U of S agriculture students create a prairie-centric resource on best practices that can help make farming more sustainable
While the concept of sustainable agriculture is becoming more familiar, details of the what, why and how can be hard to ferret out, even for the motivated producer.
Reese Kinaschuk and Matt Robertson hope to make it easier with Prairie Ag Sustainability, an online resource that provides an easy-read primer on what sustainability is and what it involves.
The two students conceived the project as part of their degree program at the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan.
“We wanted to get the information started for farmers, to get their feet wet and learn what some of these things are that they might not have heard of,” Robertson said.
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The two said that while the ideas behind sustainable agriculture are not new, they saw their project as a way to pull the ideas together and to collect information specific to Western Canada.
“You go on the internet and you search something about intercropping or cover cropping, you might get an article from Iowa, the corn belt, a completely different system,” he said. “It might be difficult to find some content relevant to what their farming practices are.”
Prairie Ag Sustainability covers soil health, cropping systems, waste management and water, in some cases including links to resources in all three prairie provinces.
“Then there’s making some of those programs out there (more accessible), bringing them all into one place to show people what’s available, even for funding, certain programs that are on-farm like for water conservation and that sort of thing,” Robertson said.
A notable omission is livestock. Robertson said neither he, an environment and soil specialist, nor Kinaschuk, a crops specialist, have livestock expertise. They’ve set it aside for possible further development with a collaborator.
“I feel the livestock industry gets a lot of flack, like that people don’t really understand,” Robertson said. “There is a place for livestock in sustainability, it’s just that I don’t know a whole lot about livestock to even get into the meat of things and explain that outright.”
The site also defines sustainable agriculture by quoting the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which states: “To be sustainable, agriculture must meet the needs of present and future generations, while ensuring profitability, environmental health, and social and economic equity.”
Resilience also figures prominently, that is, adjusting management practices to meet the challenges of climate change and a growing world population.
“This sustainability spin or take we took on it, you know, best management practices take, it’s kind of our way of giving back to and bringing forward all these ideas we were taught in school,” Kinaschuk said.
He and Robertson acknowledge the need for farmer input with the Prairie Ag Sustainability project. Luckily, this was available in their families. Robertson, from St. Walburg, Sask., grew up in town and he worked in ag retail but his grandparents and uncles and aunts farm. Kinaschuk, from Yorkton, Sask., could also draw on his grandfather and brother for advice.
“My brother, he was an agronomist at Nutrien,” Kinaschuk said. “He’s mostly a full-time farmer now out at our family farm there and he was kind of my test dummy on most of this. Then I sent it to my grandpa, who is kind of an old school farmer….”
The main advice was to keep it simple, to not ask too much of busy producers, and to respect their expertise. This means practical knowledge, such as where and how to dispose of empty herbicide containers, or the bottom-line benefits of crop rotation.
“What I’ve been telling people a bit is you don’t have to change the way you farm to be sustainable,” Kinaschuk said. “The way we farm is how Saskatchewan people do it and we know how to do it. It’s just the little things we can tweak to be a bit more environmentally friendly here and there.”
While the Prairie Ag Sustainability project is complete for now, Robertson and Kinaschuk hope other students can take it on to expand it further, or a sponsor could provide resources to make it a lasting resource.
The site is located at prairieagsustainability.com. Feedback and questions can be sent to prairieagsustainability@gmail.com.
