610 Adapt. Then Mitigate.
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#RealisticRegenAg | The heat has come to southern Alberta! After never making it above 30C we are now in week well over 30C. This is going to be tough on nearly every crop as it’s right at flowering time or early seed fill. In the case of potatoes, the first set has been made and they are deciding how much to keep of their second set. Hopefully they keep them and get bulking!
How is it in your area? Reply back to this email if you like. It only comes to me.
Below is a small highlight of my business and then some articles that I’ve come across over the past month.
In case you’re new here, let me introduce myself. I’m an author and independent agronomist from the Western Canadian Prairies specializing in climate-smart agriculture. I focus on scientifically proven practices that benefit the planet and, just as importantly, farmers' economic sustainability. Be sure to visit my website, www.plantsdigsoil.com, to learn about my book “Practical Regeneration” and for services I that I offer for farmers and agribusiness.
Transcript:
https://www.plantsdigsoil.com/podcast/adapt-then-mitigate
Newsletter signup:
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Realistic Regen Ag Channel (WhatsApp):
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Practical Regeneration: Realistic Strategies for Climate Smart Agriculture
https://www.plantsdigsoil.com/books
My consulting packages:
https://www.plantsdigsoil.com/pricing/#consulting
Speaking, Teaching, & Workshop Design:
https://www.plantsdigsoil.com/speaking
My funding service offerings:
https://www.plantsdigsoil.com/pricing/#paperwork
SCAP program details https://www.alberta.ca/sustainable-cap.aspx
OFCAF program details https://rdar.ca/funding-opportunities/ofcaf
Email: scott@plantsdigsoil.com
X (aka Twitter) (Scott): https://twitter.com/scottcgillespie
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LinkedIn (Scott): https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcgillespie/
LinkedIn (Company): https://www.linkedin.com/company/plants-dig-soil
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Podcast Subscription Apps: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottcgillespie
Business Highlight
Do you have a short period before harvest begins to relax and slow down a bit? How about some light summer reading? For anyone in the Prairies & BC, UFA currently has a free shipping promotion! It is on until July 23rd. For anyone else in Canada, if you just reply to this email and ask me to ship it to you directly I can send it to you at the same price. Sorry, but international shipping is much too expensive for me to do it for free. In any other country, find your local bookstore or use the link to buy direct from the publisher.
609 The Fit for Cover Crops
Cover crops aren’t required in every situation. This is a key theme throughout my book “Practical Regeneration”. In this episode I’m going to talk about the development of no-till and how it might give us some clues on how to think through where cover crops work best.
https://www.plantsdigsoil.com/podcast/the-fit-for-cover-crops
Virtual fence provides cattle management options
The biggest limitation of multi-paddock grazing is the labour and the fencing. In the flat prairies I hadn’t thought of another limitation: trees and hills. This is an interesting story about a family farm trying out virtual fencing on Ontario.
https://www.producer.com/livestock/virtual-fence-provides-cattle-management-options/
Including cattle on cropland didn’t help soil health
Now before you think the virtual fence is finally going to allow you to integrate cattle onto your crop farm, think again. Or at least read this article. I applaud the researchers for reporting what they found, even though it’s apparent they went in thinking they’d see a difference. A good point to this article is that most of the research happened in a drought and so they need to test it more in normal conditions, but it’s still a good cautionary article.
Something that wasn’t brought up in the article are the economic considerations. They used full season cover crops. These will have the best chance of showing soil health due to the longer growing period and biomass. However, taking a field out of production for a year (or two in this case) puts a lot of pressure on the cattle grazing to pay. From my discussions with producers, it’s hard to make cattle pay on annual forages, unless the land is only suitable for grazing and this is a break year.
https://www.producer.com/news/including-cattle-on-cropland-didnt-help-soil-health/
Climate change adaptation urged
This the lead article I titled this newsletter on. Instead of rushing into mitigation, let’s adapt first. Instead of trying to do things on the farm to lower CO2 levels, why not take advantage of higher CO2 levels? Or take advantage of climate change? Canada is uniquely positioned to benefit from climate change.
“Being at the northern fringe of viable agriculture globally, a subtly warmer and wetter situation is surely a benefit for Canada,” says Mussell of Agri-Food Economic Systems, a research group in Rockwood, Ont.”
This article points to a more complete report. It’s a short one (22 pages) but I haven’t read it yet. I’m curious to dig into it deeper. Let me know what you you think. Reply back to this email, send me a message on Spotify if you are listening there, put a comment on the YouTube video, or find me on LinkedIn or X.
https://www.producer.com/news/climate-change-adaptation-urged/
Senate urges soil strategy
I called the last report “short” because this one is much longer. It’s 160 pages, which I guess is short for a government report. I want to have time to really get into this and not rush when reading it. They are clear that each region needs it’s own locally adapted strategy, so that’s a good sign. They also want a consensus on how to measure, report, and track soil health. I have hope that this could be a good thing. Right now it’s the wild west for soil health. Labs have their own ways of doing things, large companies are making their own protocols, and organizations from other countries are trying to make their own tests the standards for farmers.
https://www.producer.com/news/soil-should-be-a-strategic-national-asset-senate-ag-committee/
Soil Fertility, Fertilizers, and Crop Nutrition: Past, Present, and Future
Part One: A Look Back
This article is only available as a PDF download, but if you have a way to print it or read it on a larger screen than your phone, I highly recommend it. To truly understand regenerative agriculture you have to think about the regeneration of nutrients. No, they won’t be created with cover crops alone*. All of what we produce gets exported overseas or is sent too far away for the nutrients to ever come back. I integrated this in my talk to a busload of teachers at an Inside Education event a couple weeks ago**. We can’t be regenerative until we have a circular economy that brings the nutrients back.
In the meantime, we must rely on fertilizer. Currently it is mostly chemically produced from natural gas or mined from the earth. In centuries past, natural sources were used. Bat guano used to travel the world for it’s nitrogen content. In a sad chapter of American and Canadian history, the buffalo bones that littered the Plains and Prairies after the mass killing of the 19th century were collected and ground up for their phosphorus content.
https://acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/crso.20344
*I devote two chapters in my book to this. First, about taking the long view on regeneration and second, on the three pillar propping up regenerative agriculture. Faulty accounting of nutrients is one of the main ones. Don’t forget that there is free shipping for the next week so if you’re on the fence, now is a great time to pick it up.
**I mentioned last month I’d try to post some pictures from this event in this update. The organizers have pictures and will be sharing them. I hope to be able to add them next month.