Sustainable Soil with Conventional Farming

While riding in the combine with Roger last week, I noticed a mound of dirt in a straight line down the whole field. I asked if that was where the fence line had been. He replied, "yes, that's where we took it out when we bought that quarter two years ago. All that dirt built up along the fence line during the 1930's-1990's before we used zero-till." I was surprised at how much top soil was still piled there. We have been doing zero till since 2002. Zero-till helps us keep our soil in good condition. Keeping our soil in good condition is one of the five components of "Sustainable Agriculture" as defined by Canada Agriculture.

Keeping our soil sustainable means employing better technology because we cannot leave half the land fallow every year. In 2004, I went to Leverkeusen, Germany, with Bayer; I was lucky enough to visit their research centre. There was a fascinating digital chart that gave the world population every minute and the amount of arable land. As the population went up, the amount of the world's arable land went down. "In Canada only 5% of its vast terrain is suited to agriculture and much of this area is threatened by urbanization. The amount of land that can be used for field crops, fruits, and vegetables has peaked." (Haberen) Even in a country as large as Canada, we do not have any more farmland so we cannot leave any fallow. In Alberta,, urban sprawl takes up a large portion of the best land along the highway 2 corridor. We cannot continue to farm in the ways of our grandparents and feed the world. With less land we must grow more food and keep our soil sustainable.

A good quality soil is both tillable and fertile. It yields good-quality crops because it:

*provides a suitable medium for seed germination and root growth (including the absence of unsuitable chemical conditions, such as acidity or salinity)

*supplies a balance of nutrients to plants

*receives, stores, and releases moisture for plant use

*supports a community of microorganisms that recycle nutrients through decomposition and help plants to resist disease.

Processes that reduce soil quality are:

*wind and water erosion

*loss of organic matter

*salinization

*chemical contamination

It is important to continue to monitor our soil for these eight factors.

The soil here in our area of Alberta is some of the best for grain growing. So it is important to us to maintain that soil condition.

When first broken from native grass, organic-rich prairie soils are fertile and fairly

resistant to wind erosion. Good soil fertility, a relatively moist climate in the early 1900s,

and the development of adapted wheat varieties resulted in good crops in those early

years. By the 1920s, inappropriate farming methods and drought had combined to

produce serious problems with soil erosion and low crop yields; some farms were

abandoned in the driest regions. Droughts, devastating soil erosion, and the economic

depression of the 1930s resulted in wide-spread abandonment of farms, even in the

moist Dark Brown soil zone of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Although suitable methods

for dryland farming were developed in the 1940s and 1950s, soil health continued to

deteriorate, especially in areas where much of the land was summerfallowed. (Haberon)

Summer fallowing, or leaving barren, was the only way to let land restore moisture and be safe from crop disease. This was how Roger's grandfather and great-grandfather farmed. Without the use of fertilizers and pesticides, they grew 20-30 bushels to the acre and only on half of their land while the other half sat fallow. This small amount of crop would not feed the world today. One bushel of wheat is 60 pounds, which makes 42 pounds of flour or pasta. Today Americans eat on average 180 pounds per year per person, while Egyptians eat about 400 pounds per person per year! That means Egypt is buying 4 trillion pounds of flour per year! So grandpa was growing 1200 pounds of wheat a year on each of 640 acres, while his other 640 acres sat barren and experiencing wind erosion.

I often hear people state that in order to be sustainable you have to be organic. This is not the case. In fact our great-grandparents farmed organically and the top soil dried up and blew away. Evidence of that is sitting where the fence line was. "Sustainable agriculture as defined by Ag.Canada has 5 components: 1) Realistic crop yields, 2) environmental health, 3)natural resource conservation, 4) economic viability, and 5) safety. "(Acton & Gregorich) I'm very happy to say that our farm meets all of these conditions and grows 75 bushels of wheat per acre on 1500 acres. That's 4,725,000 pounds of spaghetti, which is not enough to feed Alberta.

On our farm we believe in soil protection so we have 760 acres of bush patches and sloughs. We employ zero-till technology. That means that after harvest we don't till to break up the straw left over from combining. Leaving the stubble helps prevent soil erosion and moisture run off. New equipment technology allows us to seed into the stubble in the spring. Zero-tillage has numerous advantages: higher earthworm count, better soil breathing, more organic matter, thicker topsoil, and less erosion. Not cultivating in the fall also cuts diesel fuel consumption. Changes in farming methods have increased carbon sequestration by 400% since the mid-1990's. Prairie grain farmers are now storing more carbon than they emit! New technology such as GPS field mapping and yield data help us to make sure that we are not over or under fertilizing. The data from our fieldview GPS tells us the soil conditions on each square foot of our fields and the yield of that square foot. Then the computer tells the fertilizer sprayer which areas to spare the nitorgen, potash, sulphor, or phosphorous and which areas need more. It literally writes a prescription for each area of the field. This technology keeps our soil healthy. Our conventional farming methods mean that our soil is environmentally healthy and gives realistic crop yields; in a word, sustainable.

Works Cited

Acton, D.F. and Gregorich, L, "The Health of Our Soils," 1995, atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca, accessed September 16, 2020