Reading Time: 4 minutes There’s more than one way to strip-till a field. During this year’s Canada’s Digital Farm Show, Woodstock-area grain growers Ken Martin and Wes Hart shared their lessons learned, and triumphs experienced, in making the hybrid tillage system work for their businesses. Why it matters: Strip-tillage continues to attract interest as a workable midway approach to […] Read more
Tag Archives Land management
Adventures in strip-tilling
How two farmers adopted and augmented their strip-till approach
Understanding and managing low pH knolls
The OMAFRA Field Crop Team wants farmers to get to know their knolls
Reading Time: 2 minutes While high pH knolls tend to be more common in Ontario, often caused by soil erosion leaving higher pH calcareous subsoils, this is not the case for all regions. How do low pH knolls develop? Low pH knolls can develop on undulating landscapes where surface soils formed from deposits of sand, such as where glacial […] Read more
Managing eroded knolls
OMAFRA Field Crop Report for September 10
Reading Time: 3 minutes Field Crop News – We’ve all seen them. Hilltops. Whitecaps. High spots where the crop struggles year after year. Eroded knolls are common to Ontario agriculture and cost farmers in lost productivity each season. This article will explore knolls: how they’ve formed, how they differ, and how they can be managed or even re-mediated. How […] Read more
Silk invests in ALUS project
Reading Time: < 1 minute Farmers involved in ALUS (Alternative Land Use Services) projects will have greater funding from a new investment in the program. Silk, the plant-based drink company, has committed $100,00 to ALUS’s New Acre Project. The funds will help farmers in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec to use their land in a way that qualifies as ecosystem services […] Read more
How to identify low organic matter
Things to look for when walking and working in the field
Reading Time: 3 minutes Did your fields show a lot of crusting this planting season? Was there standing water where there shouldn’t be? These and other indicators, say provincial soil health experts, mean your soil organic matter (SOM) levels could use some attention. Why it matters: SOM improves soil health and helps reduce crop susceptibility to extreme conditions. While […] Read more
Eastern Canada gets poor grades on soil
A report card compares soil management and health between Eastern and Western Canada
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Soil Conservation Council of Canada has released its first national soil health report card. The soil grades are based on farmer changes made over the past five to 10 years, soil conditions, and whether organic matter levels have improved. “It wasn’t in terms of hard data, but just from my experience and research, extensions […] Read more
Award winners focus on managing cows and calves on pasture
Fresh water, grazing rotation followed by Mapleseed, TESA winners
Reading Time: 3 minutes Beef Farmers of Ontario hands out two awards for pasture and environmental management — and both usually end up with similarities and that was the case in 2020. Both the Mapleseed Pasture Award winner and The Environmental Stewardship Award winners manage large numbers of cows on pasture and have made strategic decisions to intensively manage […] Read more
Promoting winter cover crops with local data
Conservation authority looking for cover crop impact on water quality in Upper Thames
Reading Time: 2 minutes In an effort to improve water quality, the Upper Thames Conservation Authority (UTCA) is promoting cover crop adoption by making data on the environmental efficacy of winter cover more relevant to local farmers. Why it matters: Better economic data would help farmers making decisions about whether to use cover crops. The UTCA is pursuing the […] Read more
Real-time soil analysis in the field
Don’t bring your soil sample to the lab, take the lab to the field, says the Canadian inventor of the SoilReader
Reading Time: 3 minutes Glacier FarmMedia – It’s a difficult concept to sum up in a few words. A Canadian startup sells a coulter that reads nine nutrient factors while pulled through soil. As the headline states, SoilReader can provide real-time data, on the go, as it is pulled through the field. The nine vital constituents are nitrogen, phosphorus, […] Read more
Editorial: Still lots to know about mechanisms of soil health
Reading Time: 3 minutes The maintenance of soil health has come into much greater prominence in the past five to 10 years. That’s an important step — our soils are the basis of civilization and those that have not understood that have had civilizations collapse. Check out the Nile River delta today. We’re a long way from the lack […] Read more
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