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Four ways to increase your organic matter

A question that I hear a lot is, “How do cover crops fit into a grain operation?” Lots of grain farmers have no desire to get into the livestock business and no interest in producing hay. But many have some soil issues that need to be addressed. This can be done by buying more iron

Hairy vetch blooms mingle with hemp plants in WADO’s hemp-legume intercrop trials this year.

Mixing and matching intercrops with WADO

Results are in on last year's Westman Agricultural Diversification Organization’s intercrop trials

Dry conditions and roving deer added extra challenge to intercropping in southwest Manitoba, but Melita’s Westman Agricultural Diversification Organization (WADO) still gleaned results this past season. Intercropping, also known as companion cropping, is an emerging practice in general. Farmers are drawn to it for potential overyielding, disease or weed management or increased water use in


Harvest goes hands free

Harvest goes hands free

British researchers have put automation to test in the farm field

A U.K. research project has planted, tended and harvested the first crop — of spring barley — that’s never seen direct human labour. Hands Free Hectare was aiming to test the concept in the field and consciously chose smaller machinery, said Jonathan Gill, a researcher at Harper University. “There’s been a focus in recent years

Vurayayi Pugeni, who works with the Mennonite Central Committee out of Winnipeg and Score Against Poverty, a Zimbabwean NGO, says a project designed by the University of Manitoba’s Martin Entz and his colleagues has brought food security to his Zimbabwean village through innovations such as intercropping 
with legumes.

Manitoba project aids Zimbabwean food security

Hemp Genetics International thinks Canadian and Zimbabwean farmers can learn from each other

If you had four children, but only enough food to feed one, how would you choose? It’s a choice Vurayayi Pugeni’s mother had to make when he was growing up in Zimbabwe. Fortunately it’s not one mothers today in Pugeni’s village have to make because they enjoy food security, thanks in part to a research


Editorial: New opportunities

Editorial: New opportunities

Agriculture is often viewed, especially by outsiders, as a staid and conservative place where things are done by tradition. To be fair, it’s often true. After all, you’re practising a craft that’s 12,000 years old and the foundation of human civilization. Without farming we’d all be hunting and gathering our next meal with no time

Intercropping wheat and soys makes for tighter rotation

Intercropping wheat and soys makes for tighter rotation

The Kutz family has had to improvise but their ideas are working

At Kutz Farms LLC in Wisconsin, the Kutz family decided that planting corn on corn repeatedly may be good short-term economics, but it was bad long term for their soil’s health. As a result, John Kutz, his father and father-in-law created a new system that gives them three crops in two years, but doesn’t include