ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOUSE, Alta. – Two years of drought have forced one west-central Alberta rancher to alter his grazing management program.
John Reid ranches in the Rocky Mountain House region and converted his operation to intensive rotational grazing in 1996.
All that changed in 2002 when a fearsome drought arrived and the grass stopped growing early in the year. He noticed the neighbours’ cereals survived so he decided to try something different in case the same conditions continued in 2003 and beyond.
“Our whole thing was managing perennial pastures. I believed I could do that in perpetuity,” he told a group hosted by Clearwater County and the Grey Wooded Forage Association.
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“We had a monoculture of cool season grasses and these grasses are not adapted to drought.”
With advice from Reduced Tillage Linkages, a network of farmers and agrologists working on conservation initiatives, he decided to seed cereals into old sod without breaking the land on 80 acres divided into three plots.
The sod was sliced into strips with a discer in 2003 and received a fall application of glyphosate to kill grass and help the sod rot over the winter and early spring.
Working with neighbour Harvey Brink, he brought in a Conserva Pak seeder to slice through the soil and lay down a mix of oats and fall rye along with fertilizer on May 26.
Results were mixed.
The Conserva Pak was a 40 foot wide unit with one-foot row spacing and knife openers. The first opener puts the fertilizer deep into the ground and the second plants seed in a shelf above the fertilizer. A packer wheel packs each furrow.
Brink’s unit worked well on one site but the others were seeded with a Haybuster drill that used coulter-disc openers, because the sod hadn’t died completely and the Conserva Pak tore up the ground too much. In some cases, the sod was ripped into pieces the size of telephone books and then fell back onto the surface, preventing seeds from breaking through.
The Haybuster drill dropped the seed and fertilizer into a common chamber so the fertility benefits were lessened.
The fertilizer mix was 70 pounds nitrogen, 25 lb. phosphorus, 15 lb. potassium and 10 lb. sulfur.
The farm did not receive moisture until late June and early July so early emergence was disappointing. Grasshoppers were also a problem and were controlled with insecticide and bait.
Reid decided the system needs careful management.
For instance, he probably should have treated his seed with a fungicide because as the sod breaks down there is considerable fungal and mould activity that can damage seed viability.
Nevertheless, he is committed to using annuals for swath grazing and baling.
“Probably annual cereals are going to be a part of our farm on a percentage of the land for quite a while,” he said.
He could rotate as much as a quarter of the farm into cereals for grazing to manage future drought risk.
When embarking on a new program like this, agrologist Roger Andreiuk advised taking soil samples.
He suggested the probe should go down at least one-third of a metre to measure nutrient requirements. He also suggested using a soil moisture probe that penetrates only as far as there is moisture.
If the land is too dry, seeding should be delayed.
