Eric Oliver finally has a little soil moisture to work with, which means he will be trimming the summerfallow reserves built up over two years of drought-plagued farming.
“You ended up losing less money by putting in more fallow than you did actually putting a crop in,” said the Aneroid, Sask., farmer.
Oliver estimates one-quarter to one-third of his arable land was idle last year. This year only about 10 percent will be fallow because of the improved moisture conditions and strong commodity prices.
He has heard friends and neighbours in southwestern Saskatchewan hatching similar plans.
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Prairie summerfallow is forecast to drop to its lowest level since 1920, the year in which the Ottawa Senators beat the Seattle Metropolitans to win the Stanley Cup.
Statistics Canada’s March survey of 16,800 growers revealed they intend to leave eight million acres idle, 25 percent less than last year.
Environmentalists say that is a positive spinoff of a biofuel furor that has bolstered grain prices, but the same craze may come back to bite them.
Blair McClinton, executive manager of the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association, is pleased growers are planning to take 2.7 million acres out of summerfallow, a practice he considers one of the worst environmental sins in farming.
But he cautioned that the crop isn’t in the ground yet and Mother Nature will still have a say in how seeding plays out.
“There is still major areas of (Saskatchewan) that may end up being unplanned summerfallow due to wet conditions.”
McClinton said strong grain prices are exacerbating what was already a steep downward trend in the practice of idling farmland. In the 1980s, prairie farmers had 20 million acres in summerfallow. Last year it was half that amount.
“It is economically harder and harder to justify summerfallow,” he said.
Farmers paying cash rent for their land find it difficult to rationalize having it sit idle and almost impossible to justify with today’s decade-high grain prices.
The irony is that the same biofuel trend that has led to high prices and decreased summerfallow is putting pressure on other environmentally sensitive land.
McClinton said there is talk in the United States about converting Conservation Reserve Program land into biofuel crop production.
He doesn’t foresee that happening in Canada because there is only a small amount of land in green cover programs and stiff penalties for taking it out.
But he is concerned about what might happen to the three million acres of tame forage land in the province if high grain prices persist.
McClinton expects there will be pressure to convert that land back into grain production, which would be a backward step in his mind. Much of it is marginal land that is susceptible to erosion and degradation.
It bothers him that little attention is being paid to this other environmental threat.
“From a policy perspective, we may be entering a new paradigm that we haven’t really thought about,” said McClinton.
He also expects there to be growing pressure to put crown lands into production, some of which is natural prairie.
McClinton said it’s time prairie governments started formulating plans on how to deal with this new conundrum.
Oliver doesn’t think farmers will convert forage acres into grain production because it was marginal land to begin with.
And he doesn’t share McClinton’s distaste for summerfallow acreage. Oliver said it is a necessary practice in the brown soil zone, where it can dramatically boost yields on moisture-starved land.
