As the owner of 640 Ag, Canada’s CarbonWorks distributor, Bryce Walker is well versed in the successes and pitfalls of improving soil health on the farm. In this article, Bryce recalls his journey with CarbonWorks and his mission to improve the soil health and bottom line of Canada’s farms, one conversation at a time.  

Founding 640 Ag 

I was always looking for an alternative way to stabilize nitrogen. We always knew that adding some carbon to twenty-eight percent could buffer salt, but no companies ever had any results. I was searching for a product that had demonstrated results and that’s when I stumbled upon George on YouTube. 

George and I talked extensively for a few months and we decided that we were going to bring some stuff into Canada. We wanted to keep that distributorship separate, so me and my business partner, Terry, started 640 Ag in 2023. Since then we’ve been working with George to develop a market up here. 

Follow the Data 

There are a ton of products on the market that are supposedly built to promote soil health. My biggest hurdle, or requirement, I guess, was the data. Show me the data. Show me the numbers. When we first got George’s products up here I had the same mindset—I was naturally a little hesitant. We started testing them, and they were doing what George said they would do. And consistently, too. 

So that’s what really got me excited after the first year and that’s when we decided to promote CarbonWorks. Again, there’s all kinds of products on the market to promote soil health, but we were following the numbers—CarbonWorks was improving soil health and showing a positive ROI. As I’ve said before, people won’t buy stuff that has no benefit on the financial end. 

Exploring Market Potential

I sold biostimulants for about nine years before finding George’s products. A lot of it was what I call “conceptual” sales—we knew we were helping, but we couldn’t look at the bottom line and see where it was actually affecting the soil and/or the yields. We’d go to the farm shows five or ten years ago and everybody would be selling the same products just labeled under different names. 

Everybody wants to be part of selling soil health because there’s good margin involved. But does it work? Consistently? When I found George’s products, that was the biggest factor: He had the numbers. He was an open book and shared everything. That’s pretty rare in the soil health realm. 

I think Canadians are a little more worried about the environment as a rule. So there’s a lot of government programs for correcting nutrient deficiencies and for different inhibitor products. Once I found CetaiN, I thought it was a fantastic opportunity. It competes with these products but doesn’t harm the soil. Why wouldn’t you use it if it does the same thing as other products without harming your soil? It’s actually invigorating the soil biology—you can have your cake and eat it too while you’re stabilizing your nitrogen. 

Combating Long-Term Soil Damage

We’ve definitely seen the degradation of soils from the continuous use of synthetic fertilizers. This can be a difficult discussion because, at the end of the day, what these guys have been doing has been working and they’re making money. In many ways, we’re just scratching the surface on soil health. There’s certain fertilizers and pesticides that are harder on biology, and we’re learning that. 

Look at all the big companies—they all have bio divisions now. If you get the chemistry right in the soil, the biology can thrive. And, you really have to treat each acre individually and figure out what it needs. 

Developing Soil Health Plans

You can’t have perfect soil health because you have to grow the grain. At the end of the day, monocultures aren’t the best for soil health. Everybody knows that. But you have to make money. Ideally, we’d have this really diverse soil that could grow everything under the sun, but our supply chains aren’t set up to handle a diverse mix of grain. I’d even call a standard rotation a monocrop, even if it doesn’t strictly conform to the “mono” label. Up here it’s wheat and canola; in the American Midwest it’s corn and soybeans. 

With all this in mind, all we can do is our best. If we can tweak things here and there to increase biological diversity in the soil, which will in turn grow more grain for us above the ground, then that’s great. Yes, you need nutrients to grow a crop, but you also need the right ratios of microorganisms in the soil. The hard thing in soil science is how to get both nutrients and balance all at once. If you talk to the cover crop guys and the cattle grazers, they’ll eagerly show you their beautiful soil by digging it up with a shovel. And that’s great. But we can’t all do that. So, I think the best way to improve your soil health is to really have a closer look at your fertility plan and your pesticide plan. What are you doing to your ground? Are you harming more than you’re helping?

The Soil Structure Puzzle

There’s also a soil structure component. We definitely should be concerned with compaction layers in the field. We’re only placing the seed one and a half inches deep in the soil and we’re doing minimal tillage. So, over time, we’re creating a compaction layer of sorts right there. Up here, though, our yearly freezing will break that up. But there is still stratification. We’re finding certain areas where there are hardpans; in these areas there might be some opportunities for some strategic tilling to improve the infiltration of water and nutrients into the soil. 

If you go up in an airplane, you can sometimes see where all the equipment has tracked across the field. We’re driving one-thousand-bushel air seeder carts up and down the field at planting, then driving a sprayer across the field, and then in the fall you have a combine tracking across every forty to fifty feet followed by a two-thousand-plus-bushel grain cart. In some parts of the world they do more controlled-traffic farming to help with equipment-driven compaction. But, like I said, we get lucky up here with our freeze-thaw cycle. 

Looking Forward to Healthier Soil

It’s important to develop a comprehensive soil health plan to not only drive your yields higher, but to ensure that your soil will support your farm’s profitability well into the future. In Bryce’s next article, he continues the discussion with a deeper look at strategies to unlock nutrients already in the soil and grow a healthier crop.