High school students are experiencing university level research at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Alana Kornelsen, a Grade 12 student at Edmonton’s Scona High School, worked with Alison Nelson, a graduate student in the university’s Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science to investigate ways to suppress weeds without chemicals.
As part of a summer 2006 work experience with the wheat breeding and agronomy program at the University of Alberta, Kornelsen andNelson compared monocrops and intercrops for yield and weed biomass in organic and conventional cropping systems.
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The study compares soil biology in annual intercrops within organic and conventional systems in Alberta. It explores whether greater crop diversity leads to greater biological diversity in the soil.
And because soil microbes perform beneficial functions in cropping systems, such as nutrient cycling, a diverse community of soil micro-organisms will help maintain the soil’s ability to supply nutrients to crops.
The same intercrops used in measuring microbial activity also have weed suppression benefits, which the project also measured.
Intercropping could provide an important weed control alternative for all farmers, not just organic operators.
In the study, wheat, barley, canola, and peas were planted as monocrops, as well as in all combinations that included wheat.
Planting several crops together combines their respective competitive traits, such as leaf cover and height, so researchers anticipated lower weed biomass in the intercropped systems.
The weed suppression benefits they observed when barley was combined with other crops in both organic and conventional systems prompted researchers to measure the benefits.
They found that all combinations that included barley had a much lower percentage of weeds than the other intercrops tested.
In the conventional system, weeds represented one percent of the total biomass in barley plots, while weeds comprised five to 22 percent of the biomass of the other monocrops and the intercrops without barley.
In the organic system, the influence of barley was even greater. The barley monocrop and barley-containing intercrops had up to 23 percent of the total biomass as weeds. This compared to 42 to 85 percent of the total biomass as weeds for all the non-barley monocrops and intercrops.
Peas did not improve the weed suppression of any combination, but that may have been due to low emergence, 30 percent, in both systems.
While harvesting problems with intercrops have yet to be suitably addressed, intercropping with wheat, especially when the intercrops include barley, was show to reduce weeds.
The study is expected to be repeated this summer.
The project is part of the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology summer research program, which seeks to increase gender diversity by encouraging women to choose careers in science, engineering and technology, and men to consider areas of science that are less traditionally male.
The summer research program partners young women with
researchers in science and engineering. Young men are partnered with researchers in nursing, human ecology and nutrition. It pairs high school students with researchers for six weeks.
This article was guest written by Alana Kornelsen, Alison Nelson and Dean Spaner. Kornelsen is a Grade 12 student at Scona High School in Edmonton. Nelson and Spaner are from the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science at the University of Alberta.
