However, according to Curtis Cavers, an agronomist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, there are practical strategies to mitigate the problem and improve crop yields.

Cavers presented his erosion research at Manitoba Potato Production Days in late January at Brandon’s Keystone Centre.

Why it matters: Eroded hilltops become less productive patches of the field, hitting at a farmer’s overall production.

Knolls and uplands are often some of the first places a farmer will develop an erosion problem.

It’s an issue that’s been tackled repeatedly by experts like David Lobb out of the University of Manitoba. In one 2019 Manitoba Ag Days presentation, Lobb argued that erosion-driven yield loss was costing Canadian farmers about $3.1 billion a year. Of those eroded areas, he noted, hilltops or knolls were some of the greatest culprits.

Tillage erosion has been a repeated topic in many of those erosion presentations, although wind erosion has also made its mark in the headlines thanks to visually striking instances of blowing soil.

Cavers also noted soil movement in those patches due to the tendancy for water to run off rather than soak in. Years of wind, water, and tillage erosion have stripped many of these patches of their topsoil, leaving behind poor seedbed conditions and low soil organic matter and soil carbon, he noted.

Those eroded hilltops often also have uneven fertility, Cavers said. Unless the farm is using certain types of precision technology, the eroded, marginal patches often get the same fertilizer as the rest of the field. Soil tests will often show excess, unused nutrient since those patches lack the plant growth to use them up.

“If you see that over time, there’s that possibility that that there could be a buildup of nutrients at these locations. So, the only way to know is to test,” Cavers said.

Farmers can confirm the impact of erosion by looking at yield maps or relying on their own experience, he added.

“You travel over a piece of ground hundreds of times in your career. You start to know what parts of the field are the productive parts and which ones are not so much.”

Recovery

Cavers pointed to several possible strategies for farmers to try and restore productivity to their eroded hilltops.

One option is to increase fertilizer and seeding rates in those patches. That more intensive management might improve yields, but it also hits on the other end of the profit margin, with increased nutrient and seed costs.

“Fertilizer is not cheap. It could be a quick fix in some cases. In other cases, you’re going to spend a pile of money and still have nothing to show for it,” Cavers cautioned.

Water is a major driver of yield potential. Therefore, the steady, measured water volumes from irrigation can help bolster crops, especially in dry years. It’s also already a strategy prevelant on Manitoba’s sandy, light potato ground.

“It’s really hard to grow a decent crop with no water, or very little water, or water that comes at the wrong time,” Cavers said.

Applying manure or compost can increase organic matter and improve soil structure, but availability and cost may be limiting factors. Planting cover crops helps protect soil from erosion and adds organic matter, but the benefits of that are gradual rather than immediate, occuring over the space of years.

Tillage is another often-pointed to villain when it comes to erosion. But while switching to conservation tillage or no-till might prevent more damage, it won’t necessarily restore soil health was lost due to erosion and, in a crop like potatoes, doing away with soil disturbance entirely is not a viable strategy anyway.

“No-till will stop the bleeding, but we have to then look at [options] for healing and recovery and all that in the long term,” Cavers said.

Topsoil redistribution is the method Cavers suggest in most cases. This strategy involves moving the previously washed down soil from lower areas back to the eroded hilltops.

He referenced one study where topsoil addition nearly doubled yield on eroded land when combined with increased seeding rates.

A mix of approaches often works best, depending on individual field conditions, Cavers said.

“Maybe you mix and match and try more than one of these things to see if you [get] a positive outcome.”

Temper expectations

While mitigating strategies can address some production loss, Cavers warned producers against getting their hopes too high.

Eroded hilltops may never match the productivity of lower areas. Setting realistic expectations is key.

“You probably will never get [these] areas yielding the same as everything else,” he said. “If we could get 80 per cent, that’d be fantastic; 70 per cent would be great, especially if you could get it more consistently, maybe not year after year, but say, even three years out of five.”

Farmers should also take a cautious approach, testing strategies on small areas before applying them across an entire field.

“You don’t want to invest in a solution only to find out it doesn’t work for your conditions. Managing risks and having realistic expectations is key,” Cavers said.

He also said that, when attempting these strategies, it’s important for farmers to think like scientists — testing solutions and analyzing results.

“You don’t want to reject something out of hand after trying it once but, at the same time, you don’t want to say, ‘Oh, it worked good the first year, now I’m going to convert the whole farm.’”

The post Save your yield on eroded knolls appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The good news is there’s a relatively easy way to restore that lost yield potential: simply move the eroded topsoil back up the slope.

Riekman was at this year’s Manitoba Crop Diagnostic School to demonstrate the impacts of tillage implements on soil movement and highlight soil restoration techniques.

She points to research from University of Manitoba soil scientist David Lobb showing that on Prairie “hilltops,” which include any slight rise in the landscape, topsoil losses average 30 to 50 centimetres — in other words, the original topsoil.

“We slow soil losses when we move to no till, but even after 20 to 30 years that lost topsoil may not necessarily be regained,”says Riekman.

For the erosion demonstration, Riekman dug a trench horizontally halfway down a slope and filled it with corn seed before three tillage implements (a tandem disc, a field cultivator and a high-speed shallow disc unit) were passed up and down the slope.

• VIDEO: Tillage erosion and how you can avoid it
• Read more: Soybeans raise tillage issues

The germinated corn seed spread four to five metres on average from the original trench under more aggressive tillage, and three to four metres on average under less aggressive tillage. But some seed was dragged up to 14 metres.

“All implements came about equal in our trial,” says Riekman. “We expected the high-speed discs would move the most soil, and they did move more corn up and down the hill compared to the tandem disc, but at seven miles per hour we didn’t get up to appropriate field speeds. We would have seen more movement if we’d got it up to 10 or 12 miles per hour.”

Restoring topsoil

According to Lobb, restoring lost topsoil is the fastest way to restore eroded land to productivity.

To restore a quarter section of land takes between five and 10 days with a custom contractor working eight-hour days, said Lobb at the demonstration, and the practice pays for itself in 3-1/2 years.

When lost topsoil is moved back to hilltops in the fall, those areas respond immediately the following spring.

• Read more: Erosion lessons learned… and forgotten
• Read more: Measuring tillage impact

Riekman’s second demonstration simulated erosion by moving soil from the top and depositing it down the length of a slope. Soil was then removed from the depression at the base of the slope and put back on the eroded knoll. Eroded, control and restoration treatments were duplicated in corn and soybeans, with half of these treated with starter fertilizer and half left untreated.

On eroded plots where starter fertilizer was not used, corn plant height was around four feet. Corn plant height increased by a foot or so when fertilizer was used. But where topsoil was restored, without help from starter fertilizer, plant height reached six feet.

“We had a two-foot height difference by going from the eroded plot to the restored plot,” says Riekman.

At the bottom of the slope, where four inches of topsoil had been removed, corn plants towered over six feet and no negative impacts could be seen.

For farmers interested in attempting the practice, Lobb recommends removing a maximum of eight inches from the bottom of the slope, to avoid disrupting biologically active soil, and adding a minimum of four inches at the top of the slope.

“I think the data speaks for itself,” says Riekman. “You can get an immediate yield boost once you’ve done this work. You’re not waiting for the soil to rebuild, that’s the most impressive thing about this. As opposed to adding manure or cover crops — why not just add the soil back to where it came from?”

Riekman says several farmers approached her at the event to say they already own scrapers that could move the soil. “One farmer did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and she believed she could do it for $75 an acre, including fuel but not time,” she says. “She was really impressed.”

The post Get your topsoil moving appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

David Lobb used crop production data and computer models to estimate how much lost productivity has occurred over the past four decades due to soil erosion.

The numbers he came up with were startling.

“When we did the analysis, looking at the accumulated soil loss and its impact on yield accounting for changes in tillage systems, cropping changes that have occurred across the country the actual loss in production, the actual loss in associated economic value is about $3.1 billion on an annual basis,” Lobb said in an interview following his presentation to the Soil Conservation Council of Canada soil summit here.

“If you looked at what cumulatively would have occurred from the 1970s to now you are probably looking at between $40 billion and $60 billion lost in terms of economic potential for the ag industry,” he said. Increased applications of fertilizer and better genetics may help mask some of the effects, but they come at a cost too.

The cost is actually much higher because Lobb only looked at the direct effects on crop production.

• Read more: Canada’s soils still degrading, albeit more slowly

“We didn’t look at the inefficiencies associated with higher input use like pesticides and fertilizer that commonly occurs in highly degraded landscapes, and we didn’t look at any of the off-field effects like sedimentation in ditches and navigable waterways or any ecological services associated with algal blooms or eutrophication of surface waters,” he said.

“The indirect costs associated with off-site impacts and water quality is often assumed to be equal if not larger than the on-site effects,” he noted.

Perceptions

Lobb said he wanted to quantify the cost of degraded soils in economic terms to hammer home the message that even though progress has been made on reducing erosion, little has been done to address the damage that has already been done.

“I think there was a perception that if you want to no till and you stopped the soil erosion, the soil would regenerate or restore itself,” he said.

But that doesn’t happen on its own, at least not for a very long time.

Bob McIntosh, a Perth County farmer who has been practising zero tillage for 27 years, said restoring degraded soils is a “lifelong” pro­cess with mediocre results. His experience mimics the results of long-term cropping studies in the area that show gains in soil organic matter, even under careful management, are slow. He said efforts must continue to reduce tillage and incorporate cover crops into farming systems.

Lobb said farmers in some areas are trying to speed up the natural soil-building process by applying high organic matter inputs, such as adding high rates of manure to their eroded knolls, growing forages or cover crops.

The economics also support transporting soil that has been moved by tillage and water erosion into low spots back onto the tops of knolls.

Adam Hayes, an extension adviser with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), told participants in the summit tour farmers can recover the cost of landscape restoration within four to six years through increased productivity. Restoring eroded knolls in that fashion can result in yield improvements of between 40 and 130 per cent in dry years and two to 33 per cent in wet years.

Lobb said governments and farmers need to realize that every soil loss event has long-term implications for a farm’s productivity, yet soil conservation seems to be falling through the cracks.

“There has been a steady decrease in interest in soil conservation,” he said.

Farmers’ best defence is a good offence, avoiding the loss of soil in the first place, he said.

Don Reicosky, a retired soil scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, told the conference that in his view, the term “conservation tillage” is an oxymoron. Conservation tillage is defined as retaining 30 per cent residue cover on the surface. “That means there is 70 per cent bare soil,” he said.

Man-made tillage in any form destroys the soil’s structure and is catastrophic to the micro-organisms living within it, he said.

Conservation agriculture

True conservation agriculture focuses on building carbon in the soil, not its steady depletion. “CO2 loss is proportional to the volume of soil disturbed,” Reicosky said.

“The solution lies in conservation agriculture, which brings together innovation, new technology and systems concepts focused on carbon management,” he said.

Don Lobb, a retired Ontario farmer who was inducted into the Canadian Conservation Hall of Fame in 1992 for his support of research to better understand soil health, said part of the problem is the industry’s focus on increasing production. He’s calling for “an agronomic shift in focus” from crop production to soil care.

“This is essential for reliable, sustainable, environmentally friendly food production,” he said.

He also noted that past civilizations who mismanaged their soil resources simply moved to a new frontier when their soils became unproductive. “We are on a familiar path,” he said, noting that with most of the world’s productive land already in use, and with most of it at various stages of degradation, there may be nowhere to go.

“The only remaining ‘new frontier’ is intensive, scientifically sound, responsible soil management,” he said.

The post Degraded soils cost farmers billions annually appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Speaking at the Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers recent SMART day in Carman, provincial soil management specialist Marla Rickman said it’s important to wait for the right conditions to avoid topsoil loss.

“Generally you want to be rolling right after seeding, but if it’s really dry — especially after going throughout that seeding pass… then it might be time to hold off,” she told producers at the Ian N. Morrison Research Farm.

“As well, if it’s really wet you will want to hold off because then you have an issue with potential compaction from the roller rolling over it,” she said. “And you might not have a very good-looking field by the time you’re done either, because you are also causing more compaction with the tractor going through.”

During the last few springs, wind erosion has been the primary concern.

“In terms of erosion risk, it’s when it’s really dry, and we’ve seen that in the last couple of springs where we’ve had no rain for a while after seeding,” she said. “And if there is no rain, we might want to hold off and try rolling when the plants have emerged, so that the crop can actually catch some of that wind and slow down the wind speed at the surface of the soil.”

Soybeans are fairly resistant, Rickman added, noting the third trifoliate is a good time to roll if you are rolling post-emergence.

“But we don’t really want to see people rolling past the first trifoliate, because we are worried about some of that stand breakage,” she cautioned, adding very new plants may also be susceptible to breakage.

Farmers should also question whether rolling is really necessary, said Rickman, adding that even large dirt clumps tend to mellow out by the time harvest rolls around, especially if there have been a couple of significant rainfalls.

“If you do really low-disturbance seeding and you have a nice table top, I guess my question is, do you need to roll? Do you already have a flat enough surface to have good harvestability? Or do you need to level that out?” she said. “Those are questions you need to be asking.”

Anyone with stones in their fields will need to roll, but they don’t have to go overboard.

“You don’t have to roll heavy, you just need to roll enough to anchor those stones into the ground a bit,” she said.

The post Rolling wet soil leads to compaction appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

David Lobb, senior research chair for the Watershed Systems Research Program and a University of Manitoba soil science professor, says riparian buffer strips are “highly inefficient” when it comes to filtering nutrient run-off from agricultural land in the Prairies, and in fact might contribute to the problem.

Three years ago, Lobb and colleagues completed a study on water quality for Environment Canada under the Lake Winnipeg Stewardship Fund that examined the effectiveness of riparian buffers on multiple sites. The report received little attention, and its recommendations have yet to turn into policy. This year, Minnesota passed a buffer strip requirement into law requiring “perennial vegetation buffers of up to 50 feet along rivers, streams, and ditches that will help filter out phosphorus, nitrogen, and sediment.”

Lobb says there are many benefits to riparian buffer strips. They improve wildlife habitats, promote stream health, and offer a setback for additional farm safety near waterways.

But Lobb said there are too many unknowns to mandate buffer strips in policy.

“We don’t know the optimum width for corridors or habitats. We don’t know what the minimum should be. Many jurisdictions, including Manitoba, have promoted buffers as a filter — that’s a problem. They aren’t. They’re so inefficient that it would be ridiculous for a farmer to propose establishing a riparian buffer for the purpose of protecting water quality,” Lobb said.

Lobb said in northern environments, the heaviest run-off events occur in the spring with snowmelt, when soils and vegetation are frozen and infiltration is extremely limited or non-existent. In this region, about 80 per cent of the run-off and nutrient losses occur in springtime.

“The vegetation is likely contributing nutrients to any run-off that’s occurring,” he said.

Secondly, when water runs off the land, it concentrates. “Water passing through the riparian buffer will pass through maybe one per cent of the area,” he said.

Lobb said vegetative filter strips were developed as an engineered technology in which run-off passes through the vegetated area during the growing season as a sheet of water in a controlled manner, and the vegetation is harvested to remove the nutrients. “Now we’re looking at undulating land, where water runs through an unmanaged riparian area, and through only a very small percentage of that riparian buffer. Based on that fact alone, riparian buffers are highly, highly inefficient, and more likely to cause a water quality problem than to solve one.”

To make them more effective, Lobb says buffer zones should be “shaped” and smoothed out to promote an evenly dispersed flow through more of the riparian areas and to detain run-off and retain sediments. And, they must be designed so the vegetation can be harvested and the accumulating nutrients can be removed.

“In low-lying areas where run-off occurs, producers should put in a broad grassed waterway and harvest the grass. This means that you put vegetation where the flow is occurring and then harvest that vegetation,” he said.

If vegetation isn’t removed, it matures and dies, which releases nutrients into the run-off and waterways. “There’s a problem with a strict naturalist approach to managing riparian areas. If we don’t manage the riparian areas, they will not be effective as buffers.”

Sandi Riemersma, an environmental biologist with Palliser Environmental Services, says the effectiveness of buffers depends on several factors, including the slope of land, soil characteristics, buffer width, vegetation, season and management.

“A riparian buffer strip is a good tool to reduce sediment transport and often can reduce particulate phosphorus mobility,” she says. “But buffers are not effective in winter and early spring when vegetation is dormant, soils are frozen and microbial activity is low or absent,” she says.

Riemersma emphasizes nutrient application management as an essential aspect of protecting waterways from nutrient run-off. In addition, she says permanent cover should be maintained near waterways, steep slopes and on erodible and saline soils. “Riparian buffers help to maintain stable stream banks, thereby reducing soil erosion and associated sediment and nutrient transport in waterways,” she says.

This article originally appeared in Grainews.

The post New research raises red flag over buffer strips appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Not so, says David Lobb, a professor in the University of Manitoba’s department of soil science and senior research chair for the Watershed Systems Research Program (WSRP).

“I think there has to be a whole new generation of tillage equipment developed in the next five to 10 years,” Lobb said in an interview Feb. 4 after speaking at the Manitoba Soil Science Society’s 59th annual meeting in Winnipeg. “It has to be if you want to deal with the fact that we have highly variable, highly degraded landscapes.

“High-disturbance direct seeding, which is fairly common on the Canadian Prairies, can actually result in as much tillage erosion soil loss as a mouldboard plow. Because of the speed, and variability of speed, it moves soil much greater distances and with much greater variability.”

For years farmers and soil experts put most of the blame for soil erosion on wind and water, but research has shown the biggest culprit is tillage. Even though the research proving that has been around for almost 25 years, Lobb said it’s still news to many people.

• VIDEO: Tillage erosion and how you can avoid it

“You should always think of any soil-engaging tool as a road grader with holes in the blade,” he said. “It’s exactly the way they behave. So anything you can do to accentuate that levelling of the landscape is going to cause soil loss in one area to accumulate in another.”

Even zero-till farmers can erode soil, Lobb said.

“The reality is they may not be moving as much soil but the nature of the disturbance is so variable they’re causing degradation, they’re causing loss. They don’t appreciate that.”

Putting it back

After 30 years of zero till, many farmers still have degraded hilltops because they were already eroded and any soil building due to zero till is probably lost because there’s still been some erosion from seeding, Lobb said.

The good news is that with tillage erosion, most of the soil is still nearby, usually in lower areas of the field. The soil can be scraped and dumped back on hilltops.

“It only takes about 10 cm of topsoil and when you do that, you get positive change in the wet years and the dry years,” Lobb told the meeting. He said studies show the cost can be recovered in four to six years.

“Its highly economic — probably the most economic land management practice that farmers have access to.”

Tilling and seeding aren’t the only contributors to tillage erosion — manure and fertilizer injection and row-crop tillage erode soil too.

“Root crop harvesting, like potatoes, will cause as much tillage erosion as all other forms of tillage combined,” Lobb said.

High and variable speeds contribute to soil movement. For example, equipment will go faster downhill than up, resulting in more soil going down than up. To compensate, farmers need either smaller tillage and seeding equipment or bigger tractors, or they have to slow down, but no one wants to do that.

Flat fields erode too

While gravity helps move soil from hilltops to low areas, tillage erosion happens in flat fields too. That’s why farmers in the famously flat Red River Valley keep having to clean out their surface drains, Lobb said.

Farmers should select tillage equipment that incorporates a little bit of crop residue and loosens the seedbed but doesn’t go excessively deep.

Given that wind and water don’t account for as much soil erosion as earlier believed, it raises questions about how much crop residue is necessary.

“So-called conservation tillage, such as chisel plowing, may not be very effective at protecting soil, particularly when you have other practices that might actually degrade it,” Lobb said. “And so-called conservation tillage systems may not actually protect water quality either.”

Lobb also questioned the value of riparian zones (vegetated areas around waterways), which are promoted to trap soil running off fields and filter out nutrients. But Lobb said not much soil is washed from fields and riparian zones don’t filter nutrients because run-off usually flows in small streams directly through the riparian area into the waterway.

“Water blows through those systems,” he said. “They do not filter. They cannot filter. They are not effective.”

To be effective, riparian zones would have to be wider and run-off would have to soak into the ground. Riparian vegetation would also have to be harvested.

“Because if you just keep putting nutrients into the vegetation and the vegetation is bleeding all those nutrients you’re not going to have any positive effect in the long run.” Lobb said. “You have to remove the nutrients by harvesting the vegetation and that’s something that people who promote riparian areas don’t want.”

Lobb is studying capturing a farm’s run-off in a large dugout, then either using it for irrigation or releasing it later in the season. Not only could nutrients and water be recycled, but the system could mitigate flooding.

Another strategy is to reduce run-off at the plant level by making soil more absorbent, Lobb said. That requires getting more organic matter and microbial activity in the soil, which comes from producing healthy crops and reduced tillage. It also requires drainage to remove excess water.

The post High-disturbance seeding can be as erosive as a plow appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

You’ve heard of wind and water erosion, but how about tillage erosion? It’s often the worse of the three, says University of Manitoba soil science professor David Lobb, who spoke to Manitoba Co-operator reporter Allan Dawson Feb. 4 at the Manitoba Soil Science Society’s 59th annual meeting in Winnipeg.

The post VIDEO: Tillage erosion and how you can avoid it appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Francesco Zurzolo, an engineer specializing in nutrient management and reduction with Dillon Consulting, says Manitoba is dealing with eutrophication and destruction of important ecosystems due to P buildup. Zurzolo spoke at the Manitoba Environmental Industries Association’s (MEIA) annual Emerging Issues conference in Winnipeg on November 19.

“The basic question is, where is this phosphorus coming from and what can be done about it?” he asked.

Lake Winnipeg carries a P load annually of 7,655 tonnes, with the Red River its biggest “loading factor,” contributing 68 per cent of the annual total load, said Zurzolo. At least 80 per cent of the nonpoint source load — or pollution discharged from a wide land area rather than a specific location — is run-off from agricultural soils.

“Globally, it’s estimated that one-third of all P applied to land is lost to water due to erosion, leaching and run-off,” said Zurzolo, citing a 2009 study.

In Manitoba, the recent surge of nutrients, especially P, to Lake Winnipeg is due to the flooding cycle of the last decade, with P moving as a particulate and dissolving in flooding events, he explained.

Management

Manitoba’s Water Quality Standards cap P at one milligram per litre. In addition, producers must follow P application rates for fertilizer and manure, and are required by Manitoba Conservation to test soils prior to manure application.

Zurzolo said source reduction is the best method for reducing P loading. “The best technique is to avoid applying too much phosphorus to soils in the first place,” he said.

Zurzolo said one way to address diffuse sources of P run-off, such as cattle operations, is source reduction. This can be achieved by reducing the amount of excess P on soils.

One method involves manure treatment through dewatering, drying, composting or direct P recovery through struvite removal.

Another technique is sedimentation, or particulate P recovery. Sedimentation involves the use of stilling basins along drainage routes to allow particle settling, followed by occasional dredging for particle recovery.

This method can sometimes require the use of land area currently used for crop production, said Zurzolo. “But the loss of a small amount of land to crop production is a small price to pay for the health of our freshwater ecosystems. These structures have been found to reduce flooding and they’re good for drought years,” he said, pointing to the success of the Tobacco Creek Model Watershed.

Another method involves filtration for particulate and soluble P recovery. “Dillon has re-examined an age-old design of the “passive filter” concept which combines physical and chemical removal processes,” he said.

Partnering with the East Interlake Conservation District, which offers programs and funds for projects that improve the health of Interlake watersheds, the company has developed a project on one cattle operation to help a farmer utilize a detention basin to remove organics and particulates through a filtration system.

“It’s a low-cost solution and very robust,” said Zurzolo. “These are the kinds of solutions we need to start looking at around the province.

“We need to combine source reduction and runoff management to come up with a proper solution,” Zurzolo concluded. “The concern I want to leave with you is that right now the big money is being spent on point sources, but we need to increase funding to look at diffuse sources of phosphorus reduction and recovery. We need to incorporate P recovery considerations for all projects. Reducing the need for P imports will contribute to a healthier lake.”

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But for the modern farm equipment and steel granaries in the background, her photographs of airborne and drifting soil could have been taken in the 1930s instead of 2015.

A video is posted on the Manitoba Co-operator website. If you can stand it, turn up the volume and listen to the wind’s eerie howl. The story tells itself.

The headlines that week were all about the toll a tragic combination of wind and fire took. But those winds caused immeasurable damage to soil as well — just as we were entering Soil Conservation Week in Canada.

Unfortunately, these black blizzards occur almost every year around this time in southern Manitoba, either just before or immediately after fields have been seeded. Blackened snowbanks at the fields’ edges provide evidence there is soil moving during the winter too.

Many will say the fact that it’s only happening a few times a year is a good thing — a sign of how much progress has been made. True, this is a far cry from the past when parts of the Prairies were on the verge of becoming incapable of producing a crop.

Nowadays, the acres on the Prairies left to summerfallow are at an all-time low. The amount of tillage farmers use has been dramatically reduced, and even on that extraordinarily windy day, there were fields in which the soil was staying put side by side with fields in which soil was being lost.

But that raises the question: why is it happening at all?

We are fully aware that some of the most lucrative crops farmers can grow in southern Manitoba leave little residue behind. That said, farmers do have options for protecting their soils. Only some are using them.

Municipal officials will now be busy assessing the damage to the drainage infrastructure from the windstorm. Several areas are now one heavy rainstorm — also common this time of year — away from serious overland flooding. It’s an expensive job cleaning out those ditches. Municipalities successfully lobbied for $1.9 million in disaster assistance to help clean drainage systems after one windy weekend in May 2008.

Those costs can be easily calculated. What is more difficult to account for is the cost of lost productivity in the affected fields for the present and future generations.

We suspect that loss is higher than any lost productivity a farmer might incur through measures that would help keep the soil intact, such as maintaining shelterbelts, sowing cover crops in the fall, leaving the stubble from last year’s crop intact, or leaving more of the previous crop’s residue on the land.

The difference is, farmers don’t know how much wind erosion costs them because there are lots of variables that affect yields. They might actually receive compensation if those plugged drains result in flooded fields that prevent them from seeding or harvesting a crop.

That’s despite the fact that under a little-known statute called the Manitoba Land Rehabilitation Act, municipalities have the authority to regulate tillage practices to control erosion, provided their plan is approved by the provincial minister.

Section 8 (1) states: A municipality may, by bylaw, provide for the regulation and control of tillage practices that, in the opinion of the council, are liable to cause rapid soil deterioration by wind erosion.

Section 8 (2): A bylaw may apply to the whole of the municipality or any portion designated.

Section 8 (3): The bylaw may contain provisions requiring adoption of the practice of strip farming, the growing of cover crops, the providing of trash cover or the spreading of straw or other refuse on cultivated lands, prohibiting the burning of stubble, prohibiting the cutting or requiring the planting of trees, requiring, prohibiting, or governing, tillage operations, and regulating or prohibiting the growing of crops in specified areas.

These laws date back to the 1940s, Alberta has recently updated its statute, Saskatchewan’s was repealed in 2012. The Manitoba legislation appears to have been forgotten, but remains listed as active on the provincial government’s website.

Bylaws, fines and regulation are never the preferred way of making change. But on the basis of this, it is hard to justify disaster assistance or spending ratepayers’ money cleaning up a post-windstorm mess.

There are no doubt farmers and organizations who believe no government would dare interfere with something so individually specific to a farm’s management as tillage practices. They used to say that about stubble burning too.

The post Editorial: What’s it going to take to stop soil erosion? appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Manitoba Co-operator reporter Lorraine Stevenson took these video clips on April 15.

The post VIDEO: Soil Conservation Week — the job is not over appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.