Claude Lampron is from Saint Vincent. He has an operation of 2,400 acres of barley, peas, canola and wheat, and a small feedlot.

“We keep 200 heifers from October to the end of April. This is where my compost material comes from,” he said.

As soon as the cow goes out and their corrals are dry, Lampron piles the manure in the corral and leaves it. After silage, when there is room in his field, he does some windrowing and spreads the manure after harvest in the fall.

“That’s as simple as it is, and it’s just manure and straw.”

Claude Lampron

WHY IT MATTERS: More producers are turning to compost instead of synthetic fertilizer to cut costs.

Colby Hansen farms between Westlock and Athabasca. His land has variable soil types, ranging from beach sand, peat moss, clay and number one black soils. He runs about 3,000 acres and about 350 cow-calf pairs, growing grain as well.

“We’re using municipal compost on our farm. I’ve used gypsum added into the compost and wood ash,” said Hansen.

Steve Cowan farms south of Camrose. He is also an agronomist with Crop Management Network in central Alberta. He is currently farming with a family friend and will eventually take over the farm.

His grain farm consists of 3,000 acres of canola, wheat, malt barley and pulses.

“The land has been annually cropped for many years. Livestock isn’t part of a lot of the land that we now own or we rent,” he said.

“We have pretty good soil, but I was certainly seeing a lot of challenges from the continuous annual cropping. And that’s what got me interested in looking at compost.”

Canola meal used as compost

Cowan farms right near a canola crush plant at Camrose. The plant needed to get rid of canola meal, and he was able to spread it on his land a few falls ago.

“With that, I got some compost as well that I mixed in, and that I also spread and saw firsthand the value of carbon-based fertilizer,” he said.

Cowan started using variable rates for seeding and fertilizer in 2025.

“I stumbled into some of the compost a bit accidentally, working with Colby and another friend of ours,” he said.

Since then, he has composted with gypsum and wastewater lime as well. He applied 2,000 pounds an acre of the canola meal, which allowed for a release over three to four years. The canola meal helped his crop get through the dry years of 2024 and 2025.

“I’m seeing evidence of something on the zone soil samples, but I certainly feel that I saw it on my yields and the consistency of yields,” he said.

Building soil health

Knowing the land had been continuously cropped for many years encouraged Cowan to think about composting. He could see crusting and sodium issues on his soil. His goal is to build resilience into the land and into the crop, so the crop can survive a year of drought or heat stress.

“By building that soil health, I think I should build some resilience into the soil to overcome those stress periods so I can continue to make money and keep farming,” he said.

Lampron said he had always composted, but co-operating with the Living Lab helped him see how he could maximize it.

“I just wanted to have some data and see if I’m doing the right thing, because there’s a way to do it better. It’s kind of simple for us, just two piles and spread it,” he said.

Lampron said compost was his main soil health amendment, improving soil structure and bringing more biology into the soil.

“That’s all I need. But it’s not a lot. I’m doing one quarter per year,” he said.

Hansen’s decision to compost came from a piece of rented land where a farmer had fed his cows for 50 years.

“You could see the texture of the soil. It looked like chocolate cake. And every year, I wouldn’t put any nitrogen, and the crop would be 11 tonnes of silage. And where he stopped feeding, it would be seven tonnes or less,” he said.

He was driven to find out more about compost because he wanted to cut costs on synthetic fertilizer.

Using municipal waste

Hansen has spread compost on all his acres, as he is a part owner of a compost facility.

“We’re taking a resource that was going to a landfill and now we’re making it into compost and diverting it and it’s going to my farm. I won’t be using commercial fertilizer this year. I’ve slowly been reducing my rates the last few years and I take a soil test to confirm that there might be one field that I might not get compost on in the springtime, so that might get a little bit of fertilizer,” he said.

Hansen’s compost is tested by the facility, which must test every 1,000 tonnes. The compost does contain some foreign material, including microplastics. Hansen said things needs to change to avoid microplastics in municipal compost.

“My understanding is that they are developing microbes to eat those microplastics and nature takes care of itself. It’s in the back of my mind, but it’s never a perfect world,” he said.

Hansen said the compost facility uses a large sifter and removes all the large plastics out before screening it.

“I think some people don’t know what’s compostable and what’s not. That won’t be fixed anytime soon. It’ll take years to change peoples’ mindsets,” he said.

The importance of livestock

Hansen said his success in building soil is not just through compost, but by growing polycrops, having livestock and recycling nutrients.

“My recent realization is that the biggest bang for my buck is doing a swath grazing or a corn grazing with the polycrops. I’ve done this a couple of times. I’ve grown this massive polycrop and put all my cattle on there. I keep my calves on the cattle all winter, so I’ve doubled the number of animals per acre. They are doing the fertilizing for me, providing the nitrogen inside of it, and all the corn stalks and the residue is providing the carbon side of it,” said Hansen.

“I’m basically turning my whole field into a compost pile in one year.

“For me, the quickest way is for grain farmers to realize cattle farmers are an asset and to take your first quarter of land out of production for one or two years and let the cattle farmer run their cattle on it with a massive polycrop on it, and fertilize it as recommended and you’ll see the benefits next year.”

Cowan said his goal is to bring nutrients in from off the farm and try to emulate what manure does.

“We can stop putting stuff into landfills, those nutrients can be recycled and put into the ground and that will create more products to go back to growing food. We can kind of create that circular green economy, but it’s probably a regulatory thing,” he said.

The post Alberta farmers cut fertilizer costs by turning to compost appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

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.

Soil acidity below a pH of 5.5 will reduce yield for common crops on the Prairies. Yield loss can be significant in soils below pH 5.0. Lime can be expensive, but may pencil out as the most important fertilizer treatment for soils with strong acidity.

Taylor Wallace has acidic soils – including one field with pH below 5.0. That has to affect yield, he thought. So in the spring of 2023, the farmer from Unity, Sask. gave that field 500 pounds per acre of lime.

A shot of lime reduces acidity. Soil pH below 6.0 to 6.5 starts to hamper phosphorus availability, and this problem gets steadily worse as pH drops. By around pH 5.0, acidity has also released enough aluminum and manganese ions to poison root growth and function.

Wallace paid $530 per tonne for pelletized lime. His 500-pound (227 kg) rate cost him around $120/acre. He based the rate on the experience of a neighbouring farmer, who ran a trial comparing 300, 400 and 500 lbs./ac. The higher rate provided the best results.

“I haven’t seen any results yet,” Wallace says. “Although we did have two fairly dry years in 2023 and 2024.”

Products to increase soil pH include calcitic lime, which is calcium carbonate, dolomitic lime, which also has magnesium, spent lime from water treatment plants and sugar beet processors, and wood ash.

Lime needs moisture to become active, and uniform distribution is key. Lime also requires high rates. One tonne per acre would be considered a low rate to treat soil with pH below 5.0. Wallace applied one quarter of that rate.

Norm Dueck is a consultant for A&L Labs in the Peace River region of Alberta – a region with millions of acres of strong acid soils. He has a lot of conversations about lime. Liming is common practice in acidic soils around the world, and the research is sound, he says. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We know lime will do what it is scientifically proven to do.”

An early 1990s study at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Beaverlodge research centre in northern Alberta looked at lime effects on canola yield and brown girdling root rot. The study site had a soil pH of 5.13 in the top four inches. Researchers applied 7.5 tonnes per hectare (three tonnes per acre) of agricultural grade calcitic lime – primarily calcium carbonate – in May 1991, and tilled it in to a depth of four inches. This increased pH to 6.6 in year one. Canola grain yield increased 37 per cent in tilled soil and 17 per cent in no-till soil. Brown girdling root rot severity went down.

A 1970s Peace Region study, led by Alberta researcher Doug Penney, compared lime benefits for canola, barley, alfalfa and red clover. Researchers limed to a target pH of 6.7. The study concluded that at pH below 5.0, all crops will likely have severe yield loss without liming. For soils with an original pH of 5.0 to 5.5, the lime application increased alfalfa yield 80 to 100 per cent, barley 10 to 15 per cent, and canola and red clover five to 10 per cent.

Despite these results, liming has not taken off in the region. “Sometimes I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall,” Dueck says.

Cost is a big hurdle. Lime cost can vary widely depending on product, location and rate. Transportation is a big component. Soil with pH below 5.0 will need a minimum of two to four tonnes per acre. On top of that, the benefit has a limited lifespan. Lime can be over $100/acre per year, when averaged over time.

However, if acidity affects yield, lime can be the field’s most essential fertilizer.

“In the end, there are no shortcuts or substitutes for raising soil pH,” says John Breker, soil scientist with Agvise Laboratories in North Dakota. “Elsewhere in the world, people have battled soil acidification for centuries, and the answer always comes back to liming.”

Breker has Idaho research showing how quickly yields fall once pH hits a certain threshold. In that study, wheat and barley yields in soil with pH 5.0 were only 60 to 80 per cent of yields in soils with pH of 5.3. The effect started sooner and cut deeper for pea and lentil – yield drop started at pH 5.8 and was down to 50 per cent at pH 5.0.

Where to start?

“The most overlooked factor is the variability of pH within fields,” Dueck says. He has seen many fields that range from below pH 5.0 to 6.5. “You might need two tonnes per acre, or more, on the low pH areas and nothing on the 6.5.”

For a test, farms could start with the most acidic part of their most acidic field. That is what Wallace did. Soil pH probes can quickly identify areas with the lowest pH. With the target area identified, send one composite soil sample to a lab to set the rate.

Lime rate depends on soil buffer pH, a factor of the soil’s cation exchange capacity. Soils with low pH and low buffer pH require a lot more lime. Labs will test soil for pH and buffer pH, and also test lime sources for “calcium carbonate equivalent”. With these tests, labs can provide lime rate guidelines based on lime quality and the farm’s target pH.

Penney, who conducted the lime study in the Peace Region in 1970, is a lime expert. He says lime has “no mobility” in the soil, so it needs uniform distribution. Best results come from powder form applied generally throughout the soil. Penney recommends surface application over dry soil, then heavy harrow to mix dry soil with dry lime, then cultivation to mix it into the top three or four inches.

PHOTO: WARREN WARD

Alternative treatments

Lime is the only real way to increase soil pH. One alternative is to simply live with lower productivity on strong acid soils.

Another alternative is higher rates of phosphorus. This will overcome some of the phosphorus no longer plant-available because of bonds with aluminum and iron.

Some wheat cultivars are more tolerant to low pH. Farmers could ask seed companies if they have data for Canada. Farmers could also look at entirely new crops. Blueberries tolerate strong acid soils. Nova Scotia has strong acidic soils and wild blueberry is the number one export crop in the province. Potatoes, wild rice and commercial grass sod also tolerate acid soils.

Wallace says crop and cultivar decisions may improve results in low-pH soil, and adjusted phosphorus rates may help. But he still sees the need for lime.

“As land becomes more expensive, it becomes more important to get the most out of the land you have,” Wallace says. “Proper soil testing and a variable rate application probably provide the best path to value from lime.”

The post Shot of lime worth the price for acidic soil appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Spot-treating soil with the mineral reduced the overall occurrence and severity of the disease by 35 to 91 per cent, growth experiments showed.

The finding, published in the Canadian Journal of Plant Pathology, could give farmers an option for managing clubroot, alongside current use of resistant varieties.

Lime has traditionally been used to manage clubroot in related plants, such as cabbages for market gardens, but not on a large scale in canola crops.

“Genetics are our first line of defence, but plant resistance can erode or break down, so we need to find every possible option to help control the clubroot pathogen in what is an important cash crop for Canada,” says researcher Nicole Fox.

As a non-genetic management practice, liming treatments could help combat all strains of clubroot in canola, adds Fox, who conducted the study to earn a Master of Science in plant biosystems from the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

Spot treatments could help control contaminated areas of a field or stem the spread of clubroot into a new field.

The lime works by neutralizing the highly acidic soil preferred by clubroot, reducing the likelihood of spore germination and plant infection.

One of the first studies to test hydrated lime in the field in Canada, the research also showed the product was more effective at managing clubroot in canola than granulated limestone, another form of lime more commonly used to treat agricultural soil.

Applying moderate to high amounts of the powdered lime resulted in canola plants that were still productive even if infected by clubroot. The plants also released fewer spores of the clubroot pathogen.

Lowering acidity levels also increases the soil’s general health, an important benefit to liming, considering Alberta has about one million acres of strongly acidic and 4.5 million acres of moderately acidic cropland soils, Fox notes.

But hydrated lime’s effectiveness does hinge on certain factors, like the interval between application and seeding, so it needs fine-tuning before it can become a practical tool, says U of A plant pathologist and study co-author Stephen Strelkov, who supervised the research.

“While lime showed good potential for clubroot management, the results varied. Sometimes the treatments provided very good control; other times they didn’t. So, we need further research to work out some details.”

Canola bred to be genetically resistant is still the most effective tool against clubroot, Strelkov adds, but options like hydrated lime could help improve the “durability of resistance and overall sustainability” of disease management.

“There may be situations, if the efficacy of lime is consistent and the costs of application reasonable, that it could be used on a larger scale.”

The research was funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Canola Council of Canada, Alberta Canola, SaskCanola and the Manitoba Canola Growers via the Canadian Agricultural Partnership program. In-kind support was also received from the U of A and Alberta Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Economic Development.

Bev Betkowski is a communications associate for the University of Alberta.

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