May 17, 2023 • 37 mins
Soil health is essential to the prosperity of feeding a growing global population. Jake Leguee, a Saskatchewan grain farmer, explains how farmers have adopted new technologies over the past generations, increasingly focusing on what soils need to produce food that feeds the world.
Host: Clinton Monchuk
Clinton Monchuk grew up on a mixed dairy, beef and grain family farm outside of Lanigan, Saskatchewan. He received his Bachelors of Science in Agriculture majoring in Agricultural Economics from the University of Saskatchewan and Masters of Business Administration in Agriculture from the University of Guelph. Clinton has enjoyed numerous roles across Canada, the United States and Mexico as a researcher, educator, manager, economist and director of trade policy.
In 2016 Clinton accepted the role of Executive Director with Farm & Food Care Saskatchewan to promote farming and ranching to consumers. Clinton understands the value of increasing public trust in agriculture and actively promotes engagement between the agriculture industry and consumers.
Clinton, Laura and their children Jackson and Katelyn, continue to be active partners on their family grain and layer farm in Saskatchewan and cattle ranch in Oklahoma.
Guest: Jake Leguee
Jake is a third generation farmer from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada, where he, along with several family members, grows durum, canola, wheat, lentils, peas, and flax. Jake is married and he and his wife have three young sons.
Passionate about advocating for the agricultural industry, Jake writes regularly in his popular blog, A Year in the Life of a Farmer, and has been a speaker at several events.
Jake currently serves as a director and vice-chair of the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission and as chair of the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition. He has travelled to several countries promoting Canadian durum, speaking as a farmer representative. He is also a member of Bayer’s global Farmers Who SUSTAIN advisory council and is a member of the Global Farmer Network.
Jake is optimistic about the future of the agricultural industry and believes its future is very bright.
Resources
What is soil? More than just dirt
Healthy soil for today and the future
How do farmers protect the soil
Protecting biodiversity: Environmental farm plans
Episode Credits: Research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton, Produced and edited by Angela Larson and Michael Jordan, Music by Andy Ellison-Track title: Gravel Road
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 foodexperts to answer your questions
about your food.
(00:28):
Well, welcome everybody totoday's podcast we have with us
Jake Leguee.
So today we're going to betalking a little bit about soil
health, and I think there's alot of conversations that
sometimes happen, whether it'son the science side or consumer
side, about soil health and howthat actually impacts our food
and, really food n ot here justin Canada, but really globally.
(00:52):
But before we get into that, I,think it'd be a great for all
the listeners out there to justunderstand a little bit more
about who you are.
Jake, you want to just give us abackground to your experience,
your education and ki nd o f where you're at right now with
your fa rm?
Jake Leguee (01:07):
Sure.
I graduated from university in2010.
I got a degree at the Universityof Saskatchewan, in agronomy
minor in Ag business I'd beenfarming while I was in
university, a half se ction, youknow, kind of to get my feet wet
and get some experience and thatsort of thing.
So, came home to the farm.
(01:28):
I've been full-time ever since,but full-time also involved ano
ther fu ll-time job for a while, a s long as I could kind of
manage that.
And I guess currently todaywe're a third generation family
farm here.
We farm about 15,000 acres.
We grow canola, Durham, hard redspring wheat, lentils, pea s an
(01:48):
d fla x.
W e dabble in some other thingshere and there, depending on the
year.
And, w e farm kind of in betweenWayburn and Fill more, ki nd of
all around those, those twotowns.
So yeah, I fa r m here with mywife.
I've got three, yo un g sons,also farm with my older sister,
my dad.
And, my br other-in-law is marri ed to my younger sister, just
(02:10):
to make things extra confusing.
And th en w e've got a coupleof, full-t ime staff and some
seasonal staff as well.
Clinton Monchuk (02:17):
So really the focus of the discussion today is
trying to understand a littlebit about the soil and the
health and, what farmers do to kind of make sure that that soil
is being either regenerated orstaying healthy so we can
actually continue to grow foodhere in Saskatchewan and around
Canada.
(02:38):
One of the things though thathas kind of tweaked the interest
with a lot of consumers is thefact that, you know, you're
hearing stories, you see somethings on social media about the
degradation of some of thesoils.
And I've seen some articlestalking about the depletion o f
nutrients f rom t he soils a ndi n some o f t he different
areas around the w orld.
A nd I t hink i t's good forconsumers to understand what
(03:02):
farmers are actually doing.
You know, Jake y ou're kind ofmore of the cutting edge, new
technology farmer.
Do you want to talk a little bitabout what your farm does in an
effort to protect the soil andtry to build some of those
healthy attributes for yoursoil?
Jake Leguee (03:21):
Soil health and regenerative agriculture and all
of that are huge topics and theyencompass a lot of area.
And, of course with anythingthis, you know, in a discussion
like this, of course there's alot of myths and, misconceptions
about what farmers are doingand, and how we're looking after
things.
So I think maybe what I'll do toanswer that question is to,
(03:42):
first kind of point out what thel ong-term vision of our farm
is.
Because I think it's similar tomost farms.
I mean, our vision is, prettysimple on our farm.
It's to create the opportunityfor the fourth generation on the
farm to actually build abusiness that survives to
generation four.
I mean, the statistics aren'tthat good on that, right?
Most businesses don't make it tonumber three, let alone four.
(04:05):
So we're trying to o vercomethat.
And then at the same time, we'realso trying to make things
better for the incominggeneration, just as my dad did
for me and his dad did for him.
That's what makes agricultureand farming so amazing as
industries.
We have this inherent implicitbenefit to long-term planning,
(04:27):
to long-term management, tomaking things better over time.
And so when I think about soilhealth on our operation, that's
what comes to mind first is howdo we make both our soils and
our farms balance sheet strongerfor generation four?
I don't want to leave them inthe same shape they were in when
I started farming.
I want to make them both better.
(04:48):
And the thing that's awesomeabout farming is the two go
together.
If we do a good job of managingour soils, our balance sheet
will benefit from doing thatbecause we'll grow better crops
or we'll save money on inputs orsome combination thereof.
I think what I need to go backto on improving soil health i s
one of the most basic aspects ofi t in Western Canadian
(05:10):
agriculture, which is theelimination of tillage, which
happened at varying points i ndifferent farms over the years.
On our farm, i t startedhappening in the late 1980s and
kind of finished up around thatearly nineties.
And of course, with any majorchangeover in technology and
management, it takes a w hile,right?
You know, you need to get theright equipment in place and
(05:32):
then you need to figure out howthose management practices work
i n your given area.
I t's one of the things aboutagriculture, is w hat I kind of
c all a hyper locality of it.
Every farm is different and someof that is soil b ased.
I mean, I can go across any oneof our fields and I c an find a
different soil a nd a spot over,over here versus a hundred feet
(05:54):
in the other direction.
The reality is that I don't knowwhat the majority of farmers
should do in Saskatchewannecessarily with their land.
I know what works here and Iknow what's worked for us and I
know that in what we're doing,we are improving our soils.
The elimination of tillage, whenthat started, that allowed a
(06:15):
bunch of other things to happen.
At the same time, with theelimination of tillage, we could
quit summer fallowing thatenabled us to grow crops on the
land every year.
Instead of doing a wheat, nocrop as in summer fallow, come
back to wheat again, or maybe aflax or something like that,
that then broadened our rotationbecause we, well, first of all,
(06:36):
we needed more diversity in therotation if we were going to
grow crops in the same fieldevery year.
But it also created a lot moreopportunity for it.
And at the same time, we hadmassive improvements in
technology.
We had tremendous improvementsin crop genetics that allowed us
to grow crops like lentils andpeas and canola especially has
(06:57):
been one of the biggest changes.
And that happened because ofimprovements in genetics.
So all of that stuff kind of hadto happen at the same time for
no-till to really take off.
Right?
We needed better air drills tobe able to seed into last year's
stubble.
That was an issue.
We needed to be able to seedinto that without plugging,
without putting straw piles allover the place, that sort of
thing, right?
That was a big innovation whendirect seeding hoe drills
(07:20):
started to show up in westernCanada.
So we needed that and we neededbetter genetics, like I
mentioned, and better cropoptions.
So all of those kind of happenedat the same time.
So we shifted from a lot ofwheat fallow, maybe some barley,
maybe some flax to a plethora ofcrop options, growing crops in
the land.
Every year
Clinton Monchuk (07:39):
You were eliminating tillage.
Now not everybody who'slistening understands what that
means with tillage.
You want to just explain,because that's a fundamental
shift that happened mainly inwestern Canada in an effort to
be more efficient, be moreenvironmentally friendly, but a
lot of people don't understandwhat that switch really
(08:00):
involved.
You want to just explain whatthat switch from tillage
practice is to minimal or zerotill meant.
Jake Leguee (08:05):
Sure.
And yeah, that's a goodreminder.
As farmers, we can get kind oftied up in the jargon sometimes
and we make assumptions weshouldn't make on what people
know about farming.
And I guess, you know, foranybody who's ever gardened
tillage is fairly intuitive.
You've got ahoe, you've got ashovel, you've got whatever to
or a rototiller to rip thatground up and turn it black.
(08:28):
I mean, in gardening, that'sstill typically what people do.
They'll go in, turn the groundblack and then they can much
easier place their seeds ortheir tubers or whatever to grow
garden.
That has been the standardpractice for most of
agriculture, for most of itshistory.
I mean, if we're talking 10 atleast thousand years of
agriculture, that's essentiallyhow we've grown crops in that
(08:52):
period of time.
Rip the ground up, make itblack, 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 groundblack, 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, the stalks, we
(09:13):
call it stubble and you seeddirectly into that.
I mean, obviously you need theright tools to be able to place
seeds in that type of anenvironment because you have a
lot of straw to deal withpotentially.
But that's, that's essentiallywhat I mean when I say the
conversion from full tillage tono-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 westarted probably about 15, 20
years ago, just managing it alittle bit different by using
soil tests.
(09:51):
Right now we soil test everyfield of ours and we go really
in depth to make sure that we'retrying 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 yourfarm, in an effort to kind of
understand a little bit moreabout 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 ofthat is the agronomic changes.
Instead of, you know, putting40, 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 thecrop was taking.
And if we're gonna do somethinglike that, we kind of need to
(10:34):
know what's i n the ground inthe first place.
Fertilizer's expensive, w e'reincentivized to put the minimum
amount on that we need to grow agood crop.
So soil testing started tobecome common on our farm about
the mid two thousands.
Pretty much since then, we'vebeen soil testing every field
every year, unless it's goinginto a pulse crop like lentils.
(10:55):
Because of course you're notworried about nitrogen fertility
in those crops.
They can get that out o f theatmosphere.
Of course, you can't grow toomany of them because then we run
into problems with disease androot rots especially.
So there's a balance there andthey have a place in the
rotation, but you know, we foundthat we can't push them too far,
(11:16):
otherwise we just end up withcrop failures.
And crop failures aren't goodfor the soil either.
So once we started learning,okay, we need this many pounds
to grow this many bushels ofcrop and we need this many
pounds for canola crop versus awheat crop versus a flax or, or
whatever, with the soil testingkind of coming online, then we
started to access technologythat would allow us to change
(11:39):
the rates of our fertilizer aswe go across the field.
So it's interesting, right?
We went from a long time agowhen, when Grandma and grandpa
first moved to this property inthe, mid 1950s, you know, they
farmed a section of land, right?
Four quarters, about 600 acres.
A bunch of that was in cattle,you know, and various other
livestock that they had.
(12:00):
And then the land that they werecropping was all split up into
little fields.
I wouldn't say that they wentand managed them entirely
differently, but there were somedifferences there.
Our fields got bigger, we kindof consolidated a lot of those
little fields into one.
But now we're actually goingback and being far more precise
than anybody ever has in anytime that any of this land has
(12:21):
been farmed.
By changing the rates as we goacross the land, changing the
rates of nitrogen, changing therates of phosphorous, even
sulfur to a degree.
We're changing the rates of ourseeding rates as well to try and
control our plant populations indifferent parts of the field.
All of these innovations, ofcourse, again, required
(12:41):
technological change.
So our air drills neededcomputer software built in that
we could use to make thesechanges happen automatically.
Now you might think, well whycan't you just do that manually?
And that sounds like a greatidea, but when you sit in a
tractor for 16 hours, you know,you might remember to drop that
fertilizer rate when you hitthat saline spot cuz nothing's
(13:03):
going to grow there anyway.
And then you go a half mile downthe field and realize you forgot
to turn it back on.
You know, those are the kinds ofthings that happen when you
spend that much time in a cab.
So it, needs to be automated, itneeds to be built in.
And of course GPS and auto steerthat came in in that same sort
of time in the early to mid twothousands that made all of that
(13:25):
so much easier to manage withinnovation.
It always takes a lot ofinnovations at the same time
kind of coming together to makethat problem that we're trying
to solve, solvable.
And then of course, latelyreally fertilizer rates have
continued to increase becauseour bushels have continued to
increase.
We're getting more efficient perbushel of production, but our
(13:45):
total rates are going up.
There's a really large soilhealth component to this that
not enough people talk about.
If we're going to grow crops onland in Saskatchewan for a
hundred years, which a lot ofland in Saskatchewan has been
farmed for that long, some of ita lot longer, we can't just keep
mining nutrients out of theground and think that we're not
going to need to replace them.
You know, the straw getsreturned to the land but the
(14:07):
grain doesn't.
And that grain is where most ofthose nutrients are stored.
That's where we get ournutrition from.
So if we're gonna export thosenutrients from the field, we've
got to find a way to replacethem.
And nitrogen of course issomething that we need every
year.
But there's also phosphorus,which is a huge component of
crop yield and chronically underfertilized on our farm.
(14:28):
And I think, you know, there'sgood data that would show on a
lot of farms in Western Canadathat's been a problem for a
long, long time.
So we've increased thephosphorus rates a lot to try
and address that, to try andactually build those levels back
up again to a level where theyshould be for ideal crop
production.
But those are just kind of thetwo big ones.
There's also sulfur, there'salso potassium, there's
(14:50):
chloride, there's magnesium and,boron and zinc and copper.
All of these nutrients are beingand have been exported from the
land.
And we're starting to see theeffects of that.
You know, now we're getting intothat level of management where
we're starting to apply some ofthose micronutrients back on to
try and ensure that not onlythat our soil health is being
(15:12):
looked after, and not only thatwe have good yields, but it's
also important for the nutritionof the grain that we're
producing now.
We're not getting paidnecessarily 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 intohigher yields and everything
else.
So the incentives kind of workboth ways on that, right?
Clinton Monchuk (15:32):
When we think about how things have changed in
farming and you know, when I goback to say my grandfather on
the quarter section or the halfsection that he kind of started
with, I think of how the, justthe tools have changed and the
technologies changed.
What are some of the bigdifferences that you see between
(15:54):
say your grandparents and whatyou're doing now just in terms
of how you farm and how that isbetter for soil health?
Jake Leguee (16:02):
The amazing thing about all of this change and the
changes that are continuing tohappen is, you know, we've
increased yields enormously inWestern Canada.
Just eliminating summer fallowessentially doubled yields,
right?
Because now we're growing cropon every acre instead of only
half the acres.
Then we went and doubled,tripled yields since then.
(16:23):
So that's quite a stellarincrease in production over the
course of not quite a fullgeneration of farming.
So to kind of broaden out all ofthose changes have resulted in
enormous amounts of greenhousegases being stored in our soils.
We've taken our erosion risk toalmost zero from wind and water.
(16:43):
You know, we're treating oursoils a lot better, we're not
mining them anymore.
And the data on this is still sonew, it's hard to draw
conclusions from it.
But I, think it makes intuitivesense that if you've got
microorganisms living in thesoil, they need nutrients just
like you and I do.
So if we have depleted soils ofvarious different
(17:03):
micronutrients, well they mighthave a hard time surviving in
that kind of an environment,right?
So everything kind of has towork together and, so when I
think about soil health and Ithink about what's regenerative,
what's improving the soils, it'sa lot different than I think
what a lot of people thinkabout, which is often
eliminating fertilizers andeliminating crop protection
(17:24):
products and all of that stuff.
I think the data shows theopposite.
We need to replace what we'reremoving at least and probably
make up for a lot of t his stuffwe've been mining for the past
century without replacing.
A nd we need healthy crops,healthy crops grow a lot of
straw that we can return to theland that provides a lot of
organic matter and massive ro ots ystems that are, you know,
(17:46):
with ou r s o il m oistureprobes in o ur 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 pa n l
and that we, that we farm a lotof.
So everything ki nd o f workstogether and I, I think the
improvements have been prettyawesome.
Clinton Monchuk (18:02):
So I know on, your farm there's, there's a ton
of different decisions and Ijust think, you know, we're in
the planning process now for ourcrops that we're going be
growing in the spring andthere's tons of different
factors that get put into whichcrops are going to go on, which
fields, and you're trying tolook at the markets and whatnot.
Do you want to explain what goesinto your, your crop rotations
(18:24):
and why you use that and whatthe benefits are for soil
health?
Because we know there's a lot ofdifferent benefits, but one of
them is soil health.
Do you want to just explain alittle bit more of how you
determine the cropping rotationsand 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 cangrow a lot of different crops.
Mostly for us it's a matter oftrying to narrow it down into a
rotation that we can actuallymanage.
Now I hear a lot aboutmonocropping and there are areas
that do it where it's just onecrop.
I mean, it might be corn on cornon corn, on corn on corn.
(19:01):
And it's hard for me to commenton that because I don't farm
where they farm.
But where we farm, we see a lotof benefits growing a lot of
different crops.
I mean, first of all, some ofit's economic, right?
Some crops handle drought betterthan others.
Some crops handle wet weatherbetter than others.
We don't know going into theyear what kind of weather we're
going to get.
So it makes a lot of sense togrow crops that can handle both
(19:24):
types of conditions.
So that's sort of one of theprimary reasons.
And then of course also it givesus lots of ability to hedge
different market conditions.
You know, sometimes a crop, onecrop might be a star and it
might be flax, it might becanola, it might be Durham.
Well, I don't know that at thestart of the year more than
anybody else does, by growing abit of a diverse rotation,
(19:44):
hopefully one of the crops weare growing will be that star
this year.
Or at least hopefully we'vebroadened out enough that we
haven't picked anything that'sgoing to hurt us too bad if it
ends up being, you know, a dog.
Right?
So those are a couple of thereasons on a broader scale, why
a diverse rotation makes senseand why I like having it, but
(20:05):
it's also beneficial for thesoil.
And there's, there's a fewreasons for that.
I mean, when the prairies gotbroke, timing differs, but say a
hundred years ago for this areait was natural grassland.
Right now there were a lot ofdifferent grasses in there,
different parts of the landmight have different species as
well, like little shrubs andthose sorts of things.
(20:25):
Now we can't replicate that withthe crops that we're growing.
We're growing annual crops,we're taking them off every
year.
The only way to replicate anatural grassland would be to go
back to having, grazing animalson it.
And that's just not the type offarm that we run.
Hopefully the thinking is with adiverse rotation we can kind of
capture some of that diversity.
I t just in different years.
(20:46):
So say, you know, on our homesection here, we might grow, l
ast year wa s s pring wheat.
This coming year it'll becanola.
The year after that we might putit into peas.
We don't have a, I guess aprescription of this crop then
this crop then this one, we sortof vary it year to year
depending on the field becausesome fields grow a great lentil
(21:08):
crop and don't do so well withpeas.
And sometimes it's the opposite.
So, you know, it does change abit.
But generally speaking, we tryto have a good break between
different types of crops on ourfields to get the diseases that
could h ave h eart, you know,been living in that crop, get
them o ut o f there to make surethat we,, you know, can confuse
(21:30):
our weed spectrum a little bitby hitting them with different
products, different timings, andthen also different competitive
ability of the crop.
Right?
A a lentil crop is notcompetitive.
Weeds can overtake and kill thatcrop i n no time if we don't
have the weeds well undercontrol at the start of the
year.
Whereas Durham or canola orspring wheat, those crops can
(21:52):
really outcompete weeds if youcan get them ahead of them.
There's a few advantages thereas 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 factfor the segment around the
environment.
So back in 1990, Saskatchewansoils actually emitted around a
half a million tons of carboninto the environment and looking
at the new numbers as of 2020.
(22:26):
So 30 years later, w e'reactually sequestering, we're
putting back into the soil about12.8 million tons of carbon, wh
ich is similar to taking off theroad, 2.8 million cars.
And I think of the, t his fun farm fac t is gr eat and I see
some advertisements now inairports and stuff like that
(22:46):
about it.
This is phenomenal when youthink of the efforts that have
been done truly by a few ofthose practices that you talked
about changing, adopting newtechnologies, and it kind of
gets to a little bit of the, Iguess you could say romanticized
view of the past.
There's a view or vision thatthe way farmers did things in
(23:10):
the past it was better, buttruly we're doing a really large
part trying to sin k th atcarbon back into soils and be
proactive to be moreenvironmentally friendly.
And just on that note, what aresome of those environmental
benefits that you actually seeon your farm as a result of
these practices that you'rechanging up?
Jake Leguee (23:31):
Yeah, well that's a , that's an outstanding
statistic and I think it goes toshow what kind of advancements
you can see over a relativelyshort period of time when
farmers can see and seizeopportunities to make things
better.
For me I think the biggest thingthat I've noticed over the past
decade that I've been a littlemore than a decade I guess that
I've been farming is resiliency.
(23:53):
When we get droughts now, and Imean there are droughts that
there's so little rain, there'snothing you can do about it,
right?
But when we get those one yearflash in the pan droughts where,
you know, we go from 10 inchesduring the growing season of
rain last year to three inchesthis year, we've had a couple of
those, and generally speaking,we kind of sneak through them.
There's enough soil moisturebuilt up from the previous year
(24:15):
that the profile is full, soilmoisture profile, is full and
the crop can root down and getinto that moisture.
I mean, what's amazing aboutthat is, you know, back in the
eighties when we had a lot ofdroughts, dad talks about
various years in there wherethey had almost zero production.
And I know that in 2021 therewas a lot of farms in a similar
situation, but in the eightiesit was far more common.
(24:38):
And the reason why is becausethey had to till the ground
black before they could goseeding.
When it doesn't rain after you,after all that the crop just
isn't coming up, it needsmoisture out of the sky to get
going.
And what's been really cool tosee in some of these years,
especially when we haven'tgotten those rains after seeding
in May and even early June ormiddle of June, the crop comes
(25:00):
up anyway.
It's absolutely amazing.
Like you think that the wind isdrying the soil down to the
bottom of that furrow and it, itkind of does, but moisture just
seems to wick its way back upand you just get enough to get
that crop germinated andemerged.
And like I said, there's limits,but what we've seen in some of
those really dry years has beenoutstanding and probably four or
(25:25):
five times a yield that dadwould've expected to see in the
eighties.
I think a lot of that comes fromgood soil health.
If we didn't have good soilhealth, we'd have clumpy hard,
ugly soil that the seedswouldn't get into contact with,
right?
To get germination, you needsoil all around that seed.
It can't just be touching it, ithas to be surrounding it.
(25:48):
So if you've got soil that'sreally clumpy and and stuff like
that, that's not going tohappen.
Then you really do need thatrain.
So, you know, we farm sometougher soils here where I farm
here it's, they're calledsolonetzic soils o rder.
So lots of hard p an, m eaningthat you get a pretty thin layer
of top soil then just rock ha rdc ement underneath.
(26:09):
It kind of needs to get softenedby a r ain now and then.
And those spots are still aproblem and there's not a whole
lot we can do about them.
But we've seen tremendousincreases in the ability of
those fields to produce,especially in tough years
because of some of these changesthat we've made continuous
cropping an d n o-tillabsolutely ch anged t his land
(26:30):
for the better, higherfertilizer rates, higher, cr op
biomass production has gone along way to improve the m even
further.
Clinton Monchuk (26:39):
It kind of adds to that resiliency of the soil
when you can leave it where itis and allow it to build and
actually do what it's supposedto do.
And truly, like you said beforewe started, breaking it for
farming practices, it was doingexactly that to, you know,
produce grass for bison thatgrazed across the lands here.
Right.
(26:59):
You had mentioned it a littlebit in, your earlier discussion
was around the biotechnology andsome of the changes in genetics.
How do you feel that'sinfluenced a lot of what you can
do on your farm and theproductivity, 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 concernsabout.
People have been pretty uneasywith biotechnology and in crop
breeding for a long time.
I mean, we've had geneticallymodified crops now for, oh man,
20 years.
It's been a long time, more than20 years.
So I would like people to know,to understand that, have
(27:39):
skepticism about it, that wegrow these crops because we
choose to.
There is a common misconceptionthat somehow farmers are forced
into growing them.
And that is absolutely not thecase.
You know, the only geneticallymodified crop that we grow on
our farm right now is canola.
It's also happens to be thesingle largest acreage crop on
our farm.
And we choose to grow it.
(28:00):
We could choose not to grow it.
There's other crops we couldgrow instead, but we choose to
grow canola because it is one ofthe most resilient crops on the
farm.
It isn't always the mostprofitable.
In fact, it tends to play sortof in the middle of the road for
us profitability-wise.
But it's the consistency that weget out of that crop that we
really love the ability tocontrol weeds.
(28:21):
You know, if canola hadn'tgained the roundup ready trait
way back when in the, in the mid1990s and, more lately, you
know, there's piles ofglyphosate resistant canola out
there, different companies,different products, there's lots
of competition i n that market,which is great.
And then we also haveglufosinate r esistant canola.
(28:42):
These two products, if we didn'thave them, we still wouldn't be
growing canola.
We'd be relying on herbicidesthat simply don't work in this
area to try and grow that crop.
So it wouldn't matter that it'scompetitive, it wouldn't matter
that it's profitable, itwouldn't matter that it fits for
this area as a plant, if wecan't control the weeds, we
can't be successful with it.
(29:03):
Weeds are still our number onebiggest problem in crop
production, probably worldwide,in all honesty.
We tend to forget them becausewe've got them fairly well at
hand.
But man, when you have a badoutbreak, there's nothing worse
than that because there isnothing you can do about it.
And you know that you've doomedthat field for the next several
(29:24):
years to a lot of expensiveherbicides to try and get them
back under control.
And yeah, I mean if it wasn'tfor that invention, that
innovation, we wouldn't havecanola on this farm.
And like I said, it's been anamazing option for us.
You know, having said thatthere's traditional crop
breeding has this, itsadvantages too.
I mean the gains in in hard RedSpring wheat and Durham
(29:45):
varieties over the past 20 yearshave, especially the past 10,
have been absolutelyoutstanding.
But, you know, a lot of theprogress that we're going to
have going forward is going todepend on having access to all
of the tools in the toolbox whenit comes to crop rotation.
You know, for wheat and Durham,we need access to gene editing
if we're going to overcome a lotof the pests, a lot of the
(30:08):
challenges around, you know,dealing with adverse weather
conditions and all the shocksthat come to a crop during the
growing season, we need lots ofresiliency built into that plant
to be able to handle all thatand still produce a viable
yield.
Gene editing will allow us to dothat.
And I think for most people,they just don't really know what
(30:29):
gene editing is and what itmeans.
And so I think the risk for usright now is that people might
hear something negative about itand, and that'll shape their
perception of it.
You know, I would just point outthat gene editing is very
similar to traditional breeding.
I t just, you're speeding up theprocess a little bit.
There's no foreign DNA comingin, it's the same plant, you're
(30:50):
just making a couple ofadjustments and we've been doing
those kinds of adjustments withtraditional plant breeding for
probably better part of 15,000years.
It's worked very well, but it isa slow process and we know that
to feed a growing population andto manage environmental concerns
and everything else, we're gonnahave to be able to react faster.
(31:11):
And to be able to do that, weneed to access gene editing.
And it is also a shame that,genetically modified crops have
kind o f fallen out of favorbecause o f the cost t o
producing them.
The regulations around t hemmake it so expensive to develop
a variety that companies justaren't interested in it.
And the only companies that canare the absolute largest ones i
(31:31):
n the world, if it wasn't soexpensive to produce those
varieties, we'd have morecompetition, more options and
we'd h ave a lot more smallercompanies invested in this space
as well.
But we sort of burried thatoption, which is really
unfortunate because, genetically modified crops have
been a real benefit to us on myfarm.
Clinton Monchuk (31:50):
Yeah, we like to talk about kind of looking
forward into the future and youkind of touched a little bit on
this.
What do you think on, you know,your farm and from your
perspective, what's that one ortwo big innovations that you see
coming down that, you know, in20 years down the road you'll
say, darn, I can't believe backin 2023 we didn't know about
(32:12):
this, and look at how muchbetter we are similar to the
advancements we've made inplanting our crops and zero t
ill.
Do you see some of thatinnovation or, one of those key
points that's going tofundamentally 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 unknownunknowns that we have no idea
what's coming that'll shapeCanadian agriculture in the
future.
But some of the things that Ican see that could be really
positive both for theenvironment and our own pocket
books on our farms is opticalspot spraying.
Right now, the way that we sprayour crops crop protection
(32:48):
products is we go out there withour sprayer and we spray the
whole field, right?
We can vary our rates a littlebit, but when it comes to
herbicides, you know, when we'retrying to kill weeds, we just
don't really have the ability todo that.
With sensors built onto the boomof the sprayer that enable us to
actually see the weeds in thefield as they are.
And I mean, we're able to seeweeds, I think they're, you
(33:10):
know, the size of a dime that'spretty amazing for a sprayer
that's going 12 miles an hourmore across the field.
That's amazing technology.
And the next step to that, ofcourse, is being able to
identify weeds inside a cropcanopy.
That's been sort of the holygrail of spray production, like
spray technology for 30 years.
(33:31):
And it feels like we're gettingreally, really close to being
able to do that.
I think that's gonna bechallenging and narrow seeded
broad acre crops that we growhere, like wheat and canola.
I think it'll be a lot easier incorn, for example, just because
you have more space to workwith.
But if we can ever get therethat'll reduce the amount of
crop protection products weapply by, by tremendous amount.
(33:53):
Yeah, I mean, it could cut it inhalf, it could cut it by more
than half.
I mean, some of the data that'scome out on Burnoff, you know,
when we go initially beforeseeding to control the weeds in
the field, some farmers arereporting a reduction at 90% in
how much herbicide they'reapplying on certain fields.
So, and not only that, we'reactually doing a better job of
killing the weeds that are outthere.
(34:15):
, because with alittle one, you don't need that
much chemical to kill it.
But the big ones, you need alot.
And right now we're trying topick that happy medium to go
across the field.
Those big weeds, we're just notkilling them.
That's creating a lot moreconcerns about weeds becoming
resistant to herbicides, whichis a huge issue.
So if we could go out there andwhen we see those weeds, we
(34:35):
could really, really smack themwith a good rate, that would be
tremendously positive.
So I, I think that's one of thebig things technologically
that's going to change.
And, you know, that kind of goesinto the whole idea about
sensors and where we're goingwith that.
And I think there's a lot ofpotential there.
We have a number of weatherstations throughout our farm
that tell us, you know, rainfall, soil moisture, soil
(34:59):
temperature, air temperature,leaf wetness, all of these
things are built into that, youknow, suite of sensors and it's
soil a nd moisture that's givenus the most interesting data so
far.
How much water there isunderneath our feet.
And no, we don't irrigate, butstill what that allows us to do
is make data-drivenprobability-based decisions when
(35:19):
we get in s eason about whatelse we should add to that crop
to give it more potential or tohelp it live up to its potential
given the weather conditionsthat we've had.
I think we're just at thebeginning of what we're going to
be able to do with that kind oftechnology.
If we can get more sensors, morereliability o ut o f them, and
understand what the data meansbetter, y ou know, over the next
(35:42):
20 years, I think we're gonnasee a lot of change in how
precisely we are managing ourcrops 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 F armer.
That's just great to go throughsome of the changes that you've
made, h ow soil health is a toppriority and and we thank you
for being part of the programand just sharing your own farm
with all of our listeners today,I want to thank you for taking
(36:15):
the time to listen to our Ask Afarmer podcast.
We at Canadian Food Focus valuethe input from our listeners and
ask that you share this podcastwith your friends and family.
Remember, this is a two-waystreet, so we seek your input
for future segments that are ofinterest to you about food and
farming.
(36:36):
To do this, please click on theAsk us icon at the top of our
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While you're there, feel free tofollow our numerous social media
links and sign up for ournewsletter.
This segment was produced andedited by Angela Larson,
research and Writing by DorothyLong and Penny Eaton.
Music by Andy Ellison.
(37:01):
I'm your host Clinton Monchuk.
And from all of us here atCanadian Food Focus, we wish you
good health and great eats.
From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask a Farmer
.
I'm your host Clinton Monchuk.
A Saskatchewan farmer.
In this podcast, we talk to foodexperts to answer your questions
about your food.
(00:28):
Well, welcome everybody totoday's podcast we have with us
Jake Leguee.
So today we're going to betalking a little bit about soil
health, and I think there's alot of conversations that
sometimes happen, whether it'son the science side or consumer
side, about soil health and howthat actually impacts our food
and, really food n ot here justin Canada, but really globally.
(00:52):
But before we get into that, I,think it'd be a great for all
the listeners out there to justunderstand a little bit more
about who you are.
Jake, you want to just give us abackground to your experience,
your education and ki nd o f where you're at right now with
your fa rm?
Jake Leguee (01:07):
Sure.
I graduated from university in2010.
I got a degree at the Universityof Saskatchewan, in agronomy
minor in Ag business I'd beenfarming while I was in
university, a half se ction, youknow, kind of to get my feet wet
and get some experience and thatsort of thing.
So, came home to the farm.
(01:28):
I've been full-time ever since,but full-time also involved ano
ther fu ll-time job for a while, a s long as I could kind of
manage that.
And I guess currently todaywe're a third generation family
farm here.
We farm about 15,000 acres.
We grow canola, Durham, hard redspring wheat, lentils, pea s an
(01:48):
d fla x.
W e dabble in some other thingshere and there, depending on the
year.
And, w e farm kind of in betweenWayburn and Fill more, ki nd of
all around those, those twotowns.
So yeah, I fa r m here with mywife.
I've got three, yo un g sons,also farm with my older sister,
my dad.
And, my br other-in-law is marri ed to my younger sister, just
(02:10):
to make things extra confusing.
And th en w e've got a coupleof, full-t ime staff and some
seasonal staff as well.
Clinton Monchuk (02:17):
So really the focus of the discussion today is
trying to understand a littlebit about the soil and the
health and, what farmers do to kind of make sure that that soil
is being either regenerated orstaying healthy so we can
actually continue to grow foodhere in Saskatchewan and around
Canada.
(02:38):
One of the things though thathas kind of tweaked the interest
with a lot of consumers is thefact that, you know, you're
hearing stories, you see somethings on social media about the
degradation of some of thesoils.
And I've seen some articlestalking about the depletion o f
nutrients f rom t he soils a ndi n some o f t he different
areas around the w orld.
A nd I t hink i t's good forconsumers to understand what
(03:02):
farmers are actually doing.
You know, Jake y ou're kind ofmore of the cutting edge, new
technology farmer.
Do you want to talk a little bitabout what your farm does in an
effort to protect the soil andtry to build some of those
healthy attributes for yoursoil?
Jake Leguee (03:21):
Soil health and regenerative agriculture and all
of that are huge topics and theyencompass a lot of area.
And, of course with anythingthis, you know, in a discussion
like this, of course there's alot of myths and, misconceptions
about what farmers are doingand, and how we're looking after
things.
So I think maybe what I'll do toanswer that question is to,
(03:42):
first kind of point out what thel ong-term vision of our farm
is.
Because I think it's similar tomost farms.
I mean, our vision is, prettysimple on our farm.
It's to create the opportunityfor the fourth generation on the
farm to actually build abusiness that survives to
generation four.
I mean, the statistics aren'tthat good on that, right?
Most businesses don't make it tonumber three, let alone four.
(04:05):
So we're trying to o vercomethat.
And then at the same time, we'realso trying to make things
better for the incominggeneration, just as my dad did
for me and his dad did for him.
That's what makes agricultureand farming so amazing as
industries.
We have this inherent implicitbenefit to long-term planning,
(04:27):
to long-term management, tomaking things better over time.
And so when I think about soilhealth on our operation, that's
what comes to mind first is howdo we make both our soils and
our farms balance sheet strongerfor generation four?
I don't want to leave them inthe same shape they were in when
I started farming.
I want to make them both better.
(04:48):
And the thing that's awesomeabout farming is the two go
together.
If we do a good job of managingour soils, our balance sheet
will benefit from doing thatbecause we'll grow better crops
or we'll save money on inputs orsome combination thereof.
I think what I need to go backto on improving soil health i s
one of the most basic aspects ofi t in Western Canadian
(05:10):
agriculture, which is theelimination of tillage, which
happened at varying points i ndifferent farms over the years.
On our farm, i t startedhappening in the late 1980s and
kind of finished up around thatearly nineties.
And of course, with any majorchangeover in technology and
management, it takes a w hile,right?
You know, you need to get theright equipment in place and
(05:32):
then you need to figure out howthose management practices work
i n your given area.
I t's one of the things aboutagriculture, is w hat I kind of
c all a hyper locality of it.
Every farm is different and someof that is soil b ased.
I mean, I can go across any oneof our fields and I c an find a
different soil a nd a spot over,over here versus a hundred feet
(05:54):
in the other direction.
The reality is that I don't knowwhat the majority of farmers
should do in Saskatchewannecessarily with their land.
I know what works here and Iknow what's worked for us and I
know that in what we're doing,we are improving our soils.
The elimination of tillage, whenthat started, that allowed a
(06:15):
bunch of other things to happen.
At the same time, with theelimination of tillage, we could
quit summer fallowing thatenabled us to grow crops on the
land every year.
Instead of doing a wheat, nocrop as in summer fallow, come
back to wheat again, or maybe aflax or something like that,
that then broadened our rotationbecause we, well, first of all,
(06:36):
we needed more diversity in therotation if we were going to
grow crops in the same fieldevery year.
But it also created a lot moreopportunity for it.
And at the same time, we hadmassive improvements in
technology.
We had tremendous improvementsin crop genetics that allowed us
to grow crops like lentils andpeas and canola especially has
(06:57):
been one of the biggest changes.
And that happened because ofimprovements in genetics.
So all of that stuff kind of hadto happen at the same time for
no-till to really take off.
Right?
We needed better air drills tobe able to seed into last year's
stubble.
That was an issue.
We needed to be able to seedinto that without plugging,
without putting straw piles allover the place, that sort of
thing, right?
That was a big innovation whendirect seeding hoe drills
(07:20):
started to show up in westernCanada.
So we needed that and we neededbetter genetics, like I
mentioned, and better cropoptions.
So all of those kind of happenedat the same time.
So we shifted from a lot ofwheat fallow, maybe some barley,
maybe some flax to a plethora ofcrop options, growing crops in
the land.
Every year
Clinton Monchuk (07:39):
You were eliminating tillage.
Now not everybody who'slistening understands what that
means with tillage.
You want to just explain,because that's a fundamental
shift that happened mainly inwestern Canada in an effort to
be more efficient, be moreenvironmentally friendly, but a
lot of people don't understandwhat that switch really
(08:00):
involved.
You want to just explain whatthat switch from tillage
practice is to minimal or zerotill meant.
Jake Leguee (08:05):
Sure.
And yeah, that's a goodreminder.
As farmers, we can get kind oftied up in the jargon sometimes
and we make assumptions weshouldn't make on what people
know about farming.
And I guess, you know, foranybody who's ever gardened
tillage is fairly intuitive.
You've got ahoe, you've got ashovel, you've got whatever to
or a rototiller to rip thatground up and turn it black.
(08:28):
I mean, in gardening, that'sstill typically what people do.
They'll go in, turn the groundblack and then they can much
easier place their seeds ortheir tubers or whatever to grow
garden.
That has been the standardpractice for most of
agriculture, for most of itshistory.
I mean, if we're talking 10 atleast thousand years of
agriculture, that's essentiallyhow we've grown crops in that
(08:52):
period of time.
Rip the ground up, make itblack, 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 groundblack, 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, the stalks, we
(09:13):
call it stubble and you seeddirectly into that.
I mean, obviously you need theright tools to be able to place
seeds in that type of anenvironment because you have a
lot of straw to deal withpotentially.
But that's, that's essentiallywhat I mean when I say the
conversion from full tillage tono-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 westarted probably about 15, 20
years ago, just managing it alittle bit different by using
soil tests.
(09:51):
Right now we soil test everyfield of ours and we go really
in depth to make sure that we'retrying 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 yourfarm, in an effort to kind of
understand a little bit moreabout 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 ofthat is the agronomic changes.
Instead of, you know, putting40, 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 thecrop was taking.
And if we're gonna do somethinglike that, we kind of need to
(10:34):
know what's i n the ground inthe first place.
Fertilizer's expensive, w e'reincentivized to put the minimum
amount on that we need to grow agood crop.
So soil testing started tobecome common on our farm about
the mid two thousands.
Pretty much since then, we'vebeen soil testing every field
every year, unless it's goinginto a pulse crop like lentils.
(10:55):
Because of course you're notworried about nitrogen fertility
in those crops.
They can get that out o f theatmosphere.
Of course, you can't grow toomany of them because then we run
into problems with disease androot rots especially.
So there's a balance there andthey have a place in the
rotation, but you know, we foundthat we can't push them too far,
(11:16):
otherwise we just end up withcrop failures.
And crop failures aren't goodfor the soil either.
So once we started learning,okay, we need this many pounds
to grow this many bushels ofcrop and we need this many
pounds for canola crop versus awheat crop versus a flax or, or
whatever, with the soil testingkind of coming online, then we
started to access technologythat would allow us to change
(11:39):
the rates of our fertilizer aswe go across the field.
So it's interesting, right?
We went from a long time agowhen, when Grandma and grandpa
first moved to this property inthe, mid 1950s, you know, they
farmed a section of land, right?
Four quarters, about 600 acres.
A bunch of that was in cattle,you know, and various other
livestock that they had.
(12:00):
And then the land that they werecropping was all split up into
little fields.
I wouldn't say that they wentand managed them entirely
differently, but there were somedifferences there.
Our fields got bigger, we kindof consolidated a lot of those
little fields into one.
But now we're actually goingback and being far more precise
than anybody ever has in anytime that any of this land has
(12:21):
been farmed.
By changing the rates as we goacross the land, changing the
rates of nitrogen, changing therates of phosphorous, even
sulfur to a degree.
We're changing the rates of ourseeding rates as well to try and
control our plant populations indifferent parts of the field.
All of these innovations, ofcourse, again, required
(12:41):
technological change.
So our air drills neededcomputer software built in that
we could use to make thesechanges happen automatically.
Now you might think, well whycan't you just do that manually?
And that sounds like a greatidea, but when you sit in a
tractor for 16 hours, you know,you might remember to drop that
fertilizer rate when you hitthat saline spot cuz nothing's
(13:03):
going to grow there anyway.
And then you go a half mile downthe field and realize you forgot
to turn it back on
You know, those are the kinds ofthings that happen when you
spend that much time in a cab.
So it, needs to be automated, itneeds to be built in.
And of course GPS and auto steerthat came in in that same sort
of time in the early to mid twothousands that made all of that
(13:25):
so much easier to manage withinnovation.
It always takes a lot ofinnovations at the same time
kind of coming together to makethat problem that we're trying
to solve, solvable.
And then of course, latelyreally fertilizer rates have
continued to increase becauseour bushels have continued to
increase.
We're getting more efficient perbushel of production, but our
(13:45):
total rates are going up.
There's a really large soilhealth component to this that
not enough people talk about.
If we're going to grow crops onland in Saskatchewan for a
hundred years, which a lot ofland in Saskatchewan has been
farmed for that long, some of ita lot longer, we can't just keep
mining nutrients out of theground and think that we're not
going to need to replace them.
You know, the straw getsreturned to the land but the
(14:07):
grain doesn't.
And that grain is where most ofthose nutrients are stored.
That's where we get ournutrition from.
So if we're gonna export thosenutrients from the field, we've
got to find a way to replacethem.
And nitrogen of course issomething that we need every
year.
But there's also phosphorus,which is a huge component of
crop yield and chronically underfertilized on our farm.
(14:28):
And I think, you know, there'sgood data that would show on a
lot of farms in Western Canadathat's been a problem for a
long, long time.
So we've increased thephosphorus rates a lot to try
and address that, to try andactually build those levels back
up again to a level where theyshould be for ideal crop
production.
But those are just kind of thetwo big ones.
There's also sulfur, there'salso potassium, there's
(14:50):
chloride, there's magnesium and,boron and zinc and copper.
All of these nutrients are beingand have been exported from the
land.
And we're starting to see theeffects of that.
You know, now we're getting intothat level of management where
we're starting to apply some ofthose micronutrients back on to
try and ensure that not onlythat our soil health is being
(15:12):
looked after, and not only thatwe have good yields, but it's
also important for the nutritionof the grain that we're
producing now.
We're not getting paidnecessarily 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 intohigher yields and everything
else.
So the incentives kind of workboth ways on that, right?
Clinton Monchuk (15:32):
When we think about how things have changed in
farming and you know, when I goback to say my grandfather on
the quarter section or the halfsection that he kind of started
with, I think of how the, justthe tools have changed and the
technologies changed.
What are some of the bigdifferences that you see between
(15:54):
say your grandparents and whatyou're doing now just in terms
of how you farm and how that isbetter for soil health?
Jake Leguee (16:02):
The amazing thing about all of this change and the
changes that are continuing tohappen is, you know, we've
increased yields enormously inWestern Canada.
Just eliminating summer fallowessentially doubled yields,
right?
Because now we're growing cropon every acre instead of only
half the acres.
Then we went and doubled,tripled yields since then.
(16:23):
So that's quite a stellarincrease in production over the
course of not quite a fullgeneration of farming.
So to kind of broaden out all ofthose changes have resulted in
enormous amounts of greenhousegases being stored in our soils.
We've taken our erosion risk toalmost zero from wind and water.
(16:43):
You know, we're treating oursoils a lot better, we're not
mining them anymore.
And the data on this is still sonew, it's hard to draw
conclusions from it.
But I, think it makes intuitivesense that if you've got
microorganisms living in thesoil, they need nutrients just
like you and I do.
So if we have depleted soils ofvarious different
(17:03):
micronutrients, well they mighthave a hard time surviving in
that kind of an environment,right?
So everything kind of has towork together and, so when I
think about soil health and Ithink about what's regenerative,
what's improving the soils, it'sa lot different than I think
what a lot of people thinkabout, which is often
eliminating fertilizers andeliminating crop protection
(17:24):
products and all of that stuff.
I think the data shows theopposite.
We need to replace what we'reremoving at least and probably
make up for a lot of t his stuffwe've been mining for the past
century without replacing.
A nd we need healthy crops,healthy crops grow a lot of
straw that we can return to theland that provides a lot of
organic matter and massive ro ots ystems that are, you know,
(17:46):
with ou r s o il m oistureprobes in o ur 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 pa n l
and that we, that we farm a lotof.
So everything ki nd o f workstogether and I, I think the
improvements have been prettyawesome.
Clinton Monchuk (18:02):
So I know on, your farm there's, there's a ton
of different decisions and Ijust think, you know, we're in
the planning process now for ourcrops that we're going be
growing in the spring andthere's tons of different
factors that get put into whichcrops are going to go on, which
fields, and you're trying tolook at the markets and whatnot.
Do you want to explain what goesinto your, your crop rotations
(18:24):
and why you use that and whatthe benefits are for soil
health?
Because we know there's a lot ofdifferent benefits, but one of
them is soil health.
Do you want to just explain alittle bit more of how you
determine the cropping rotationsand 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 cangrow a lot of different crops.
Mostly for us it's a matter oftrying to narrow it down into a
rotation that we can actuallymanage.
Now I hear a lot aboutmonocropping and there are areas
that do it where it's just onecrop.
I mean, it might be corn on cornon corn, on corn on corn.
(19:01):
And it's hard for me to commenton that because I don't farm
where they farm.
But where we farm, we see a lotof benefits growing a lot of
different crops.
I mean, first of all, some ofit's economic, right?
Some crops handle drought betterthan others.
Some crops handle wet weatherbetter than others.
We don't know going into theyear what kind of weather we're
going to get.
So it makes a lot of sense togrow crops that can handle both
(19:24):
types of conditions.
So that's sort of one of theprimary reasons.
And then of course also it givesus lots of ability to hedge
different market conditions.
You know, sometimes a crop, onecrop might be a star and it
might be flax, it might becanola, it might be Durham.
Well, I don't know that at thestart of the year more than
anybody else does, by growing abit of a diverse rotation,
(19:44):
hopefully one of the crops weare growing will be that star
this year.
Or at least hopefully we'vebroadened out enough that we
haven't picked anything that'sgoing to hurt us too bad if it
ends up being, you know, a dog.
Right?
So those are a couple of thereasons on a broader scale, why
a diverse rotation makes senseand why I like having it, but
(20:05):
it's also beneficial for thesoil.
And there's, there's a fewreasons for that.
I mean, when the prairies gotbroke, timing differs, but say a
hundred years ago for this areait was natural grassland.
Right now there were a lot ofdifferent grasses in there,
different parts of the landmight have different species as
well, like little shrubs andthose sorts of things.
(20:25):
Now we can't replicate that withthe crops that we're growing.
We're growing annual crops,we're taking them off every
year.
The only way to replicate anatural grassland would be to go
back to having, grazing animalson it.
And that's just not the type offarm that we run.
Hopefully the thinking is with adiverse rotation we can kind of
capture some of that diversity.
I t just in different years.
(20:46):
So say, you know, on our homesection here, we might grow, l
ast year wa s s pring wheat.
This coming year it'll becanola.
The year after that we might putit into peas.
We don't have a, I guess aprescription of this crop then
this crop then this one, we sortof vary it year to year
depending on the field becausesome fields grow a great lentil
(21:08):
crop and don't do so well withpeas.
And sometimes it's the opposite.
So, you know, it does change abit.
But generally speaking, we tryto have a good break between
different types of crops on ourfields to get the diseases that
could h ave h eart, you know,been living in that crop, get
them o ut o f there to make surethat we,, you know, can confuse
(21:30):
our weed spectrum a little bitby hitting them with different
products, different timings, andthen also different competitive
ability of the crop.
Right?
A a lentil crop is notcompetitive.
Weeds can overtake and kill thatcrop i n no time if we don't
have the weeds well undercontrol at the start of the
year.
Whereas Durham or canola orspring wheat, those crops can
(21:52):
really outcompete weeds if youcan get them ahead of them.
There's a few advantages thereas 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 factfor the segment around the
environment.
So back in 1990, Saskatchewansoils actually emitted around a
half a million tons of carboninto the environment and looking
at the new numbers as of 2020.
(22:26):
So 30 years later, w e'reactually sequestering, we're
putting back into the soil about12.8 million tons of carbon, wh
ich is similar to taking off theroad, 2.8 million cars.
And I think of the, t his fun farm fac t is gr eat and I see
some advertisements now inairports and stuff like that
(22:46):
about it.
This is phenomenal when youthink of the efforts that have
been done truly by a few ofthose practices that you talked
about changing, adopting newtechnologies, and it kind of
gets to a little bit of the, Iguess you could say romanticized
view of the past.
There's a view or vision thatthe way farmers did things in
(23:10):
the past it was better, buttruly we're doing a really large
part trying to sin k th atcarbon back into soils and be
proactive to be moreenvironmentally friendly.
And just on that note, what aresome of those environmental
benefits that you actually seeon your farm as a result of
these practices that you'rechanging up?
Jake Leguee (23:31):
Yeah, well that's a , that's an outstanding
statistic and I think it goes toshow what kind of advancements
you can see over a relativelyshort period of time when
farmers can see and seizeopportunities to make things
better.
For me I think the biggest thingthat I've noticed over the past
decade that I've been a littlemore than a decade I guess that
I've been farming is resiliency.
(23:53):
When we get droughts now, and Imean there are droughts that
there's so little rain, there'snothing you can do about it,
right?
But when we get those one yearflash in the pan droughts where,
you know, we go from 10 inchesduring the growing season of
rain last year to three inchesthis year, we've had a couple of
those, and generally speaking,we kind of sneak through them.
There's enough soil moisturebuilt up from the previous year
(24:15):
that the profile is full, soilmoisture profile, is full and
the crop can root down and getinto that moisture.
I mean, what's amazing aboutthat is, you know, back in the
eighties when we had a lot ofdroughts, dad talks about
various years in there wherethey had almost zero production.
And I know that in 2021 therewas a lot of farms in a similar
situation, but in the eightiesit was far more common.
(24:38):
And the reason why is becausethey had to till the ground
black before they could goseeding.
When it doesn't rain after you,after all that the crop just
isn't coming up, it needsmoisture out of the sky to get
going.
And what's been really cool tosee in some of these years,
especially when we haven'tgotten those rains after seeding
in May and even early June ormiddle of June, the crop comes
(25:00):
up anyway.
It's absolutely amazing.
Like you think that the wind isdrying the soil down to the
bottom of that furrow and it, itkind of does, but moisture just
seems to wick its way back upand you just get enough to get
that crop germinated andemerged.
And like I said, there's limits,but what we've seen in some of
those really dry years has beenoutstanding and probably four or
(25:25):
five times a yield that dadwould've expected to see in the
eighties.
I think a lot of that comes fromgood soil health.
If we didn't have good soilhealth, we'd have clumpy hard,
ugly soil that the seedswouldn't get into contact with,
right?
To get germination, you needsoil all around that seed.
It can't just be touching it, ithas to be surrounding it.
(25:48):
So if you've got soil that'sreally clumpy and and stuff like
that, that's not going tohappen.
Then you really do need thatrain.
So, you know, we farm sometougher soils here where I farm
here it's, they're calledsolonetzic soils o rder.
So lots of hard p an, m eaningthat you get a pretty thin layer
of top soil then just rock ha rdc ement underneath.
(26:09):
It kind of needs to get softenedby a r ain now and then.
And those spots are still aproblem and there's not a whole
lot we can do about them.
But we've seen tremendousincreases in the ability of
those fields to produce,especially in tough years
because of some of these changesthat we've made continuous
cropping an d n o-tillabsolutely ch anged t his land
(26:30):
for the better, higherfertilizer rates, higher, cr op
biomass production has gone along way to improve the m even
further.
Clinton Monchuk (26:39):
It kind of adds to that resiliency of the soil
when you can leave it where itis and allow it to build and
actually do what it's supposedto do.
And truly, like you said beforewe started, breaking it for
farming practices, it was doingexactly that to, you know,
produce grass for bison thatgrazed across the lands here.
Right.
(26:59):
You had mentioned it a littlebit in, your earlier discussion
was around the biotechnology andsome of the changes in genetics.
How do you feel that'sinfluenced a lot of what you can
do on your farm and theproductivity, 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 concernsabout.
People have been pretty uneasywith biotechnology and in crop
breeding for a long time.
I mean, we've had geneticallymodified crops now for, oh man,
20 years.
It's been a long time, more than20 years.
So I would like people to know,to understand that, have
(27:39):
skepticism about it, that wegrow these crops because we
choose to.
There is a common misconceptionthat somehow farmers are forced
into growing them.
And that is absolutely not thecase.
You know, the only geneticallymodified crop that we grow on
our farm right now is canola.
It's also happens to be thesingle largest acreage crop on
our farm.
And we choose to grow it.
(28:00):
We could choose not to grow it.
There's other crops we couldgrow instead, but we choose to
grow canola because it is one ofthe most resilient crops on the
farm.
It isn't always the mostprofitable.
In fact, it tends to play sortof in the middle of the road for
us profitability-wise.
But it's the consistency that weget out of that crop that we
really love the ability tocontrol weeds.
(28:21):
You know, if canola hadn'tgained the roundup ready trait
way back when in the, in the mid1990s and, more lately, you
know, there's piles ofglyphosate resistant canola out
there, different companies,different products, there's lots
of competition i n that market,which is great.
And then we also haveglufosinate r esistant canola.
(28:42):
These two products, if we didn'thave them, we still wouldn't be
growing canola.
We'd be relying on herbicidesthat simply don't work in this
area to try and grow that crop.
So it wouldn't matter that it'scompetitive, it wouldn't matter
that it's profitable, itwouldn't matter that it fits for
this area as a plant, if wecan't control the weeds, we
can't be successful with it.
(29:03):
Weeds are still our number onebiggest problem in crop
production, probably worldwide,in all honesty.
We tend to forget them becausewe've got them fairly well at
hand.
But man, when you have a badoutbreak, there's nothing worse
than that because there isnothing you can do about it.
And you know that you've doomedthat field for the next several
(29:24):
years to a lot of expensiveherbicides to try and get them
back under control.
And yeah, I mean if it wasn'tfor that invention, that
innovation, we wouldn't havecanola on this farm.
And like I said, it's been anamazing option for us.
You know, having said thatthere's traditional crop
breeding has this, itsadvantages too.
I mean the gains in in hard RedSpring wheat and Durham
(29:45):
varieties over the past 20 yearshave, especially the past 10,
have been absolutelyoutstanding.
But, you know, a lot of theprogress that we're going to
have going forward is going todepend on having access to all
of the tools in the toolbox whenit comes to crop rotation.
You know, for wheat and Durham,we need access to gene editing
if we're going to overcome a lotof the pests, a lot of the
(30:08):
challenges around, you know,dealing with adverse weather
conditions and all the shocksthat come to a crop during the
growing season, we need lots ofresiliency built into that plant
to be able to handle all thatand still produce a viable
yield.
Gene editing will allow us to dothat.
And I think for most people,they just don't really know what
(30:29):
gene editing is and what itmeans.
And so I think the risk for usright now is that people might
hear something negative about itand, and that'll shape their
perception of it.
You know, I would just point outthat gene editing is very
similar to traditional breeding.
I t just, you're speeding up theprocess a little bit.
There's no foreign DNA comingin, it's the same plant, you're
(30:50):
just making a couple ofadjustments and we've been doing
those kinds of adjustments withtraditional plant breeding for
probably better part of 15,000years.
It's worked very well, but it isa slow process and we know that
to feed a growing population andto manage environmental concerns
and everything else, we're gonnahave to be able to react faster.
(31:11):
And to be able to do that, weneed to access gene editing.
And it is also a shame that,genetically modified crops have
kind o f fallen out of favorbecause o f the cost t o
producing them.
The regulations around t hemmake it so expensive to develop
a variety that companies justaren't interested in it.
And the only companies that canare the absolute largest ones i
(31:31):
n the world, if it wasn't soexpensive to produce those
varieties, we'd have morecompetition, more options and
we'd h ave a lot more smallercompanies invested in this space
as well.
But we sort of burried thatoption, which is really
unfortunate because, genetically modified crops have
been a real benefit to us on myfarm.
Clinton Monchuk (31:50):
Yeah, we like to talk about kind of looking
forward into the future and youkind of touched a little bit on
this.
What do you think on, you know,your farm and from your
perspective, what's that one ortwo big innovations that you see
coming down that, you know, in20 years down the road you'll
say, darn, I can't believe backin 2023 we didn't know about
(32:12):
this, and look at how muchbetter we are similar to the
advancements we've made inplanting our crops and zero t
ill.
Do you see some of thatinnovation or, one of those key
points that's going tofundamentally 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 unknownunknowns that we have no idea
what's coming that'll shapeCanadian agriculture in the
future.
But some of the things that Ican see that could be really
positive both for theenvironment and our own pocket
books on our farms is opticalspot spraying.
Right now, the way that we sprayour crops crop protection
(32:48):
products is we go out there withour sprayer and we spray the
whole field, right?
We can vary our rates a littlebit, but when it comes to
herbicides, you know, when we'retrying to kill weeds, we just
don't really have the ability todo that.
With sensors built onto the boomof the sprayer that enable us to
actually see the weeds in thefield as they are.
And I mean, we're able to seeweeds, I think they're, you
(33:10):
know, the size of a dime that'spretty amazing for a sprayer
that's going 12 miles an hourmore across the field.
That's amazing technology.
And the next step to that, ofcourse, is being able to
identify weeds inside a cropcanopy.
That's been sort of the holygrail of spray production, like
spray technology for 30 years.
(33:31):
And it feels like we're gettingreally, really close to being
able to do that.
I think that's gonna bechallenging and narrow seeded
broad acre crops that we growhere, like wheat and canola.
I think it'll be a lot easier incorn, for example, just because
you have more space to workwith.
But if we can ever get therethat'll reduce the amount of
crop protection products weapply by, by tremendous amount.
(33:53):
Yeah, I mean, it could cut it inhalf, it could cut it by more
than half.
I mean, some of the data that'scome out on Burnoff, you know,
when we go initially beforeseeding to control the weeds in
the field, some farmers arereporting a reduction at 90% in
how much herbicide they'reapplying on certain fields.
So, and not only that, we'reactually doing a better job of
killing the weeds that are outthere.
(34:15):
much chemical to kill it.
But the big ones, you need alot.
And right now we're trying topick that happy medium to go
across the field.
Those big weeds, we're just notkilling them.
That's creating a lot moreconcerns about weeds becoming
resistant to herbicides, whichis a huge issue.
So if we could go out there andwhen we see those weeds, we
(34:35):
could really, really smack themwith a good rate, that would be
tremendously positive.
So I, I think that's one of thebig things technologically
that's going to change.
And, you know, that kind of goesinto the whole idea about
sensors and where we're goingwith that.
And I think there's a lot ofpotential there.
We have a number of weatherstations throughout our farm
that tell us, you know, rainfall, soil moisture, soil
(34:59):
temperature, air temperature,leaf wetness, all of these
things are built into that, youknow, suite of sensors and it's
soil a nd moisture that's givenus the most interesting data so
far.
How much water there isunderneath our feet.
And no, we don't irrigate, butstill what that allows us to do
is make data-drivenprobability-based decisions when
(35:19):
we get in s eason about whatelse we should add to that crop
to give it more potential or tohelp it live up to its potential
given the weather conditionsthat we've had.
I think we're just at thebeginning of what we're going to
be able to do with that kind oftechnology.
If we can get more sensors, morereliability o ut o f them, and
understand what the data meansbetter, y ou know, over the next
(35:42):
20 years, I think we're gonnasee a lot of change in how
precisely we are managing ourcrops 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 F armer.
That's just great to go throughsome of the changes that you've
made, h ow soil health is a toppriority and and we thank you
for being part of the programand just sharing your own farm
with all of our listeners today,I want to thank you for taking
(36:15):
the time to listen to our Ask Afarmer podcast.
We at Canadian Food Focus valuethe input from our listeners and
ask that you share this podcastwith your friends and family.
Remember, this is a two-waystreet, so we seek your input
for future segments that are ofinterest to you about food and
farming.
(36:36):
To do this, please click on theAsk us icon at the top of our
website, canadian food focus.org.
While you're there, feel free tofollow our numerous social media
links and sign up for ournewsletter.
This segment was produced andedited by Angela Larson,
research and Writing by DorothyLong and Penny Eaton.
Music by Andy Ellison.
(37:01):
I'm your host Clinton Monchuk.
And from all of us here atCanadian Food Focus, we wish you
good health and great eats.
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