Andrew Dennis used to farm as aggressively as he possibly could but slumping commodity prices have prompted a mellower approach to farming, one that revolves around putting a sizable chunk of his operation into summerfallow every year.
“I used to go absolutely full bore … but man, the losses were just getting intolerable,” said the grain and oilseed producer from Brookdale, Man.
Dennis farms in an area blessed with prime crop-growing land, but he found he was consistently losing $40 to $50 an acre with his high-input approach to farming.
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“With commodity prices as low as they are, a great big giant crop just will not cover those kind of expenses.”
Six years ago Dennis decided to put more land into summerfallow, a strategy he said pays big dividends the following year through increased yields, decreased input costs and more time on his hands.
This year he will summerfallow one-third of his 2,400 acres but in the past he has set aside as much as half of his land, estimating that it costs him about $20 per acre in chemical, sprayer and tillage costs.
“I’m pretty sure you recapture $30 to $40 the next year,” he said.
Dennis is part of a growing number of producers who are turning to this minimalist approach to farming.
According to Statistics Canada’s March seeding intentions report, producers plan to reverse a 25-year trend by putting substantially more land into summerfallow this year.
Growers intend to idle 11.6 million acres of land in 2006, which is slightly more than what they plan to seed to canola, the second largest crop grown in Canada.
It represents a 15 percent increase over last year’s summerfallow acreage but the number would have been much higher had Manitoba not lost so much cropland due to excessively soggy soil in 2005.
In Saskatchewan and Alberta summerfallow acreage is projected to rise 29 percent and 25 percent respectively.
Grant McLean, crop management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, isn’t surprised growers are opting to idle land, considering that there are so few crops where they can pencil in a profit and so little disposable income in the countryside.
“I think the major factor is cash flow,” he said.
Investing $25 to $30 an acre in chemical or tillage control may make economic sense in a year when the province’s crop planning guides show farmers can expect bigger per acre losses growing crops such as wheat, barley and canola, but McLean said by not planting a crop they also forgo the possibility of capitalizing on a price rally if a crop disaster occurs somewhere in the world.
They also risk soil erosion and water management problems by summerfallowing their land, he added.
He wonders if the summerfallow number might shrink as farmers get closer to seeding time, especially considering that prices for crops such as peas and canola are on the rise.
Last year Saskatchewan growers put 400,000 fewer acres into summerfallow than they said they would in the March intentions report.
“If there was any optimism at all to grow a crop, they would probably plant it,” McLean said.
Dennis agreed: “Farmers’ resolve to summerfallow is pretty weak for the most part.”
However, he is not wavering from his plans. He will use a combination of chemfallow and tillage on a third of his land this year, spraying weeds with glyphosate once or twice during the growing season and then coming in with a disc at the end of the year.
He finds it works well to plant a winter wheat crop on those fields, which in a good year will yield 60 to 65 bushels per acre while saving him $32 per acre in fertilizer costs.
And there is another substantial perk.
“It takes a lot of the work out of the spring – makes it a lot more relaxing,” Dennis said.
