A team of scientists have just developed exactly that: a dynamic model that predicts which photosynthetic manipulations to plants will boost the yields of wheat and sorghum crops.

“We have developed a reliable, biologically rigorous prediction tool that can quantify the yield gains associated with manipulating photosynthesis in realistic crop environments,” said Dr. Alex Wu, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP) and the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia.

Plants convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into food through photosynthesis and several studies have shown that this vital process can be engineered to be more efficient.

“Until now, it has been difficult to assess the impacts of these manipulations on crop yield. This prediction tool will help us to find new ways to improve the yields of food crops around the world.”

Dr. Wu, the lead author of the paper published this week in the journal Nature Plants, said that this modelling tool has the capacity to link across biological scales from biochemistry in the leaf to the whole field crop over a growing season, by integrating photosynthesis and crop models.

“It is a powerful tool to assess and guide photosyn­thetic manipulations and unravel effects that confound the relationship between photosynthetic efficiency and crop performance,” he said.

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The hormone supports the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots, thus encouraging plants’ growth — even under the challenging conditions found in space.

The idea has been bounced around for a while now — of one day establishing colonies for people to live on the moon or on other planets. Such visions raise the question of how to sustainably provide food for the people in space.

One possible answer is to cultivate crops. However, the soils on the moon and on other planets are surely lower in nutrients. The alternative — transporting nutrient-rich soil and fertilizers up into space — comes with a high cost.

When looking for a possible solution, the research group working with Lorenzo Borghi of the University of Zurich and Marcel Egli of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts concentrated on the process of mycorrhiza, a symbiotic association between fungi and plant roots.

Their experiments revealed that microgravity hindered the mycorrhization and thus reduced plant uptake of nutrients from soil. But the plant hormone strigolactone can counteract this negative effect. Plants that secreted high levels of strigolactone and fungi due to treatment were able to thrive.

“In order to get crops such as tomatoes and potatoes to grow in the challenging conditions of space, it is necessary to encourage the formation of mycorrhiza,” summarizes research leader Lorenzo Borghi.

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These growth-management processes are critical for all organisms, because without them, cells can proliferate out of control — as they do in cancers and bacterial infections.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia, along with colleagues from the universities of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, say plants use this messaging system to survive under harsh conditions or to compete successfully when conditions are favourable.

It tells them when to grow, when to stagnate, when to flower, and when to store resources — all based on the prevailing conditions. Understanding how it all works could enable innovations in agriculture, forestry and conservation as climate change takes hold.

UBC botany professor, Geoffrey Wasteneys says the system is driven by a protein called CLASP. The protein, found in plants, animals and fungi, plays an essential role in cell growth and division by co-ordinating the assembly of filaments within cells.

Their study published in the journal Current Biology reveals that production of CLASP is reduced by a plant-growth hormone called brassinosteroid.

Researchers say the findings could be of particular interest to agriculture as dry conditions have hit several crop-growing regions around the world this year, including the Prairies.

“One of the aims of the future is to be able to have smart plants that can sense their environment and adjust their development, so that they will reliably produce crops under increasingly adverse conditions,” said Wasteneys.

The post Calling all plant cells appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Amir Farooq, crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and one of the speakers at a soil fertility update in Brandon Jan. 30-31, argued that high pH soils would need a prohibitively expensive amount of elemental sulphur to lower levels.

The province also has patches of low-pH acidic soil east of Brandon, through the Riding Mountain and Duck Mountain regions and in the eastern edge, according to Manitoba Agriculture.

For most of agricultural Manitoba however, pH sits neutral or climbs above 7.4. Alkaline soils are the norm in most of the Interlake, as well as much of the far southwest Red River Valley and areas around Dauphin.

Sometimes, for certain crops, acidic soils can be an advantage.

“Potato farmers, they like acidic soils,” Farooq said. “They like low-pH soils, like close to Carberry. There are some special crops like blueberries, they also need acidic soils.

“If you want to grow the crops like potatoes and special crops, try to find those fields that already have pH low,” he added.

Other provinces echo Farooq’s message. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs encourages farmers to choose already acidic land for blueberries, since soils with pH over seven tend to resist change.

“Any changes would be short lived and the pH would soon return to where it started,” their horticulture page states.

Free carbonates like calcium and magnesium also block efforts to lower pH, they add, since those elements tend to react with acidifying elements, cancelling them out.

Ontario’s sulphur guidelines estimate that it would take 312.26 pounds of elemental sulphur an acre to lower pH by one point on sandy soil, a number that goes up to 669.14 on sandy loam and 981.4 for loam soils.

That’s still lower than studies out of South Dakota State University in the early ’90s, which found that lowering pH from 7.8 to 6.6 took 4,000 pounds per acre of sulphur, and that it took double that, 8,000 pounds per acre, to jump further down to pH 5.7 in the first three inches of soil.

Farooq pointed to the South Dakota study during his talk Jan. 30.

Banding phosphorus and micronutrients may be a more economical way to handle alkaline soils, the Manitoba Agriculture employee said. Fertilizer bands are already acidic and could cross over the advantages of acidic soil in the area directly around the seed row.

Farooq doesn’t advise doing away with sulphur fertilizer on high-pH soils, despite the dim outlook for long-term pH changes. Crops like canola can often use a sulphur boost, he said.

“I think pH is very crucial to use all these nutrients wisely, so I think this is a message to farmers if they want to improve their soils and if they want to improve their nutrient efficiency, they should consider the pH level,” he said.

What’s the problem with high pH?

High pH may limit available phosphorus, according to both Farooq and Tom Jensen of the International Plant Nutrition Institute.

The same South Dakota study reported that available phosphorus rose from 27 parts per million to 52 as sulphur was added and pH dropped from 7.8 to 5.7.

“Theoretically, if you lowered pH, you could manage phosphorus better, but you can’t afford to put on that much elemental sulphur,” Jensen said. “It’s amazing how good of crops we grow on higher pH.”

High-pH soils may face phosphorus and nutrient issues, he said, but acidic soils may face toxicity issues.

Jensen tagged a six to seven pH as ideal for phosphorus availability. The nutrient tends to get tied up with iron and aluminum in more acidic soils and calcium as pH slides towards alkaline, the room heard.

Fungal-bacterial balance may also skew in favour of bacteria in high-pH soils. Mycorrhizal fungi are a known asset for certain crops to access phosphorus. Alkaline soils, however, are a less friendly environment for fungi as a whole, Jensen said, while bacteria thrive at higher pH.

Farmers may also want to balance salinity issues before dumping on the sulphur, Farooq said. The researcher pointed out that acidifying soil, while it encourages microbial activity and increases available phosphorus, may also increase salinity risk.

The post Low, high or in the middle, soil pH affects your farm appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

According to researchers at the Experimental Lakes Area, operated by Winnipeg’s International Institute for Sustainable Development, that’s because many of the algae responsible for the harmful blooms can turn around and fix their nitrogen from the air. Instead, they say you would need to concentrate on limiting phosphorus loading into the surface water bodies.

• Read more: The phosphorus conundrum: low soil levels meet Lake Winnipeg pressures
• Read more: Phosphorus recovery can complement source reduction

This is according to a recently published article in Springer’s Ecosystems journal that presents the results of a 46-year whole-ecosystem experiment.

Since 1969, researchers have been artificially manipulating a lake by adding varying amounts of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus to investigate the nutrients responsible for algal blooms. Throughout the experiment, researchers have been continually adding phosphorus.

However, 40 years ago, researchers began reducing the amount of nitrogen they were adding to the lake, and from 1990-2013, they cut artificial nitrogen loading to zero. Despite these dramatic cuts in nitrogen loading, algal blooms continued to cover the lake.

“We have been researching the role of artificial nitrogen in algal blooms for almost 50 years now, and these latest results clearly demonstrate that ceasing nitrogen loading into lakes has little effect on the size or duration of algal blooms,” said Scott Higgins, lead author on the paper.

The research team says the study clearly shows that phosphorus should be the key target when tackling the issue, especially with limited resources.

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Soil naturally absorbs carbon from the atmosphere through a process known as sequestration which not only reduces harmful greenhouse gases but also creates more fertile soil.

Better soil management could boost carbon stored in the top layer of the soil by up to 1.85 gigatonnes each year, about the same as the carbon emissions of transport globally, according to a study published in Nature’s online journal Scientific Reports.

“Healthier soils store more carbon and produce more food,” Louis Verchot of the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.

“Investing in better soil management will make our agricultural systems more productive and resilient to future shocks and stresses.”

• Read more: Measuring tillage impact
• Read more: Farmers’ focus must shift from yields to soil health

Using compost, keeping soil disturbance to a minimum and rotating crops to include plants such as legumes can help restore organic matter in the soil, Verchot told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The extra carbon that could be stored from rejuvenated soil is equivalent to three billion to seven billion tonnes of planet-warming carbon dioxide, he said.

“The U.S. emits around five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. So (emissions) equivalent of a major economy could be sequestered in soils each year with changes in farming practices,” he added.

The study found the United States has the highest total annual potential to store carbon in the soil, followed by India, China, Russia and Australia, if soil management is improved.

• Read more: Degraded soils cost farmers billions annually

Carbon sequestration could be increased intensively in parts of southern Africa, Ethiopia and Sudan too, Verchot said in a phone interview.

The Earth’s soils contain more carbon than the planet’s atmosphere and vegetation combined, but when land is overexploited or degraded,. trapped carbon is released back into the atmosphere, resulting in planet-warming emissions.

About a third of the world’s soils are degraded because of soil erosion — the loss of the topsoil by wind, rain or use of machinery — and other practices, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Agriculture, forestry and changes in land use together produce 21 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them the second-largest emitter after the energy sector, FAO said.

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Jen Unwin of Nature’s Perfect Plant Food said the ability for Canadians to grow their own marijuana could be a “huge boon” to small input providers, as consumers learn more about indoor plant production.

“In eight short months you’ll be able to grow your own cannabis for recreational purposes… and the question you have to ask is, how do you want to do that?” she asked would-be growers during a presentation at Hempfest Cannabis Expo in Winnipeg earlier this month.

This is the first time the family-run business has reached out directly to recreational cannabis growers in its more than two decades of existence, but Unwin said that with tens of thousands of Canadians poised to begin legally growing their own cannabis, the market for organic fertilizer could see massive growth.

And while she has little doubt that some marijuana growers are already purchasing her vermicast fertilizer — produced just south of Steinbach — the company can now actively market to that demographic.

“Legalization is going to create new customers for us as organic fertilizer producers,” Unwin said. “I think people who maybe would have never done this before are now feeling safe and ready to grow their own if they want, and I think that’s a huge thing… it’s going to open up some doors.”

Unwin said that while many people are concerned large companies and giant pharmaceuticals will dominate the recreational marijuana market, there will always be interest in organic production methods. She hopes that she can help facilitate that interest.

“I would like to see the power put back in the hands of individual growers and individual people,” Unwin said. “I want to help give them a choice, so they can choose to do this themselves… that’s the joy of it.”

Paul Martin of Green Beaver Genetics is already growing cannabis organically and agrees there’s going to be a surge of interest in growing organic cannabis as soon as prohibition ends next summer. He’s also a big fan of vermicast fertilizer.

“One of these great things about these worm castings is they just will not burn your cannabis plant at any stage,” Martin said. “And one of the joys of worm farming is that you can bring it into your house or your basement or even your grow room.”

In layperson terms, Unwin describes vermicast as “worm poo,” but she is quick to add it’s not a gross or stinky process.

“Vermicomposting is so effective because of the high bacterial interaction that is going on between the worms and the environment they live in,” she said, adding unlike anaerobic decomposition processes, the aerobic vermicomposting process generates carbon dioxide, not methane.

“Vermicast is then the end product of composting with worms,” she said.

At least one person who listened to Unwin’s presentation was prepared to give vermicast fertilizer a try.

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to put worms in my house,” said David Wiebe, who wasn’t familiar with vermicomposting prior to the presentation. “But if someone else makes it… it sounds like a good thing to try out.”

Unwin adds that conventional agriculture is also looking at vermicomposting more seriously.

“We’ve been able to introduce this technology… into a lot of co-operating cattle operations, so they are doing this on their sites now,” she said. “So really once the ball gets going the supply is endless.”

She and her business partner have also expanded to new sites, away from their operation near Steinbach.

“At the end of the day, we’ve been able to bring more understanding to the idea of organic,” she said. “And now by talking to cannabis growers we can do more of that.”

The post Expansion possible as cannabis market grows appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

This was about 40 acres, once slough, and drained more than 30 years ago, explains Brenda who farms southwest of Morden in the Kaleida area.

• Read more: A watershed moment

They got better crops off it years ago, but in the last while only two or three out of every 10 years were productive. It was too wet the rest of the time.

“It’s always been a marginal piece of land,” she said.

Ultimately, the couple decided the inputs trying to farm it were wasted and to convert it back to slough. They signed on to a project two years ago with the Pembina Valley Conservation District to have it restored to the wetland it once was.

“It was broken up years ago. It shouldn’t have been,” said Seward who is also a board member with the PVCD.

The land was first drained and cultivated about 30 years ago, around the time a road running through it was being built, she added.

2017 has been the first year the site has had water on it since completion of the wetland restoration, which was designed and executed by the PVCD.

“It’s amazing how quick the bulrushes have grown around the edges,” said Seward. It’s been a bit weedy but they’ll eventually seed it to slough grass and hay it.

“It won’t be long and the grass area will be filled in, hopefully.”

The parcel may not sound very large, but this project is significant in several ways, says PVCD manager Cliff Greenfield.

It adds to another adjacent parcel owned by Cliff’s brother that was previously put under wetland restoration after he also saw the land better off this way and was supported through incentives offered through Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation to have it converted. It was after seeing what was involved on this land that Cliff and Brenda decided to do the same.

The slough encompasses both parcels of land and together make about a quarter section, said Greenfield.

PVCD’s main objective in seeing this happen was to stem erosion they were seeing on land downslope from here. This agreement to now hold water will go a long way to achieving it, he said.

“The location of that restoration is above the Pembina River, and there’s a fair bit of drop down to the river, he said. “The way to treat that kind of erosion is through holding water back on the land. Those acres with maybe four or five feet of water put back on it has a pretty significant impact in terms of managing the run-off.”

“It’s signifcant enough in size and volume to definitely slow down that flood peak and reduce erosion downstream.”

What’s also significant is where this wetland restoration has taken place, he added.

“We do a fair number of water retention projects with farmers in areas who are OK with it, but typcally those would be ravines that would not have a lot of agricultural use anyway,” he said.

“This is a area where they were trying to cultivate the land and so that is significant. In the flatter Red River Valley it’s rare to find those locations where it’s maybe not suitable to cultivation and landowners would consider a conservation project like this,” Greenfield said.

He said there’s likely many parcels of land that could be considered for the same type of project.

“Nowadays tile drainage and even surface drainage can maximize productivity but there are areas where even with that technology it’s still not guaranteed a crop eight or nine or 10 years out of 10.

“It makes sense to put your effort into the good land, land you can make productive nine years out of 10 and do something different with the land you’re not so succesful with. It could be a conservation project like what we’re talking about or even into permanent cover that can handle more flooding than a cultivated crop.”

Seward said they feel they did the right thing, considering what they were losing trying to farm this piece of land and the positive impact this will have.

“Restoring these two Seward wetlands reduces erosion and flooding downstream,” said chairman for PVCD’s Lizard Lake subdistrict, Walter McTavish.

“This benefits everyone in the watershed, including the municipality, as downstream roads are less at risk from washing out.”

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That’s not a new idea, but it has been driven home by 18 years of research spearheaded by researcher scientists Alan Moulin and Taras Lychuk of Brandon’s Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research station.

From 1994-2003, the pair’s team cross-compared organic, reduced- input no till, and high-input management with three six-year rotations. There was a low-diversity rotation of wheat and summerfallow, plus one year of canola, diversified annual grains (which mixed canola, fall rye, peas, barley, flax and wheat) and an annual-perennial mix, which took canola, wheat and barley and finished off the rotations with three years of alfalfa.

High inputs largely echoed conventional agriculture, while reduced-input systems applied fertilizer according to soil tests and yield goals and herbicides were applied to manage weeds.

Where’s the balance?

For the Scott, Sask. research site, Moulin and Lychuk found that reduced inputs and a rotation of diverse annual grains rose to the top on their list of combinations.

“This combination may offer a sustainable solution, at least for that particular location we were looking at, in terms of soil organic carbon contents, the crop yield, nitrogen and phosphorus,” Lychuk said.

Limiting inputs made for the lowest nitrogen losses and highest phosphorus content, while reduced tillage, increased cropping frequency and “appropriate combinations of fertilizer input and diversified cropping” helped build carbon and organic matter and maintain soil nutrients.

“I’m not saying that following the zero tillage and including grain crops in the production will be a 100 per cent solution for farmers to pursue in the future,” Lychuk added. “It will just help alleviate the negative impacts of climate change on crop and environmental quality in the region.”

At the same time, the mix promised to be the most economical.

High inputs gave the most raw yield out of the three management systems and, within that system, low diversity and annual grain rotations outperformed the annual-perennial mix. Reduced-input no till, however, was close behind. The lower inputs averaged 95 per cent of high-input yields in wheat.

Organic plots dropped behind with only 77 per cent of high-input yields, a pattern that would repeat throughout the study.

Results were similar in barley, but yields leaned more towards diversification. Both annual grains and annual-perennial crops yielded high when mixed with the two highest input levels.

The study noted, however, that yield increased in all three input systems over time.

Downside

Soil quality data was not as kind to conventional agriculture.

Data from the second cycle (2001-06) found that fallow systems, like in any form of the low-diversity rotation or organic annual grains, had more nitrate in the 90-centimetre-deep rooting zone and more leaching into the subsoil.

High-input systems had a similar problem. Plants didn’t need or use the amount of nitrogen fertilizer added, which also increased nitrate in the rooting zone, the study found, although some years showed little nitrate difference between high- and reduced-input soil nitrate.

High-input plots averaged 84.7 kilograms of nitrate in the first 90 centimetres of soil from 2001-06, while reduced input and organic sat at 76 and 74 kilograms per hectare respectively.

“Our results suggest that conventional soil testing is not robust enough to detect over-application of fertilizer N, particularly during dry cycles,” the study’s final report read. “Under such conditions, some mechanism is needed to adjust recommended fertilizer rates downward to account for this.”

Carbon, likewise, favoured reduced-input no till, in no small part due to the reduction in tillage.

The lower-input system averaged 36 grams of aggregate organic carbon per kilogram of soil, compared to 31 grams per kilogram in high-input plots and 30 grams per kilogram in organic.

There was no impact on total organic carbon across either inputs or rotations, but light fraction carbon, light fraction organic matter and light fraction nitrogen were all highest in reduced input and, within the three rotations, in annual grains and annual-perennial plots.

“Light fraction carbon accumulates at the surface of reduced tillage because the roots and the crop residue aren’t mixed thoroughly into the soil,” Moulin said. “In organic systems, with cover crops, that’s a different equation.”

Soil stability

Reduced-input plots had the highest wet aggregate stability (54.4 per cent compared to 42.6 per cent in conventional plots and 40.6 per cent in organic), something Moulin attributed to less tillage. Both annual grains and annual-perennial rotations (46.9 and 46.3 per cent, respectfully) beat out low-diversity plots’ 44.3 per cent aggregate stability.

The study did not take organic cover crops into account, Moulin added, something that might add into the soil health equation when comparing reduced input and organic systems in the field today.

For Stephen Crittenden, one of the Brandon research stations’ experts in nutrient management and soil health, the study’s results become a matter of long-term versus short-term gain.

“Researchers looking at soil health might say that sometimes producers might take a hit in terms of yield in the short term,” he said.

Crittenden, who has delved into reduced tillage and is currently looking at biological soil health indicators like water movement, soil carbon, organisms like earthworms and water infiltration, argues that building soil health and soil structure will add capacity to the system and better buffer against environmental changes.

“These are indicators which, over the long term, the idea is they will build resistance to change,” he said. “So if they have a drought year and yields go down, you hope that the management practices that you implemented to try and improve your soil health will, in that case, give you a better yield.”

Organic’s nutrient struggle

Organic systems were gener- ally nitrogen and phosphorus deficient.

Organic plots averaged 19 kilograms of extractable phosphorus per hectare in the first 90 centimetres of soil from 2001-06, compared to an average 24.3 kilograms per hectare in high-input systems and 25.5 kilograms per hectare with reduced input. Phosphorus was as high or higher in reduced input as in conventionally managed plots.

“One fundamental process in agriculture is that if you don’t add nitrogen and phosphorus and you continue to crop the soil, you’re going to remove nitrogen and phosphorus,” Moulin said. “So mining the soil in a system without replacing those plant nutrients will certainly reduce nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil. Other systems that use fertilizer and soil test recommendations for fertilizer will maintain nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil. That said, with organic systems — if you have a system that has green manure, for example — green manure can fix nitrogen and that nitrogen will be added to the soil and certainly reduce the loss of nitrogen.”

The study noted green manure helped limit both nitrate in the rooting zone and leaching, since the crop stored nitrate and used up more water that would have otherwise drawn the nutrient down.

Legumes and composted manure also helped make up for removed nitrogen,

although Moulin’s team warned that organic producers should be on the watch for dropping nutrients.

Environmental factors important

Farmers can play with combinations of inputs and rotations, but it might not matter in wet or dry years, Moulin and Lychuk said.

In both of those cases, environmental factors like terrain and rains took the lead.

“It has nothing to do with your inputs or crop diversity in that particular year,” Lychuk said. “That’s why we were looking at many years of simulations in climate change so that we can get a better signal based on average by averaging out the dry spells and wet spells in the long-term yield and N (nitrogen) and P (phosphorus) and carbon.”

Despite elevation varying only 3.5 metres across the field, the Scott study found that only 56 per cent of yield variation could be explained by input or diversity in 1998, the driest year of the study and terrain featured heavily into the difference. At the wettest point in 2010, about 66 per cent could be explained by input and diversity and in 2005, when crops were following a wet year, almost all wheat yield variation was attributed to terrain.

Likewise, a “primary yield driving factor” in the study was not input or diversity, but April rain. The early precipitation was cited for 18.5 per cent of total yield variation and, when combined with June rain, accounted for more yield variation than input and diversity changes.

The researchers argued taking those environmental factors into account during long-term field trials would lead to better data analysis.

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After an all-night session at the Manitoba Legislature, Bill 24 has passed its final reading and received royal assent.

Better known as the Red Tape Reduction and Government Efficiency Act, Bill 24 covers legislation ranging from consumer protection and labour relations, to residential tenancies and transportation of dangerous goods, but it has been proposed changes to hog production that garnered the most attention as the legislation made its towards becoming law.

“It’s good news for us of course, to be allowed to build barns without the requirement of an anaerobic digester, so it’s a step in the right direction,” said George Matheson, chairman of the Manitoba Pork Council. “It didn’t surprise me that it passed.”

The newly passed act amends The Environment Act, removing general prohibitions for the expansion of hog barns and manure storage facilities. Bill 24 also strikes the winter manure application ban from the Environment Act, although winter application would continue to be prohibited for all livestock operations in Manitoba under the Livestock Manure and Mortalities Management Regulation.

• Read more: Hog production faces opposing ideologies

While hog producers have never been banned outright from building new barns, the previous requirement that all new barns install costly anaerobic digesters effectively made new barn construction unattainable, the Pork Council has said.

Matheson said it’s possible that some new construction will begin as early as next year.

“I think that in 2018 we might see a few,” he said. “We’ve got the swine development corporation in place to assist producers with that — It’s one thing to be allowed to build barns, it’s another thing to get them built and go through the permitting process.”

He hopes to see an average of 10 new barns built each year for the next 10 years, enough to cover the current hog shortfall experienced by processors in the province.

“I’d say that’s a realistic goal, I hope we build more than that, but I think that’s very doable,” Matheson said.

Keystone Agricultural Producers were also pleased to hear the bill had passed its third reading.

“Clearly the government has made a commitment to taking agricultural issues seriously and dedicating the legislative time necessary to find resolutions to them,” said KAP general manager James Battershill.

The activist group Hog Watch Manitoba had opposed Bill 24, but could not be reached for comment before press time.

— With files from Allan Dawson

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