Since 1992, this ongoing study has tracked the evolution of southern Alberta cropping practices and shown the benefits of a diverse crop rotation.

You’re looking to buy or rent some land, and have your eye on two parcels. In one case, the cropping, tillage and management history is a bit vague. In the other, the landowner has detailed records that show a diverse crop rotation and robust soil health. Which land would you pay more for?

The research land managed by Dr. Eric Bremer isn’t for sale, but it’s an example of how good stewardship accumulates over time to build heathy soil and a healthy living in farming. Located near Bow Island, the site’s diverse crop rotations were established in 1992 and maintained for 24 years by Dr. Ross McKenzie and his team at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry. Since 2015, the long-term impact of these rotations has been evaluated under uniform cropping through a research grant provided by Alberta Pulse Growers.

The site’s mission is to explore the long-term impact on soil health and productivity of a wide variety of crop rotations and agronomy choices. As Bremer explains, this land embodies a history of recent decades’ farming practices in the region.

“When the location started, a lot of crop producers in that area were transitioning out of fallow-wheat type of rotations and out of tillage, maybe going into chemfallow,” said Bremer. “It was minimum-till for the first six years then zero-till after that, just like the farmers were doing in that area. Over time, it added more pulses, oilseeds and grasses.”

The steady pulse of good stewardship

The addition of pulses into the rotation had the expected impact on soil health and productivity, compared to a nutritionally bland wheat-fallow tandem. In fact, Bremer has found that the impact of pulses keeps on showing up.

“Even three years later, we’re still seeing differences with the pulses compared to continuous wheat,” he said. “It’s not night and day, but barley yields in Year 3 were still seven bushels per acre higher when previous rotations included pulses than following continuous wheat.”

Even so, farmland that’s seen less-than-ideal crop rotations and tillage practices is by no means a write-off. Diversifying crop mix and supplementing nutrients as needed can go a long way to restoring soil health. That’s another finding of this project.

Bremer’s most recent planting across the site was winter wheat in Fall 2019. Looking ahead to the site’s 29^th spring, he’ll keep working to build a case for good rotational stewardship as a source of soil health and slow, steady wealth creation.

“If you’re taking over land through purchase or rental, you’ll be thinking about its history and the implications of that for how you should be farming,” Bremer said. “Most realize that, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind. If you’re following someone who’s put in a lot of pulse crops, you can expect to have some kind of nitrogen benefit. If you’re renting out your land or selling, whether or not you can ask for a higher price, you can use that as a selling point.”

A vital insect management resource for the past 20 years, the Prairie Pest Monitoring Network is making plans for its new five-year funding period.

If you’ve ever read an insect forecast in a provincial agriculture publication or received an insect heads-up from a crop consultant, you’re likely familiar with the work of the Prairie Pest Monitoring Network (PPMN).

“The project has been going for over 20 years and we’ve had funding from a number of industry groups, as well as federal support, to run this coordinated monitoring project,” said Meghan Vankosky, Entomology Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

The Network acts as a central hub of data for incidents and severity of key insect pests in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Information is gathered by farmers, agronomists, industry, university scientists and federal and provincial entomologists.

In 2018, the Network secured five additional years of funding from the Integrated Crop Agronomy Cluster, of which APG is a funder. Vankosky and Jennifer Otani (Biologist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) will serve as project co-leads, with provincial roles led by Scott Meers of Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, James Tansey of the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture and John Gavloski of Manitoba Agriculture.

Old foes and new challenges

Farmers won’t be surprised to hear that several insect pests have been on the most-wanted list continuously throughout the past 20 years.

“We have a lot of biological data on insects like grasshopper and wheat midge,” Vankosky said. “We put that information together into different scenarios to forecast where they might be found and what their potential impact might be going into the next growing season.”

Other insect pests, such as pea leaf weevil, were little-known when the Network first started but have become a significant concern on the Prairies in recent years.

“The pea leaf weevil is one of several pests we now monitor for every year,” Vankosky said. “Going forward, we’re hoping to include new emerging pests, including pulse pests like pea and soybean aphids.”

Just as pest populations have changed in 20 years, notions of environmental stewardship have come a long way. More producers are careful to manage the impact of insecticide applications on beneficial insects and pollinators, and the Network’s maps help shape growers’ choices.

“Our maps show pest densities or areas at risk of pest outbreaks,” Vankosky said. “Growers can use that information to decide to avoid using insecticides in order to promote natural enemy populations, or to perhaps scout more closely.”

The Network provides this time-sensitive information on the distribution and severity of insect pest challenges mainly through their weekly online PPMN blog https://prairiepestmonitoring.blogspot.com/. They are also growing into social media.

Vankosky, or @Vanbugsky as she’s known on Twitter, believes technology will become more important in providing critical in-season information to growers on insect threats.

“The technology available to us has evolved a lot over 20 years,” Vankosky said. “We’ll be improving our online presence over the next five years based on what our subscribers want and how they want to get it.”

Once operational, the Prairie Crop Disease Monitoring Network will help producers get a better handle on disease risks, so they can mount a timely defense.

When you’re growing pulses, managing disease threats just comes with the territory.  Should you budget for a fungicide application? Should you plan cultural practices to fend off disease? Should disease worries influence whether or not you plant pulses, or in which fields, or how many acres?

Kelly Turkington sees a better way. He wants to build a reliable, robust tool to reduce guesswork in your disease management decision-making.

Between now and 2023, Turkington is leading a major research project tasked with designing and implementing a monitoring program for plant diseases on the Canadian Prairies. The project is being funded by the Integrated Crop Agronomy Cluster.

“We’re looking at developing a similar approach to the Prairie Pest Monitoring Network used for insects, and that network has taken a decade or more to develop,” said Turkington, Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lacombe. “With diseases, you’re dealing with a wider range of issues that are usually unique to individual crops.”

One central hub for current, accessible information

Getting the Prairie Crop Disease Monitoring Network (PCDMN) off the ground will take a large amount of program design and foundational work. The Western Grains Research Foundation is a key partner and will be leading the development of a website and online presence for the PCDMN.

In-field scouting for diseases is critical, but if a certain disease is seen in a field, who’s to say whether the outbreak is mild, medium or severe? It’s a judgment call.

For this reason, a good deal of the project’s initial work will be in developing standardized protocols and scales that are either directed towards research-focused surveys or farmer/crop consultant-focused surveys. The Network will solicit ongoing survey information from provincial plant pathologists and disease researchers, and perhaps even farmers and consultants, and will turn this information into alerts during the growing season as well as annual disease situation reports.

“It’s our hope that researchers who are doing surveys see this as another venue for them to get their information out to producers,” Turkington said. “This information may also help inform research activities and even shape research proposals. The PCDMN can also help to build survey capacity to assist researchers to enhance their coverage of the prairie region, while also providing them with plant samples that can be used for assessments of pathogen virulence and fungicide sensitivity.”

By having observations made in the same locations over time, and reported consistently, the Network can identify changes in severity for key diseases in key crops.

“A farmer or crop consultant could use the Network information to stay on top of issues on an annual or growing season basis,” Turkington said, “and perhaps gauge the risk of the disease issues they are facing, and based on that, what the appropriate management tools are that they should use.”

With the right agronomic systems, Alberta growers could one day boost yields, including those of pulses, by up to 50%. This research project will help develop the blueprint.

If Alberta crop producers wrote a mission statement for the next 30 years, it might go something like this: feed the world, protect the planet and make money doing it. This statement captures three interlocking priorities with which producers contend – production, environment and economics.

On the level of production, it’s a tall order. Farmers are challenged to increase output to keep pace with a global population that could reach 9.6 billion by 2050.

Here’s good news. Yantai Gan, Senior Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Swift Current, SK, sees plenty of room for production to grow. He points to a yield gap between actual yields and yield potential of between 30% and 50% for key western Canadian crops.

“Yields have been increasing through genetic enhancements and agronomy management improvements,” Gan said. “Moving forward, genetic enhancement will still play a major role developing better varieties, but agronomy management will have lots to contribute as new technologies become available.”

If greater yield alone was all that was needed, Alberta farmers could certainly oblige. They could increase seeding rates, fertilize aggressively and treat the crop to all manner of yield-enhancing crop protection products. This increased yield, of course, might come at a potentially high cost to the environment and to the farmer’s livelihood.

To help get production, profitability and environment all pulling together, Gan is leading an ambitious, five-year, cross-disciplinary research project to provide detailed, data-based recommendations for future crop production in Western Canada. This project will be funded until 2023 by the Integrated Crop Agronomy Cluster (ICAC).

Comprehensive look at cropping systems and environmental conditions

As Gan explains, the project will study six carefully-designed cropping systems at seven sites within three large ecological zones: the Eastern Prairies Zone (southern Manitoba), the Parkland Region (Melfort, SK and Lacombe) and Dry/Drought areas (Swift Current and Lethbridge).

The cropping systems include a conventional farming system, a higher nutrient-use efficient farming system and a soil health-focused system. There’s also a so-called ‘freestyle’ system in which crop rotation decisions are heavily weighted to current market conditions. Pulse crops will play a key role in this research.

“Pulse crops have a higher yield gap than cereals and other crops,” Gan explained. “This is because pulse varieties come from a smaller genetic pool, and there is large potential to discover how enhanced genetics can be married with changing environments. Doing so will minimize damages to the system in case of severe stresses like a disease outbreak.”

With funding in place, Gan and his team have their marching orders for the next five years. He believes, however, that the project’s greatest value could occur well past that point. He’ll be looking to secure one or two more five-year funding cycles to keep the information current and steadily flowing to growers.

“Once we have three years of data we can start looking at making recommendations,” Gan said. “At the end of five years, we will have a lot of concrete information to give detailed information to growers for different regions with varying environmental conditions.”

It’s complicated, but intercropping pulses with oilseeds could be viable and profitable in southern Alberta. A three-year research project will sweat the details.

Improvements in farm productivity tend to be made in small increments: a seed variety that promises 2% more yield, a herbicide that offers slightly sharper weed control or a grain auger that lets you work 5% faster.

Now, let’s think really big. What would you say to increasing your per-acre crop production by up to 40%? It could be possible using a crop production technique you might’ve heard of, but which only a handful of growers are currently practising.

Eric Bremer started a three-year project in 2018 to study the feasibility and economics of intercropping. His team will plant a variety of canola/pulse combinations, including spring and winter canola and spring and winter field peas and lentils.

“Putting two crops together usually means you get less yield for each crop, but when you have two crops with different needs, they can be quite complementary,” said Bremer, Head of R&D at Western Ag Innovations. “We’re interested in seeing if you can get more productivity overall.”

Previous studies give intercropping a promising thumbs-up

Bremer cites studies indicating intercropping can result in an overall per-acre crop production boost of around 50%. He thinks there may also be other benefits.

“You often get diseases when it’s wet, but if you have two crops using up the water better and keeping the canopy open, we think that could help reduce disease,” Bremer said.

There are potential complications, too, with weed control being one of them. A grower practising intercropping may have challenges finding a product that can be used on both crops.

“A potential benefit with weed control is that intercropping provides a more competitive stand than either apart,” Bremer noted. “Many growers find it’s competitive enough to just need pre-seed weed control.”

If you’ve ever struggled getting a pea crop harvested, now imagine harvesting your canola at the same time. As Bremer explained it, growers who are intercropping go through with one pass of the combine and separate the seeds when unloading the truck before storage. In the case of peas and canola, the large difference in seed size makes that straightforward.

Bremer admits adjustments will be needed depending on a farmer’s location, soil type and crop combinations. It’s a concept with lots of moving parts, but he believes it could deliver immense dividends.

Winter canola growing in the same field as winter peas or spring lentils? Flax plus chickpeas? A lentil/mustard combination? As Bremer kicks off this intriguing project, he’s as full of questions as anyone.

“It’s a more complicated system, so we’ll need to try a lot of things to make it work,” he said. “It will involve large changes to cropping practice, but if there’s a large payback, then growers will figure it out. Some growers have already been intercropping routinely. We’re just trying to help that along and see if it can work in southern Alberta.”