Bryce Walker has been involved in the fertility management and biostimulant facets of agriculture for ten years. Now owner of 640 Ag—Canada’s CarbonWorks distributor—Bryce helps farmers manage and improve the soil health on their farms. Living in east central Saskatchewan, in the middle of Canada’s canola and wheat country, Bryce begins this series with a look at the unique challenges that farmers face in Western Canada.

Crops in Western Canada

Our biggest crop in Western Canada is canola, with about twenty to twenty-two million acres seeded a year. We also have spring wheat, barley, oats, and durum wheat (used in pasta production). And then there’s a variety of pulses. We have chickpeas, lentils, field peas, fava beans, all kinds of stuff. As far corn and beans, you have to get into Manitoba and Southern Alberta to get into any grain corn production. We have silage corn where the livestock’s heavier, but we just don’t have the heat units up here to grow corn in most of Western Canada. In my area, the predominant crops are wheat and canola.  

Learn More: A Snapshot of Saskatchewan agriculture

Large and Larger Farms  

The average farm in Western Canada is around thirty-five hundred acres. Don’t quote me on that, but in my area, we have farms that range from thirty-five hundred acres up to three hundred thousand acres. 

From the FCLG: The “official” number from the National Farmers Union of Canada is eight hundred and nine acres. However, as in the United States, farmers are aging and retiring, and more production is centered around larger farms than ever before. Canada has lost the equivalent of three farms per day for the past twenty years. In Western Canada, where Bryce lives, average farm size is considerably larger. 

What’s a “big” operation up here? We have quite a few twenty-five-thousand-acre farms. And five- to ten-thousand-acre farms are very common. 

Saskatchewan Soil

In our area we have pretty good black top soil. But there is a huge variety up here, from your sandier soil types to the gumbos, or clay-heavy soils. Just like anywhere, you have to adapt to the soil you have on your farm. Down near Regina, they can grow a good crop on two inches of rain because the clay soils down there hold moisture so well. We’re pretty fortunate with weather patterns up here. We’ll get a drought here and there, but moisture is usually pretty consistent for us.  

Farming Challenges in Canada

Like anywhere, farming in Canada has its challenges. Government policy would probably be the biggest one, to be brutally honest. Trade issues are top of mind as we’re talking today—those introduce a lot of uncertainty. It’s especially bad when we’re already struggling with the rising costs of fertilizer and machinery. How can we control that? I guess that’s on a farm-by-farm basis—your fertility program and how you utilize your machines. Anyway, you have costs that are high while commodities are low. I think farmers down there (In the United States) are struggling with the same issues right now. I feel like there might be a shift coming, but it all depends on what happens with commodities. 

In Western Canada, one of our biggest practical hurdles is transportation. We’re in the middle of the prairie out here, and it’s a long way to either Vancouver or Thunder Bay, Ontario, via rail. Otherwise, we’re in much the same situation as farmers in any northern locale—we need to get our crops in as early as possible so we beat the frost in the fall. Sometimes we get them in too early and get frosted out in May, even June. So it’s all about timing. 

Conserving moisture is also a priority, because the average rainfall in our area is eight to ten inches in a growing season. We’re generally pretty fortunate where I’m at, but when you get over to the south and west, the rainfall isn’t as plentiful. So, up here, we generally do a lot of zero till to try and conserve moisture. 

Canadian Attitudes Toward Soil Health

There’s always room to improve attitudes toward soil health. I do think farmers are starting to wake up a bit. The important thing to always remember is that, at the end of the day, the focus has to be on profitability. With fertilizer costs where they are, and guys having a greater understanding of what fertilizers and pesticides are doing to the soil, I think farmers are looking at soil health a lot more now than in the past. 

And we’ve seen examples of how healthier soil can produce as much (or more) of a crop as the conventional path. So, guys are interested, right? They’re looking for ways to lower their bottom lines while still growing the same crop. But, as I said, at the end of the day it’s about profitability. That’s the driver. It’s less about “going green” and more about improving the soil and making more money.

Typical Canadian Fertility Programs

In our area there’s a lot of anhydrous and it’s most commonly fall-applied. Since we get cold enough and our ground freezes up, there’s not as much chance of loss. Forty-six granular urea is also big across Western Canada. We’re commodity-based like anywhere else. There’s also MAP 11-52, and we’re big on potash in this area and use 0-0-60. We use a lot of elemental sulfur because it’s a byproduct of the oil fields. Some guys use AMS, but elemental sulfur is relatively cheap. 

We have over eighty million acres in Western Canada, so we’re actually pretty diverse in what guys use. Everybody has a different way of doing it. When you get further south, into corn and soybean country, their approach is going to be very similar to what you’d see in the Minnesota or the American Midwest.

Since we direct-seed with a lot of small grains, we apply most of our fertilizer in a sideband at seeding. Most everything is done around here with giant air seeders and commodity carts in one pass—there’s Väderstad, Bourgault, and John Deere to name a few. 

On a Mission to Make Farming More Profitable

Agriculture in Canada is diverse and no one-size-fits-all approach will drive progress toward soil health or other farm goals. In Bryce’s next article, he introduces us to 640 Ag—his CarbonWorks distributorship—and his approach to helping individual farmers increase their farms’ soil health and productivity.