Researchers in Germany have calculated optimal land use configurations that could work under future climate conditions. Their study, published in the journal PNAS, suggests that rejigging where we grow food could almost triple crop production while maintaining supplies of freshwater and stores of carbon.

It’s a radical suggestion that isn’t likely to ever happen, but a thought experiment like this provides an insight into the scale of transformation that may be required to maintain a healthy planet while adapting to a changing climate and a growing population.

After all, land use change is a key driver of biodiversity loss. With eight billion humans to feed, more than a third of the world’s land surface and about three quarters of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production, leading to a significant drop in the abundance of many native species.

The new study calculates the optimal configuration of global land-use under different climate change scenarios until the end of this century. It targets three key indicators: the total carbon stored in trees, wetlands and so on, which is an indicator of climate regulation and mitigation; crop production as proxy for food supply; and available runoff indicating freshwater availability.

The study’s authors then used an optimization algorithm to identify how land could be best allocated to reach a point at which the global totals of each of these three objectives could not increase without declines in the other two – that is, the optimum use of land.

What might this mean in practice? The research identified some global priority areas where, under the analysis’s conditions, natural habitats could regrow. Those are predominantly areas currently used for farming, but in their natural state would have been forests.

To compensate for the regrowth of forests, the optimization suggests a significant expansion of croplands in temperate regions including the southern U.S. and Mexico, western Europe, South Africa, eastern China and the coastal regions of Australia.

New pasture would be created from cropland in India and from natural land in eastern and southern Africa and in regions south of the Sahara.

More controversially, the optimization suggests converting natural land in the Amazon basin into pasture. This is because long-term climate modelling suggests the rainforest is becoming drier anyway and even risks “tipping” into more savanna-like conditions.

Carbon storage, freshwater and food supply are important, but they are just three of the many ecosystem services provided by nature. If others – such as flood management, pollination or even human recreation – were factored in, it might paint a very different picture and shift the optimization boundaries.

The authors briefly mention the potential impact that large-scale land use conversions may have on biodiversity, for instance, a crucial aspect of these services. But an exercise like this is unable to capture the nuances of impacts on threatened species, let alone on the movement and establishment of invasive species.

It’s also tough to see the suggested land use as feasible or pragmatic when geopolitical and socio-economic factors tend to drive decisions on what to do with land. For example, the optimization suggests more cropland in most of Great Britain, with parts of Scotland and southern and eastern England left to nature. But this would require significant policy and socio-culture change in a country where 52 per cent of land is already enclosed farmland and only 11 per cent is woodland.

Only a very brave politician would suggest abandoning British farms, or taking iconic woodlands or moorland grazed by sheep and turning them into wheat fields.

The challenges might be even greater in a country like India, which the optimization suggests should be converted to pasture. This would be a radical overhaul in a country where 70 per cent of rural households still depend on agriculture, predominantly growing crops.

The authors acknowledge that such drastic land-use changes over such extended regions are unrealistic. East Africa won’t suddenly become a huge livestock farm, and northern states in the U.S. won’t be reforested overnight. This remains a theoretical exercise.

For land use optimization to succeed in practice, any transformations will need to consider both the local policy and practice context of each region.

This study is, however, a good example of the sort of big picture thinking required in the longer term and provides a theoretical framework that gives an inkling of the direction and scale of change that may eventually need to be considered.

– This article first appeared in the Conversation, by Reuters. Dr. Deepa Senapathi is the Head of Department of Sustainable Land Management at the University of Reading.

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For example, the earliest no-till farmers were hoping for soil conservation benefits. Research now shows fields in long-term no-till require less fertilizer.

Miles Dyck, a University of Alberta soil scientist, provided that information at the Manitoba Agronomists’ Conference this past winter, noting the result from North Dakota State University research.

“They had to change the fertilizer recommendations for the fields that had been under no-till for a while compared to conventional management,” he said. “So this is an example of how a change in management can affect soil properties and processes.”

There have been many changes in the North American Great Plains over the last 20 to 30 years. There’s greater diversity in crops and rotations and higher-yielding cultivars.

“So this is bound to affect our nutrient cycling and, oddly enough, we can show examples of the differences between rotation and nutrient dynamics in an experiment that’s 90 years old,” Dyck said. “That’s the Breton Classical Plots, established near the town of Breton, Alberta.”

The Breton Plots are in a grey soil zone where native vegetation was boreal forest. The soils are different from the typical black grassland chernozem of the Red River Valley.

In the boreal forest, most of the organic matter is on top of the mineral soil in the forest floor, and when that landscape is converted to agriculture, much of that organic matter is lost.

“So you’re starting off with a very organic matter poor topsoil, so these soils present a pretty significant challenge when they’re first converted over the agriculture,” Dyck said. “But, as we can see, they respond fairly quickly to changes in management, which has been interesting.”

The rotation experiment began in 1929. There are two rotations running on the plots; a five-year cereal/forage combination running wheat-oats-barley-hay-hay and a two-year wheat/fallow rotation producing one wheat crop every second year.

A long term study like this allows researchers to observe how different crops draw nutrients, either applied in fertilizer or stored in soil, over the long term. It also shows how exclusion of one nutrient affects the uptake of others.

To see this, they superimposed a number of nutrient regimes including a check with no fertilizer, a full NPKS treatment, a manure treatment and a number of nutrient exclusion treatments.

Each of these is missing one of N, P, K or S. The five-year cereal/forage rotation’s responses differed from that of the wheat/fallow rotation. Different responses to different nutrients can be explained by a rotation effect.

“Wheat is the common crop in the two rotations and I chose the most recent 12 years and calculated a 12-year average,” Dyck said. “In the five year rotation, we have a much stronger response to phosphorus, sulphur and potassium than we do in the wheat-fallow rotation.”

It’s a function of the different crops in the rotation. Forages will move a lot of phosphorus, potassium and sulphur, so over time, the wheat had a much greater response to potassium, phosphorus and sulphur fertilization in the forage rotation.

Correspondingly, the N uptake shows the same response to different fertilizers.

“If we compare the two rotations, a lot of the differences can be explained in those biological N additions from the forage phase, plus a much greater export of nutrients because of those forages and because we have a crop every year. With our wheat-fallow rotation, there’s only a crop every second year.”

At the heart of it, the long-term nutrient balances in the established rotation have a profound effect on the wheat’s response to different fertilizers. The level of nitrogen influences the wheat’s uptake of phosphorus and the soil stock of phosphorus is equally important to wheat’s uptake of nitrogen, said Dyck.

The same is true with other key nutrients.

“Crop recovery and response to the fertilizers depends on the soil nutrient stocks, the availability of the nutrients in all those stocks and all those we see have been influenced by the long term management,” he said.

“The magnitude of the interactions depends on the magnitude of the crop response to those fertilizer nutrients and this depends on the availability of those nutrients in those soil nutrient stocks. That goes back to rotation and fertilization history.”

Dyck said there are practical applications. Farmers can develop field-specific nutrient budgets to run over time. With yield monitors, weighing wagons and straw analysis, they can estimate how much nutrient is removed from harvest.

That information can be complemented by pH measurements every five years or so.

“If you have those nutrient balances documented, you have that historical data base to help you support that decision from year to year for your fertilizer management plan,” he said. “And I think it helps manage risk.”

An exclusion strip compared to the rest of the field can show how much difference fertilizer makes and provide an assay of nutrient stocks in the soil.

Dyck proposed three scenarios for nutrient budgeting.

“If you have a balanced nutrient budget and, through your nutrient exclusion strips, you see that your crop is still responding to applied nutrients, you just replace the nutrient removals in the harvest.

“If you have a negative budget, if you’re removing more nutrients than are applied and you have a measurable crop response to the applied nutrients, then it’s time to try to build up those soil reserves a little more.

“If you have a positive budget, if you’re adding more nutrients than you’re removing and you don’t see a large response to applied nutrients, then you can draw down those soil nutrients for a little while and reduce your fertilizer applications.”

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Typically they’re viewed as an annoyance at best, and a waste at worst. Larger equipment has made draining them more tempting over the years and there’s always the understandable desire to maximize acreage by simply draining them and planting right over them.

But one researcher says that’s simply taking a short-term gain in exchange for what’s looking increasingly like a helping of long-term pain.

Masaki Hayashi, a geoscience professor at the University of Calgary, has been studying the role of these low-lying bits of Prairie topography (see this story from our FarmIt section). In particular he’s looked at how they contribute to replenishing the region’s precious groundwater.

In a semi-arid region like Western Canada, farms typically run a moisture deficit during the growing season of between two and four inches for their typical crops. That makes moisture their most common yield-limiting factor, and what happens with soil moisture outside the growing season extra important.

There are two great periods of recharge for this region. There’s the fall season after crops have been harvested. Without growing plants in the soil, that rainfall can infiltrate the soil and then await the next crop in the spring.

Then there’s the annual snowmelt. This is the area Hayashi has looked most closely at, and it’s a very important annual event for the region’s groundwater recharge, and it’s these low-lying depressions in the topography that make it possible.

Every winter a significant amount of precipitation falls onto the landscape and awaits the spring melt. Take the Brandon area, for example, where in an average year 37.5 inches of snow comes down.

Equating that to rainfall isn’t easy, because as anyone who’s seen snow fall knows, that snow can be wet, dry and all gradations in between. But most online snow-to-rain calculators (yes, they’re a thing) suggest that would mean Brandon has between just under three inches and just under five inches of water arriving every spring.

In the natural, pockmarked ecosystem, that melt water would pool in these low spots. Some would stay full all summer long, but others would simply hold the water until the underlying soil had melted, allowing it to infiltrate the earth.

When those low-lying areas are drained, they can no longer provide that service. Which shortens the trip that water takes to a ditch, then stream, and river, and ultimately to somewhere in Hudson’s Bay, where it won’t do agriculture in Manitoba much good.

So the question farmers need to ask themselves when they drain a wetland is, how much is that water worth to them?

It certainly helps boost production around a wetland during a dry year. Cattle producers can, no doubt, attest to that.

And during a dry cycles, subsoil moisture is frequently the deciding factor between a wreck and a decent crop that comes off despite the odds.

Catching every last drop of snowmelt could become even more important over the coming years and decades.

Climate change and its effect on agriculture is still a muddy issue. Some studies, like one released by Agriculture Canada in late 2019, suggest it could be a boon for Prairie crops like wheat and canola, with yields in some parts of the region increasing by as much as 30 per cent, especially in its northern margins.

But that study came with an enormous caveat — it was limited to calculating the effect of higher carbon dioxide levels and didn’t take into account the effect of weather events like hail, flood and, crucially, drought.

It’s a combine-sized loophole and it ignores the risks most researchers see — and those risks include warmer and shorter winters, with less opportunity for that snowpack to accumulate.

As researcher Hayashi points out in the article, that will likely mean a sizable reduction in that spring recharge year after year, which will mean less resiliency for the overall agriculture system and less opportunity for things like irrigation expansion as aquifers fall.

Here in Manitoba we’ve got a few examples of water management that address this question. The Deerwood Soil and Water Management Association’s small dam projects along the escarpment come to mind.

At least one research at the Winnipeg offices of the International Institute for Sustainable Development has long promoted the idea of catchment ponds adjacent to farm fields.

These are all ideas worth considering. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough time, money and energy available to recreate the work of Mother Nature.

Perhaps society would be better served by preserving — and paying for that preservation if necessary — of the natural infrastructure that remains on the region’s farm fields.

The post Editor’s Take: A slight depression appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Masaki Hayashi, a professor with the University of Calgary’s geoscience department, says that’s only half of it. Prairie snow is important but it needs to find its way into the ground, recharging reserves.

“The Canadian Prairies are unique… it’s dry but it’s also cold,” he explains. “The snowpack accumulates but when it melts, the ground is still frozen. This precious meltwater, instead of infiltrating into the ground, actually runs off and tries to find the lowest spot in the landscape.”

The result of that would be a straight run to the streams and rivers that would take meltwater downhill to the nearest ocean — but there’s something that slows it down and holds it. We’re all familiar with the ponds and sloughs familiar to Prairies people but they aren’t the whole story. The Prairies are dotted with countless thousands of small depressions on the landscape, almost like the surface on a golf ball, tiny dimples, some less than a foot deep and 100 metres across.

“There are just so many millions of them,” Hayashi said. “They’re pretty small individually but collectively they hold a lot of water during the snowmelt and then eventually the soil underneath those depressions thaws and the snowmelt water percolates down. That’s the main mechanism of groundwater recharge.”

Approximately one-third of Canadians depend on groundwater and this holds true across the Prairie provinces. Hayashi conducted a study at Spyhill, located in the northwest corner of Calgary. Once used for grazing it’s mostly tame hay so it presents deep-rooted perennials, similar to a natural grassland, with a dark-brown Chernozem soil underneath.

“We have our own meteorological stations, so we measured precipitation, temperature, humidity and the wind,” Hayashi said. “And we also have a specialized device measuring evapotranspiration. We can actually monitor how much water the plants are taking up every day.”

The stations showed how much water infiltrated the soil and compared it to how much went back into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. This gave them a good idea how much of it went deeper into the soil where it reached the water table and was retained as groundwater.

Data from the meteorological stations were plugged into a computer model and they compared the results to what the field data told them. According to a paper they published, the model presented the seasonality of the different hydrologic processes, the evapotranspiration and groundwater recharge reasonably well, compared to the field observations from the ground stations.

The next question was, what does this mean in a possible future when temperatures are higher, winters are shorter with less snowpack and summer precipitation is greater?

“The result that was presented in the paper is that recharge is expected to decrease,” Hayashi says. “We can’t tell how much but there will be a sizable decrease in recharge because the snow accumulation is going to decrease. You will have warmer winters and a slower start of snow accumulation and a thinner snowpack. We won’t have that meltwater filling up the depressions under the future climate. I think that was the take-home message of that paper.”

It may sound strange but it’s that crucial snowpack and spring melt that recharges the groundwater. A warmer, wetter summer may increase the soil moisture but it may also increase evapotranspiration. Greater heat means greater evaporation and any plants, either natural or crop species, will use as much of the water as they can get.

The possibility of reduced groundwater supply is important to that third of the population that depends on it and managing groundwater is very much like managing a bank account. No matter how much the account is holding you can’t withdraw more than goes in. Groundwater is renewable but it only goes at its own speed. This kind of work may offer us a crucial tool in predicting and managing future groundwater supplies and allocation.

“In Alberta there’s not going to be more irrigation because the water supply is maxed out so there’s no more water for irrigators,” Hayashi says.

“I think the agriculture will change with the warming of the climate but I’m not entirely sure where this is going to go; how would that impact the choice of crops and how would that impact water use? Those are interesting questions.”

Causes of depressions

Our Prairie landforms are a consequence of several different causes. Some are from river and stream action. The wind has always played a big part in what we see and some come from the work of those ancient herds of bison. The most profound of all were the glaciers that retreated about 10,000 years ago.

Even all the small depressions that make groundwater recharge possible come from those massive continental ice sheets. Something in their behaviour pockmarked the Prairies with potholes, sloughs and depressions and, although we’re not certain how, there are two possibilities.

A mile-thick sheet of ice comes about because of snow accumulation over a long time period. In the process of accumulation, the weight of the snow actually presses its lower layers into ice and the pressure is great enough that the ice behaves like a thick fluid. The mounting pressure actually pushes the ice southward in much the same way pancake batter flows when you pour it onto a griddle. The massive ice sheet scrapes the land, much like an enormous bulldozer and, because the ice thickness varies all the way across the glacier, the forces exerted on the ground will be uneven. These depressions could be a result of that.

Or, as the glaciers retreated they didn’t actually move. In a process called ablation, they simply melted away starting in the south, moving north. As the toe of the glacier weakened, big blocks of ice would actually fall off and land on the outwash plain only to sit there until they melted away. The force of the drop and the action of the meltwater may have formed a small pool around the melting ice block. Whatever the reason, the sheer number of these features is instrumental in how our northern landscape captures and holds water either in the soil or in the underlying geology.

Groundwater basics 

What is groundwater?

Almost all farms get water from a well drilled into the earth where potable water, stock water and irrigation water may be pumped out. That’s simple enough.

How it gets there in the first place, how it moves through gravel or into cracks and fissures within bedrock can be really complicated. Water quality, quantity and accessibility is dependent on a dizzying array of variables. It starts with rain or snow falling on the recharge area.

Some of that water will evaporate back into the atmosphere or it may be collected by the local plants that will use it for metabolism and then release it through their leaves and into the air. The combination of evaporation and transpiration is called evapotranspiration. Some of the fallen water percolates deeper into the soil.

Different soil types as well as vegetation can make a difference in how easily the water can move through it. Some materials, like clay, will hold water more effectively than sand because sandy soils provide more of the pore spaces that water may move through. Different vegetation covers will also have some effect. Deep-rooted plants provide a conduit of sorts that allows water to penetrate farther into the soil. Then there are the cracks, worm tunnels and gopher holes that may provide quick passage for rain- or meltwater.

Gravity takes some water deep enough that it finds its way into the water table. That’s the level where the pore spaces are filled to capacity with water, or saturated. These may range from small pores such as you find in sand and gravel up to the caves and tunnels within layers of limestone.

Groundwater will follow gravity and move downhill through whatever material it’s seeped into. This is called an aquifer and this is what you tap into when you dig a well. Sometimes these will discharge at a lower point of the land surface into a small channel or cave that we call an artesian spring.

Some groundwater finds its way into lakes or rivers and joins the surface water in a journey to the ocean where it will evaporate and fall again. Some of it will evaporate sooner and may also fall into the same recharge area and start the process all over again. It moves in this pattern that we call The Hydrologic Cycle no matter how long the trip is.

The post Unique pothole landscape allows annual spring groundwater recharge on Prairies appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Even more rare are MacArthur Fellows with ties to farming and food. Before this year, only 12, or one per cent, of all grantees, have had any connection to agriculture.

On Sept. 28, Lisa Shulte Moore, a landscape ecologist at Iowa State University, became the 13th when the foundation recognized her for “working closely with farmers to build more sustainable and resilient agricultural systems.”

And that’s the key, it noted in honouring Shulte Moore. She “combines expertise on the environmental, economic, and policy aspects of large-scale agriculture and food production with an ability to communicate practical information directly to landowners about ways to make their land both more productive and sustainable over time.”

Even more astonishing is that she’s doing this timely work in the very centre of the crop monoculture universe, Iowa, a state that defunded the nation’s premier sustainable ag research effort, the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, in 2017. More recently, powerful farm groups have stymied efforts to strengthen the state’s oversight of water, fertilizer, and manure run-off from farm fields.

Shulte Moore’s work, however, did not go unnoticed outside of Iowa. In 2020 she was awarded a US$10-million federal grant to “develop new ways of turning biomass and manure” — both in hyper-abundance in Iowa — “into fuel.”

That effort is an outgrowth of a broader, longer-term project, STRIPS, or the Science-Based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips. And that’s exactly what it is; a program where strips of native prairie perennials from 30 to 120 feet wide slow water flow across farmed fields.

With it, Shulte Moore and an interdisciplinary team of agronomists, hydrologists, entomologists, statisticians, and soil scientists “have shown that prairie strips reduce soil erosion by 96 per cent and nitrogen and phosphorus run-off by 85 and 95 per cent respectively,” explained the MacArthur Foundation.

Equally important is that STRIPS “improves… crop success” and that “incorporating prairie strips is one of the least expensive agricultural conservation practices because they can be located on the least productive, and thus less profitable, parts of a field.”

Researchers can make this statement with confidence because the program now includes 11,735 acres of prairie strips protecting 112,707 cropped acres in 11 states.

As widespread as that might sound — and it is wonderfully widespread for any on-farm research program — it’s a flea compared to the elephantine acres of corn and soybeans, a collective 180 million, in the U.S. this year (Iowa holds 10 per cent of that) with little, if any, run-off mitigation on any of it.

Which gets to the bigger question innovative researchers like Shulte Moore and others throughout the Land Grant system face: Why aren’t field-proven solutions that address today’s biggest ag woes, like nutrient run-off, promoted by farm policy leaders as necessary, smart, long-term investments in sustainable food production?

The plain answer is that our pedal-to-the-metal food system rarely pays farmers and ranchers to do the cheaper-in-the-long-run right thing and often pays them to do the more-profitable-in-the-short-run wrong thing.

Even our federal farm programs focus on fixing problems after they occur, not before; programs like federal crop insurance, the Conservation Reserve Program, the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, the Market Facilitation Program, and soon, on-farm carbon sequestration.

And should your research anger contradict any Big Ag dogma — or worse, any farm or commodity group — well, it’s good-bye Land Grant perch, hello windowless lab purgatory.

We seem impervious to the clarifying truth that our relentless focus on the bottom line is dragging us to the bottom. Worse, we have the people and talent to make a difference, maybe even the critical difference, to slow or even stop the slide.

What we don’t have a lot of is time.

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That’s the message from Manitoba’s soil specialists, as harvest wraps up on a tremendously dry year — one they worry will end even drier if some of that precious water is lost through weed uptake or extra movement of soil.

Why it matters: Periodic tillage takes more planning, but experts say that the benefits may be well worth the effort, compared to just hitching up to the deep tiller as a matter of course.

Data from the province’s ag weather network suggests that Manitoba is a full year behind its normal precipitation. Or, put another way, one whole crop’s worth of water. That data puts available water holding capacity in the top four feet of the soil anywhere from 20 to 50 per cent, with areas of the west faring a bit better.

Provincial staff estimate next year’s crop moisture will be starting in the red by potentially 10 to 12 inches of water, with much lower moisture reserves at depth than typical.

Given that, provincial soil specialist Marla Riekman says she is surprised about how much tillage she’s seen this fall.

In a province that has made international headlines for serious drought, most were expecting producers to avoid disturbing the soil and losing precious water reserve.

“I think, a lot of times, for some people there’s a bit of a fear of the idea of not tilling,” she said, citing reasons like preparing the seedbed or uncertainty around running a seeder through residue, if reduced tillage is not typically the operator’s production method of choice.

Preferred crops, which may come with more complicated residue management, in areas like the Red River Valley may also play in, she added.

“Part of it too could be the fact that, while we are in a dry spell, a lot of Manitoba doesn’t experience dry to this level or this degree and we’re so used to having moisture, especially in spring,” Riekman also said.

In places like the heavy clay of the Red River Valley, that often tips the scales in favour of fall tillage, since a pre-seed tillage pass may not always be possible.

At the same time, snowy ditches blackened with “snirt” during the winter have been a starkly visible impact of wind erosion in recent years, something experts like Riekman and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada agrologist Curtis Cavers warn are encouraged by that same fall tillage.

“If we have a dry spring and we’ve prepped (the field) now — lost moisture, not holding that extra moisture into next spring — we also have an overly tilled field that is at high risk in those dry conditions of having soil blowing, that type of thing,” she said. “That might not be the best position to be in either.”

Riekman also pointed to sandblasting damage, which caused several reseed claims to be filed this year.

For his part, Cavers can see two main exceptions where a case for tillage could be made. In one case, the dry conditions may actually be conducive to subsoiling compacted areas, he said.

The other complicating factor is weeds.

“Especially if we’re concerned about herbicide resistance,” Cavers said.

While tillage may dry soil, so too do the weeds, taking up moisture and nutrients.

Kim Brown-Livingston, provincial weed specialist, has argued that fall weed control might be particularly critical this year, including annual weeds that are typically left to winterkill.

She did, however, urge producers to avoid tilling kochia patches at all costs, since those areas often have a salinity issue.

“That’s the worst thing I think you could be doing to manage your kochia,” she said.

The weed specialist urged producers to spray when possible, maintain moisture and, if tillage is needed, to try and hold off until spring.

“Tillage, if you need to do it, think about how you’re doing it,” Cavers said. “I’m not judging. I’m not trying to make it all black and white or anything like that. But if you can eliminate it, that’s probably a really good thing.”

The case for reducing tillage

Like many soil scientists, neither Riekman nor Cavers are huge fans of tillage.

Cavers argued that tillage can remove a half-inch of water in the soil per pass while also oxidizing soil organic matter, causing loss. At the same time, he noted, tillage often drops soil cover below critical levels. High-speed tillage that throws dirt helps strip topsoil off higher elevations of the field — referred to as tillage erosion.

Reducing tillage, along with increasing soil organic matter, are among the basic lessons that Cavers hoped to convey during a soil and water management webinar put on by the provincial government in early October.

A one per cent increase in soil organic matter is associated with up to 36 per cent jump in yield, the soil scientist argued.

“It’s reconstructing the sponge, so to speak,” Cavers said. “Rebuilding your organic matter, improving your structure. It’s kind of a hard thing in some ways to do this, because we’re saying, do this by not doing something else.”

This year, in particular, producers will also want to trap every bit of snow on the field that they can.

“If you can trap it and keep it where you need it, we know the soil’s dry. We know that it will soak in if there’s infiltration ability… but you’ve got to set it up so it can rather than just blow off,” Cavers said.

Middle ground

For some people, tillage is a dirty word. For others, it’s a significant part of production practices.

Riekman, meanwhile, says it’s complicated, even in a drought year like Manitoba is currently experiencing. Both Cavers and Riekman urged farmers to be strategic with their tillage, not just this year, but as a matter of course.

For Riekman, the immediate question becomes about how much tillage reduction the producer can realistically commit to.

“You don’t have to commit to zero till if you’re not ready to commit to zero till, but it’s baby steps,” she said.

If there is periodic tillage, there should also be periodic rest from tillage, she said. She urged producers to examine their rotations to identify windows for those rests.

“You can also start looking at that rotation and saying, OK, I know I’m dealing with ‘x’ residue, and I also need ‘x’ for a seedbed to prep for the next crop following it, what is the most appropriate tillage decision in that case?” she said.

“It takes a lot of planning to look at it from that perspective, essentially,” she said. “But by having that option and that opportunity to look at that kind of perspective, it may actually be beneficial in the long run because you might actually be able to plan your tillage where it is essentially most needed.”

Riekman cited one scenario where the producer might find rotational, occasional tillage is the best way to bury stratified phosphorus and decrease phosphorus loss.

As a tool, Cavers argued that tillage is “value neutral,” and no one tillage plan will fit every operation

The premise of strategic tillage also pushes back against the idea of one tool for all jobs, Riekman said. For cutting up residue, true vertical tillage certainly does the work, but while an excellent tool for residue management, vertical tillage is less than optimal for soil management.

Still, she noted, low-disturbance, true vertical tillage may be one way to deal with difficult residue like soybean. High-disturbance discs, meanwhile are hard on soil structure, Riekman said.

“Everybody loves the vertical till unit, because it fluffs everything up and leaves it nice and smooth on the surface, and it leaves a nice pack down two inches, so you’ve got something firm to place the seed into,” she said. “The problem is you’ve got this potential for compaction showing up at two inches where we’re overusing this type of equipment.”

Strategic tillage, on the other hand, should include how different tillage implements on the farm can be mixed and matched to best fit within the system, webinar attendees heard.

Long term

Regardless of tillage choices, those choices won’t solve Manitoba’s dry soil problem. Any producer working to build soil organic matter can likely testify on how long it took to start seeing improvement.

Instead, experts like Cavers and Riekman are looking more in the long term, urging producers to look at reduced and strategic tillage to buffer against similar years down the road.

For this year, it’s all about mitigating damage as much as possible for the spring crop to come.

“We have no idea what’s coming,” Riekman said. “We could have this beautiful year next year with the perfect amount of timely rains as we need it and we could just have a bumper crop. But we don’t know. What we do know right now is our soils are dry. We don’t have that stored soil moisture that we normally would have in the fall, and we’re just trying to figure out how we can plan for kind of a worst-case scenario.”

The post The complicated question of tillage appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“They are a very community-minded couple that has always been interested in conservation and nature,” said RBWD board member Reg Marginet.

“They have been such a benefit to our district. We are pleased to be able to showcase their efforts in soil and water conservation,” he added.

RBWD announced the Turners would receive the 2021 RBWD Conservation Award in a news release September 29.

Gordon and Val were married in 1974 and purchased Val’s family farm in 1994.

Gordon worked in construction most of his life. As a semi-retiree, he works at seed potato company Swansfleet Alliance.

Val was CAO for RM of Lorne for over 20 years. She has been retired since 2008. They have three children and seven grandchildren.

Although Gordon and Val weren’t active farmers, they were always looking at ways to protect and improve their land, said RBWD. The Turners worked with the watershed district to implement projects like an erosion control program, riparian-area protection and management, off-site watering systems, cover crops and small water-retention projects.

They were also the first applicants to the RBWD GROW program, funded through the provincial GROW Trust.

“The Turners are enthusiastic and forward-thinking landowners,” said Jennifer Corvino, RBWD GROW co-ordinator. “Their commitment to the health of the watershed is very evident in the practices they implement.”

The Turners are also keen to share conservation information, RBWD said.

“If given the opportunity, I will always share and pass any information to other landowners. We have to work together,” said Gordon. “I also take great pride in being a landowner and I think it is very important to help preserve the land for future generations. I feel very fortunate to have had the assistance on many projects from Redboine Watershed District.”

Gordon and Val will be recognized at the Manitoba Association of Watersheds Annual Conference in Brandon in December.

The post Turner family recognized for conservation efforts appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The biggest increase — 8.9 per cent — was in the Eastman region followed by 4.7 per cent in Central Plains-Pembina Valley, 3.9 per cent in Parkland, three per cent in Interlake and 2.7 per cent in Westman (read related and see below).

It’s the 27th year in a row that Manitoba farmland values went up. However, the annual rate of increase has plateaued, rising by the equivalent of inflation (two per cent) and increased land productivity (one to two per cent) combined.

Canadian farmland values, on average, went up 5.2 per cent in 2019 and are expected to continue increasing slowly, the report says.

Canadian farmland values, on average, went up 5.2 per cent in 2019 and are expected to continue increasing slowly so long as farm income holds or improves, the report says.

“These factors support the elevated valuation of farmland,” it reads.

Why it matters: The price of farmland affects farmers at both ends of their career. Higher values mean young farmers struggle to build their operations, but can make expansion more attainable later in the career path, and retirement more comfortable.

“Farmland values are still going up (in Canada and Manitoba), but at a slower pace,” J.P. Gervais, FCC’s chief agricultural economist, told reporters during a telephone news conference April 3.

So far COVID-19 hasn’t had that much of a negative impact on Canadian agriculture, except for cattle and corn, he said.

The big drivers of land prices are farm income and interest rates, he said.

“To the extent that prices are somewhat what we recorded in previous years, and we can still export… and… I would argue yields should go back to trend — it’s not out of the question we have a good year,” Gervais said.

Land is still in demand as farms continue to get larger and younger farmers enter the business, Gervais said.

In addition, interest rates are low and could even go a bit lower, he said.

“But there is no guarantee that you wouldn’t see a decline (in land values) at one point, especially given that current valuation of land relative to farm income is at the highest point it has ever been,” Gervais said. “Do I anticipate that? The answer is no… ”

While COVID-19 might not have hurt farmers yet, they’ve had setbacks, including lower revenues the last few years, trade disputes, including canola exports to China, have been disruptive, there were harvest struggles last fall, and grain delivery delays due to a railway strike and protesters blocking the tracks.

And COVID-19 will only add to the uncertainty, not just in commodity markets, but land sales.

“I expect more caution from (land) sellers, more caution from buyers,” Gervais said. “But having said that, low interest rates, farm income that might not be too different from what we’ve seen in recent years… I would expect a similar pattern for farmland values in 2020.”

In fact, Gervais said his land value forecasts the last few years were lower than the actual advance in land prices.

Meanwhile, farmland is getting harder to afford, he said. The farmland value to farm income ratio is higher than it has ever been.

“That means land is getting more expensive relative to farm income,” Gervais said. “2015 is really the turning point no matter where you look… it started to shift.”

The long-standing trend to fewer, bigger farms continues, but is slowing, Gervais said, something he says isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“We have more and more smaller farms and we’ve got bigger farms getting bigger,” he said. “It’s the middle part that seems to be squeezed a little bit — squeezed in the sense of not necessarily moving. Having more, different business models out there is a good thing because that means, from a demand point of view, demand remains healthy… ”

Given the problems many farmers have had in recent years, and the added uncertainty from COVID-19, liquidity is going to be crucial for many farmers this spring, Gervais said.

Why liquidity was so critical in this current situation is that you don’t want to compound the negative impact of what we saw prior to this crisis and compound this into what we’re likely to see in the next few months, he said.

“If you have margins that are really tight and liquidity issues to begin with you don’t want to force businesses to make decisions that are not in their best interest long term,” he said. “So that’s the reason you need to focus on liquidity in the first place.”

In March the federal government announced FCC would have an additional $5 billion to assist farmers with cash flow this spring and loan deferrals.

The post Canadian, Manitoba farmland values higher in 2019 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Called the ‘slake test’ it was designed to demonstrate soil stability to the 100 attendees at a soil health workshop at the Shevchenko Ukrainian Centre in Rosa.

Archuleta, a longtime employee of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service turned consultant, had lined up four large graduated cylinders filled with water.

He gave each volunteer a chunk of air-dried soil. One sample was from a regularly tilled field in Missouri, another from a cover crop, no-till field from his own farm in Missouri.

The other two were from Manitoba with a tilled sample and another from a no-till pasture field. Archuleta explained that if the soil falls apart, it is missing the organic compounds that act as “superglues” to bind the silts, sands and clays together.

The volunteers placed the samples into the cylinders where they were suspended on a screen. Within seconds the two tilled samples began breaking down. The pasture field sample broke down much more slowly, while the cover crop, no-till sample from Missouri, barely broke down at all.

“What started the movement in the United States were demonstrations like these,” said Archuleta. “It’s a demonstration that has connected people back to the soil. I love these demonstrations because the soil is speaking to us. I’m just interpreting what the soil is telling us.”

The other big draw at the meeting was Gabe Brown, a North Dakota rancher from the Bismarck area who’s become a rock star of the regenerative movement.

Where Archuleta’s presentation was more visual, Brown got down to the nitty-gritty with detailed analysis and comparisons of the various methods of regenerative agriculture versus traditional methods.

Brown is considered a pioneer of the movement. With his wife Shelly and his son Paul, Brown operates a diversified 5,000-acre farm and ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota. He bought the ranch from his father-in-law in 1991 and has integrated principles of regenerative agriculture to improve the health of the soil.

The Brown Ranch hosts over 2,000 visitors a year from people interested in his methods of agriculture. In 2018, Brown authored the book, Dirt to Soil, One Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture. Along with Archuleta, he is a partner in Understanding Ag LLC, and he is an instructor for the Soil Health Academy.

The crux of Brown’s message to the Rosa audience was that the soil is a direct reflection of the farmer. He showed slides comparing soil samples from his own farm with those of neighbours to illustrate that point.

“Every decision you make on your farm has compounding, cascading effects,” said Brown. “They’re either positive or negative – never neutral.”

The comparisons of Brown’s soil with his neighbours’ were vastly different. And he says it all comes down to stewardship – the choices the farmer makes.

“If all you want to do is grow corn and beans, so be it. But don’t come to me and say my soils are poor. I’m not going to feel sorry for you. You can only change that if you change the compaction between your ears,” he joked.

The Brown Ranch follows some simple guidelines that Brown says lead to a healthy soil ecosystem. These six guidelines are essentially the guiding principles of the regenerative agriculture movement.

The first is context.

“We all have an ecological context, you’re not going to grow the same things here as a farmer in Florida,” said Brown.

But it goes beyond environmental context; it also extends to financial context, the size of the farm, and resources available.

The second principle is employing the least amount of chemical and mechanical disturbance possible.

The third principle is creating a “soil armour” with cover crops.

The fourth is to diversify cash crops grown.

The fifth is to leave the living root in the soil for as long as possible.

The sixth and final principle was the integration of livestock into the cycle.

The idea with these principles is to mimic as closely as possible, the way nature works.

While soil health and environmental stewardship are important aspects of the movement, one of the key messages that both Brown and Archuleta emphasized was that following these principles is also a path to a better bottom line for farmers. That is the message that seems to resonate most with the audience in Rosa, as well as audiences around the globe. A quick Google search shows that their YouTube videos have hundreds of thousands of views.

Some of the growers in attendance were quite familiar with these principles and have been dabbling in them with some success.

“I’ve been watching his videos for years and we’ve been trying it out on our farm,” said Markus Dueck, who runs a farm near Beausejour.

Dueck, who was also one of the volunteers called up by Archuleta during his presentation, says he’s been happy with the results.

The post Spreading the word appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The comments came from Infrastructure Minister Ron Schuler February 4, in a release announcing a new Basin Conditions Report that provided an updated snapshot of river levels and soil moisture conditions.

“The report will present Red River and Assiniboine River Basin conditions as of late January,” said Schuler in the release. “The actual extent of spring run-off is still largely dependent on weather conditions between now and April.”

As noted in the province’s Fall Conditions Report, soil moisture levels range from well-above average in southeast Manitoba including the Red River Valley, southwest and southeast Manitoba to near normal in northern Manitoba. In the United States portion of the Red River watershed, soil moisture levels were at record-high levels.

Since November 2019, precipitation is tracking below to well-below normal in most parts of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. However, precipitation in the United States portions of the Red and Souris rivers are tracking as much as 150 to 300 per cent of normal accumulation.

Frost depth is below normal in most areas. As moist and frozen soils reduce infiltration of meltwater and increase spring run-off, below-normal frost depth is considered a favourable condition in reducing the extent of spring run-off.

Base flows and levels in Manitoba rivers have been declining since the fall of 2019, but are still above normal for southern and northern Manitoba, and normal to above normal in central Manitoba basins.

Manitoba’s Hydrologic Forecast Centre is starting to build its first full Flood Outlook, which will be released in late February.

Forecasters will compile data from several sources including points south and west of Manitoba. Weather developments from now through April will largely determine the occurrence, extent and severity of spring run-off in 2020.

Spring run-off in Manitoba rivers is dependent on soil moisture, snow cover, soil frost depth, base flow and levels of rivers, along with the snowmelt rate and the amount and timing of the spring rain. Peak flows on Manitoba rivers are also dependent on the timing of peak flows from the United States and Saskatchewan portions of the basins.

The full Basins Condition Report is available at the Manitoba government website.

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