Alberta’s soils have made headlines a lot in the past couple of years. “They’re drying out!” they say. Reading the news, it sounds like our province’s farms are in rough shape.
Talking to farmers, this isn’t the case across the board. I spoke to Rob Luymes, a dairy farmer in Central Alberta, about the farming conditions in the Lacombe area. And it turns out that conditions there are alright.
“In Lacombe, we typically get around 12-15 inches of rain every year. Last year and the year before, we got around nine to ten inches,” he tells me.
Looking at how much rain falls in a year doesn’t tell the whole story, either. Farmers know that what’s more important than having rain is having timely rain. This can happen in good years, and this can happen in drought years. If it rains a good amount in the spring, right after planting, and then it’s dry, that’s better for crops than if it rains all summer and fall.
Two years ago, less rain fell than on average, but Luymes’s crops were still on the edge of bumper because the rains came at the right time. Last year, they got the same amount of rain but at different times, so his crops burnt.
Land Means Resilience
Farming has always always been at the mercy of the weather.
The best farmers find ways to be resilient even in drought years, Luymes tells me. Over the years, he’s found two solutions that work well for his context.
The first is to have a big land base.
“If we have a very poor year, we have a cash cropping base that we can defer into feed,” he says. “It’s kind of an insurance area.”
His land grows more feed than his animals can possibly use in a year. This way, if there is a year where his land doesn’t grow enough, he feeds the hay to his own animals rather than selling it.
The second is that he has six to eight months of feed stored away for his animals. That way, if there’s an especially bad year, he doesn’t have to buy feed for his animals.
Of course, not every farmer can do this. The amount of land in an area is finite, and a lot of it is owned by investors and mega-farms that collectively own hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. This prices small family farms out of buying new land and building up their land base.
Technology, Tilling, and Irrigation
Some farmers are finding other creative measures to make sure that they’re able to produce enough food, even when drought years hit.
“A lot of guys practice minimal till, using organic matter and even cover crops,” Luymes tells me. Each one of these works together to keep moisture in the soil.
Soil is filled with roots and compost. These hold moisture. Tilling the soil rips all that organic matter up and leaves the soil less able to hold moisture. Tilling is necessary to loosen the soil up for planting, but overtilling hurts soil quality in the long run. By only tilling when absolutely necessary, farmers protect their soils against droughts.
Some farmers are also experimenting with going in and planting cover crops that help keep the moisture in the soil. They’re great for soil moisture and nutrient content. They’re especially useful in hilly areas, but even on flat sections of soil, cover crops help keep moisture and nutrients where they’re meant to be.
Precision planting is still another method. Farmers can arm themselves with GPS that show them exactly where the good soil is and which areas of soil need a bit more help. They can use this data for fertilizing the soil as well. That way, they can plant more in the good sections and fertilize poor sections to help them grow.
In Southern Alberta, where the chinook winds take moisture out of the soil and farmers are forced to irrigate, farmers are finding even more creative solutions. Instead of irrigating with the usual giant irrigation sprinklers we’re so used to seeing in the Southern Alberta landscape, they’re putting irrigation systems underground. This way, all the moisture goes exactly where it needs to and none of it evaporates or is blown away by the wind.
Some are calling it “the future of irrigation north of the border.”
Drier But Still Nutritious
The curious thing about a drought year is that the lack of moisture doesn’t always mean that plants produce less nutrients. It just means that the plants don’t grow as much. Farmers end up with very nutrient-dense feed.
“Where we have drier weather, our yields are definitely down, but typically our forage quality is phenomenal,” Luymes says. “It’s basically like dehydrated food – it’s more dense, it’s more nutritious. This leads to better milk production. It’s just the quantity is lower.”
More nutritious feed is better for the animals. And all these nutrients end up in our diets as well – when we eat animals that have been fed high-quality food, our bodies take in all those nutrients that they got from eating good feed.
The only problem is that drought means that less feed is produced overall. And Alberta’s population just keeps growing.
Albertan farmers are creative, though. Even when drought hits and even as Alberta’s population grows, they’re finding ways to prepare themselves and make sure that we still have enough food on the table.
