“As you near the Old Man River, there’s a grassy basin, and it’s part of a grazing co-op owned by a group of ranchers called the Waldron Grazing Co-operative,” said Larry Simpson, senior advisor to the Alberta region of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

In 1999, the Bob Creek Wildland Park was created thanks to British Petroleum, a company which donated 2,900 acres of its mineral interests to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to create the park. The park was about 70,000 acres.

In 2013, the Nature Conservancy of Canada entered into an agreement with the Waldron Grazing Co-operative to preserve the 13,000-acre Waldron Ranch.

Simpson said the piece of land at that time was the largest conservation easement in Canadian history. The Waldron Grazing Co-operative, possibly the largest grazing co-op in North America, used some of the money paid to them by the Nature Conservancy of Canada to buy the King Ranch.

“The last piece is the Bob Creek Ranch,” said Simpson. The ranch connects with miles of riverfront on the Old Man River and is bordered on two sides by the Bob Creek Wildland Park. The ranch is more than 2,400 acres.

The first phase of the project is done, and the groups are moving on to the second phase.

Conserving it will create a continuous land block of over 100,000 acres of conserved and protected lands within the headwaters of the South Saskatchewan watershed.

“When you put them all together, it creates connectivity between the Rocky Mountains and a forest reserve called the Porcupine Hills Forest Reserve. It creates 20 miles of connectivity in between two big blocks of land that are frequented by all kinds of wildlife and all kinds of people,” said Simpson.

When the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the Waldron Grazing Co-operative put a conservation easement on the land, it does not mean that the Nature Conservancy of Canada owns it.

“It means they (the Waldron Grazing Co-op) still own it, but they have agreed to register restrictions on the title of their land, that they won’t subdivide the land, they won’t cultivate it, but they will still own it,” said Simpson.

The land can still be used for grazing and sold if future owners do not subdivide it or break it up in any way.

The Bob Creek Ranch was purchased by the Waldron Grazing Co-operative about two and a half years ago.

“We are looking to preserve this land so it can’t be developed. It can stay in the state that we’ve acquired it in, and it will be forever undeveloped and uncultivated and grazing cattle,” said Kim Wachtler, a member of the board of directors of the Waldron Grazing Co-operative and a fourth-generation rancher at Burke Creek Ranch.

“It’s important for people to know that we’re using cattle to keep these landscapes intact,” said Wachtler.

Negotiations to acquire the first piece of the Bob Creek Ranch began in 2021, and the land was acquired in 2022, said Wachtler. The Waldron Grazing Co-operative entered negotiations immediately with the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

“It took a while for them to get their funds together and go through terms to be worked out,” said Wachtler.

The conservation easement on the Bob Creek Ranch has been done in two phases. The first part of the conservation easement on the Bob Creek Ranch was finalized in May 2025. Wachtler said the second phase has acreages that are a bit different and there is more waterfront on the second piece.

The Waldron Grazing Co-operative was created in 1962 and took over a private ranch at that time. Since then, the co-operative has brought little pieces of land and attached them onto the ranch. There are currently 80 ranching families involved with the co-operative.

“As the shareholders, we find a lot more economies of scale. We can do things as a group that we couldn’t do as individual ranchers,” said Wachtler.

Both Simpson and Wachtler agree the Bob Creek Ranch is a unique area that can also be used for hiking, as well as grazing.

Wachtler said the area is very diverse and contains ecologically sensitive grasslands. Many species of risk pass through the land, including black bears, grizzly bears, moose and large herds of elk.

“There are different species at risk that they’re seeing out there right now. Some of these are things that you wouldn’t be so aware of, like leopard salamanders and different kinds of bats,” said Watchler. MULTISAR, an organization that collaborates with partners throughout Alberta to work towards conserving species at risk in the province, is currently doing a study on the land.

“They’re out there right now, assessing the range health and doing a wildlife species count and looking at the riparian areas,” she said.

Simpson said the area has an interesting mix of wildlife that you would find on the Prairies as well as the Rocky Mountains.

“Part of the Bob Creek Ranch is part of the Bob Creek Wildland Park, and it’s the largest block of uneroded montane. It’s not mountain, it’s just in between,” said Simpson.

There are big ridges, with partial forest with lots of open spaces.

Simpson said the area was Napi’s playground. Napi is a trickster figure in Blackfoot culture.

The Nature Conservancy of Canda is seeking support to help fund the second phase of the conservation easement and complete the Bob Creek Ranch project. When the second section of the Bob Creek Ranch is preserved, three quarters of a section will be added to the conservation easement.

“That’s going to happen here, this fall,” said Simpson.

“And so we need to raise $100,000 for that as well.”

The post Saving southern Alberta’s Bob Creek Ranch appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Regarding the statement “the agriculture community seems incapable of re-prioritizing land use,” priorities by whose standards and by what criteria? Farmers who have invested their lives in becoming sustainable both in their financial as well as their ecological business are incapable of making correct decisions? Correct by whose criteria? And just whose priorities are to take precedence over others’ priorities?

Regarding the statements of the taxpayer’s willingness or unwillingness to fund “incentives for the agricultural landscape,” there is a class of people, to which Matt McIntosh seems to be a party, who have the hubris to think that third parties (themselves) have the authority and competence to pre-empt the decisions and priorities of other people.

In this case, pre-empt the decisions of farmers and taxpayers and to impose undetermined and undefined financial, social, and long term ecological costs and risks on them while bearing none of those costs or risks themselves.

Yes, we need to protect and enhance the environment that we share, but granting the power to impose one group’s priorities on other people, no matter how well intentioned, in order to prevent them from imposing even greater restrictions, is ceding the battle now and in the future to those whose stated objective is to shut down agriculture completely.

The hope that it will appease them by granting them the power to possibly impose even greater restrictions is naive at best. I have far more confidence in a free society’s ability to cope with future environmental problems than in our ability to cope with a government and a parasitic bureaucracy whom we have ceded all of our property rights and civil liberties to, with all of the environmental, economic and social catastrophes that are inherent with that type of government.

A simple perusal of history will give you plenty of examples. Matt McIntosh even references the EU and the onerous regulations that are imposed on the farmers there, imposed by the very enviro-blindered bureaucrats he wants to appease here.

The day that Matt McIntosh or anyone else purchases at my determined price, and assumes ownership of my land, is the time at which they can begin to make decisions of what they will or will not do with it.

Why on earth would you ever want to concede to anyone else the power to dictate what will happen on your land and the power to force taxpayers against their will to pay you to do anything? Power to extract a tax on one person to be paid to another is the same power to force compliance with the regulation.

The ‘payment’ is only the moral rationalization we grant politicians for imposing what we want on others. Accepting such a payment is a capitulation of part, if not all, of our property rights.

Protect our property rights. Do that by taking care of the environment and do not give up your rights and become party to the further extortion of the taxpayer. We want them to feel that they are our allies, not that they are our patron benefactors nor our extortion victims.

I’m sorry, but a pre-emptive surrender of our rights to people who want our demise is not the answer.

Travis Hatch
Sunset House Alta.

The post Letter to the Editor: Don’t surrender on the enviro front appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Then say hello to a new government program called the Resilient Agricultural Landscape Program (RALP).

There has never been a program quite like this one, said Giselle Ulrich, a grant program specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation.

“A lot of the best management practices being offered are ones that help maximize the creation of ecological goods and services, things like carbon sequestration or improved water quality, enhanced biodiversities, those sorts of natural benefits,” she said. “It is a bit of a different program.”

The program offers per-acre payments of up to $150,000 per applicant (who must be an “active primary producer”) and double that for a grazing association. The per-acre fee will be “calculated to cover most of the applicant’s implementation cost and may also pay an opportunity cost.”

Grants are available in four categories: pasture management (such as rotational grazing, adding legumes to pastures and riparian protection), cropland conversion (such as seeding to forages), tree establishment (shelterbelts, eco-buffers and pollinator strips), and wetlands (restoration or constructing new ones).

“These are typically areas that can cost a lot of money, which may be the reason why people haven’t chosen to adopt some of these practices or management strategies yet,” said Brodie Haugan, a cow-calf producer from Orion and chair of the Alberta Beef Producers.

“This should help producers who have potentially been thinking of some of these projects. This enables them to jump on the ideas that they have had.”

An applicant doesn’t have to be a livestock producer, but has to be responsible for input costs and the day-to-day management of the operation, and it must produce $25,000 worth of commodities annually.

“There’s a diversity of options,” said Ulrich. “There are certainly best management practices that will be attractive to cattle producers. But there are also options for grain farmers. We’re hoping that every type of producer could find something in this list that they could apply for on their farm.”

RALP was launched this month as part of the new five-year federal-provincial ag funding framework called the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership. It replaced the previous five-year deal, the Canadian Agricultural Partnership.

It has some overlap with the On-Farm Climate Action Fund but RALP doesn’t have cost-sharing, and the producer does not have to front any funds.

“There are different eligible expenses for each best management practice,” said Ulrich. “It’s a bit flexible in what you do or not. You can put in the expenses you are claiming, as long as the expenses that you are claiming are eligible. Some of them do have maximums.”

For example, it will pay up to $2,000 for technical support from a provincial agrologist or crop advisor. Payment for the “opportunity cost” depends on what’s being done.

“The opportunity cost is specific to the best management practices, as not all of them will have that,” she said. “Additionally, each operation will be evaluated for project size, carbon sequestration improvement, number of livestock involved, water quality and biodiversity enhancement and that could result in an additional impact adjustment payment.”

The program is for a three-year term to help the long-term establishment of best management practices. The program launched April 3 and applications will be accepted until Nov. 30, except for the wetlands category, which is open until Jan. 31. Program details and applications can be found at www.alberta.ca/resilient-agricultural-landscape-program.aspx.

The program recognizes that the cost of this sort of work can be a barrier and that the payoff in terms of environmental benefits aren’t immediate, said Ulrich.

“If you’re trying to improve a riparian area and water quality, it could take years for that to happen,” she said. “That’s part of the reason why we have three-year project terms, and we’re trying to offer funding that could really offset the cost to help farmers with some of these things that could be a little more difficult to implement without that support.”

It’s an approach that will appeal to many producers, said Haugan.

“These are typically projects that producers want to implement for a positive change for their operations,” he said. “Usually, the cost associated with them keeps them from choosing to implement them on their own.

“These changes hopefully create more efficiencies and improvements on the land and within their operations. These usually aren’t big changes that are going to make a lot of money. It’s that smaller, incremental approach.”

Cattle producers might also want to consider the Water Program, which is part of the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, said Haugan.

One part of that program, called the “on-farm water supply stream” will typically cover 25 per cent of the cost of things such as expanding or constructing a dugout or drilling a well.

“We did a big push to try to drought-proof the landscape and this program specifically enables and implements dugouts and dams and wells to try and mitigate drought into the future,” he said.

The maximum grant is $5,000 per parcel and $35,000 per applicant. However, the province’s website warns “there is limited funding in the program.”

It will be interesting to see what producers come up with in terms of applications, said Haugan.

“I think it will be extremely positive to our industry and I’m excited to see what producers can do with this funding.”

Several other programs could be of interest to livestock producers. For example, the Farm Technology program offers grants for tag readers and sensors for weigh scales or monitoring cattle. Each program (go to alberta.ca/sustainable-cap.aspx) has a list of eligible and ineligible expenses.

The post New program offers big dollars for providing eco-services on your land appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“I grew canola and barley last year and we had 28-bushel canola on four and a half inches of rain and five weeks of smoking hot weather,” said Steve Larocque, an agronomist at Three Hills who has a small cropping operation. “Neighbouring fields were like 20 to 18. Dismal.”

In controlled traffic farming (CTF), all equipment is run on the same tracks, called tramlines, year after year. That limits compaction to just those tracks, improving water infiltration and soil health in the rest of the field.

Over the years, Larocque said his barley yields have increased eight per cent. However, the impact on his barley last year is unknown as he decided to apply a plant growth regulator after receiving four-and-one-half inches of rain in early June.

“On a drought year where CTF would have shined like it did in canola, I applied a plant growth regulator to my barley, which erased any benefits from CTF by adding a tonne of stress,” he said. “It was really unfortunate because I’ve been waiting 12 years to really test the system under drought conditions.”

There’s no secret about why non-compacted soil produces better crops, not only during drought but also in years with excessive moisture, he said.

“When you get average rains, everybody wins,” said Larocque. “But the whole premise of CTF is to allow that soil to breathe, to open up and repair itself over time. It adds a lot of aeration and porosity.”

Has Larocque had inquiries about CTF following last year’s drought?

“No, and one of the reasons I think is we fared really well financially because of crop insurance,” he said. “Crop insurance paid out.”

Although widely used in Australia, adoption of CTF has been slow in Alberta, said Larocque, who became an advocate of the practice after receiving a 2007 Nuffield scholarship and seeing it in action Down Under.

However, there is a significant learning curve involved and the not inconsiderable problem of having equipment align with the tramlines for both wheel spacing and equipment width. As well, there isn’t an immediate financial incentive to change, said Larocque.

“Why would you change when you’re making money?” he said. “People are taking baby steps.”

However, the benefits go beyond reducing overall compaction because tramlines allow farmers to start seeding or harvesting earlier when field conditions are wet. It makes in-crop applications easier and reduces fuel use and machinery wear.

“The best analogy is taking a bicycle and riding down a gravel road, and then riding down an asphalt road — and tell me what the resistance is like,” said Larocque. “Naturally, when you’re driving down CTF-hardened traffic lanes, you require less energy.”

If farmers are interested in converting their operations to the practice, Larocque recommends focusing on sprayers and combines to start because both machine tracks can be matched. Appropriate GPS technology is required.

“You can start up by just running tramlines on your sprayer, and you can tiptoe your way into it. You don’t have to go all in,” he said. “In many cases, it’s a gradual process and something that you move towards.

“So start with your sprayer, maybe add in your combine, and get your logistical head wrapped around it. A lot of times we are our own worst enemy — we can think of a million reasons why it won’t work.”

Grain carts are one of the worst soil compaction offenders, said Larocque, noting machine speed and weight add to compaction. But grain carts can be run on tramlines despite farmers thinking it’s more challenging, he said.

“The weight you add and the faster you travel, the bigger the wave, the harder it is,” he said. “So, the grain cart is logistically challenging. On big fields a lot of times they’ll just split a field in half and have a turnaround, so you don’t have to go all the way down to the end. Split a half section into quarters — which most farmers do anyway — when you’re blocking it out.”

Controlled traffic farming is a good way to dramatically reduce input costs (including fuel, time, and machinery wear) while increasing yields and profitability, says the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in the United Kingdom.

“Some farmers in Australia have cut their machinery costs by as much as 75 per cent while their crop yields have risen,” says the organization on its website.

Getting into fields because they absorb moisture — be it spring snow melt or fall rain — can also have a big impact on the bottom line, added Larocque.

“I don’t know how you put a value on timeliness, but it’s big,” he said. “We can travel down fields much sooner and much easier.”

Can CTF take off in Canadian agriculture?

“Certainly, in drier areas. I’d be all over it if I were in a drier area,” said Larocque. “As soon as you get further east, like east of Drumheller all the way to the border – anywhere you really need to have resilience, whether it be floods or droughts, that’s where CTF shines.”

Scott Keller, who farms wheat, barley, canola, peas, fava beans, oats and winter wheat near Camrose, is another CTF practitioner and advocate. He has been using zero till since the 1990s and said with good quality GPS, CTF is the next step.

“One of the important things with CTF is to get down to that repeatability of trafficking,” said Keller, who began transitioning in 2014.

The process of switching equipment took several years but the effort was worth it, he said. Being able to work in wet conditions can be invaluable, said Keller.

“We’ve had situations where it’s time to spray, but normally the field would be too wet. But with tramlines set up, it’s amazing how the sprayer sits up on those tramlines and doesn’t cut ruts.”

Grain farming equipment will likely keep getting bigger, said Keller, so CTF could become more relevant as compaction becomes a bigger problem.

“And the other beauty is, when we do make ruts, they’re all in the same spot,” he said. “Even if you don’t think there is a benefit to doing CTF, start setting up sprayer tramlines and you’ll see it for yourself.”

The post Controlled traffic farming is proving its worth, say advocates appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“Our farm harvests 40 years of water in two weeks just from snowmelt,” said Takota Coen, who farms near Ferintosh with his parents.

“We live in one of the only places in the world where you can actually increase your precipitation just by putting up a snow fence or building shelterbelts. All those things can drastically increase the amount of water on your property, which is going to increase the effectiveness of your operation.”

On Coen Farm, annual rainfall runs anywhere between two inches and two feet, with roughly the same amount of snowfall. That amount of moisture wasn’t enough to sustain the land, or the family — three of their wells had gone dry by the time the Coens decided to start actively managing water on their land about five years ago.

“The limiting factor on our property was absolutely water,” Coen said during a Rural Routes to Climate Solutions webinar last month. “It doesn’t matter how good your topsoils are if you don’t have enough moisture. You’re not going to grow anything.”

So the family started exploring permaculture principles to make the most of what little moisture they did get.

“If we’ve got a damaged water cycle — if on your property, water is the weak link — the goal is to fix it,” he said. “The way to do that is either by increasing infiltration, precipitation, condensation, or transpiration.”

He soon found that the easiest way was to mimic nature by enhancing wetlands, increasing soil carbon, reducing evaporation and run-off, planting trees, and harvesting snow.

In fact, snowfall is the primary source of water on their operation nowadays. Every year, roughly 10 million gallons of water in the form of spring run-off travels through the property, and they’ve managed to capture it through a series of interconnected dams, swales, and wetlands.

“What we decided to do was basically channel our inner beaver and create a bunch of dams across the property,” he said.

“We hold basically a million and a half gallons of water behind the dam, and later on, we’re able to open the culvert and flood it out into a swale just by having them at the right elevation.”

Swales for snow run-off

Permaculture practices are employed on Coen Farm, which raises and direct markets grass-fed beef, Berkshire pork and free-range eggs. Swales — which Coen describes as just “a wetland on contour” — have been used to raise the water table, provide water for irrigation, and watering cattle in their rotational grazing system.

Swales are essentially shallow ditches that catch and hold water until it can absorb into the ground.

“Its function is to slow, spread, and sink water into the ground, just like a wetland,” said Coen. “The way that we do that is basically by excavating material to build a wetland of sorts so that any overland flow falls in this ditch and infiltrates into the ground.”

As a result, the family can capture very large amounts of water.

“Based on the estimates we’ve done by measuring surface area and volume calculations, we estimate that we harvest about 10 million gallons of water every spring run-off,” he said.

“To put that into perspective, our farm only uses 250,000 gallons of water. We’re infiltrating 40 years’ worth of water in two weeks.”

And the impacts on their operation have been significant so far.

“After infiltrating this water into the ground for five years, we’re starting to see our wells come back into production,” he said, adding that their neighbours’ wells have also become more productive.

“We’re seeing improved production in pastures, in tree growth, in our wells.”

Two years ago, their county saw some of the worst flooding in 30 years, followed the year after by the worst drought in 30 years. But the Coens didn’t notice any impacts on their land.

“Our wetlands were able to buffer that flow of water — slow it down, spread it out, and sink it into the ground. And in the drought, we could see how much more production we had below any areas where we were able to infiltrate water.”

But despite the benefits that Coen has seen on his own operation, swales aren’t right for everybody, so before you take the plunge, determine if they’re the right option for your farm.

“Where swales come in really handy is when you’re dealing with water run-off from snowmelt,” he said.

“For the most part, if you’re dealing with run-off from rainfall, the cheapest and most effective way to store it is through improving your soil health.”

The post Innovative farmers ‘harvest’ water to boost production appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“It’s important to look at this basic stuff because it helps tune the eye,” said Ross Adams, range management specialist with Alberta Environment and Parks.

“It’s easier to integrate livestock into the system if you understand the behaviour of the rangeland system and the grazing animals.

“Your management will be better if the underlying behaviour of the system is better understood.”

Effective range management focuses on the land, animals, and grazing system, said Adams in a July 16 Cows and Fish webinar.

“No two ranches — and no two pastures — are the same,” said Adams. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It requires monitoring and the application of a set of fairly simple principles that allow beneficial grazing systems to be developed to address the unique challenges in an operation.”

While the tactics may vary from ranch to ranch, the underlying principles are the same across the province: Balancing forage supply and demand; avoiding grazing during vulnerable periods; distributing livestock impacts across the landscape; and allowing for effective rest.

“It’s about managing grazing activities on rangeland in a way that recognizes the natural constraints of ecosystems and applies the principles of range management,” he said.

Balancing forage supply with demand is the first — and most important — step.

“If too much is being consumed, there’s really no way to manage around that,” said Adams.

‘Decreasers’ versus ‘invaders’

Forage supply will depend on things such as moisture, soil health, topography, plant communities in the pasture, litter, the level of disturbance — basically anything that impacts plant health and growth.

“All of those will come together to determine the composition of the community and influence how productive those plant communities are.”

Some plants — called ‘decreasers’ — are relatively intolerant of grazing disturbances.

“They’re called decreasers because, as grazing or other disturbance intensity increases, they tend to decrease in dominance,” he said.

“They are replaced in the stand by increasers or invaders, which are more tolerant of disturbance. They’re usually more grazing tolerant, but are also usually shorter in stature, less productive, and in many cases less palatable.”

As the level of grazing increases, the plant community starts to shift from highly productive decreaser species to one that is less productive and less attractive to livestock.

“Comparing very heavy grazing to light or moderate grazing, you’re going to have a much more productive plant community at those light to moderate levels of disturbance than at heavy or very heavy.”

But productivity isn’t the only consideration, he added.

“Plants need to maintain enough leaf tissue that they’re able to meet their growth needs, maintain their root systems, and set seed for the next growing season,” he said. “If too much of that leaf material is removed by grazing animals, the plant will begin to lose vigour and productivity, and at high levels of disturbance, the plant may die.

“It’s important to recognize that some fraction of productivity must be left to maintain the plants to keep them on the land.”

Managing grazing

Avoiding grazing during vulnerable periods — the next tenet of effective range management — is also key.

“For range plants in Alberta, they’re most vulnerable when they’re coming out of dormancy and initiating new growth in the early spring,” he said.

That’s when plants draw on stored carbohydrate reserves from the previous year to initiate growth. By the early part of summer, plants have enough leaf material “to meet their fuel demands,” and can tolerate grazing better.

“If grazing is done in this early period when they’re relying entirely on stored sugars, this can really weaken plants and limit growth and productivity later in the growing season,” he said. “It requires the plants to dig deeper into limited carbohydrate reserves to replace those leaves that are lost to grazing.

“But if grazing is deferred later into the season once they have more leaf tissue above ground, the impacts of grazing are much less severe.”

Distributing livestock evenly reduces the impacts of grazing.

“Livestock are attracted to certain features on the landscape, and if left to their own devices, they will avoid other areas,” said Adams. “Over time, we need to overgraze the preferred areas and leave forage resources unused in areas they’re less likely to visit.”

Active management of livestock distribution means understanding what makes your animals tick. Cattle tend to prefer spending their time close to water sources, on open grasslands, and on level terrain. So you may need to develop water sources in under-utilized areas or herd the animals to other parts of the pasture in areas of rough terrain, he said.

More predictable forages

The final consideration is providing enough rest after grazing — “and this means growing season rest.”

“Plants need time to replace lost leaf material, build up stores of carbohydrates before the next growing season, and to set seed and complete their lifecycles. This can only be done during the growing season,” he said.

“Plants that have been heavily grazed will require more time and more rest to recover than lightly grazed plants.”

Plant type will also play a role in that, he added.

“Grasses have their growing points at or near the soil surface, so unless vegetation is being very closely cropped, there will be some growing points after grazing to initiate new growth,” he said.

“But on trees and shrubs, the growing points are up in the air, and if they’re grazed off, that effectively turns off that part of the plant. So it takes trees and shrubs a much longer time to recover.”

These foundational range management practices already exist on ranches across Alberta, said Adams, but by seeing your pasture with fresh eyes and a beginner’s mind, you can manage the land more effectively — and make the most out of your productivity.

“The benefits of a stewardship approach to rangeland management is that it provides a more stable and predictable forage base from year to year,” he said.

“If you know how the system works and how you would expect it to behave, you can anticipate how systems might respond to different disturbances and how to address an issue when it does come up.

“It allows you to be proactive rather than reactive.”

The post Taking a fresh look at your land, cattle and grazing system appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

But having a valid environmental farm plan (EFP) has several benefits and renewing one has become easier, say officials who run the program.

A constant in Alberta since 2003, there are 4,500 current EFPs and at least 9,000 which haven’t been upgraded. However, the program now requires any plan older than 10 years to be renewed. Having a valid EFP is a requirement for several popular cost-share programs under the Canadian Agriculture Partnership (CAP).

Qualification for CAP programs, such as Efficient Grain Dryer and Improved Pesticide Management, is still the No. 1 reason for starting or renewing an EFP, said program manager Lisa Nadeau.

“Many people sign up because it’s a prerequisite for CAP and then once they have completed their EFP they reflect back on all of those other benefits,” said Nadeau, who works for the Agricultural Research and Extension Council of Alberta (ARECA), which administers the program.

“Once they have completed it they feel like they’ve really learned something.”

Plans are created by going through a workbook that identifies environmental risks and helps develop action plans to tackle them. Going through a process that documents stewardship efforts is increasingly important as more food companies embrace ‘sustainable sourcing.’ For example, McCain’s Foods only buys from farms with a completed EFP, a move that prompted the Potato Growers of Alberta to make a valid EFP a membership requirement.

“We have heard anecdotally from, for example, canola producers who say those who have a farm plan have a much easier time doing their ISCC certification for export into Europe,” said Paul Watson, director of the EFP program in Alberta. (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification helps canola producers access EU markets.)

As well, when combined with federal and provincial regulations, the program’s content is considered equal to the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment version 2.1 (FSA 2.1) at the silver level. That’s a mouthful, but it essentially means that the Alberta EFP is meeting the standards of this major global initiative for sustainable agriculture.

As well, a slightly modified version of the EFP is due to be released in September, which will make it easier for producers to achieve FSA certification, said Watson. There are plans to merge this modified ‘EFP+’ with the current one in a future version of the EFP WebBook.

“Not all of our (current) questions and rankings with the questions hit the nail on the head, so to speak, so we will clarify language and ratings in such a way that they meet the FSA requirements more directly without substantively changing the questions,” he said.

This will make completing an EFP more attractive and may also bring former participants back into the fold, said Watson.

“We anticipate additional programs will require an EFP to access funding. More importantly, as the marketplace increasingly demands documentation of sustainability practices, we anticipate producers using EFP and EFP+ for this purpose and as a preparatory tool.”

Completing a plan

The WebBook, the online version of the workbook, was designed to streamline and simplify the process.

“We still offer the binder as an option but we have maybe one per cent of producers in the end decide to do the binder over online,” said Nadeau.

Once registered (either for a new plan or a renewal), producers are assigned an EFP technician from their area who can help if they have questions. The plan comes with a confidentiality agreement.

“We assure (participants) that only the producer, their assigned technician and the EFP admin team have access to their account,” Nadeau said.

“The government never sees their workbook. The only thing producers send to the provincial government is — if they’re applying for funding — their certificate saying they’ve completed an EFP. The government never sees any of the information inside.”

It is likely the program will someday aggregate EFP data to measure trends and progress in stewardship practices, but that would not jeopardize confidentiality in any way, said Watson.

“It’s not about what an individual does. For the most part people just don’t care about that,” he said. “What they do care about is whether or not we’re making progress on some of the bigger environmental concerns such as greenhouse gases and water stewardship. It’s at a bulk level rather than an individual level.”

Upcoming changes

A new version of the EFP WebBook and binder slated to be released later this year will include a section on habitat management.

“It’s going to be a fairly straightforward piece for producers to run through our habitat management tools. It will include a very small number of questions,” said Watson.

“It will take about 10 to 15 minutes or so. We don’t look at specific species you have or anything like that. We just talk about the kind of land you have and what kind of features you have on your land and then offer some suggestions for management that would be beneficial for large swaths of species.”

Future versions will emphasize carbon capture and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, said Watson.

“The other big piece that we are looking at is going to be water stewardship. This has become a major concern for lots of international players. It’s an issue in some parts of Canada as well.”

For more info, see albertaefp.com and cap.alberta.ca.

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“The TD sponsorship is an indication that the private sector recognizes the value of this kind of work and is willing to put money behind it,” said Katherine Balpataky, director of corporate partnerships and business development at ALUS Canada.

“We know that restoring nature on the landscape has many benefits for both farmers and their communities, and this sends a signal to farmers that this kind of land management is valued by not only the bank but also by society at large.”

ALUS Canada — a national program that compensates farmers and ranchers for providing ‘ecosystem services’ on their land — launched the New Acre initiative in 2016 as a way to help companies fund conservation projects on Canadian farms while paying producers for preserving the land.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing that business leaders are paying attention to what their stakeholders are demanding of them, and what they’re hearing more and more is that the private sector has a role to play in improving the environment and the resilience of communities,” said Balpataky.

“We created the New Acre program as a mechanism to connect those business leaders that have an interest in environmental outcomes with the farmers and ranchers who are delivering environmental outcomes at the community level.”

And with its recent two-year commitment of $220,000, TD Bank Group has secured its spot as the launch sponsor for the New Acre program.

“It’s a little bit risky to be the first company to jump on board any new initiative, but they believe very strongly in the outcomes from the program and what the farmers and ranchers who are involved are doing,” said Balpataky.

“So they’re the first, and we’re really thrilled to be aligned with them.”

These funds will help create and maintain 300 acres of projects in eight ALUS Canada communities across the country, including in Lac Ste. Anne County and Red Deer County here in Alberta. One project in Saskatchewan (ALUS Saskatchewan Assiniboine Project) will also receive support, along with one in Manitoba (ALUS Little Saskatchewan River), three in Ontario (Elgin County, Middlesex County, and Peterborough County), and one in Quebec (in the Montérégie region.)

“TD looked at areas where they have a high level of engagement from within the agricultural community,” said Balpataky, adding TD reps visited ALUS projects and met with farmers to see the work first hand.

“They wanted a program that has tangible environmental impacts that will improve the lives of Canadians and that will really have an impact on society at large.”

And ALUS Canada seems to fit the bill. Since its launch in 2006 in Manitoba, the amount of land in its program has grown to nearly 24,000 acres in 25 communities across six provinces, including 13,400 acres in Alberta alone.

“For our national program, Alberta’s footprint is larger than anywhere else in the country, which really demonstrates the spirit and interest of the farming community to take an active role in improving the environment,” she said.

“The growth has happened really organically but really quickly and in a really wonderful way. It’s been tremendous.”

Balpataky credits that growth to the farmers themselves and the leadership role they’re taking in preserving the environment.

“Farmers are stewards of the land,” she said. “They’re in the best position to take an active role in some of these challenges that society is tackling. They’re smart, and they’re interested in responding. So there’s definitely strong uptake in the program.”

And TD Bank Group’s sponsorship has shown that paying farmers for these ecosystem services “makes practical sense,” she added.

“We believe there is great potential to draw on farmers and ranchers to mitigate many different kinds of environmental risks that affect businesses,” said Balpataky.

“Healthier, more resilient communities are good for everybody’s business.”

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One of those recipes presented at the sold-out Western Canada Conference on Soil Health & Grazing last month came from a Colorado potato grower who farms in high-elevation, near-desert conditions and no longer uses chemical inputs.

Brendon Rockey calls the set of practices employed by himself and his brother as “biotic” farming. And it’s proved to be a winning formula, he told the 550 people who packed a hotel conference hall.

“We were able to maintain the yield of the crop, but we managed to reduce the number of inputs to grow that crop,” said Rockey, a third-generation producer who grows table potatoes and 25 varieties of certified seed potatoes. “And we were increasing the quality of the crop at the same time. That approach has a huge economic impact for us as well.”

The family decided about 20 years ago that conventional farming was no longer paying off.

The amount — and cost — of inputs was a big part of the problem, prompting them to question their use of insecticides, herbicides, nematicides (used to kill nematode worms) and fungicides.

“We were trying to kill off our problems, but it wasn’t just that simple,” said Rockey. “We were forgetting about a lot of other factors — like beneficial insects and life that lives on the soil and in the plant. We were really forgetting about carbon capture.

“Those were things we weren’t having conversations about, and that’s where we were running into trouble.”

Fertilizer was another issue. Adding synthetic fertilizer would produce a bump in yield but then the yields would start diminishing. The problem, the Rockeys concluded, was that they were inadvertently shutting down nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil, hurting mycorrhizal fungi and adding more salt.

Because they irrigate, they were also concerned about water infiltration — and didn’t like what they were seeing.

“When we had poor soil structure with tight aggregates and little pore space, when we irrigated, the water did not go where it belongs,” said Rockey. “So we ended up putting more water on the soil.”

Reduced pore space also meant there was less air movement and not enough available oxygen in the soil. And at the same time, moving their irrigation rigs was difficult because they would sink deep into the soil.

All of these issues had a common denominator, the brothers concluded.

“We had to accept that we were the source of the problem,” said Rockey.

Although their south-central Colorado farm is far different than those of his audience, he said many of the lessons learned on his potato operation apply to any farm.

One is to use weeds as an indicator of what is right, and what is wrong, with the soil on their farm, he said. Weeds can be an indicator of fertility imbalances and Rockey encouraged his audience to find out more about the weeds on their land and see what they indicate about soil health.

Because water conservation is a top priority in their area (and an increasingly worrying one as levels of the aquifer they pump from continue to drop), the brothers are big on cover crops. (They can both reduce evaporation and remove excess moisture in wet years, he noted.)

The shift away from chemical inputs was a slow one, he said.

“We had to go back in and figure out how we can build the system up so we don’t need these chemicals,” he said. “That was an important part for us.”

That eventually resulted in their ‘biotic’ system, which is based on carbon cycling.

Cover crops are part of that as they help increase levels of bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi while adding nutrients and more carbon to the soil.

Initially, Rockey said they put too much emphasis on biomass on top of the soil, instead of focusing on the root systems, which is where the real action happens. Particular attention is given to the rich mix of cover crop species, which includes ones with long roots. The breakdown of the root systems adds to the soil structure and feeds the fungi in the soil.

“Bacteria and fungi break down the roots and you end up with a release of energy,” he said. “That plays an important role in soil structure.”

Having long roots opens the soil and brings oxygen down there.

The Rockeys also add compost (a fish and soybean product) and manure, but no longer use any synthetic fertilizers. They’ve also connected with a neighbour whose cows graze the cover crops and also have flowering plants to encourage higher levels of beneficial insects.

“The value of carbon is keeping it in motion,” he said. “I don’t like to see it in one place. We need that carbon coming in and coming out. Cycling is the most important part of all this, in my eyes.”

Collectively, these changes have increased carbon levels, improved soil structure (water infiltration is better and pivots are easier to move), and reduced water usage while maintaining yields, and improving crop quality.

And they’ve reduced input costs, which are about half of those of a potato-growing neighbour, Rockey said.

“We have eliminated a lot of expenses, really emphasized investing in our soil, and that’s what has allowed us to continue to do this for a long time,” he said.

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That includes farmers, even though degraded soil is significantly reducing their yields, according to University of Manitoba soil scientist David Lobb.

“Soil erosion accounts for a loss of about 10 per cent,” he said. “Farmers are only getting about 90 per cent of their yield because of soil erosion.”

That lost yield currently costs farmers about $3 billion a year, according to an economic analysis done by Lobb — a study he conducted to draw attention to the issue of soil health.

“Politicians should look at this and say, ‘Huh, we’re investing about a million annually in soil conservation programs while we’re losing $3 billion a year — there’s a bit of disparity there,” he said in an interview. “They should be realizing that. They’re not yet.”

The Soil Conservation Council of Canada has taken a different approach to raising awareness of soil health — a clever campaign called Soil Your Undies aimed at illustrating how healthy soil should function.

But the issue still isn’t top of mind for most people, said the council’s executive director.

“Soils are getting talked about as part of operations, but not in terms of conservation and health,” said Jim Tokarchuk. “The programs and initiatives that support soil health are pretty slim.”

It’s actually worse than that, Lobb told the Senate agriculture committee earlier this month.

In his presentation to the committee, he said that in the 1980s, the federal government had 35 people collecting and analyzing soil data but that number has fallen to half a dozen and “it won’t be much longer and it will be zero.”

“This is a role that only the federal government can play and it is one it has completely neglected,” Lobb told the committee.

Soil health became a big issue in the early 1980s, he said, after a study found that erosion was costing farmers $1 billion a year (in today’s dollars) in lost yields. Not only has that figure tripled since then, but it does not include the cost of additional inputs to make up for lost fertility.

“It would be reasonable to assume that these costs exceed the cost of that lost crop yield,” he told the senators.

And while some producers have begun exploring practices such as cover crops or adding annuals to perennial forages, there’s also been an upswing in tillage (albeit the minimum-till variety) in recent years, said Tokarchuk.

“Our message to people is to do as little tillage as you can,” he said. “One of the fundamentals of keeping soil healthy is disturbing it less.”

Even limited tillage breaks down soil structure and negatively affects microbial life, he said.

“We ask you to think about it, do as little as you can, and disturb the biology of the soil as little as you can,” said Tokarchuk.

As well, conservation tillage doesn’t regenerate the soil, it simply stops wind and water erosion from happening, Lobb said.

“That’s how come we have areas that may not be experiencing much soil loss now, but because of the historical soil loss, they still have a major problem,” he said. “If you’ve lost organic matter and productivity, once you’ve lost a bit of it, it’s very difficult to get it back.”

Lobb is an expert on ‘tillage translocation’ — a type of soil erosion caused by tillage that slowly sees soil move downhill from knolls and high spots in the field. He spoke about that issue at FarmTech this winter and how landscape restoration (physically moving soil from those low spots to knolls and hills) can improve overall fertility in a field.

But more needs to be done to properly assess the problem of lost fertility and promote methods to reverse it, he said.

“It’s astounding how little we know about some of the things that are truly important in managing the soil resource,” Lobb told the agriculture committee.

Soil health and soil conservation isn’t just an issue for farmers, but for all of society, added Tokarchuk.

“We need to make soil health as important to all Canadians as air and water,” he said. “We have household conversations in Canada about air and water quality. Everyone is thinking about that.

“Soil is the third leg of the stool that people need to think about. If we don’t get urban people involved in that, we’re going to fail. We’re not going to have the pressure on urban governments, industry, and (other groups) for people to consider soil health to be equal to air and water in the minds of Canadians.”

Climate change presents an opportunity and a threat, Tokarchuk added.

On the one hand, increasing soil organic matter would sequester more carbon. On the other, “with higher temperatures and lower precipitation, it is more difficult to maintain soil organic matter,” he said.

Farmers need to push to make soil health a priority, said Lobb, adding his study showing they are losing $3 billion a year in reduced yields demonstrates the problem wasn’t fixed by reduced tillage and summerfallow.

“Farmers need to be aware of this story because it impacts their bottom line,” he said. “Politicians need to realize it because they need to make some investments into the industry.”

– With staff files

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