Farmers in other parts of the world are using it to prevent soil compaction and increase yield and profit, but can controlled traffic farming work in Alberta?
That’s what crop advisor Steve Larocque wants to find out.
The owner of Beyond Agronomy from Three Hills has become one of Canada’s leading advocates of controlled traffic farming – a system in which all equipment in a field follows the same tracks, or tramlines.
Larocque’s initial interest developed due to concerns about soil compaction from running heavy equipment. Every piece of equipment compacts the soil to some extent, he told attendees at the recent Advanced Agronomy conference in Leduc.
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“Those wheel tracks were costing us, whether it’s yield or maturity, we don’t know,” said Larocque, who manages over 30,000 acres of cropland and publishes a weekly crop production and grain market newsletter with his wife Vanessa.
“But the effects are certainly significant when you start looking at maybe 15 or 10 per cent of your field and you can see the delays in maturity or crop flowering. That can be significant in a 110-or 90-day growing season.”
Larocque found 1,000-bushel carts that run on thinner, narrower wheels can push up a large amount of soil in front of them. Compaction can also be caused by seeding, spraying and harvest activities in fields. Larocque thinks pre-harvest activities, which generally occur in fields at the wettest time of the year, have a definite effect.
“Certainly it’s your pre-burn, it’s your seeding, it’s your spraying,” he said. “Those three activities alone could be 20 to 25, up to 30 per cent of your field covered.”
Equipment conversion
Larocque used a 2007 Nuffield Scholarship to investigate controlled traffic farming systems around the world. In 2010, he, father-in-law Mitch Currie, and brother-in-law Sam Currie converted their equipment to run on permanent tramlines in a controlled traffic system. They farm heavy clay, high-magnesium soils that are sticky when wet, and which crack when dry. Roots do not grow well in cracked soil, which limits the plant’s ability to take up nutrients and water. After conducting his controlled traffic experiment, he found the majority of the cracks in his field happened along the wheel tracks.
Larocque and his in-laws needed to make numerous modifications to their farming equipment. All their equipment was modified to a 30-foot system which included a 30-foot header and a 30-foot drill.
“In order to get all your equipment running on the same tramlines or axle widths, you have to do some modifications,” he said.
The combine and sprayer were both running on 10-foot centres already, so they just modified the tractor to fit. They modified their drill and removed the wings from their 5 plex Concord Drill to bring it down from 40 feet to 30 feet. They also developed an offset hitch in order to practice between-row seeding. There were 32 seed runs and 28 fertilizer runs on the field.
“When you’re running your equipment on one permanent set of tramlines and you need to drill, your tractor can’t move because it needs to stay on the tramlines,” said Larocque. “You have to find ways to move the drill and keep your tractor and the tank stationary. That’s what the offset hitch was designed to do. We keep the tractor on the tram lines and offset the hitch each year.”
No crop was grown on the tramlines, but rows on both sides of the tramline were double seeded.
“With an open space of about 23 inches on those tramlines, there’s a lot of sunlight and a lot of water and extra nutrients,” he said. “The outside rows on the sides of the tramlines will have access to more water, nutrients and sunlight so they will grow longer.”
Larocque decided to push the maturity with the seeding rate and the area was fertilized once. The most expensive part of the operation was the RTK, which included a monitor, easy steer, and GPS, all of which help keep the equipment on the tramlines. Seeding started on May 19. Since it was their first year in a controlled traffic system, the family learned a few things.
“One thing that we learned is that you do not ever nudge the GPS,” said Larocque. Nudging the GPS can cause check strips on fields, he said.
Larocque and the Curries managed to get 30 plants per square foot in wheat in the normal rows and about 35 plants per square foot in the double-seeded areas.
“That was only about 15 per cent more plants,” he said. “This actually worked in our favour, because I don’t think I wanted 60 plants per square foot on each side.”
Maturity in these areas was speeded up by three or four days, which worked really well. The double seeding also worked well in barley, but proved to be unnecessary in canola. Overall, Larocque and the Curries noticed a 20-per-cent increase in seeding, spraying and harvest efficiency.
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“Thosewheeltrackswerecostingus,whetherit’syieldormaturity,wedon’tknow.”
STEVE LAROCQUE
