Podcast: Why does the soil matter?

Clinton Monchuk: (00:07)
From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask a Farmer. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, a Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food.

Clinton Monchuk: (00:28)
Well, welcome everybody to today’s podcast. We have with us Jake Leguee. So today we’re going to be talking a little bit about soil health, and I think there’s a lot of conversations that sometimes happen, whether it’s on the science side or consumer side, about soil health and how that actually impacts our food and really food not just in Canada, but really globally. But before we get into that, I think it’d be a great for all the listeners out there to just understand a little bit more about who you are. Jake, you want to just give us a background to your experience, your education and kind of where you’re at right now with your farm?

Jake Leguee: (01:07)
Sure. I graduated from university in 2010. I got a degree at the University of Saskatchewan in agronomy, minoring in Ag Business. I’d been farming while I was in university, a half section, you know, kind of to get my feet wet and get some experience and that sort of thing. So, came home to the farm. I’ve been full-time ever since, but full-time also involved another full-time job for a while, as long as I could kind of manage that. And I guess currently today we’re a third generation family farm here. We farm about 15,000 acres. We grow canola, durum, hard red spring wheat, lentils, peas and flax. We dabble in some other things here and there, depending on the year. And, we farm kind of in between Weyburn and Fillmore, kind of all around those two towns. So yeah, I farm here with my wife. I’ve got three young sons, also farm with my older sister, my dad. And my brother-in-law is married to my younger sister, just to make things extra confusing. And then we’ve got a couple of full-time staff and some seasonal staff as well.

Clinton Monchuk: (02:17)
So really the focus of the discussion today is trying to understand a little bit about the soil and the health and what farmers do to kind of make sure that that soil is being either regenerated or staying healthy so we can actually continue to grow food here in Saskatchewan and around Canada. One of the things though that has kind of tweaked the interest with a lot of consumers is the fact that, you know, you’re hearing stories, you see some things on social media about the degradation of some of the soils. And I’ve seen some articles talking about the depletion of nutrients from the soils and in some of the different areas around the world. And I think it’s good for consumers to understand what farmers are actually doing. You know, Jake you’re kind of more of the cutting edge, new technology farmer. Do you want to talk a little bit about what your farm does in an effort to protect the soil and try to build some of those healthy attributes for your soil?

Jake Leguee: (03:21)
Soil health and regenerative agriculture and all of that are huge topics and they encompass a lot of area. And, of course with anything, you know, in a discussion like this, of course there’s a lot of myths and misconceptions about what farmers are doing and how we’re looking after things. So I think maybe what I’ll do to answer that question is to first kind of point out what the long-term vision of our farm is. Because I think it’s similar to most farms. I mean, our vision is pretty simple on our farm. It’s to create the opportunity for the fourth generation on the farm to actually build a business that survives to generation four. I mean, the statistics aren’t that good on that, right? Most businesses don’t make it to number three, let alone four. So we’re trying to overcome that.

Jake Leguee: (04:06)
And then at the same time, we’re also trying to make things better for the incoming generation, just as my dad did for me and his dad did for him. That’s what makes agriculture and farming so amazing as industries. We have this inherent, implicit benefit to long-term planning, to long-term management, to making things better over time. And so when I think about soil health on our operation, that’s what comes to mind first is how do we make both our soil’s and our farm’s balance sheet stronger for generation four? I don’t want to leave them in the same shape they were in when I started farming. I want to make them both better. And the thing that’s awesome about farming is the two go together. If we do a good job of managing our soils, our balance sheet will benefit from doing that because we’ll grow better crops or we’ll save money on inputs or some combination thereof.

Jake Leguee: (05:02)
I think what I need to go back to on improving soil health is one of the most basic aspects of it in Western Canadian agriculture, which is the elimination of tillage, which happened at varying points in different farms over the years. On our farm, it started happening in the late 1980s and kind of finished up around that early nineties. And of course, with any major changeover in technology and management, it takes a while, right? You know, you need to get the right equipment in place and then you need to figure out how those management practices work in your given area. It’s one of the things about agriculture, what I kind of call a hyper locality of it. Every farm is different and some of that is soil based. I mean, I can go across any one of our fields and I can find a different soil in a spot over here versus a hundred feet in the other direction.

Jake Leguee: (05:56)
The reality is that I don’t know what the majority of farmers should do in Saskatchewan necessarily with their land. I know what works here and I know what’s worked for us. And I know that in what we’re doing, we are improving our soils. The elimination of tillage, when that started, that allowed a bunch of other things to happen. At the same time, with the elimination of tillage, we could quit summer fallowing. That enabled us to grow crops on the land every year. Instead of doing a wheat, no crop as in summer fallow, come back to wheat again, or maybe a flax or something like that, that then broadened our rotation because we, well, first of all, we needed more diversity in the rotation if we were going to grow crops in the same field every year. But it also created a lot more opportunity for it.

Jake Leguee: (06:45)
And at the same time, we had massive improvements in technology. We had tremendous improvements in crop genetics that allowed us to grow crops like lentils and peas and canola especially has been one of the biggest changes. And that happened because of improvements in genetics. So all of that stuff kind of had to happen at the same time for no-till to really take off. Right? We needed better air drills to be able to seed into last year’s stubble. That was an issue. We needed to be able to seed into that without plugging, without putting straw piles all over the place, that sort of thing, right? That was a big innovation when direct seeding hoe drills started to show up in western Canada. So we needed that and we needed better genetics, like I mentioned, and better crop options. So all of those kind of happened at the same time. So we shifted from a lot of wheat fallow, maybe some barley, maybe some flax to a plethora of crop options, growing crops on the land every year.

Clinton Monchuk: (07:39)
You were eliminating tillage. Now not everybody who’s listening understands what that means with tillage. You want to just explain, because that’s a fundamental shift that happened mainly in western Canada in an effort to be more efficient, be more environmentally friendly, but a lot of people don’t understand what that switch really involved. You want to just explain what that switch from tillage practice is to minimal or zero till meant?

Jake Leguee: (08:05)
Sure. And yeah, that’s a good reminder. As farmers, we can get kind of tied up in the jargon sometimes and we make assumptions we shouldn’t make on what people know about farming. And I guess, you know, for anybody who’s ever gardened, tillage is fairly intuitive. You’ve got a hoe, you’ve got a shovel, you’ve got whatever or a rototiller to rip that ground up and turn it black. I mean, in gardening, that’s still typically what people do. They’ll go in, turn the ground black and then they can much easier place their seeds or their tubers or whatever to grow garden. That has been the standard practice for most of agriculture, for most of its history. I mean, if we’re talking ten at least thousand years of agriculture, that’s essentially how we’ve grown crops in that period of time. Rip the ground up, make it black, make it so that it’s easy to work with and get the seed, into the ground. No-till eliminates that step. So instead of turning the ground black, whatever stalks are left over from last year’s harvest, you just leave them there. You take the grain off the top, you leave the stalks, we call it stubble and you seed directly into that. I mean, obviously you need the right tools to be able to place seeds in that type of an environment because you have a lot of straw to deal with potentially. But that’s, that’s essentially what I mean when I say the conversion from full tillage to no-till.

Clinton Monchuk: (09:30)
So when we’re talking about soil health, we’re trying to determine, you know, some of the different things that you use on your farm to, you know, assess the health of your farm. And, I know on our farm we started probably about 15, 20 years ago, just managing it a little bit different by using soil tests. Right now we soil test every field of ours and we go really in depth to make sure that we’re trying to find out what’s in the soil and depending on the crop, what we’re going to put on for the optimal yields. Like what do you use on your farm, in an effort to kind of understand a little bit more about the soil health on a field by field basis?

Jake Leguee: (10:11)
We’ve been growing bigger crops, partially because of genetics. Also probably a bigger piece of that is the agronomic changes. Instead of, you know, putting 40, 50 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre on the land, we started recognizing the need to go a lot bigger than that, right? To be able to match what the crop was taking. And if we’re going to do something like that, we kind of need to know what’s in the ground in the first place. Fertilizer’s expensive, we’re incentivized to put the minimum amount on that we need to grow a good crop. So soil testing started to become common on our farm about the mid 2000s. Pretty much since then, we’ve been soil testing every field every year, unless it’s going into a pulse crop like lentils. Because of course you’re not worried about nitrogen fertility in those crops. They can get that out of the atmosphere.

Jake Leguee: (11:02)
Of course, you can’t grow too many of them because then we run into problems with disease and root rots especially. So there’s a balance there and they have a place in the rotation, but you know, we found that we can’t push them too far, otherwise we just end up with crop failures. And crop failures aren’t good for the soil either. So once we started learning, okay, we need this many pounds to grow this many bushels of crop and we need this many pounds for canola crop versus a wheat crop versus a flax or, or whatever, with the soil testing kind of coming online, then we started to access technology that would allow us to change the rates of our fertilizer as we go across the field. So it’s interesting, right? We went from a long time ago when Grandma and Grandpa first moved to this property in the mid 1950s, you know, they farmed a section of land, right?

Jake Leguee: (11:53)
Four quarters, about 600 acres. A bunch of that was in cattle, you know, and various other livestock that they had. And then the land that they were cropping was all split up into little fields. I wouldn’t say that they went and managed them entirely differently, but there were some differences there. Our fields got bigger, we kind of consolidated a lot of those little fields into one. But now we’re actually going back and being far more precise than anybody ever has in any time that any of this land has been farmed. By changing the rates as we go across the land, changing the rates of nitrogen, changing the rates of phosphorous, even sulfur to a degree. We’re changing the rates of our seeding rates as well to try and control our plant populations in different parts of the field. All of these innovations, of course, again, required technological change.

Jake Leguee: (12:43)
So our air drills needed computer software built in that we could use to make these changes happen automatically. Now you might think, well why can’t you just do that manually? And that sounds like a great idea, but when you sit in a tractor for 16 hours, you know, you might remember to drop that fertilizer rate when you hit that saline spot because nothing’s going to grow there anyway. And then you go a half mile down the field and realize you forgot to turn it back on . You know, those are the kinds of things that happen when you spend that much time in a cab. So it needs to be automated, it needs to be built in. And of course GPS and auto steer that came in in that same sort of time in the early to mid 2000s that made all of that so much easier to manage with innovation.

Jake Leguee: (13:28)
It always takes a lot of innovations at the same time kind of coming together to make that problem that we’re trying to solve, solvable. And then of course, lately really fertilizer rates have continued to increase because our bushels have continued to increase. We’re getting more efficient per bushel of production, but our total rates are going up. There’s a really large soil health component to this that not enough people talk about. If we’re going to grow crops on land in Saskatchewan for a hundred years, which a lot of land in Saskatchewan has been farmed for that long, some of it a lot longer, we can’t just keep mining nutrients out of the ground and think that we’re not going to need to replace them. You know, the straw gets returned to the land but the grain doesn’t. And that grain is where most of those nutrients are stored.

Jake Leguee: (14:10)
That’s where we get our nutrition from. So if we’re going to export those nutrients from the field, we’ve got to find a way to replace them. And nitrogen of course is something that we need every year. But there’s also phosphorus, which is a huge component of crop yield and chronically under fertilized on our farm. And I think, you know, there’s good data that would show on a lot of farms in Western Canada that’s been a problem for a long, long time. So we’ve increased the phosphorus rates a lot to try and address that, to try and actually build those levels back up again to a level where they should be for ideal crop production. But those are just kind of the two big ones. There’s also sulfur, there’s also potassium, there’s chloride, there’s magnesium and, boron and zinc and copper. All of these nutrients are being and have been exported from the land.

Jake Leguee: (15:00)
And we’re starting to see the effects of that. You know, now we’re getting into that level of management where we’re starting to apply some of those micronutrients back on to try and ensure that not only that our soil health is being looked after, and not only that we have good yields, but it’s also important for the nutrition of the grain that we’re producing now. We’re not getting paid necessarily for having more, you know, nutritionally dense grain, but I guess we just maybe feel like it’s a good thing to do. And again, it fits back in into higher yields and everything else. So the incentives kind of work both ways on that, right?

Clinton Monchuk: (15:32)
When we think about how things have changed in farming and you know, when I go back to say my grandfather on the quarter section or the half section that he kind of started with, I think of how the, just the tools have changed and the technologies changed. What are some of the big differences that you see between say your grandparents and what you’re doing now just in terms of how you farm and how that is better for soil health?

Jake Leguee: (16:02)
The amazing thing about all of this change and the changes that are continuing to happen is, you know, we’ve increased yields enormously in Western Canada. Just eliminating summer fallow essentially doubled yields, right? Because now we’re growing crop on every acre instead of only half the acres. Then we went and doubled, tripled yields since then. So that’s quite a stellar increase in production over the course of not quite a full generation of farming. So to kind of broaden out all of those changes have resulted in enormous amounts of greenhouse gases being stored in our soils. We’ve taken our erosion risk to almost zero from wind and water. You know, we’re treating our soils a lot better, we’re not mining them anymore. And the data on this is still so new, it’s hard to draw conclusions from it. But I think it makes intuitive sense that if you’ve got microorganisms living in the soil, they need nutrients just like you and I do.

Jake Leguee: (16:59)
So if we have depleted soils of various different micronutrients, well they might have a hard time surviving in that kind of an environment, right? So everything kind of has to work together and so when I think about soil health and I think about what’s regenerative, what’s improving the soils, it’s a lot different than I think what a lot of people think about, which is often eliminating fertilizers and eliminating crop protection products and all of that stuff. I think the data shows the opposite. We need to replace what we’re removing at least and probably make up for a lot of this stuff we’ve been mining for the past century without replacing. And we need healthy crops, healthy crops grow a lot of straw that we can return to the land that provides a lot of organic matter and massive root systems that are, you know, with our soil moisture probes in our farm, we’re able to see those roots are going a full meter deep, which is pretty outstanding for annual crops, especially in hard, hard pan land that we, that we farm a lot of. So everything kind of works together and I, I think the improvements have been pretty awesome.

Clinton Monchuk: (18:02)
So I know on your farm there’s a ton of different decisions and I just think, you know, we’re in the planning process now for our crops that we’re going be growing in the spring and there’s tons of different factors that get put into which crops are going to go on, which fields, and you’re trying to look at the markets and whatnot. Do you want to explain what goes into your crop rotations and why you use that and what the benefits are for soil health? Because we know there’s a lot of different benefits, but one of them is soil health. Do you want to just explain a little bit more of how you determine the cropping rotations and what that really means for your own farm?

Jake Leguee: (18:41)
Yeah, I mean, so we’re pretty fortunate in this part of Saskatchewan that we can grow a lot of different crops. Mostly for us it’s a matter of trying to narrow it down into a rotation that we can actually manage. Now I hear a lot about monocropping and there are areas that do it where it’s just one crop. I mean, it might be corn on corn on corn, on corn on corn. And it’s hard for me to comment on that because I don’t farm where they farm. But where we farm, we see a lot of benefits growing a lot of different crops. I mean, first of all, some of it’s economic, right? Some crops handle drought better than others. Some crops handle wet weather better than others. We don’t know going into the year what kind of weather we’re going to get. So it makes a lot of sense to grow crops that can handle both types of conditions.

Jake Leguee: (19:24)
So that’s sort of one of the primary reasons. And then of course also it gives us lots of ability to hedge different market conditions. You know, sometimes a crop, one crop might be a star and it might be flax, it might be canola, it might be durum. Well, I don’t know that at the start of the year more than anybody else does. By growing a bit of a diverse rotation, hopefully one of the crops we are growing will be that star this year. Or at least hopefully we’ve broadened out enough that we haven’t picked anything that’s going to hurt us too bad if it ends up being, you know, a dog. Right? So those are a couple of the reasons on a broader scale, why a diverse rotation makes sense and why I like having it, but it’s also beneficial for the soil. And there’s, there’s a few reasons for that.

Jake Leguee: (20:08)
I mean, when the prairies got broke, timing differs, but say a hundred years ago for this area it was natural grassland. Right now there were a lot of different grasses in there, different parts of the land might have different species as well, like little shrubs and those sorts of things. Now we can’t replicate that with the crops that we’re growing. We’re growing annual crops, we’re taking them off every year. The only way to replicate a natural grassland would be to go back to having grazing animals on it. And that’s just not the type of farm that we run. Hopefully the thinking is with a diverse rotation we can kind of capture some of that diversity, just in different years. So say, you know, on our home section here, we might grow, last year was spring wheat. This coming year it’ll be canola.

Jake Leguee: (20:54)
The year after that we might put it into peas. We don’t have a, I guess a prescription of this crop then this crop then this one, we sort of vary it year to year depending on the field because some fields grow a great lentil crop and don’t do so well with peas. And sometimes it’s the opposite. So, you know, it does change a bit. But generally speaking, we try to have a good break between different types of crops on our fields to get the diseases that could have hurt, you know, been living in that crop, get them out of there to make sure that we you know, can confuse our weed spectrum a little bit by hitting them with different products, different timings, and then also different competitive ability of the crop. Right? A a lentil crop is not competitive. Weeds can overtake and kill that crop in no time if we don’t have the weeds well under control at the start of the year. Whereas durum or canola or spring wheat, those crops can really outcompete weeds if you can get them ahead of them. There’s a few advantages there as well to having a diverse rotation.

Clinton Monchuk: (22:05)
So part of the conversation was about some of the changes in practice. This leads to our fun farm fact for the segment around the environment. So back in 1990, Saskatchewan soils actually emitted around a half a million tons of carbon into the environment and looking at the new numbers as of 2020: so 30 years later, we’re actually sequestering, we’re putting back into the soil about 12.8 million tons of carbon, which is similar to taking off the road, 2.8 million cars. And I think this fun farm fact is great and I see some advertisements now in airports and stuff like that about it. This is phenomenal when you think of the efforts that have been done truly by a few of those practices that you talked about changing, adopting new technologies, and it kind of gets to a little bit of the, I guess you could say romanticized view of the past. There’s a view or vision that the way farmers did things in the past it was better, but truly we’re doing a really large part trying to sink that carbon back into soils and be proactive to be more environmentally friendly. And just on that note, what are some of those environmental benefits that you actually see on your farm as a result of these practices that you’re changing up?

Jake Leguee: (23:31)
Yeah, well that’s a, that’s an outstanding statistic and I think it goes to show what kind of advancements you can see over a relatively short period of time when farmers can see and seize opportunities to make things better. For me, I think the biggest thing that I’ve noticed over the past decade that I’ve been a little more than a decade I guess that I’ve been farming is resiliency. When we get droughts now, and I mean there are droughts that there’s so little rain, there’s nothing you can do about it, right? But when we get those one year flash-in-the-pan droughts where, you know, we go from 10 inches during the growing season of rain last year to three inches this year, we’ve had a couple of those, and generally speaking, we kind of sneak through them. There’s enough soil moisture built up from the previous year that the profile is full, soil moisture profile is full and the crop can root down and get into that moisture.

Jake Leguee: (24:23)
I mean, what’s amazing about that is, you know, back in the 80s when we had a lot of droughts, Dad talks about various years in there where they had almost zero production. And I know that in 2021 there was a lot of farms in a similar situation, but in the 80s it was far more common. And the reason why is because they had to till the ground black before they could go seeding. When it doesn’t rain after you, after all that the crop just isn’t coming up, it needs moisture out of the sky to get going. And what’s been really cool to see in some of these years, especially when we haven’t gotten those rains after seeding in May and even early June or middle of June, the crop comes up anyway. It’s absolutely amazing. Like you think that the wind is drying the soil down to the bottom of that furrow and it, it kind of does, but moisture just seems to wick its way back up and you just get enough to get that crop germinated and emerged.

Jake Leguee: (25:16)
And like I said, there’s limits, but what we’ve seen in some of those really dry years has been outstanding and probably four or five times a yield that Dad would’ve expected to see in the 80s. I think a lot of that comes from good soil health. If we didn’t have good soil health, we’d have clumpy hard, ugly soil that the seeds wouldn’t get into contact with, right? To get germination, you need soil all around that seed. It can’t just be touching it, it has to be surrounding it. So if you’ve got soil that’s really clumpy and and stuff like that, that’s not going to happen. Then you really do need that rain. So, you know, we farm some tougher soils here where I farm here it’s, they’re called solonetzic soils order. So lots of hard pan, meaning that you get a pretty thin layer of top soil then just rock hard cement underneath. It kind of needs to get softened by a rain now and then. And those spots are still a problem and there’s not a whole lot we can do about them. But we’ve seen tremendous increases in the ability of those fields to produce, especially in tough years because of some of these changes that we’ve made continuous cropping and no-till absolutely changed this land for the better. Higher fertilizer rates, higher crop biomass production has gone a long way to improve the N even further.

Clinton Monchuk: (26:39)
It kind of adds to that resiliency of the soil when you can leave it where it is and allow it to build and actually do what it’s supposed to do. And truly, like you said before we started, breaking it for farming practices, it was doing exactly that to, you know, produce grass for bison that grazed across the lands here. Right? You had mentioned it a little bit in, your earlier discussion was around the biotechnology and some of the changes in genetics. How do you feel that’s influenced a lot of what you can do on your farm and the productivity, that you have right now versus, you know, generation before?

Jake Leguee: (27:17)
Yeah, well, and you know, this is a subject that a lot of people have some concerns about. People have been pretty uneasy with biotechnology and in crop breeding for a long time. I mean, we’ve had genetically modified crops now for, oh man, 20 years. It’s been a long time, more than 20 years. So I would like people to know, to understand that, have skepticism about it, that we grow these crops because we choose to. There is a common misconception that somehow farmers are forced into growing them. And that is absolutely not the case. You know, the only genetically modified crop that we grow on our farm right now is canola. It’s also happens to be the single largest acreage crop on our farm. And we choose to grow it. We could choose not to grow it. There’s other crops we could grow instead, but we choose to grow canola because it is one of the most resilient crops on the farm.

Jake Leguee: (28:09)
It isn’t always the most profitable. In fact, it tends to play sort of in the middle of the road for us profitability-wise. But it’s the consistency that we get out of that crop that we really love the ability to control weeds. You know, if canola hadn’t gained the Roundup Ready trait way back when in the in the mid 1990s and, more lately, you know, there’s piles of glyphosate resistant canola out there, different companies, different products, there’s lots of competition in that market, which is great. And then we also have glufosinate-resistant canola. These two products, if we didn’t have them, we still wouldn’t be growing canola. We’d be relying on herbicides that simply don’t work in this area to try and grow that crop. So it wouldn’t matter that it’s competitive, it wouldn’t matter that it’s profitable, it wouldn’t matter that it fits for this area as a plant, if we can’t control the weeds, we can’t be successful with it.

Jake Leguee: (29:03)
Weeds are still our number one biggest problem in crop production, probably worldwide, in all honesty. We tend to forget them because we’ve got them fairly well at hand. But man, when you have a bad outbreak, there’s nothing worse than that because there is nothing you can do about it. And you know that you’ve doomed that field for the next several years to a lot of expensive herbicides to try and get them back under control. And yeah, I mean if it wasn’t for that invention, that innovation, we wouldn’t have canola on this farm. And like I said, it’s been an amazing option for us. You know, having said that, traditional crop breeding has its advantages too. I mean the gains in hard Red Spring wheat and durum varieties over the past 20 years have, especially the past 10, have been absolutely outstanding. But, you know, a lot of the progress that we’re going to have going forward is going to depend on having access to all of the tools in the toolbox when it comes to crop rotation.

Jake Leguee: (30:01)
You know, for wheat and durum, we need access to gene editing if we’re going to overcome a lot of the pests, a lot of the challenges around, you know, dealing with adverse weather conditions and all the shocks that come to a crop during the growing season. We need lots of resiliency built into that plant to be able to handle all that and still produce a viable yield. Gene editing will allow us to do that. And I think for most people, they just don’t really know what gene editing is and what it means. And so I think the risk for us right now is that people might hear something negative about it and, and that’ll shape their perception of it. You know, I would just point out that gene editing is very similar to traditional breeding. Just, you’re speeding up the process a little bit.

Jake Leguee: (30:46)
There’s no foreign DNA coming in, it’s the same plant, you’re just making a couple of adjustments and we’ve been doing those kinds of adjustments with traditional plant breeding for probably better part of 15,000 years. It’s worked very well, but it is a slow process and we know that to feed a growing population and to manage environmental concerns and everything else, we’re going to have to be able to react faster. And to be able to do that, we need to access gene editing. And it is also a shame that, genetically modified crops have kind of fallen out of favor because of the cost to producing them. The regulations around them make it so expensive to develop a variety that companies just aren’t interested in it. And the only companies that can are the absolute largest ones in the world, if it wasn’t so expensive to produce those varieties, we’d have more competition, more options and we’d have a lot more smaller companies invested in this space as well. But we sort of buried that option, which is really unfortunate because, genetically modified crops have been a real benefit to us on my farm.

Clinton Monchuk: (31:50)
Yeah, we like to talk about kind of looking forward into the future and you kind of touched a little bit on this. What do you think on, you know, your farm and from your perspective, what’s that one or two big innovations that you see coming down that, you know, in 20 years down the road you’ll say, darn, I can’t believe back in 2023 we didn’t know about this, and look at how much better we are similar to the advancements we’ve made in planting our crops and zero till. Do you see some of that innovation or, one of those key points that’s going to fundamentally change the way we farm going forward?

Jake Leguee: (32:27)
There’s some things that we can kind of see coming and then there’s unknown unknowns that we have no idea what’s coming that’ll shape Canadian agriculture in the future. But some of the things that I can see that could be really positive both for the environment and our own pocket books on our farms is optical spot spraying. Right now, the way that we spray our crops crop protection products is we go out there with our sprayer and we spray the whole field, right? We can vary our rates a little bit, but when it comes to herbicides, you know, when we’re trying to kill weeds, we just don’t really have the ability to do that. With sensors built onto the boom of the sprayer that enable us to actually see the weeds in the field as they are. And I mean, we’re able to see weeds, I think they’re, you know, the size of a dime that’s pretty amazing for a sprayer that’s going 12 miles an hour more across the field.

Jake Leguee: (33:17)
That’s amazing technology. And the next step to that, of course, is being able to identify weeds inside a crop canopy. That’s been sort of the holy grail of spray production, like spray technology for 30 years. And it feels like we’re getting really, really close to being able to do that. I think that’s going to be challenging on narrow seeded broad acre crops that we grow here, like wheat and canola. I think it’ll be a lot easier in corn, for example, just because you have more space to work with. But if we can ever get there, that’ll reduce the amount of crop protection products we apply by a tremendous amount. Yeah, I mean, it could cut it in half, it could cut it by more than half. I mean, some of the data that’s come out on Burnoff, you know, when we go initially before seeding to control the weeds in the field, some farmers are reporting a reduction at 90% in how much herbicide they’re applying on certain fields.

Jake Leguee: (34:09)
So, and not only that, we’re actually doing a better job of killing the weeds that are out there. Because with a little one, you don’t need that much chemical to kill it. But the big ones, you need a lot. And right now we’re trying to pick that happy medium to go across the field. Those big weeds, we’re just not killing them. That’s creating a lot more concerns about weeds becoming resistant to herbicides, which is a huge issue. So if we could go out there and when we see those weeds, we could really, really smack them with a good rate, that would be tremendously positive. So I, I think that’s one of the big things technologically that’s going to change. And, you know, that kind of goes into the whole idea about sensors and where we’re going with that. And I think there’s a lot of potential there.

Jake Leguee: (34:51)
We have a number of weather stations throughout our farm that tell us, you know, rainfall, soil moisture, soil temperature, air temperature, leaf wetness, all of these things are built into that, you know, suite of sensors and it’s soil and moisture that’s given us the most interesting data so far. How much water there is underneath our feet. And no, we don’t irrigate, but still what that allows us to do is make data-driven, probability-based decisions when we get in season about what else we should add to that crop to give it more potential or to help it live up to its potential given the weather conditions that we’ve had. I think we’re just at the beginning of what we’re going to be able to do with that kind of technology. If we can get more sensors, more reliability out of them, and understand what the data means better, you know, over the next 20 years, I think we’re going to see a lot of change in how precisely we are managing our crops in the field as a result of all that.

Clinton Monchuk: (35:49)
I appreciate you, Jake, for being with us today on Ask A Farmer. That’s just great to go through some of the changes that you’ve made, how soil health is a top priority and and we thank you for being part of the program and just sharing your own farm with all of our listeners today,

Clinton Monchuk: (36:14)
I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask A Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share this podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us’ icon at the top of our website, CanadianFoodFocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton. Music by Andy Ellison. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk. And from all of us here at Canadian Food Focus, we wish you good health and great eats.