REDVERS, Sask. — If research is going to be ground-truthed to make sure it applies to the real world of farming, it needs to be truthed on the kind of ground farmers actually farm.
That was probably one of the keys to the South East Research Farm (SERF) landing a major research contract from food giant Pepsico and the U.S. Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR).
SERF is running trials with cover cropping and other management practices to discover what their environmental and crop production impacts might be in western Canadian conditions.
“This is a cover crop study,” said Lana Shaw, SERF’s research manager, as she drove a reporter around the farm’s fields, pointing to a rolling field with in-crop weather stations and soil monitors.
“What’s most interesting is what’s happening below the ground,” said Shaw.
With SERF’s mixed land base of slopes and sloughs, high and low land, saline patches and rich topsoil, putting crop trials into farmer-typical situations is easier than at most research centres, which are generally sited on high quality land. Here, trials can look at a spread of conditions.
“We have the ability to zone seed and all sorts of zone management,” said Shaw.
“Why would we broadcast apply cover crops if that’s not the best approach?”
The field-scale trial with the weather stations is looking at the impact of cover crops on soil and following crops. The stations are measuring impacts on high land, mid-slope and bottoms. The oat crop will be followed after harvest with a fall-seeded cover crop, which will be followed by canola seeded next spring.
How does that affect the soil, water and productivity of the canola? They’ll have an idea after this trial is done.
The Pepsico-FFAR grant is allowing SERF to study many approaches to “sustainable” farming, with the University of Manitoba conducting some of the studies at its sites on behalf of SERF.
Pepsico is interested in boosting canola and oat production’s positive environmental impact because it is a major consumer of oats and provider of oat products such as Quaker oatmeal, while it also uses large amounts of canola oil in its other food products.
For more than a year SERF has been helping Pepsico operate a program that rewards farmers for “beneficial management practices.”
What the research funders most wanted, Shaw said, was farmer-relevant research that could be applied by their grower-suppliers in Canada. Field-scale and farmer participation were important.
“The farmers decide what they want to try out,” said Shaw.
That could include growing canola that has been underseeded with Italian ryegrass. How does that affect canola yields? Does it discourage flea beetles?
Shaw said trials like these help fit existing knowledge to specific conditions on land similar to SERF’s. There has been much cover crop research in the United States and Europe, but the conditions of Western Canada are much different.
From this project, Shaw hopes it will become more clear what’s likely to work in Western Canada and what isn’t. Places such as SERF allow theories from elsewhere to be tried out and evaluated.
If something works, great. Farmers could use it. If it doesn’t, other approaches can be explored. That’s what research on a farm scale attempts to do.
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