GrainsWest Winter 2018

Winter

2018

grainswest.com

BY IAN DOIG • LEAD PHOTO BY GEORGE CLAYTON

Alberta farmers experiment with improvement practices

N A DRIVE ALONG HIGHWAY 41 NEAR THE

hamlet of Hilda, soil health specialist Yamily Zavala

spotted a field containing sunflowers, a plant that

she happens to incorporate in cover cropping studies at the

Chinook Applied Research Association (CARA) facility in Oyen

just over an hour to the north.

Curious, she pulled over and immediately knew she’d

found something special. “What caught my attention was the

composition of the material that was there,” she said. This was

clearly a great soil system exhibiting excellent turnover of its

abundant organic matter, which improves nutrient recycling,

water-holding capacity and more. “I was amazed.

Amazed

,”

said Zavala. “What I saw there, I haven’t seen in the whole

province.” In fact, this farm in southeast Alberta had soil similar

to what she’d seen while working as a consultant on a West

African rainforest cocoa plantation.

This chance discovery represents the coalescence of a trifecta

of soil health practices that were in substantial part pioneered

in Alberta. Soil health and its pillars of zero-tillage, crop

rotation and cover cropping have captured the imagination of

farmers and the non-farming public alike. Rejuvenating the soil

ecosystem, or microbiome, is being increasingly examined as

a means of preventing erosion, managing moisture, retaining

nitrogen and restoring carbon as well as aiding weed and

pest suppression. Though implementation has its challenges,

according to its advocates this suite of practices can boost

sustainability and economic return.

The exceptional soil Zavala found near Hilda contained

a great deal of organic matter in various stages of

decomposition, but also relatively little surface residue.

“Which is a really good indication there has been good

turnover,” said Zavala. “That’s what we need in the system,

that you can turn over the organic matter so that you can take

advantage of all the benefits from nutrient recycling and more

water-holding capacity. All this happens when you increase

the organic matter in the soil.” She soon learned that the land

belonged to Andy Kirschenman, a farmer deeply committed

to improving his soil and his bottom line.

A central pillar of soil health, conservation tillage became

standard practice in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Its broad

implementation owes much to now-retired agricultural

engineer and soil scientist Wayne Lindwall, who researched

and developed the practice in the 1970s while working for

the Alberta government as well as Agriculture and Agri-Food

Canada (AAFC) at the Lethbridge Research Station. He later

served as AAFC’s director general for environmental health

and was instrumental in having no-till soil declared a carbon

sink in the Kyoto accord. “We’re the only country whose soil

carbon levels are going up,” said Lindwall. “Which is a bit

unusual these days.”

Raised on a farm near Wrentham, his initial motivation to

improve soil health was tackling wind erosion and its hallmark

black blizzards, Prairie dust clouds that closed highways

and filled irrigation canals and ditches with silt. Prior to the

introduction of no-till, southern Alberta farming also involved

little re-cropping and no rotation, and wheat or barley

fallow was only occasionally followed by flax or mustard,

said Lindwall. Though an economical model for no-till didn’t

then exist, research revealed in principle that cultivation was

unnecessary and yields were as good or better without it.

“Our freeze-thaw cycle and self-mulching soils, by nature,

tend to sort of till themselves, and then once you get a little

earthworm activity, that helps,” said Lindwall. Additionally,

he and fellow researchers found summer fallow to be quite

inefficient at conserving water, but that standing stubble did

so by trapping snow.

Interest in the implications soon grew as word spread that

with fertilizer, continuous cropping was possible in southern

Alberta. Despite the challenge to conventional wisdom and

the existing economic model, innovative farmers and forward-

looking ag groups pushed the industry to develop air seeding

technology that, with increased surface moisture, allowed a

wider variety of crops to be grown and launched the canola

revolution.

“You can understand how difficult that transition was,” said

Lindwall of the industry’s wholesale adoption of conservation

tillage. “I’m amazed myself, because I wouldn’t have

imagined. It takes that first 10 or 15 per cent—the innovators—

and then the followers move in when it’s more attractive.”

While tillage has recently made a resurgence, Lindwall

remains a staunch advocate of no-till, conducting volunteer

lectures at the University of Alberta and speaking at field

days. The benefits of no-till remain apparent, he said. “It

really showed this year in southern Alberta where we had 60