Minnedosa, Man. – Most people wouldn’t be comfortable making a speech from a narrow trench, but Alan Moulin is in his element as he talks about the varying soil characteristics at the Manitoba Zero Till Research Farm.
Starting at the highest elevation of the metre wide and metre deep trench, Moulin, a soil scientist with Agriculture Canada in Brandon, explains the changes in the soil profile as he walks downhill.
About halfway down the 40 metre long pit, Moulin points to a soil profile with an A horizon that is dark gray to black and about 30 centimetres thick.
Read Also
VIDEO: Green Lightning and Nytro Ag win sustainability innovation award
Nytro Ag Corp and Green Lightning recieved an innovation award at Ag in Motion 2025 for the Green Lightning Nitrogen Machine, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into a plant-usable form.
The group of 60 people, representing the Manitoba Soil Science Society and the Soil Conservation Council of Canada, leans over the edge of the trench for a closer look at the profile of Newdale soil, which may soon become the provincial soil of Manitoba.
On July 8, the Soil Science Society and Soil Conservation Council visited the zero till farm between Minnedosa and Brandon as part of the society’s annual summer tour. The participants learned why Newdale deserves to be the official soil of Manitoba.
“It (Newdale) covers such an extensive area of Western Manitoba and there are very similar soils in Saskatchewan and Alberta. It really is characteristic of agricultural soils on the Prairies,” said Moulin in an interview.
Newdale, named after a town on the Yellowhead Highway west of Minnedosa, is a Class 2 soil and an orthic black chernozem. It’s found in undulating or hummocky terrain and is a mixture of glacier eroded granite, limestone from Manitoba’s Interlake, also deposited by glacier, and local shale.
“It doesn’t have any adverse problems, it’s got undulating topography … and it’s got slight stones, but not a lot of stones,” said Wally Fraser, head of the land resource unit for Agriculture Canada in Winnipeg.
“Overall it has a clay-loam texture to it, which has a very good water holding capacity,” added Fraser, noting that the motion to enshrine Newdale as the provincial soil has passed first reading in the Manitoba legislature.
There are Class 1 soil types in Manitoba around Portage la Prairie, but those soils only cover a small portion of the province, Fraser said. In comparison, Newdale is found in a broad band stretching from Brandon to the Riding Mountains.
“These (Newdale soils) occur in western Manitoba and this is part of what they call the Newdale till plain. It extends about 10 miles or so east of the Manitoba zero-till farm, clear across to the Saskatchewan border,” he added.
The undulating till formation and the chernozem extends into Saskatchewan, Fraser said, but across the border its name changes to Oxbow soil. However, Newdale is distinct from the brown chernozem soils of Saskatchewan, he noted. Black chernozemic soils have more organic matter than the drier soils common in the Palliser Triangle.
Naming a provincial soil would be an excellent public education tool, Fraser said.
“It increases public knowledge and (encourages) thinking about soils as an important resource that has to be maintained and preserved.”
The province would become the third in Canada to have an official soil, after New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
