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GrainsWest:
Tell us about your focus as a graduate student at
the U of A.
Sheri Strydhorst:
When I was doing my master’s degree in the
early 2000s, faba bean was growing in acres at the time, so I
studied faba bean agronomy. I was looking at details like how we
seed it and how we do harvest management for it. For my PhD, in
a nutshell, I was looking at the rotational benefits from peas, faba
beans and lupin to wheat crops.
GW:
Is it true that after your university days you took a bit of
a research hiatus?
SS:
Yes, I absolutely did. I worked as the executive director for
the Alberta Pulse Growers Commission, where I managed the
day-to-day operations and had a 12-member board and staff to
supervise. A lot of my work there was building relationships with
national organizations, like Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada,
and industry.
GW:
Can you explain what you’re working on right now?
SS:
As a research scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, I
conduct agronomic research on a variety of crops including pulses
and cereals, both wheat and barley. Right now I’m trying to take a
systems approach to what can be done in agronomy to maximize
yields and do it profitably. My research in cultivar-specific manage-
ment looks at three major areas: plant growth regulators (PGRs),
foliar fungicides and topping up with in-crop nitrogen.
GW:
What have you found regarding the efficiency of foliar
fungicides and topping up with in-crop nitrogen on Alberta
cereal crops?
SS:
A high overview is that the in-crop topping up with
nitrogen doesn’t seem to work well on wheat. On the other
Winter
2017
grainswest.com15
Sheri Strydhorst is an agronomist, an
internationally recognized agriculture researcher and an adjunct
professor at the University of Alberta, who also somehow finds
the time to work on her own farming operation—tremendous ac-
complishments for a city kid who grew up in St. Albert, knowing
little about the land and how the Canadian agriculture industry
functioned.
Strydhorst’s passion for agriculture was sparked during her
undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta. At the univer-
sity, since she “didn’t really see a career in counting fruit flies,”
she switched her focus from biological sciences to agriculture
and subsequently met her husband, who’s from a farming family
in the Neerlandia area. Today, Strydhorst is involved in running
a 1,220-acre grain farm in Neerlandia and conducts agronomic
research in cereal-cultivar-specific management in Barrhead for
Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.
“Agriculture is my life now,” she said. “And now that I have a
personal and professional connection to farming, I’m aware of
how much I didn’t know about agriculture and food production
in Canada beforehand.”