Liisa Jeffrey, executive director of Peace Country Beef and Forage Association (PCBFA), said the funding offered by the RSP is a good fit for her organization.

“We’re a forage-based research association and all of the research and everything that we are doing very much ties in with the goals of that program,” said Jeffrey.

This year, grant recipients for the 2024-2025 program include academic institutions, Indigenous organizations, non-profits and grazing associations. The RSP is funded by a portion of rental fees collected from grazing disposition holders on Crown land. The money is then reinvested into projects supporting responsible stewardship across Alberta’s rangelands.

“That’s money coming from ranchers set aside to benefit ranchers. It’s a good concept that the government has come up with,” said Lindsye Murfin, general manager of the Western Stock Growers Association.

The projects for this year include education and community outreach, adaptive grazing practices, conservation strategies, grassland bird conservation and bee biodiversity surveys.

Murfin said they submitted their application for the program in fall 2024, and funding was approved in March 2025.

The WSGA’s project is looking to develop a market for ecosystem services that would work best for ranchers.

“We have an index that we developed that measures ecosystem health, and you could take that, apply it to a parcel of land, get the score and then use the score in the marketplace,” she said.

“You could contract your management of that parcel to either keep your high score or improve it,” she said.

“Our project is fine tuning that index. We’re doing a market analysis and a cross jurisdictional scan of what metrics and measurables are already being used,” she said.

Next summer, the WSGA will be field testing the new index on ranches of stock grower members to make sure it works. WSGA is working with Solstice Environmental Management, and Green Analytics, both of which are based in Edmonton. These companies have started doing a scan of all market analysis in North America and Australia.

Field testing for the project will take place on 50,000 acres in Alberta.

Jeffrey said PCBFA has three projects funded by the RSP.

The projects include a silvopasture project, a liming project, and a perennials project.

“All three of them are three-year projects that started in 2024, so they’re in their second field season right now,” said Jeffrey.

The silvopasture project is a producer-led study that evaluates the potential benefits of grazing forest systems versus open pasture.

“That kind of intentional combination of trees, forage and livestock managed as a single integrated practice is what’s called a silvopastural system, and they have potential to provide a number of benefits to livestock and to the plant community,” she said.

Some of the benefits include increasing soil fertility and conservation, improving wildlife habitat and the quality of forage, and diversifying income. There are also some ecosystems benefits like atmospheric carbon sequestration and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

“On top of that, trees and shrubs in these systems provide shade for animals, so that’s going to improve thermal comfort, which then improves the ability of animals to consume and digest adequate forage biomass, especially in hot weather conditions,” said Jeffrey. This research is being conducted on a ranch in High Prairie, in Big Lakes County.

The second project is a liming project, which is being run as a field study on a producer’s farm in Sexsmith. Adding lime to forages can increase soil pH, which is the primary outcome of the project.

For that project, agricultural lime, pelletized lime and wood ash (an industry by-product from a mill), are being tested to measure the impacts of PH on farm income and profitability.

“It’s assessing the economic feasibility and measuring the impact of liming over the three-year period, and the goals to design liming guidelines and management strategies, particularly for forage systems,” said Jeffrey. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to provide clear recommendations for producers. We’re seeing that soil acidity is a growing concern,” she said.

“When soils are strongly acidic, so 5.5 and under, the availability of many macronutrients for forages decreases and some elements will increase to toxic levels as well. So that’s a concern,” she said.

The Peace country, which contains the boreal forest, has a low pH and more acidic soils, so lime can increase the pH.

The third project is called the Longevity and Ecosystem Services of Perennial Forage Mixes.

Small plots were seeded in 2020, but the project will be monitored again between 2024 and 2026.

“We’re continuing to monitor the biomass production and feed quality of the forage itself, as well as water use efficiency and some soil health parameters,” she said.

A former PhD student who is now a staff member started this project to test water use efficiency, said Jeffrey.

“It’s been interesting because we have had some severe drought years in the time we’ve had these plots. We had our field day last week, and they had harvested these plots about two weeks before the field day and took their cut off them,” she said.

The project has highlighted the value of legumes in drought conditions.

“In the two very dry weeks since the plots were harvested, the only thing that has come back is legumes. None of the grasses have and the legumes look great, like they’re green, they’re up, they look fantastic,” she said.

The plots have been seeded with monoculture grasses, and everything in between, all the way up to monoculture legumes.

“We saw how strong of an impact those legumes had on the water use efficiency of the forage, and their ability to continue producing decent quality and decent quantity of forage in drought conditions,” said Jeffrey.

The project is now in its fifth year.

“We’re at the point where we are looking at how long can these plots continue producing a forage stand that’s worthwhile,” she said.

Jeffrey said there were other benefits to participating in the RSP.

“On the silvopasture project, we were able to get the rangeland specialists to come out to the site and do some of the data collection analysis with us. They looked at identifying all the species that were present and determined the proportion of the species that were there,” she said. “That was really cool.”

Jeffrey said the RSP is a great program, and she would encourage people to consider applying for it.

Applications for the program are now open for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Applicants will be considered based on their knowledge and understanding of rangeland management. Applications are open until Sept. 17, 2025.

More information on the program and how to apply is available online.

The post Alberta invests $1.3 million in rangeland research appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Western Canada is slowly emerging from a blast of arctic temperatures over the weekend, but the winter had otherwise been unusually mild.

Many cities experienced their warmest December ever recorded and British Columbia’s snowpack is on average 44 per cent below normal, according to provincial data. The dry winter follows Canada’s hottest summer on record, partly due to the El Niño weather phenomenon, and is raising concerns that 2024 could be another record-breaking wildfire year.

Despite plunging temperatures in recent days, the winter overall is likely to stick to a milder, drier pattern, said Weather Network meteorologist Doug Gillham.

Agriculture

As of Dec. 31, 70 per cent of the country was abnormally dry or in drought, according to Agriculture Canada, with the worst conditions in southern Alberta, western Saskatchewan and north-central British Columbia.

Virtually all of the Prairies have received less precipitation than normal during the past 60 days as of Jan. 8, with large stretches of each province collecting less than 40 per cent of usual precipitation.

In Alberta, three years of drought have raised the cost of feeding cattle and drained dugouts that the cattle drink from. This has forced some farmers to reduce their herds. Canada’s cattle inventory hit its lowest level on record in 2022, according to Statistics Canada.

Farms in southern Alberta depend on irrigated river water to sustain crops of potato and sugar beet. Non-irrigated Prairie farms produce most of Canada’s wheat and canola, much of which are exported.

Oil and gas

Regulators in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada’s main oil and gas-producing provinces, have urged companies to cut back on water use because of drought. In December the Alberta Energy Regulator said it may restrict access to water due to extremely low levels in many parts of the province, especially the South Saskatchewan river basin.

Firms are taking steps to manage potential shortages although companies are not changing development plans yet, said Tristan Goodman, CEO of the Explorers and Producers Association of Canada.

Companies that usually take their water from tributaries are looking for larger sources within the same basin, while others are building more permanent and temporary water storage facilities or planning drilling programs to coincide with the peak of the spring snowmelt, Goodman added.

Hydro power

BC Hydro’s largest water reservoirs in British Columbia’s north and southeast are below normal levels, a spokesperson for the province’s electric utility said. BC Hydro imported 10,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2023, about one-fifth of its total energy needs, the spokesperson said.

Forestry and wildfires

Alberta still has 60 active wildfires burning and British Columbia more than 100, illustrating the dry and mild state of conditions.

Reduced snowpack means snow will likely melt faster in the spring, prolonging fire season and stretching firefighting resources, said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University.

Widespread wildfires could reduce the areas forestry companies are allowed to harvest, while prolonged drought weakens trees by making them more susceptible to disease, he added.

Winter sports

Western Canada’s 92 ski areas typically receive around 9 million skier visits every year, according to the Canada West Ski Areas Association (CWSAA), and the sport contributes CAD $2 billion a year to British Columbia’s economy.

This year a number of ski hills including Red Mountain in Rossland and Big White near Kelowna delayed their opening dates due to warm temperatures and lack of snow.

Conditions are improving but CWSAA CEO Christopher Nicolson said reports from a number of ski hills suggested visitor numbers were lower than usual over the Christmas period.

The post Western Canada’s dry winter heralds worsening drought for 2024 appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Scott Chang’s research combined pulp mill waste with conventional fertilizer to support growth of hybrid poplar trees in northern Alberta. The idea was to develop a greener alternative to using conventional fertilizers alone.

That same concept could carry over to grain production, Chang noted.

“There is opportunity to test it in crop production systems as another potential means to utilize these biosolids,” he said.

It will take a lot of work to get there. For one thing, it’s hard to say how well the biosolid-urea hybrid would work as a fertilizer on annual crops, which require more nutrients than trees, said Chang.

“More research would definitely be needed. How other constituents contained in the biosolids might affect crop quality or food quality is unknown.”

There is also the issue of contaminants, which Chang did not have to be concerned about in his forestry trials, since the end products weren’t going near Canada’s food system.

The study

The two-year research project took place in 2007 and 2008, but results were only recently published.

It got its start when Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries established hybrid poplar plantations near its mill in the Boyle, Alta., area. The village is 160 kilometres north of Edmonton.

The company initially planned to establish 1,200 hectares of hybrid poplar plantations every year over a 20-year period.

“The objective was to use those hybrid poplar plantations in the future as a source of wood fibre to supply their pulp mill needs,” said Chang.

“The idea was really nice because the hybrid poplars will grow five times faster than native trees in native forests. So instead of having to wait for 100 years to harvest those native forests, you would only have to wait for 20 years to harvest those hybrid poplars.”

While the company’s full plan ultimately fell through, Chang and his fellow researchers started to wonder if the landfill-destined wood fibre byproducts coming from the mill had potential as fertilizer for the poplars that had been planted.

“We were thinking that these biosolids were mostly organic matter … The wood itself has a lot of cellulose and very little nitrogen content,” Chang said. “They contain really low amounts of other contaminants. It’s really a fairly rich source of organic carbon.”

The researcher set out to discover how many nutrients the pulp mill waste could provide.

The process came with some environmental risk. Although pulp mill biosolids are generally low in toxicity, the researchers didn’t know the effects they might have as they decompose.

“Every time you add sources of nutrients or organic matter to the soil, you’re going to disturb microbial populations and influence these transformation rates,” Chang said.

“The rate they are changing in the soil could have implications for the emissions of greenhouse gases. But there may be some implications for our ability to mitigate climate change as well.”

The research team had the idea of combining biosolids with conventional fertilizer in the form of urea, though that would bring additional emissions in the form of nitrous oxide.

The research was broken into three tests: the effects on soil of biosolids alone, urea alone, and urea plus biosolids.

The addition of biosolids increased soil carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions by 21 and 17 per cent, respectively, while urea increased emissions by 30 (carbon dioxide) and 83 (nitrous oxide) per cent, respectively.

However, something remarkable happened when the substances were combined.

Although the higher-emitting urea was added to the mix, there was no jump in carbon dioxide emissions, and nitrous oxide emissions were reduced compared to chemical fertilizer alone.

In terms of soil traits, the addition of biosolids and biosolids plus urea increased soil dissolved organic carbon and microbial biomass.

The addition of urea, as well as biosolids with urea, increased soil inorganic nitrogen, available phosphorus and denitrifying enzyme activity.

The hybrid fertilizer failed to create a statistically significant improvement in tree growth, said Chang. However, it positively impacted soil health by way of elevated organic matter.

“The increase in available nutrient concentration in the soil [causes] it to become more available for plants to take up, to potentially improve the production yield of crops,” Chang said.

Soil health benefits should be another factor of interest for agriculture, he added.

“There is potential in terms of biosolids as a potential source of nutrients, a potential source of organic matter, because the soil can always benefit from organic matter input.”

The post Building a better fertilizer from wood waste appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Chosen by Alberta’s governing United Conservatives (UCP) on Oct. 6 to replace outgoing premier Jason Kenney, Smith on Friday announced Kenney’s incumbent minister of agriculture, forestry and rural economic development, Nate Horner, as her new minister of agriculture and irrigation.

Horner tweeted Friday that he “look(s) forward to building on our government’s historic investment of nearly $1 billion in irrigation infrastructure” and to “supporting an ag sector that’s driving economic growth and job creation.”

Smith, in a release Friday, said the new cabinet is “committed to standing up for Albertans, growing our economy and addressing affordability.”

A cow-calf rancher before entering politics and the MLA for the south-central constituency of Drumheller-Stettler since 2019, Horner had served in the ag and forestry file since last November.

The provincial forestry file was merged into the agriculture ministry by then-premier Rachel Notley’s New Democrats at the start of their term in government in 2015.

Smith’s shuffle moves that file to a new ministry of forestry, parks and tourism, to be led by Central Peace-Notley UCP MLA Todd Loewen, a farmer and former Wildrose MLA who ran against Smith and others for the UCP leadership earlier this month.

Smith on Friday also named Glenn van Dijken, a farmer and the MLA for what’s now Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock since 2015, as her parliamentary secretary for agrifood development.

Van Dijken is well known in Alberta agriculture circles; he and his wife Barb were named Alberta’s Outstanding Young Farmers in 2001 and he later served as a co-chair for the national Outstanding Young Farmer program. He was also a founding member and director of the Western Hog Exchange.

Among other cabinet appointments of interest to Alberta farmers, former energy minister Sonya Savage becomes minister of environment and protected areas; Devin Dreeshen, who Horner replaced last year as ag and forestry minister, returns to cabinet as minister for transportation and economic corridors; and Rebecca Schulz, formerly minister for children’s services, moves to the municipal affairs file.

In this week’s other provincial cabinet shuffle, returning Quebec Premier Francois Legault has re-appointed Andre Lamontagne as his minister of agriculture, fisheries and food and as minister responsible for the Centre-du-Quebec region. Legault’s Coalition avenir Quebec (CAQ) was re-elected to government on Oct. 3.

Among other Quebec cabinet appointments of interest to farmers, Benoit Charette returns as minister for the environment, climate change and parks and wildlife; Maite Blanchette Vezina becomes minister for natural resources and forestry; and Genevieve Guilbault, formerly minister for public security, moves to the transport portfolio and also remains deputy premier. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Alberta reorganizes ag portfolio for returning minister appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

But the changes are unlikely to happen unless governments act to spur them along, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released on Monday found.

“We are in the early stages of climate and agriculture policy development, but we need to start with acknowledging the urgency of the challenge,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “The IPCC warns that governments thus far have not been up to the task.”

About 22 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions came from agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors in 2019, the report said, around half of which were from deforestation. Much of the rest came from the combustion of fossil fuels.

Mitigation measures in those sectors — including protecting forests from clearcutting, sequestering carbon in agricultural soils, and more sustainable diets — can provide as much as 20-30 per cent of the emissions reductions needed to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 C above pre-industrial levels.

Scientists say that is the threshold at which climate change risks spinning out of control.

“Indigenous peoples, private forest owners, local farmers and communities manage a significant share of global forests and agricultural land and play a central role in land-based mitigation options,” the report said.

While the changes required in the agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors — dubbed AFOLU by climate specialists — would not cost much to implement, there is little momentum so far to trigger them, the report said.

A lack of institutional and financial support, uncertainty over long-term tradeoffs of how land is managed, and the dispersed nature of private land holdings have hindered implementation so far, it said.

“Land provides us with so much, for example, food, nature, and our livelihoods,” said Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the IPCC working group that authored the report. “These competing demands have to be carefully managed.”

One major obstacle is that dictating diet is divisive.

The IPCC panel’s initial report summary included a recommendation that consumers shift to plant-based diets and reduce their intake of meat, according to a draft seen by Reuters.

But the final version of the summary included a recommendation instead for balanced diets that include sustainably produced animal products alongside plants like grains and legumes.

Asked about the changes, Joanna House, an expert on land use at the University of Bristol and an author of the report, said she could not comment on why the changes were made but said the issue of dietary changes is complex.

“If meat is produced sustainably, it can be low-carbon and support soil carbon and nutrients,” she said. “If produced unsustainably, particularly in intense systems requiring large amounts of animal feed that result in deforestation, it can cause large net emissions.”

Global demand for livestock products is growing, a headwind to cutting agriculture’s emissions, the report said.

— Leah Douglas reports on the U.S. energy and agriculture sectors for Reuters from Washington; additional reporting by Gloria Dickie.

The post Food, farming, forestry must be transformed to curb global warming, UN says appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Canada, the world’s top exporter of natural Christmas trees, is grappling with a shortage that will likely be exacerbated by historic flooding in British Columbia, where some tree farms are underwater.

A phenomenon known as an atmospheric river dumped a month’s worth of rain on the Pacific province in just two days, destroying roads and bridges and leaving some communities cut off from the rest of Canada.

Canada exports about 2.3 million Christmas trees per year, with some 97 per cent going to the United States. While British Columbia does not export cut Christmas trees, it is a significant domestic supplier. That means shortfalls in that province will have to be made up with supply from elsewhere, leaving fewer Canadian trees for export.

“We can’t ship them because all the roads are closed,” said Arthur Loewen, whose tree farm at Chilliwack has been swamped. “We’re basically shut down until the water recedes.”

Trees already cut and wrapped for wholesale buyers are piled up on wood pallets, surrounded by water, he said. His self-serve fields, where people choose and cut their own Christmas trees, are 75 per cent flooded.

Loewen said that if the waters don’t subside within the week, younger trees could be damaged, hurting future supply. Water levels were starting to drop by Thursday.

The flood impact comes as North America is already seeing more demand than available supply, in part due to people staying closer to home in the pandemic.

“In North America, we’ve seen such an increase in demand for the real tree,” Shirley Brennan, executive director of the Canadian Christmas Trees Association, said. “I’ve been fielding calls at my office since the spring.”

Dwindling production has also hampered supply. Canada had 2,381 Christmas tree farms in 2011, which fell to 1,872 by 2016 and continues to decline as farmers retire. Planted acres fell by 16 per cent in the same period.

Late frosts, hot and dry summers and a labour shortage are adding to the problem, particularly in Ontario, where planted acres were down by 25 per cent from 2011 to 2016.

Dan Laird, who owns a tree farm in Ottawa, said he won’t be selling Christmas trees this year for the first time since 1977, citing the summer weather toll on his crops.

“I just don’t have an abundance of trees,” he said, adding that he’d need to double his staff to open up this holiday season. “I couldn’t get the workers.”

Christmas tree buyers can expect less selection than in the past and should expect to pay 10-15 per cent more this year, said Quebec farmer Larry Downey.

— Reporting for Reuters by Julie Gordon in Ottawa; additional reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal.

The post B.C. floods may tighten market for real Christmas trees appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Brandt Tractor, the equipment sales arm of the Regina-based Brandt Group, on Monday announced an agreement to buy all of publicly-traded Cervus Equipment Corp. for $19.50 a share, valuing the Calgary-based chain at about $302 million.

Cervus’ holdings today include 22 Deere dealerships in Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C., 17 Peterbilt dealerships in Ontario and Saskatchewan, eight forklift dealerships in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, seven Deere dealerships in Australia and nine in New Zealand. Another Deere dealership is due to open at Penhold, Alta., near Red Deer, next year.

Cervus dates back to 1982, when the company’s current chairman Peter Lacey bought five Deere dealerships in Alberta. It listed on the TSX in 2000 and went on to buy further outlets across Canada, expanding also into New Zealand and Australia in 2010 and 2012 respectively.

Brandt Tractor, meanwhile, operates 56 dealerships across Canada, selling Deere equipment such as skid steers, dozers, excavators and feller bunchers and also handling sales and service for brands such as Ditch Witch, NPK, Hammerhead and Topcon.

Brandt CEO Shaun Semple said Monday the addition of Cervus would see Brandt Tractor shift its dealership chains into three new segments “dedicated to serving the agriculture, transportation and material handling industries.”

Those segments, he said, “will further establish Brandt as a total solutions provider across our diverse customer groups.”

“As a private company with a committed, well-capitalized and long-term owner, Cervus will be better positioned for the next stage of evolutionary growth for our dealerships,” Cervus CEO Angela Lekatsas said in the same release.

“The size and scale of the entity created by the combination of our two companies will allow for increased investment into Cervus for the benefit of our employees and customers.”

John Deere Canada and Peterbilt Motors have already consented to the change of control, Brandt and Cervus said in their release.

Brandt and Cervus said they expect to close the deal sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, pending the outcome of a special meeting of Cervus shareholders to be held sometime in October.

Among Cervus shareholders, Lacey, who holds about 18 per cent, has already locked into an “irrevocable” agreement to vote his shares in favour of the Brandt deal.

Other Cervus directors and officers, who in all hold about one per cent, have “revocable” agreements in place to vote in favour. Also, as of Monday, Brandt and affiliates together hold about nine per cent of outstanding Cervus shares.

Brandt said its proposed deal represents a 37 per cent premium to the 20-day volume-weighted average price per Cervus share for the period ending Aug. 13.

Cervus on Monday also announced its best-ever second quarter, booking $14.88 million in adjusted before-tax income for the period ending June 30, up from $8.08 million in the year-earlier period. Gross revenue from sales and service for the period came in at $402.3 million, up from $340.97 million in Cervus’ 2020 Q2.

Ag equipment revenue specifically was up 10 per cent in the quarter, “primarily driven by increased customer demand for new equipment, supported by strong market fundamentals in all our geographies.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Brandt to buy Deere dealership chain Cervus appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The Regina-based Brandt Group announced Wednesday it has reached a deal to buy the assets of GeoShack Canada Co. and the Canadian assets of Inteq Distributors, both owned by Dallas-based Ultara Holdings.

In Ontario, GeoShack is billed as the “long-time exclusive supplier” for Topcon Positioning Systems equipment, including sales, service, and rentals of GPS and other equipment for the ag, construction, survey and engineering industries, through locations in Toronto, Ottawa and London.

California-based Topcon’s agricultural products include precision seeding, spraying and harvest equipment as well as autosteer and guidance systems.

Formed in 1995, Geoshack expanded to Ontario in 2003 when it merged the Toronto- and Exeter-based businesses of Laserline Ontario with those of three other independent distributors in Texas, Ohio and Michigan. Outside Ontario it will still have 16 U.S. locations in eight states.

The GeoShack deal, on top of Brandt’s “pre-existing Topcon footprint” in Western and Atlantic Canada — and a new separate agreement in which Topcon has assigned distribution rights to Brandt for the Quebec market — makes Brandt “the exclusive dealer for Topcon construction and geopositioning products for all of Canada.”

“The territorial expansion of the Brandt operation will scale our presence and penetration in Canada,” Eduardo Falcon, general manager for Topcon’s geopositioning group, said in a separate release.

Brandt’s other acquisition, Inteq Distributors, is a “complementary business” with a distribution centre at Exeter, Ont. providing sales and service on “an extensive selection of construction instruments, optical equipment, survey supplies and accessories.”

The deal with Ultara is expected to close June 26, giving Brandt what it calls a “comprehensive retail footprint to supply premium geopositioning equipment to Canadian construction and forestry contractors, engineering firms and survey companies.”

“We are very excited to add this highly respected team along with these key product lines and support services for our customers in Ontario and Quebec,” Brandt CEO Shaun Semple said in Wednesday’s release.

“The combination of the GeoShack team and Brandt’s national infrastructure is going to be powerful for Ontario customers,” GeoShack president Scott Beathard said in the same release.

“We’ve worked very hard to build strong relationships and a solid operation in the Ontario market over the years and we’re completely confident that Brandt will continue to grow the business and provide unmatched value for clients in that market.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Brandt buys GeoShack’s Ontario business appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“This is when the elm bark beetles, responsible for spreading the deadly DED fungus, are not active,” said Feddes-Calpas.

But it is important to properly prune trees and STOPDED recommends using a professional arborist. Pruned elm wood should be properly disposed of by burning, burying or chipping by March 31.

For more info, go to the Alberta Agriculture website. To find an ISA Certified Arborist, go to isaprairie.com.

The post Elm pruning ban over until March appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

After reading what Caroline-area farmer Will Vohs has discovered, landowners may want to think twice before signing over their woodlots too quickly.

That’s because Vohs says he can manufacture a 12-inch by 12-inch by 20-foot timber on his band sawmill and sell it for about $250 compared to the $50 to $100 per raw log that forest companies wanted to pay him 10 years ago. And raw log prices have gone down since then, he said.

The idea to custom cut his own wood products occurred to Vohs when he agreed to sell some standing timber to a forest company to raise some cash. He and his family purchased 2-1/2 sections about a half-hour west of Innisfail after immigrating to Canada in the 1970s.

In Europe, private forests are highly valued and Vohs recognized the value of the woodlot on their new home — which they named Valley of Hope Farm. While most of their land was converted to pasture, they left a half section as a woodlot.

Over the years, they developed a successful cattle business. But Vohs encountered a series of unfortunate circumstances involving drought and one of their cows being diagnosed with BSE in 2003. He and his partners decided to wind down their 130-head, pure Charolais cattle herd in 2005.

That gave him time to try something new, which turned out to be custom raising cattle for neighbours and custom sawmilling timbers and lumber for himself, neighbours, and a network of customers who discovered him through word of mouth.

“Being here 40 years, I realized that stuff falls apart,” said Vohs. “So you need to buy lumber to fix it or you can cut your own lumber to fix it. Being that I already had a tractor to pull logs out of the bush, I already had a Bobcat to put logs on my sawmill, and a chainsaw — all I was missing was the sawmill.”

Vohs carefully harvests about 50 spruce and aspen trees annually, with each measuring at least 16 inches at the butt (and some up to 30 inches). Typically, he falls the trees and transports them to his band sawmill, which is set up in an enclosure that also serves as shelter to protect his sawn lumber.

He focuses on lumber dimensions not readily available from retail lumberyards and recently milled a load of 1×10-inch boards for a friend. He generally cuts nothing smaller than 1×6 and as large as 2×12, along with a fairly high volume of 2×6 and 2×8 for cattle fencing he uses both on his own farm and sells to others.

What Vohs discovered about the value of selling wood products instead of raw logs comes as no surprise to veteran Alberta woodlot owner, Pieter Van Der Schoot, past president of the Woodlot Association of Alberta and 1998 recipient of the Master Woodlot Stewardship Award.

Van Der Schoot owns a 218-hectare woodlot near Breton and said he has planted well over 100,000 trees on the property over the many decades that he has lived and managed it. The woodlot, which includes two small brooks and 20 kilometres of trails, has become a popular field tour destination for forestry reps, landowners, scientists, and government officials, as it has evolved into a highly biodiverse setting.

It takes a bit of work to ensure that planted trees are free to grow without too much competition, but a well-managed woodlot produces high-quality wood fibre that is healthier and grows faster than trees in a natural forest, he said.

“I’ve seen pine seedlings grow three feet in one year,” said Van Der Schoot.

However, marketing the wood has been a constant source of frustration, and to this point, the province’s forest industry has not been willing to pay more for the wood than it has cost him to own and manage the woodlot, he added.

Vohs’s band sawmill provides him with the option of producing either timbers or boards. Timbers are the easiest wood product to manufacture on his all-hydraulic, 28-horsepower, gas-fuelled, Wood-Mizer LT40 band sawmill equipped with a debarker, which he purchased for $30,000 about 12 years ago.

Waste wood is processed through a small wood chipper, with the material used in Vohs’s cattle operations while first-cut slabs are processed into firewood for his home and shop.

“Small sawmilling and wood value adding are good opportunities to diversify farm income and provide local employment while reducing risk for forest fire,” said provincial agroforestry specialist Toso Bozic. “We have over 3.6 million hectares of private forest in Alberta, and it currently provides between two million to three million tonnes of wood fibre to the forest industry.”

When queried by friends and neighbours about the wisdom of making this investment into a band sawmill, Vohs points out its cost was about the same as a round baler. Having spent a couple of decades raising cattle, he says he’d rather be sawing lumber than baling hay.

“I don’t have the pressure of harvest and haying weather anymore,” said Vohs. “The sawmill is really nice that way. If the unit breaks down, it’s not that bad because there is nothing spoiling on you right away. You can just fix the sawmill and carry on.”

Today, between running his sawmill, custom grazing cattle for other area farmers, and offering farm services to his neighbours, Vohs said, “I am plenty entertained every day.”

The post Timber is a winner for Caroline cattle producer appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.