Reading Time: 5 minutes Dallas Timmerman farms in the Tiger Hills around Treherne, Man., and sometimes those tigers need training. “We have a lot of hills and sometimes you need to be aggressive with them,” he says. Timmerman’s chair and whip are a Leon scraper and Versatile 4WD. He started training his hills over a decade ago, working on […] Read more

Timmerman trains the Tiger Hills of Treherne
A Manitoba farmer has seen major yield improvement by recapping his hills with topsoil from his lower land

A change in equipment vs. a change in mindset
Refocusing attention on soil health is the driver behind newer technologies
Reading Time: 4 minutes A number of years ago, Carl Brubacher looked at his soils and realized something had to change. He’d been relying on a full complement of tillage passes and he could sense his topsoil levels were becoming shallower. What he wanted was to find a way to avoid falling into the trap the U.S. has experienced, […] Read more

Avoiding another year of ‘snirt’
North Dakota farmers and researchers are finding success in controlling soybean field erosion by planting cover crops
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Snirt” became a buzzword in Prairie agricultural journalism in 2017 and 2018, and for good reason: the dirty snow lining ditches along highways was a telling indicator that there had been a soybean field there last season. It’s a problem across the Red River Valley region in particular, where soybean producers are used to tilling […] Read more

Going underground for soil ecology
Soil is far more than just dirt. Are you nurturing the organisms that help it grow great crops?
Reading Time: 5 minutes A warm, early-July breeze blew through a wheat field in northeastern Saskatchewan, not far from Nipawin. The heads had just emerged and were still green, but the field was taking on that fuzzy look that you typically get with a fresh, bearded cereal. This field was unusual, however, because even though you couldn’t see it, […] Read more

Working together to find solutions to algal blooms
Yes, farming is part of the Great Lakes pollution story, but let’s get the facts straight
Reading Time: 9 minutes Once again, agriculture in Eastern Canada is under fire, this time in the Great Lakes basin. Already bearing media scorn for neonicotinoid seed treatments and biotech innovations, now farmers are getting blamed for Great Lakes pollution. To be specific, the type of pollution in the headlines is eutrophication. It’s a phosphorus enrichment of waterways, and it […] Read more