Learn about the various techniques Canadian farmers are using to help maintain healthy soil to grow their produce.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 Soil degradation, things like that happen slowly enough
00:06 that we don't realize it's happening
00:09 until it's almost too late.
00:10 I was still helping my dad on the farm.
00:23 It was plowing the traditional inverting the soil
00:27 and just seeing old crop from the year before
00:30 coming back up black and charred.
00:32 And we stopped and the two of us looked at that
00:35 and said, "This isn't right."
00:37 We didn't know what to change,
00:38 but we just knew we had to change.
00:40 One of the biggest challenges
00:45 is maintaining soil health, soil quality,
00:48 not losing organic matter.
00:50 So I developed essentially three goals.
00:53 I tried to keep the soil covered,
00:56 whether it's a crop, a crop residue,
00:58 or a cover crop as much as possible.
01:01 A second goal is to do as little tillage as possible.
01:04 And my third goal is to try to keep a living root system
01:07 growing in my soil 365 days a year.
01:11 And this all has to come under the umbrella
01:13 of being economically feasible.
01:15 There's an upfront cost to bringing a farm
01:20 to more sustainable system.
01:22 There's a change in equipment.
01:24 A lot of conventional farm equipment manufacturers
01:27 don't exactly make equipment that's adaptable
01:30 to what I'm trying to do on my farm.
01:32 So I take older pieces of equipment, try to modify it
01:35 so that I can use it in a reduced tillage system
01:38 where I can use cover crops,
01:40 where I can leave as much residue on the soil.
01:43 I still do use fertilizer,
01:47 but I'm trying to also use the cover crops
01:50 to use the manure that my livestock operation produces
01:54 to also take up some of that or most of that manure.
01:58 So it's held in place in a biological system
02:01 until it can be released into the following year.
02:04 So I'm trying to keep my nitrogen, my phosphate
02:07 from leaving the farm through the use of cover crops.
02:10 I can replace between 60 and 70% of my commercial fertilizer
02:15 with the use of that system.
02:19 It's a slow process to bring soil back
02:22 from traditional conventional agriculture.
02:25 And this is probably year 10 or 12
02:29 of being fairly intensive at doing that.
02:32 And I'm just starting now to see some of the benefits.
02:35 I'm trying this and there is a lot of interest.
02:40 AFC Living Lab was interested in what I was trying to do.
02:44 I do spend a lot of time networking with other farmers
02:48 that do similar things just to see
02:50 if we can figure this out.
02:51 What I really find exciting is getting a better system
02:56 to work is having that success of producing a crop
03:01 as good or better as a conventional system
03:04 in a more sustainable way.
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