It’s rather amazing that the seventh biggest crop in Canada and the fifth largest in Saskatchewan by acres is no crop at all. In times of high-priced farmland and some of the best returns ever enjoyed in the grain sector, millions of acres are deliberately left fallow every year.
The latest estimates for 2013 show nearly 3.5 million acres of summerfallow nationally with 2.4 million of those in Saskatchewan and 830,000 in Alberta.
In 2011, Saskatchewan’s summerfallow acreage was 7.9 million, ballooned by land that was too wet to seed. This year, most of the summerfallow acres are land that has been deliberately left idle. Same story in Alberta.
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You can drive a long time in most parts of Saskatchewan and Alberta without seeing much summerfallow, but it’s easy to find in the more drought prone regions. While the practice has seen a dramatic reduction in the past 20 years, it continues to be a mainstay on many farms.
Farming has changed dramatically. Direct seeding has become the norm. We grow a far more diverse mix of crops. Canola provides a cropping option with excellent weed control. Some would argue that weather patterns have become wetter. And producers able to grow a decent crop are making good money.
Taken together, these factors should have all but wiped out summerfallow. Weed control has certainly changed. Chem fallow has overwhelmingly replaced tillage, but summerfallow is alive and well.
As someone who grew up at a time and in a place where the normal rotation was half crop and half summerfallow, it now pains me to see valuable real estate sit idle. What are the operators thinking? What’s the justification?
There is no joy in making multiple herbicide applications to a field in an effort to keep it weed free throughout the growing season. Weed control is much more difficult without crop competition. You’re spraying out dollars on ground that will produce no economic return that year.
Beyond the cash costs, what about all the fixed costs? Decreasing your cropped acreage increases the fixed cost per seeded acre on everything from machinery to land debt to taxes.
Although summerfallow is probably more common among older producers, many younger and otherwise progressive producers are also hesitant to seed all of their acres. Summerfallow this year is drought insurance for next year’s crop.
There are years when a crop seeded on summerfallow is dramatically superior. In very dry conditions, the extra stored moisture can sometimes generate a decent crop while adjacent stubble-seeded crops might be a writeoff. In wetter years it may be hard to tell one from another. Summerfallow confers little, if any, benefit and may be more prone to excess water problems.
However, there are astute, progressive and profitable farmers who swear that chem fallow gives them consistently higher returns along with more income stability. They believe that even in wet years and even with lots of nitrogen added to re-cropped land, it doesn’t produce as well as a crop on summerfallow.
So, even if future weather patterns provide ample moisture and grain prices remain profitable, it’s doubtful summerfallow will completely fade away. Most producers have concluded that idle land is a waste of resources, but a solid core remain convinced that their situation is different.
