The 18th annual Moose Mountain Ag Day in Arcola coincided with both provincial and national days dedicated to all things agricultural, as producers and suppliers from throughout this corner of the province gathered in Prairie Place Hall on Tuesday, Feb. 13.
There, those in attendance listened and learned from a roster of speakers - which included a keynote address from David Phillips, Senior Climatologist, Environment & Climate Change Canada, part of his Saskatchewan speaking tour.
Moose Mountain Ag Day Chairman Mark Neuman of Frobisher says: “Part of what we are trying to do is to bring new and relevant information that can be used by local producers. We want to empower producers with new knowledge and cutting-edge information.”
The day opened with a presentation from Lana Shaw, research manager of the South East Research Farm (SERF) near Redvers. Shaw discussed intercropping, a practice involving crop rotation which involves planting different crops together in the same row, or in alternating rows, as opposed to monocropping, which is the practice of planting only one type of crop on a piece of land.
“It's something that both conventional and organic farmers are doing,” said Shaw. “It's especially useful for mid-size farms, which tend to be in a crunch as far as their land base. Intercropping allows them to maximize profit on a smaller piece of land. And mid-size farms often have more flexibility, so intercropping allows them to extract more money out of each acre.”
Shaw's extensive presentation was peppered with case studies and numerous real-world examples of intercropping at locations throughout Saskatchewan.
“Some combinations of crops work really well together,” she said. “For example, there's some kind of a buddy system with chickpeas and flax. They are two crops that work really well when they're planted together. They help each other.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” added Shaw. “So growing more than one crop and filling in niches on the land that might otherwise be taken over by weeds is a pretty winning approach on multiple levels.”
“This is a way that we can take crop diversity to the bank in a meaningful way. It's promising and profitable.”
David Pattyson, Executive Director of the Upper Souris Watershed Association reminded the audience of the importance of healthy waterways for everyone - whether they are a producer or not - and issued a warning about invasive aquatic species such as zebra mussels.
“Once they're introduced to a waterway, they're virtually impossible to eliminate,” he said. “In the upper Souris (River), we have six resevoirs. That's quite a bit of infrastructure and it would cost the province and municipalities into the upper hundreds of thousands of dollars - or even millions of dollars - to deal with mussels if they got into pipes.”
“I know a lot of you have boats and as producers, this affects you.”
Pattyson said that invasive mussels feed on bilge water and since the early 1980s, they have made their way up the eastern coast of the U.S. and Ontario and Quebec. Of late, they have made their way to Lake Winnipeg and have appeared in Montana, “brought in by watercraft.”
Because of the boat traffic from Manitoba, North Dakota and Minnesota to and from this part of Saskatchewan, Pattyson urged boat owners to be vigilant when returning home from boat trips in those areas, adding, “Get involved with your local watersheds group. They play a huge part in our communities.”
Forage specialist Lorne Klein from Saskatchewan Agriculture spoke about an unlikely discovery - using canola straw as a potential roughage resource.
Klein - who raises bison near Francis, said: “On October 2, 2017, I got a call from a producer. He told me he baled 500 bales of canola straw and I thought: 'How on earth?'”
“I found out that two producers (baled canola) by accident - one forgot to engage the chopper and the other one had a chopper breakdown.”
“Three days later, I read about three guys in Alberta who had been doing this for years. I'm a forage specialist - I should know this!”
“But I'm excited about this because canola is by far the biggest single crop we grow in the province...But stay tuned, we're fairly new in this game.”
Ryan Boyd of SG&R Farms of Forrest, Manitoba shared his experiences with grazing mixed species cover crops and relay cropping, which is cover crop seeded with cash crop. Focusing on the intergration of cash crops, forages and livestock, Boyd said that engaging in these practices on South Glanton Farm's 2,000 acres led him to conclude that “increasing diversity enhances resilience.”
“Diversity leads to stability,” he added. “Diversity on the landscape - different plants and different niches - leads to a stable situation.”
“The goal is for the farm to provide a flexible, low-stress life that is constantly increasing the health of our land, community and our family.”
“We're getting there. It's a work in progress,” concluded Boyd.
Progress was the theme of Cory Beaujot's presentation. Beaujot - the marketing and communications manager for SeedMaster Manufacturing and its sister company, DOT (www.SeeDotRun.com) - gave attendees a glimpse into the future of farming with his presentation outlining the DOT autonomous agriculture system, invented by his father, Norbert Beaujot.
The DOT system was a retirement project for Norbert and the family farm near Langbank served as a laboratory for product testing. The DOT system consists of a self-driving U-shaped platform which will fit a seeder, sprayer, land roller, rockpicker, manure spreader, bale processor and grain cart. The prototype has already been exhaustively tested on the Beaujot's Langbank-area farm and this year, a limited release is planned for select farms to use. Following that, production will ramp up and distribution will be broadened.
Beaujot said that the power platform has a myriad of advantages for farmers.
“The power platform can be adapted to facilitate other implements, so there's more value and efficiency right there,” he said. “DOT is also scalable to both smaller and larger farming operations.”
“With this system, the whole problem of trading in equipment goes away, because if your farming operation grows, you don't really outgrow DOT, you just need more platforms,” explained Beaujot. “A farm never grows out of a DOT unit size, you would just add more units as needed as your operation grows.”
“Even things like oil filters are standardized.”
“The advantages of using an autonomous system like DOT are many,” he added. “To name a few, there are lower capital costs with power platforms and implements, lower fuel usage, lower labour costs, higher levels of precision farming, better data collection linking all operations, more timely completion of jobs on the farm and longer safe operating hours, because there is no operator fatigue.”
“DOT also allows farmers to extend their careers, if they wish,” said Beaujot. “Accessibility issues and age are actually no longer issues with DOT. And in addition to helping farmers participate more fully in family life, on a larger scale, systems such as DOT can bring more high-tech jobs to rural areas.”
“Farmers have always embraced innovation,” said Beaujot. “Tractors replaced horses. We have the ability to embrace innovation in the ag industry and as we stand, we're already semi-autonomous.”
“We've launched DOT at AG in Motion in Saskatoon and at Agritechnica - a worldwide show for the agricultural machinery sector in Germany - and there's a lot of interest out there already.”
Keynote speaker David Phillips closed out the event, entertaing the audience with weather facts and fancies. A Member of the Order of Canada, Phillips is a senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. The television personality's Ag Day engagement was part of his Saskatchewan speaking tour, and he peppered his talk with numerous real-life weather events and oddities from Saskatchewan communities, including Alameda, Lampman and Regina.
Phillips said that the weather scenario for Saskatchewan farmers was a good news-bad news scenario.
“The character of weather has changed,” he said. “There are extremes of weather and they seem to be more volatile. Everybody's been hit by this greater volatility - including farmers.”
“Farmers can deal with variabiliy, but still expect some normality. But it's almost as if normal doesn't occur anymore. We've had some of the driest growing seasons and some of the wettest growing seasons...And that volatility is the joker in the weather deck.”
“How can we see this variability?” asked Phillips. “We looked at 70 years of (weather records) from the Prairies.We took the 10 driest seasons and the 10 wettest seasons in this part of Canada over 70 years.”
“Over half of them have occurred in the last 17 years and the other half occurred in the early 53 years over the past 70 years,” explained Phillips.
“Since 2000, we've had more back-to-backs,” he added. “That is, a really wet year followed by a really dry year, instead of more gradual changes.”
“But the future looks good for Canadian agriculture,” said Phillips. “Nine billion people in the world must be fed. And in the not too distant future, weather patterns suggest that the weather will be warmer wetter and wilder.”
“There are five countries that are agricultural superpowers and Canada is one,” he added. “In the future, rising temperatures and a longer growing season might mean producers grow more corn and soybeans than wheat and canola.”
Phillips also gave the audience his “fearless forecast.”
“It's clear that the current situation demonstrates that this area has been through a long period of drought without adequate precipitation. From November 2016 to January 2018, we haven't seen drier conditions in Regina, Swift Current and Moose Jaw since the 1880s. We've never had a drier period in southern and central Saskatchewan than in these periods.”
“My fearless forecast is that there will be minimal spring flooding and you'll get on the fields earlier,” said Phillips. “I believe it will be wetter this year than in 2017 and not as hot, and the number of extreme events involving wild weather will occur at a normal rate or slightly below normal.”
Phillips said that the need for accurate weather forecasts - especially for farmers - remains a priority for producers.
“But I'm confident that farmers will adapt, whatever the weather. They always have and they always will.”
