), artificial intelligence (equipment that will make decisions in the field), and digitization of data.

Although technology seems limitless in its possibilities, the biggest hurdle is the issue of managing and connecting all the data so that it will empower farmers and the agricultural industry to make informed decisions, seamlessly and across multiple management platforms and equipment types.

When we crack that nut and begin to de-centralize data, the rewards in terms of efficiency, productivity and profitability will be huge.

There are a few provisos in this future view of inter-connectivity and collaborative technologies, though, and the biggest one is that we still have a long way to go before rural Canada has good internet and wireless connectivity that can make all these advances seamless.

Markets and rural youth

Markets will be more transparent in the future thanks largely to the connectivity that is bound to provide better access to information about the state of crop production worldwide and how that reflects at the market and farm level in real time. Farmers already consult their phones to see a visualization of the markets at that exact moment and compare them against historical averages and trends. The future will be the same, only a million times more powerful.

It’s also heartening to learn, through speaking with rural development people, that the rural population isn’t in decline as many people believe — in fact, it’s growing, just at a slower rate than urban populations. That’s not to say that there aren’t pockets of rural Canada that are struggling, but others (Morden and Winkler in south-central Manitoba, for example) are among the fastest-growing communities in the country.

What will prove vital is to make opportunities for young people to stay and work in rural areas, and to encourage them to pursue careers in agriculture, whether it’s on or off the farm. Again, a lot of great work is already being done in this area, but some experts feel the message needs to reach kids earlier about the agricultural possibilities available to them, especially as technology advances and the industry will be crying out for data management, communication and IT specialists who can basically work remotely from anywhere.

Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: agriculture is an industry bursting with innovation and smart people and it’s going to adapt and help find solutions to economic, environmental, social and humanitarian dilemmas that face the world, as it always has.

Envisioning a day on the farm in 2030

Hank is pouring a second cup of coffee when the in-crop sensors in field 14 send a message via his phone to say the crop is 98 per cent evenly mature and that moisture conditions are now perfect to begin combining. Soil monitors say “go” too, and so do Hank’s weather trackers.

Hank double-checks his equipment availability via his shop monitor, makes a couple of last decisions on segregating the crop by grade, and pushes out a command that sends the driverless combine trundling out to the field, with the automated grain cart following behind.

Hank turns his attention back to the real-time marketing data and sees his closest elevator is tracking the early frost that hit parts of Ukraine last night because it hit a little harder than expected. With the wet fall they’d had up to now, that means some of their customers are going to be looking at alternative supply sources this morning, so the basis signals here are solid; it’s time to get the crop out of the field.

Next, Hank pulls up the farm map that confirms the location of his trucks and employees. He texts Geoff to meet the grain truck at yard two, and once the computerized augers have finished loading the grain, drive the truck to the elevator that will already have received the shipping information and manifest. Although the province still requires actual people to drive vehicles on major highways, Hank wonders how long it will be before that will change, given the incredible safety record of the driverless vehicles and the plunge in insurance premiums it’s triggered.

Hank is so lost in thought, the electronic alarm startles him, but thankfully it’s just the tank sensor on the seeder. He almost forgot it’s been out seeding the cover crop for a couple of hours already and is down to 14 per cent in the tank, but almost simultaneously he’s texted by the seed supplier who has just received the same alert and more seed will arrive this morning at 10 a.m.

“Got it Dad,” comes another text from Ronnie. “I’ll meet the seed guy at storage shed two at 10.”

The combine has been straight cutting the canola/pea intercrop for a while now and Hank smiles at the yield and moisture data for each crop, which are being separated in the field into the divided tanks in the grain cart. The data feeds into his farm management app and the return over cost of production figures are quickly generated. It’s going to be a good season.

Hank would like to do some spraying later this afternoon but he needs to get the second tractor up and running. “Can the dealer fix it remotely?” his wife Sarah asks. “We don’t have to wait for them on site, do we?”

“It’s okay,” Hank says. “They have to come out, but the part is coming out of the 3D printer as we speak. I’ll drop the kids off… we’ll still be fine.”

It’s just as well, Hank says to himself. “The equipment leaves the farm so rarely these days, it’s nice to have a reason for a trained mechanic to actually put human eyes on it.”

“I’m getting another cup. Want one?” Sarah asks.

As she refills their mugs, Hank muses how he doesn’t sweat as much over the weather as he used to, despite the fact that the climate has definitely changed and local weather conditions are more unpredictable than ever.

But since he adopted regenerative ag he’s not as worried about whether it’s a short or long season, excessively dry or wet, or even about weeds, pests and diseases. His soil is healthier because he’s embraced diversity and built up a strong microbial community that does wonderful things. His whole system works together to make the farm so much more resilient and profitable. He was so skeptical about it at first, but he has to admit, regenerative is the way to go if you want to be in farming for the long term.

Besides, the coffee’s hot and tastes good!

The post What the future farm could look like in 2030 appeared first on Country Guide.

Water-use efficiency has been part of agronomy’s lexicon for decades, yet as yields have increased, its definition and how it functions have been blurred and confused. At its simplest, water-use efficiency can be defined as the amount of water it takes to make a bushel of grain. Other definitions rank it as the amount of yield per unit of water applied, or the yield per unit of soil-water used.

For Dr. Hugh Earl, the more scientific rendering is: Water-use efficiency equals total crop biomass divided by the volume of water the crop transpires in its life.

In other words, it can seem pretty remote from anything a crop manager would need to know on a day-to-day basis. But it isn’t.

The total biomass is the dry-weight of the crop with the water removed. In a greenhouse lab, it’s a fairly simple computation: just weigh the pots every day to determine how much water the plants have transpired, then harvest the entire plant, dry it down and measure the dry-weight.

On a field scale, measuring water-use efficiency does become more of a challenge. Anything that affects biomass accumulation will affect water-use efficiency, as will anything that affects water use.

“There are a lot of subtleties involved here — when I talk water use, I mean water used by the plant itself,” says Earl, an associate professor in the department of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph. “But a significant fraction of water use in the field is from soil evaporation, directly. From an agronomic standpoint, you care about both — you care about the soil-water evaporation and also the transpiration by the crop.”

In humid areas, water-use efficiency will be naturally high because the plants don’t transpire as much water. In a drier environment, it will be lower.

Overall, according to Earl, water-use efficiency in agriculture has been increasing steadily since the Industrial Revolution. A lot of different factors are involved, but one reason is related to the fact that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased, which has directly increased water-use efficiency.

In a short-term scenario, higher CO2 levels are actually a good thing for crops because CO2 is good for photosynthesis. That means higher CO2 concentrations are a net benefit to water-use efficiency, for now. When we factor in any temperature increase from higher CO2, not surprisingly, the picture isn’t so benign.

In plant biology, photosynthesis cannot occur without water use. The two are linked. The tendency is to have more water use when there is more photosynthesis, the reason being that in order to get CO2 inside of the leaf, the stomata (the pores of a leaf) must be open. If the stomata are open, water escapes via diffusion. Plants need water for lots of reasons but quantitatively, this diffusion of water out of leaves (transpiration) accounts for essentially all of the water that crops use.

“If you want to have higher rates of photosynthesis you have to have high stomatal aperture and high rates of transpiration,” says Earl. “But there’s a subtlety here where the amount of photosynthesis you get per amount of water use (i.e. the ratio between the two) is actually higher at lower stomatal conductance. If a crop tends to have more closed stomata — and therefore lower photo­synthetic rates — it will produce more photosynthesis per unit water.”

It’s an interesting pattern that takes shape, particularly with the prospect of climate change. With higher CO2 levels, a plant can have its stomata more closed and maintain the same photosynthetic rate or keep the stomata open and have a higher photosynthetic rate. Either way, water-use efficiency is increasing but in the former case, soil water is conserved: in the latter, growth rate is enhanced.

Not interchangeable

Contrary to how the terms are used, water-use efficiency is not the same as drought or heat tolerance. A number of innate characteristics combine in a hybrid to convey a greener and healthier plant, capable of withstanding conditions where heat is high and moisture is low. But understanding the difference between water-use efficiency and drought tolerance is not the key point in the discussion for Peter Johnson. Instead, for Johnson, it’s realizing that as yields continue to increase, we may reach a point where water-use efficiency actually becomes a limiting factor.

“To me, water-use efficiency is a matter of how we make more crop out of a given amount of water,” says Johnson, an agronomist with RealAgriculture. He adds that figures from various sources dating back to the 1950s indicate it takes about two millimetres of water to add one bushel of corn. “We really haven’t changed that number at all. When we look at drought-resistant hybrids, they’re resistant to drought for other reasons. But to make yield, they still need the same amount of water per bushel. It’s not as though they can make the same bushel out of one millimetre.”

Nor have breeders or researchers been able to drop that two-millimetre threshold for producing a bushel of grain down to 1.5 millimetres.

The trend on corn yields — as well as those in soybeans and wheat — is upward, whether it’s due to grower management, the plant genetics or a combination of the two. But at some point, there’s a ceiling to those yields. In order to keep driving them higher, says Johnson, the plant roots must access more of the soil moisture, which is fine provided there’s water there that’s not currently being utilized.

If Ontario typically gets 20 inches of usable precipitation per growing season, that’s 500 mm of rain. According to the literature, that would translate to 250 bushels of corn per acre. If the plants don’t become more efficient with water, then theoretically, that would be the ceiling.

Using Ontario Corn Committee trial sites, Greg Stewart, now a sales agronomist with Maizex Seed, determined that two millimetres of added rainfall is equivalent to a bushel of yield. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but Stewart was trying to determine a similar point with respect to water use, i.e. when does rainfall become the limiting factor? He approached it from the standpoint of attempting to build up general stress tolerance as a means of improving water-use efficiency.

“If the dry climates get drier, unless we have improved water-use efficiency, we won’t grow corn there — we’ll have to grow sorghum or some other crop that’s naturally drought-resistant and yields less. That’s the bottom line,” says Johnson.

“A lot of people think that when they hear ‘drought tolerance,’ the plant must use water more efficiently, but that’s not the case at all,” Johnson says ”I’ve never seen anything to say that we’ve improved water-use efficiency.”

Johnson theorizes that the “stay-green” trait has become a critical part of the package in current hybrids and varieties. “If I don’t get rain at that critical time but I get some kernel set, the old hybrids lost their photosynthetic capability earlier in the season, so if the weather turned around and allowed you to make photosynthate, you didn’t have that capability,” he says. “Now at harvest, there are corn hybrids that are at 20 per cent moisture and the plant is still green from the bottom to the top.”

Many elite growers state that if your corn plant is not green from top to bottom at 30 per cent moisture, you’re losing yield. The British, says Johnson, have found that a grower might gain four bu./ac. per day in wheat yield for every day that plant stays green through grain fill.

“That’s part of why we deal with the drought better. It’s because we’ve built in that stay-green and a compensatory capability,” Johnson says. “Even in 2012, it was really dry, but when you did get a little bit of moisture, that plant was able to make 100 per cent use of it.”

From Earl’s point of view, water-use efficiency is affected by CO2 and temperature, and those affect stomatal activity — opening or closing to allow more or less water to transpire. From a breeding perspective, he suspects the effort has been for water-use to be more aggressive instead of more efficient.

Drought tolerance in corn, on the other hand, has more to do with kernel development at tassel-silking, while in soybeans, the crucial phase is that part of reproductive development between R2 and R5. What really matters is that the crop is actively growing during that period, so that it creates and retains kernels or pods that can be filled later.

“Whether it does that because it maintains a higher photosynthetic rate in the absence of water or it does that because it’s saying ‘even though my photosynthetic rate is low, I’m going to set more kernels anyway’ is not clear,” explains Earl. “That’s something we’re investigating. But drought tolerance is about maintaining yield capacity formation under stress conditions, not necessarily about using less water.”

Eyes west and south

It’s also possible that water-use efficiency has something of a regional quality. In Western Canada and parts of the Great Plains in the U.S., water availability can be an issue. Both regions experience a drier climate and some parts rely more on irrigation, particularly in the U.S. That’s why Earl believes water-use efficiency may be more important in Ontario than in those regions that rely on using additional water resources to aid in production.

The trend he’s seen, although the evidence is mainly anecdotal at this point, is that in the Ontario growing environment, it’s beneficial to have plants that are “gamblers” with water. They tend to have more open stomata and if it’s becoming dry, they tend to keep behaving as though they “believe” that more water is on its way. Earl’s research into water-use efficiency in soybean indicates that this may be the right strategy for Ontario’s environment.

“Basically, if we could convince plants to waste a bit more water, we’d actually come out better — in southwestern Ontario,” says Earl, adding that there is some data to support that theory but it’s inconsistent, year-to-year.

Earl’s group looked at adapted soybean varieties in the Group 0 relative maturity range and measured the water-use efficiency in greenhouse experiments, and then looked at how they compared in the field in irrigated versus non-irrigated conditions.

The relationship was only clear in one year of a three-year study, but Earl found a trend that the varieties with lower water-use efficiency — more open stomata — exhibited less of a yield difference between irrigated and non-irrigated conditions.

In other words, they weren’t as hurt by naturally occurring soil-water deficits. In the other two years, however, there was no relationship between water-use efficiency and variety performance in the field.

The post The water question appeared first on Country Guide.

It’s a problem across the Red River Valley region in particular, where soybean producers are used to tilling to manage heavy clay soils. Because soy is a low-residue crop there’s little left on the surface to anchor the topsoil.

“Tillage is a big problem and in these dry years we get especially concerned,” says Cassandra Tkachuk, a production specialist for Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers Association.

Tkachuk says that following the second dry year in a row, the association is challenging soybean growers to reduce tillage as much as possible to minimize erosion.

“You want to conserve the moisture that’s already there because there’s no guarantee we’ll get a lot of snow this winter, or rain next year,” she says. “Less tillage is not an easy answer but it’s an answer I would like farmers to consider.”

Interseeding

There is another answer being considered south of the border by North Dakota State University researchers.

Marisol Berti, a professor in forages, cover crops and biomass production at NDSU, conducts annual field trials interseeding cover crops into standing soybeans to minimize erosion.

Berti says wind erosion in soy fields is a huge problem in North Dakota and the reason she started the trials in 2016.

“In the spring, the soil starts freezing and then thawing and that change of volume makes the topsoil particles vulnerable to detachment from the soil structure, especially in high-clay soils,” she explains. “It forms a layer of loose particles. So you can lose soil by wind when it’s not covered by residue.

“For every inch of soil you’re losing through erosion you’re losing productivity.”

Berti’s objective is to determine cover crop biomass, yield and per cent cover when interseeded at two soybean reproductive stages, R4 and R6, and to assess any impacts on soybean yield and quality.

In 2016, four cover crops were tested, including a winter camelina, a winter pea, a winter rye and a forage radish.

The study found that soybean quality and yield were not affected by cover crops interseeded into soybeans at the R4 or R6 stages. It also found that interseeding cover crops such as winter peas, rye or radish after R4 is possible because soon after cover crop planting the soybeans begin to drop their leaves, allowing enough light into the canopy for cover crops to become established before winter.

“Interseeding cover crops during the later soybean reproductive stages is a viable solution for North Dakota producers to mitigate soil erosion after soybean harvest when there is not time for a cover crop to have enough growth to cover the soil before a hard frost,” Berti concluded in a report on the 2016 trial.

No-till systems plus cover cropping works best, Berti says, and if winter-hardy cover crops are used, producers can get on the land sooner for spring planting.

“Soils with a live cover crop in the spring dry faster,” she explains. “You reduce erosion because of ground cover and you have the advantage of moving water off the soil faster.”

In North Dakota, because of strong weather fluctuations in the spring, producers have fewer choices for winter-hardy cover crops than Manitoba growers — even though use of cover crops as an erosion management strategy is more common in the U.S. than it is north of the border, and seed is easier to find.

Berti says the Red River Valley is a difficult place to convince people of the utility of cover crops — farmers have been told that no till will make their soils wet and cold. But her team has worked with a farmer using no till and cover crops in the valley who typically seeds five to seven days before his neighbours.

“When other farmers see that, they get interested,” she says.

Managing moisture

Abbey Wick, an extension soil health specialist with NDSU, works with producers on tackling erosion. She says soybean producers across the state are losing productivity due to erosion in April and after the crop comes off — in the so-called “shoulder seasons.”

Her program is attempting to help producers establish cover crops on the “front end” and also the “back end” of the crop year. For producers planting soybeans after corn, Wick’s program recommends interseeding the beans with cereal rye so the rye will overwinter and offer erosion control right into the spring.

They’re also helping some farmers fly on cover crop seed just before soybean leaf drop, which allows the cover crop to take off after the beans are harvested.

Flying on seed can be hit or miss, says Wick, particularly if soils are hot and dry in August. But in heavy clay soils, some farmers have had a lot of luck with the strategy if there’s enough moisture, she says.

“The alternative is to build up residue with cornstalks and cereal rye. I encourage farmers to go that route. If they can interseed cereal rye into their corn or seed it after wheat, they’ve got something to help them manage the moisture and plant their soybeans into it.”

In the Red River Valley, moisture control, not erosion, is the primary reason many producers plant cover crops, according to Wick, so when producers can accomplish both goals with one cover crop “it’s pretty outstanding,” she says.

North Dakota producers are finding that cover crops require more management, but for many of them it’s worth it.

“The benefits outweigh the risks,” says Wick. “They’re learning how to manage their cover crops and get the right species in the mix.”

Berti cautions that the use of cover crops doesn’t come with an automatic return on investment, at least not in the traditional sense.

“Cover crops don’t increase yield in general. They’ll increase soil health and soil organic matter, but you don’t see that in dollars,” she says.

“But they (growers) need to start protecting their soils because they’ll have to invest more and more in fertilizers and other inputs to keep the crop’s productivity. You never get the eroded soil back. Organic matter takes a long time to build.”

This article was originally published in the Oct 2018 issue of the Soybean Guide.

The post Avoiding another year of ‘snirt’ appeared first on Country Guide.

While snirt is an indication that fields are susceptible to wind erosion, however, University of Manitoba soil science professor David Lobb says wind and water have “negligible” impacts on soil erosion in the Prairies when compared with tillage erosion. “If you look at how much soil is lost as ‘snirt’ it’s an insignificant amount. If you lost a significant amount from every field, you’d have every ditch brimming with topsoil and that just doesn’t occur.

“Tillage is the number one soil-degrading process by far,” says Lobb.

Though Lobb’s work looks at water, wind and tillage, he says it’s primarily tillage erosion that’s responsible for soil losses and the lost productivity that currently costs Canadian producers at least $3 billion annually.

Last year, Lobb completed a detailed analysis using soil erosion modelling to determine how much the loss of topsoil from the 1980s to 2011 cost producers. In the 1980s, he says, it worked out to about $1 billion a year. But that figure has tripled in recent years.

Lobb says most estimates fail to account for losses over time. When Lobb’s team accounted for cumulative losses in their soil erosion models, they found producers have lost about $40 to $60 billion cumulatively due to soil erosion since the 1980s.

“You can go to complete zero till, and then even if you have no tillage erosion, that doesn’t eliminate the history of erosion that’s occurred,” he explains.

Because areas that have been severely eroded have very little ability to grow biomass or restore the soil, soil loss causes greater and greater economic losses because crop losses are increasingly severe on eroded land. “Your ability to regain the profit on eroded hilltops doesn’t exist,” says Lobb. By “hilltops,” Lobb means any rise in the landscape, including slight ridges or knolls.

Because producers have higher yields across the board than they did in the 1980s, and field averages have increased, Lobb’s calculations also account for potential as well as actual losses. “In 1981 you may have had a 30-bushel wheat crop on that hill, but now the potential is 50 bushels. You’ve lost a whole lot more because production has changed,” he says.

By Lobb’s estimation, there are two ways to restore lost topsoil. Producers can add organic matter such as manure to eroded areas. Or they can physically move the topsoil that shifted from hilltops to low-lying areas back to the hilltops.

The latter method has shown excellent results in experiments in Minnesota and South Dakota as well as locally, says Lobb, and when his team performed a full economic analysis of the costs associated with the practice, they found Canadian producers could recover the cost in three-and-a-half to five years — “making it the most cost-effective land improvement practice we have,” he says.

Lobb hopes to do more research on this form of soil landscape restoration to assess landscape resiliency in the face of climate change.

Why tillage?

Producers across the Prairies are increasingly using tillage to manage soil structure, explains Yvonne Lawley, a researcher at the University of Manitoba’s soil science department.

In the Red River Valley, where Lawley conducts most of her research, there is a growing awareness that erosion is still a problem and tillage is at the very least a contributing factor. But in many producers’ minds, she believes, the issue is tied to soil compaction — they’re planting and harvesting under too-wet conditions and thus creating compaction, and they’re reversing compaction with tillage.

“We need to find solutions to the problems that tillage is trying to resolve,” she says.

Much of Lawley’s research is focused on crop and soil management, and how producers can grow good crops and also build or conserve soil.

She’s working on studies looking at corn and soybean residue management. With longer-season crops like these, there’s a risk that soil management is taking a backseat to producers’ needs to extend the growing season, planting these crops early into black, dry soil so they can fully mature before the frost.

Lawley’s field study with corn residue management compared the impact of different types of tillage on stand establishment and yield. They compared discing corn residue — standard practice for many producers in the Red River Valley — to using vertical tillage equipment. Her team didn’t find any differences in impacts on the test crops.

What was novel about that study, says Lawley, is how farmers were using vertical tillage. It’s sold to producers from a conservation standpoint because it can chop residue and leave a lot on the surface. But farmers in the study were not using it that way. They were running the equipment with a high-speed disc.

Soil temperature and tillage

Because tillage is widely used to remove residue in order to warm the soil earlier (i.e. so producers can get the crop in on time), Lawley and Lobb agree more research is needed to understand the relationship of soil temperature and moisture to stand establishment.

The impact tillage has on soil temperatures varies based on the residue type, says Lawley.

“In wheat residue we see higher daytime temperatures where we do tillage,” Lawley says. “Strip tillage has the highest daytime temperatures. It creates a rounded berm that has higher surface area.”

Yet soil temperature may have less impact on yields than producers think. Lawley had a grad student working on planting soy into different temperatures of soil — six, eight, 10, 12 and 14 degrees Celsius. “In that study we found that date of planting was more important for yield than temperature. Cold soil temperature treatments were our highest yielding,” she says.

In other words, misperceptions about soil temperature and crop performance may be fuelling tillage practices. But the paradigm that insists crops do better when planted into warm, black earth isn’t necessarily wrong, says Lawley — producers do need warm soils for good stand establishment.

“What my projects are exploring is if there are other ways to achieve warm dry soil other than using tillage, for example planting into tall stubble. It’s more than substituting product A for product B — we’re looking at many factors that need to change to make that work.”

Erosion in the Prairies is a growing problem. That’s “unmistakeable” after the last few springs, says Lawley.

“We’ve had forgiving soils in the Red River Valley, but I don’t know what the tipping point is,” she says. “Even on these soils, which we would consider higher productivity soils, these practices aren’t sustainable. The issues are accumulating.”

The post Tillage erosion costing farmers billions appeared first on Country Guide.

Dr. Evan Fraser wears multiple hats at the University of Guelph, although “hats” doesn’t seem a big enough word. Fraser is Canada research chair in global food security, scientific director of the university’s acclaimed Food from Thought research initiative, and much more.

Fraser is also director of the Arrell Food Institute, whose mission statement conveys the scale of the issues he grapples with: “to transform global food systems and elevate Canada’s place within the global food economy.”

Fraser has been recognized both for his academic research as well as for his public outreach, including his 2010 book, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. He has also developed a highly successful animated white-board video series explaining the global food crisis (see YouTube link further down), and he is a popular public speaker.

Recently Country Guide sat down with Fraser to explore his insights into whether humanity is destined to live on the edge of starvation.

Q. Is it realistic to even hope to feed the world’s growing population?

Fraser: It’s the great irony of the modern world that we produce so much food that two billion people are obese or overweight while 800 million remain undernourished. We produce far too much sugar and fat but we don’t produce enough fruits and vegetables for the world’s population. I’m not blaming anyone, especially farmers, but I am pointing out that there’s a disconnect between what we produce and what we know we should be eating to be healthy.

And there’s a huge equity and accessibility challenge. A lot of people aren’t food insecure because there isn’t enough food. They are food insecure because they can’t access it, or they’re too poor or too remote, or for other reasons. And we waste a third of the world’s food.

And there’s a major environmental sustainability challenge associated with producing food in a way that doesn’t undermine the environment.

Figuring out how to sustainably, equitably and nutritiously feed the world is one of the most important and pressing challenges of the 21st century. There are other major challenges, of course, but this is one of the key challenges for humanity for the next 100 years.

These are big challenges. Consumers, consumer groups, farmers, industry, government policy must all be brought to bear on the situation.

Q. Is the answer bigger and bigger farms, or smaller?

Fraser: Rather than talking about whether a big farm or small farm is the way to go, I think there are basic principles that we need to be thinking about and we need to apply those to farms of any scale. Let’s take an environmental perspective such as nutrient cycling. We don’t want to mine the nutrients in one area and overload in another. Crop diversity and crop rotation, practices that build up soil and reduce runoff, these are agro-ecological principles that farms should be using regardless of the scale.

I’ve been on very, very large farms that do well on these principles and small farms that do very, very well. And the reverse is true. I’m not as interested in the scale of a farm as I am in what kind of principles and practices underpin that farm.

Farmers need to make money, find markets, and do it in a way that maintains soil health and biodiversity, that doesn’t mine the soil or dump so many nutrients that we have water pollution.

And I think almost all types of farms that I can imagine have a role to play in doing that.

Q. Is it all doom and gloom, or are you optimistic?

Fraser: I see reasons for optimism. If there is a message to deliver to your readers it’s that we are not facing a Malthusian collapse globally. We live in a world where there is enough food (although not enough fruits and vegetables) and we waste a lot so there are all kinds of things we can do. We are also living on the cusp of some new technological innovations.

A little over a year ago the federal government released a report from the Advisory Council for Economic Growth…this was a committee of top-tier global economic experts commissioned by the Finance Minister to make recommendations on how to boost growth and create jobs. One of their top recommendations was to invest in ag and food due to the rise in global food demand.

Canada is well positioned to benefit from that rising demand. We have the infrastructure, an educated workforce, abundant fresh water, technology, etc.

They made a further recommendation to grow our food economy and exports by becoming the world’s trusted source of safe and sustainably produced food in the 21st century.

Trusted means we need to invest in technology that allows consumers and processors to look back along the supply chain and verify where our food’s coming from, what’s in it, how it’s produced. Here I think the processing industry and retail sector are leading the charge.

Safe… we need to be ever vigilant that we are maintaining the world’s highest safety standards. We have a great foundation to build on.

Sustainable. I think we need to recognize there is a market opportunity for us to really double down on issues around water use, energy, soil health, and animal welfare, and to aspire to be the best in the world on those criteria and use transparency tools to demonstrate it. There are a lot of economic benefits for us if we do this.

We’re living in a time of rapid transition… there will probably be winners and there will probably be losers, or people who struggle to adapt. It’s exciting but a little worrisome or stressful at the same time, especially for communities who have an established way of doing things.

Q. How do we reduce the amount of food waste?

Fraser: One-third of the world’s food is wasted, but how and why varies greatly from place to place. In Canada, the U.S. and Europe — that is, the rich part of the world, or the “developed world” — most waste happens at a consumer and retail level.

In Africa, South Asia, the developing or Global South, it’s largely farm-level waste due to inefficient storage and drying. In some regards the second problem is easier to solve. These are straightforward engineering problems… better drying facilities, better transportation infrastructure… so it’s easier to get product to market without spoilage.

The issue of food waste in Canada and the rich parts of the world is linked to the fact that most of us don’t spend very much on our food. We do our shopping once a week, and in large volumes, so we tend to waste a lot. I’m embarrassed to say my own family’s practices fall into that category. You buy kale at Loblaw’s on Saturday full of good intentions but then you realize it’s Friday and you forgot to cook it and it’s gone bad. I am as guilty of this as the next person.

That’s a much harder problem to solve. Education around using leftovers and best before dates and engineering-based solutions such as food packaging to extend shelf-life would help.

Q. You’ve developed some innovative educational tools. Which ones have been the most effective?

Fraser: About five years ago I put out a series of short animated videos about food security. These have been watched around 400,000 times and are used in classrooms around the world. So, it is these white board animated videos that have been the single most effective tool I’ve used. I’m working on another series that I hope will be available later this year.

I just developed a card game for grade 12 students that fits with the high school curriculum. It basically tries to introduce students in a fun, engaging, interactive way to basic concepts of agriculture and food security.

I’m also pretty proud of the graphic novel I wrote. It’s all about the power of storytelling.

Q. You helped out on your grandfather’s farm when you were young. Has that influenced your thinking?

Fraser: My grandfather on my father’s side had a farm in the Niagara Peninsula… I spent a lot of summers there, running the strawberry patch, hoeing melons, dragging irrigation pipes around. That early exposure to production and farming was definitely pivotal. My grandfather on my maternal side was an Anglican bishop. My mom has always been extraordinarily community-minded and her form of hospitality is almost always done around food. Farming on one side and food on the other. These are my personal roots.

Resources

feeding9billion
A food security initiative based out of the University of Guelph to provide insight, outreach, and education around issues of food, agriculture and hunger globally.

feeding9billion: #foodcrisis
A graphic novel about food security weaves together gripping story-lines about land grabs, rising food prices, inequality, climate change and more. #foodcrisis isn’t just a work of fiction though. All the elements of the plot are based on the history of past food crises, like the Dust Bowl or the Great Irish Potato Famine, just imagined in our future. Along with its 13 background essays and almost 200 footnotes, #foodcrisis comes with a six-week unit plan based on the Ontario curriculum.

Feeding 9 Billion: The Card Game is aimed at 14- to 18-year-olds as a classroom tool that introduces students to key concepts pertaining to global food security such as climate change, population growth, global trade, and agro-ecology. The game is linked through a series of grade 10-12 lesson plans with the graphic novel #foodcrisis.

Feeding 9 Billion: Introducing Solutions to the Global Food Crisis (YouTube)
Animated White Board Video Series explaining global food security issues. Fraser is planning another series which should be available in autumn 2018.

The post Trust the opportunity appeared first on Country Guide.

It all helps explain why Lobb is on the steering committee of the Ontario Soil Network.

“What happens is that every time there are high crop prices, people have gone out and destroyed the soil,” says the former farmer, long-time soil advocate, and director-at-large of Soil Conser­vation Council of Canada. “It just goes on and on — we never learn — even the Greeks in 350 B.C. had figured out that tillage was a problem and banned plowing on sloping land.”

Lobb then cites the 1920s, when the U.S. and Canadian governments wanted to expand production, encouraging people to move out onto fragile land. At the same time, there was a transition from animal horsepower to engine horsepower, allowing for even greater destruction. Horrendous erosion ensued, with the Dust Bowl and big gulleys opening up in the Appalachians and Ontario.

Lessons were learned and soil conservation programs encouraging better practices were set up north and south of the border. But the next time around, when prices rose in the 1970s, everybody went back to the old ways of cropping every inch of arable land — even, as Lobb says, “growing white beans on 15 per cent slopes, which was stupid.”

Pasture land was ripped up, air-conditioned tractor cabs came on the scene, and tillage was king. Yet once again, serious problems occurred, including the near-death of Lake Erie from algae.

By the 1980s, programs again were implemented, including Ontario’s SWEEP (Soil and Water Environmental Enhancement Program), which focused on reducing algae-producing phosphorus levels in Lake Erie, and that included other soil-saving measures as well.

“We made real progress — we moved no till forward really quickly, and we got a lot of support,” Lobb says. But priorities change, governments change, and people revert back to their old ways. When crop prices went up in this past decade, grasslands in traditionally beef-raising areas like Bruce and Grey Counties were taken out, plowed up and seeded into crops.

Lobb admits there’s a temporary yield boost produced by releasing carbon through tilling previously pastured land, but it goes away fairly quickly, and the quality of the soil goes into decline as the cycle goes on again.

“Now,” says Lobb, with an air of the inevitable, “there’s another resurgence in trying to protect the soil.”

But maybe this time it will be different, because part of today’s resurgence is the Ontario Soil Network, which is aiming to break the cycle by encouraging the adoption of better long-term soil health practices on farms across the province.

It’s a pilot leadership course that includes 40 farmers and 10 researchers, extension and policy staff from the Ontario government and conservation authorities. The goal is to spread the word on decreasing tillage and chemical inputs while increasing the use of cover crops and organic amendments.

The farmer participants are from across the province and represent a wide variety of commodities and organizations. They have already been active at conferences and speaking events.

“We’re in the minority — soil health is not being advocated enough, and we need to make it mainstream,” steering committee member Gord Green says. “The whole idea of the soil network is to have a support system so farmers can share ideas and experiences, and people who want to get into it have a resource network to lean on.”

Green is the past president of the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association and has been strip tilling and no tilling on his cash crop and dairy farm for 25 years. He, too, is passionate about soil health and understands the importance of keeping living roots in the soil. Among the many practices he has taken up is using cover crops to feed his heifers.

Green warns that while there are many farmers doing good things for their soil, there aren’t really good numbers to back them up, and there are persistent problems.

“We don’t have it all figured out by any stretch,” Green says, citing a conference call he recently was on trying to find a way to suppress slugs in cover crops.

That’s why he’s a big believer in research, and why he supports side-by-side trials that are being carried out now in Ridgetown and other places to test the efficacy of the practices being advanced by the network.

The network’s tagline is “connecting farmers for the good of the soil,” and Melisa (Mel) Luymes, the project co-ordinator, explains it as reinvigorating, not reinventing what farmers are already doing.

“Farmers are always learning from other farmers,” says Luymes. “The networks already exist — this is a way of formalizing it and measuring it.”

Ken Laing agrees. Laing represents the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario on the network and owns the 93-acre Orchard Hill Farm, which produces fruits and vegetables for 100 families that participate in his Community Shared Agriculture.

“Farmers pick up a certain amount from researchers and extension people, but when it comes down to it they really want to see other farmers doing something successfully before they’ll stick their neck out,” Laing says. “It’s great both socially and agronomically to get these innovative farmers together to talk to each other — they’re scattered all over, are a little isolated from neighbours and many are considered a bit crazy because they do things differently.”

The course kickoff was a two-day workshop in late March that included presentations, break-out discussion groups and networking.

Highly qualified professionals provided information and resources on what it takes to be a leader and how to put together a compelling presentation. They also talked about leading-edge soil health practices in Quebec and the United States. Participants were taken through the latest available research and programs, as well as how in-field trials are bolstering confidence in research results.

The project itself is a bit groundbreaking, since the participants themselves actually mapped out how they were going to operate during the ensuing 10 months.

Luymes is adamant on the point that the course “has to be farmer-driven. It’s the first and foremost principle here.”

It seems to be working. In the first two months of the network’s existence, 40 participants spent 970 hours hosting 15 events like crop tours and open houses, speaking at 24 events like conferences and workshops, engaging in 225 one-on-one conversations and talking to 22 small groups. Members of the group also use social media — especially Twitter — and participate in webinars. A total of 2,285 farmers and 1,614 industry representatives were engaged during this time.

The network is administered by the Rural Ontario Institute and supported financially by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). The Ontario Soil & Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA), Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario (IFAO), Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO), and Farm & Food Care Ontario, with the Soil Conservation Council of Canada (SCCC) also as supporters. A total $60,000 is being spent over two years on the project, which wraps up in February 2018.

Laurent (Woody) Van Arkel, another steering committee member, has cash crops and livestock near Dresden. He started a group called Cover Crops Anonymous about five or six years ago.

“It’s pretty informal — there are about 10 of us who get together because someone has a problem or a question,” Van Arkel says. The afternoon meetings are usually in someone’s kitchen, a church basement, or the boardroom of the grain elevator — wherever they can get space on short notice.

Van Arkel sees the network as an expansion of the work he’s been doing, and thinks it’s a great way for “the guys who are quietly doing their own thing, and putting them where they can best use their talents.”

Having a wider group of people chatting with their neighbours in one-on-one conversations or in small groups across the province means people like him don’t have to take as much time away from their farms for meetings.

Van Arkel is on the speaking circuit giving presentations at the Southwest Agricultural and Innovative Farmers conferences, and he regularly gets phone calls and Tweets about what other farmers’ cover crops are doing and how they can do better. With Twitter, he says there’s a lot of give and take, and he gets back as much advice as he gives out.

The network will continue providing resources and support for the participants for the next few months. A website has been set up at ontariosoil.net where there are explanatory videos of different soil health practices, upcoming events are posted and farmers can plug into the knowledge network.

As for breaking the cycle of making higher profits by destroying the soil, Don Lobb says that, this time, we have to get it right because there’s no more land for expanding crops. On the upside, he adds, we’re starting to learn how to build up the soil while we’re growing crops, which is a new twist in the ongoing battle to protect this crucial resource.

As for the future of the network, there will be a course graduation and stakeholder meeting in February 2018 at which Luymes hopes to have a wide array of industry, government, academia and farmer participants exchanging ideas, evaluating the experience — and discussing next steps.

The post The news on soil health appeared first on Country Guide.

The numbers are indeed staggering.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, Africa’s population will hit 2.5 billion by 2050, and the United Nations estimates that Africa’s share of the global population will increase from 16 per cent in 2015 to 25 per cent in 2050 and 39 per cent in 2100.

These statistics certainly do underscore the need for additional food. But what about the other half of the equation. Yes, demand will rise. But will that demand have to be met by imports?

Some African farm leaders are convinced that agricultural development on the continent will see Africa, led by South Africa, feed itself in the decades to come, meaning it will actually reduce its reliance on the global community for its food security.

Realistically, it may set its sights even higher.

“Agriculture accounts for 65 per cent of the continent’s employment,” said Dr. Klaus Eckstein, CEO of Bayer South Africa, at a recent conference of agricultural journalists in South Africa. “Africa has the potential to be self-sustaining as well as to feed the world. We can produce crops that match the standards of leading countries around the world.”

His words were echoed by Dr. John Purchase, CEO of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, who stated that revitalizing the agriculture and agri-processing value chain is at the top of nine major focus areas for growth in the country.

It’s not easy farming in South Africa, he added, citing political problems, land reform policies, and water scarcity as significant challenges. The current drought across the Southern and Western Cape areas of the country, a major horticultural production area, is the worst in more than a century, for example.

“Africa is where big population growth will come in the next 35 years… it’s a massive opportunity for agriculture but also a critical risk if we don’t get it right,” Purchase said. “For example, how we manage our water is critical to the future, but we have diversity in South Africa where we can produce a whole range of crops from tropical through to livestock production.”

Progress is already being made with South African farmers and marketers starting to grow sales on their own continent instead of in Europe or elsewhere.

According to Purchase, Africa has become a growing destination for South African agricultural exports since the global economic downturn in 2008 that affected the country’s long-established export markets, particularly in Europe.

“By far since 2008, Africa is our destination; more than 50 per cent of our agricultural export goes into Africa,” Purchase said, attributing a large portion of this success to South African supermarket chains expanding into neighbouring countries like Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mauritius and Zimbabwe.

The change is particularly evident in the fruit and vegetable sector. According to the South African Produce Marketing Association, Africa has surged to number two in the top five major export markets for African fruit, behind only the European Union, and ahead of Asia, the Middle East, United Kingdom and Russia.

In vegetables, Africa is also the second most popular destination, accounting for just over 34 per cent of all fresh vegetable exports from South Africa; 83 per cent of potatoes, 80 per cent of carrots, 78 per cent of garlic, 76 per cent of ginger, 54 per cent of cucumbers and 34 per cent of tomatoes stay on the continent.

“Africa is the only part in the world where land can still be brought into production; the countries with the biggest growth potential in Africa and potential for South African farmers are in western and eastern Africa,” said Lindie Stroebel, CEO of the Produce Marketing Association. “Local procurement has become a priority for some supermarkets to address complications of transportation and border crossing.”

This evolution is evidence of the forward-thinking attitude of many leading farmers in South Africa despite the risks posed by infrastructure challenges, climate change, government policies and a growing number of brutal attacks on predominantly white farmers in the country.

Brylene Chitsunge is one such example, having bought her 1,000-acre farm near Pretoria in 2010. The feisty black farm leader raises Kalahari red goats, a breed of African cattle called Nguni, pigs, ostrich, rabbits and chickens, as well as growing vegetable and fruit crops.

Innovation and collaboration are the name of the game on her farm, where she’s willing to try just about anything to see if it will succeed, with the rule being “everything has to produce.”

Chitsunge’s small tomato crop now fills 10 greenhouses and is sold to over 200 restaurants as well as in leading South African retail chains like Pick n Pay and SPAR. She invented an overhead spray system for her greenhouses to help her produce a consistent, quality crop — each 1,000-plant greenhouse will produce about 10 tons of tomatoes.

“Quality, sustainability and appearance are very important,” Chitsunge said, adding that technology can help farmers add value. “I have cameras to stream video of my veggie fields or my chickens laying eggs for customers and I can remote-view my farm from anywhere.”

She’s also an outspoken advocate for advancing women and small-holder farmers, and for the need for education to build Africa’s agricultural future.

“It’s a value train, not a value chain,” Chitsunge says. “Education is so important, and if we get that right, it’s time for Africa,” she said.

The Schoeman family has been growing citrus in South Africa for almost a century, and the family business ships oranges, lemons, and mandarins from its almost 3,500 acres northeast of Pretoria to 32 countries around the world, including Canada.

They’re in the midst of building a new pack house to accommodate new plantings of mandarins and lemons, and are transitioning towards bio-friendly production, always with an eye to the future.

“If my neighbour’s farm goes up for sale, I would buy it; we have such a strong belief in South Africa,” said family patriarch Kallie Schoeman, a former South African national farmer of the year whose self-proclaimed motto is: “Get bigger, get better or get out.”

ZZ2 is one of South Africa’s largest produce companies, growing tomatoes, avocados, mangoes, and more, as well as raising stud cattle and weaners. The family-owned business employs almost 10,000 people in primary agriculture throughout South Africa, and uses a consistently updated framework to lead company development for the next 12 months.

That includes constantly adding new crops, new land, new technologies, and new markets as well as continually seeking out new opportunities.

For example, ZZ2 recently added almost 30 acres of cherries which strategically ripen about the time when British Columbia’s crop ends — making the company the only one in the world with fresh cherries for a six-week period, said ZZ2’s CEO Tommie van Zyl.

“We never thought we’d have a product that was so wanted it is being flown out — they’re flying to Hong Kong right now,” van Zyl said.

It’s a pattern that is repeated more and more, with horticulture creating models for other farmers to follow.

“We are building ZZ2 for the future, and the way we see things developing, it will represent in the future what South Africa looks like,” said van Zyl. “The future is more important than the past… we are inspired by what we think we can become.”

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