Instead of relying on synthesized chemicals and fertilizers, a Saskatchewan farmer says he and his colleagues should start using tools that Mother Nature provides for free.
That’s what farmers are doing in impoverished countries where they can’t afford to buy expensive inputs, said Larry Marshall of Shellbrook, Sask., who recently returned from an agricultural exchange program to Cuba organized by the Saskatchewan Federation of Production Co-operatives.
He learned how the Cuban government supplies its farmers with cheap biological controls to combat insects, weeds and fungi. A few years earlier he took a similar trip to Costa Rica where farmers use beneficial microbes to enhance soil fertility and to fight plant diseases.
Read Also
Canola oil transloading facility opens
DP World just opened its new canola oil transload facility at the Port of Vancouver. It can ship one million tonnes of the commodity per year.
“I think it’s crazy that we haven’t looked at these ideas here.”
He said the Pest Management Regulatory Agency needs to relax its rules to allow these natural crop inputs.
Marshall has been experimenting with his own brand of effective micro-organisms on his pesticide-free farm.
Effective micro-organisms is the name given to the microbes by Teruo Higa, a horticulture professor at the University of Ryukyu in Japan.
In a manner similar to the Costa Rican farmers he visited, Marshall collects rotting organic material from brush stands near the farm and adds it to a concoction of wheat bran, pea flour, molasses and water. Some of it is set aside to compost aerobically, while the remainder ferments in air-sealed tanks.
“Basically it’s like making wine,” Marshall said.
It takes about a week for each fermentation process to yield a microbe-rich liquid that is added to a large compost pile of cattle manure and straw.
He either sprays the “inoculated compost” on seed to act as a fungicide or applies it to a lush green manure crop, which is then tilled into the ground.
Feeding off the crop material, microbes reproduce to generate “zillions” of beneficial organisms that break down organic material into plant available nutrients and displace a variety of pathogens lurking in the soil.
“They’re more powerful than the disease,” Marshall said.
Agriculture Canada rhizosphere ecologist Jill Clapperton said the “biological soup” that Marshall is creating will indeed increase soil fertility and will out-compete “wimpy” disease organisms for a place on plant roots. But there are alternatives to the inoculated compost approach.
Producers can achieve similar results by incorporating long-term sustainable practices into their farming operations, such as reducing tillage and increasing crop diversity.
“You can create this cocktail in the soil as well,” she said.
Clapperton said soil is a perfect habitat for plants, but it needs a diversity of organic matter to do its job properly. Farmers can assist by growing cover crops containing three or four species of plants and by regularly applying uninoculated compost to their soil.
“We need to feed it complex residues.”
She is pleased farmers like Marshall visit impoverished countries and come back with a passion for creating better soil.
“I think it’s wonderful,” said Clapperton.
Marshall’s enthusiasm for effective microorganisms doesn’t stop with their soil-related benefits. He thinks the most exciting potential lies in the hog industry, because the same microbes that break down organic matter in the soil can be used to help animals digest their food.
“By fermenting the feed with these micro-organisms, it increases the digestion so greatly that they’re actually doubling the weight gain in hogs in Denmark,” he said.
It decreases manure production and the need for certain antibiotics, two environmental concerns associated with large hog barn projects.
Marshall believes the Saskatchewan government, which has expressed interest in expanding its livestock industry, should jump at the chance to pave the way for a product offering those kinds of benefits.
In addition to relaxing rules on effective micro-organisms, Marshall would like government regulators to approve more biological controls, which are used extensively by farmers in Cuba, where the registration process is far less cumbersome.
“They don’t have to do piles of testing. It’s put into practice right away.”
He said Cuban authorities recognize the benefit that biological controls provide to the country’s farmers and don’t believe they pose a big threat to human health because they are based on naturally occurring bacteria.
When he was visiting a government facility in Cuba, he saw a producer pay a little more than $2 to pick up a sprayer load of biological product for controlling aphids and sclerotinia.
“There has to be a better way of getting our pest management review agency to approve some of this stuff.”
