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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:37):
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. We’re getting on into the middle of July now, and we celebrate the 4th of July here in the United States. That’s one of our big summer holidays and we really enjoy that. But north of the border, July the first is Canada Day. They recently celebrated that, but another big event that goes on in Canada every year usually starts the week after the 4th of July is the Calgary Stampede Rodeo. That’s something that’s always been on my bucket list, something I want to get up and see one of these days. Maybe I’ll make that happen before too much longer. But in the next few episodes, we wanted to spotlight the Calgary Stampede, talk a little bit about the rodeo. We’re also going to talk about Canadian agriculture and some of the crops that are grown across Canada and some differences between that and other parts of the world.
(01:24):
To help us do that, I want to introduce you again to Lyle Cowell. Lyle has been on the programme before. He joined us when we did our discussion about canola several months ago. But since that time, Lyle has had some changes go on. And Lyle, if you will, kind of reintroduce yourself to our listeners and tell them what you’re doing these days.
Lyle Cowell (01:42):
Well, when we chatted last time, I worked for Nutrien Ag Solutions and as a regional agriologist in northeast Saskatchewan. And more recently, I’ve changed my role, now senior agronomist with Nutrien in Canada, supporting the products that Nutrien manufactures and PKS fertiliser, ESN, MAP+MST, and as yourself, Mike, in terms of good agronomy of those fertilisers and sustainability of fertiliser practises. So it’s a new view on my career, and I’m looking forward to it and getting to know a bit broader range of the geography and crops of Western Canada and also now Eastern Canada.
Mike Howell (02:20):
Lyle, we’re excited to have you being a part of our team. We’ve kind of been missing out on that Canadian agronomist position for a couple of years now and excited to have you in that role and look forward to working with you. Lyle, you mentioned that you worked for Nutrien Ag Solutions for quite a while before joining us. Tell us a little more about your background, your education, and things like that.
Lyle Cowell (02:40):
Well, I grew up not too far from where I’m sitting here today in northeast Saskatchewan. Grew up a small farm in the northeast near the small town of Star City, Saskatchewan. From there I went to the University of Saskatchewan, did a degree in soil science and then a master’s in soil science and worked there for a number of years, had a good opportunity to learn from a lot of very smart people, working with people like Elcher de Young and Darwin Anderson, Jeff Chano and many others in the faculty of the Department of Soil Science as well as in general the faculty of the University of Saskatchewan.
(03:15):
Great learning opportunity for myself. And from there we made the decision, my wife and I, to move back to northeast Saskatchewan and had a bit of a consulting business for a few years and was looking for that right place for me as far as that place to bridge research bridge good agronomy to farmers. And that opportunity came along with, at that time, Westco Fertilisers, which then was part of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, became Viterra/Crop Production Services and Nutrient Ag Solutions. So it’s been a great career in continuing to be able to interact with the research community to learn and use what I learned to try extend that to other agronomists in the community as well as make it make sense for the farmers on the farm.
Mike Howell (04:02):
Lyle, we’re excited to learn more about what you’ve been working on up there, and I’m sure we’ll have more episodes talking about Canadian agriculture, but today we wanted to focus on the crops that are being grown up there. Now we all know about canola and the importance of canola to the economy in Canada and specifically Western Canada, but what all crops are being grown in that part of the world?
Lyle Cowell (04:23):
It varies depending on geography. So across the northern part of the prairies, very close to 50% of the acres would be in canola, usually 45 to 50% across the northern block and grey soils, and that’s in a mix with cereals, wheat, barley, oats, minor cereals like canary seed. As you go south across the prairies, you’ll see a bit of a change. The southern prairies, you’d see more Durham and a transition to a lot more pulse crops, legumes such as lentils, peas and chickpeas, which have always retained an important part of our cropping rotation. Broader scale, you’re going to some of the southern regions of Manitoba, you’ll run into a lot more crops, familiar to yourself, Mike, a lot of corn and soybeans, and that would be the case as well in southern Alberta in particular in some of the irrigated districts of southern Alberta.
(05:17):
It’s a fairly broad range of crops. There’s probably another dozen crops that I didn’t mention, crops that are very important like flax and others, but that’s the general landscape of cropping in the prairie province of Western Canada. A big geography that tends to farm with fairly similar techniques across Western Canada. Eastern Canada, quite different, more growing season, more heat units. There’s a lot more reliance on the C4 plants, the heat loving plants like corn and soybeans, so we can learn back and forth between each region as far as farming practises and fertiliser practises. It can be different, but you can still be the same and learn from each other.
Mike Howell (05:59):
That’s exactly right. Now Lyle, one thing you did mention was one of the minor crops, you said canary seed. Now when I think about canary, I think about a little bird that’s flying around. Obviously there’s a crop named canary as well. Enlighten me a little bit. That’s a new one on me. What is canary?
Lyle Cowell (06:15):
Yeah, sure. So annual canary seed. A lot of these smaller crops, I refer to them as minor crops in Western Canada, and yet Western Canada is often the big player in some of these minor crops and that includes canary seeds. Canary seed is actually seed primarily produced for bird seed including canaries, and if it weren’t for the canary seed crop in Saskatchewan in particular, the canaries of New York City might go hungry. It’s a very important crop even though it’s in small acres. Same thing with a lot of the other minor crops. Mustard. I’m sure that a lot of the ballparks in the states love to have their mustard on their hot dogs, and if it wasn’t for the yellow mustard crop, an oriental mustard crop in Saskatchewan, there wouldn’t be yellow mustard and they wouldn’t be Dijon mustard for a lot of France. A lot of these minor crops don’t have great acreage coverage, but are still very important in terms of crops in a world scale.
Mike Howell (07:11):
Lyle, let’s dig in a little bit on some of these major crops. How are the growing conditions this year? What are the crops looking like at this point of the growing season? Well,
Lyle Cowell (07:20):
There’s one thing about Western Canada. It’s almost all dry land agriculture and in a tough environment. It’s a short growing season and almost entirely dry land agriculture, and if there’s one thing that’s consistent in Western Canada, it’s the lack of consistency in growing conditions, and that’s the way it is every year. We will always have areas that have a little bit too much rain once in a while and we will always have some areas that are suffering from drought, and that’s the case this year. Where I sit here today and northeast Saskatchewan crops are good. They’re not exceptional, but they’re good crops. Not too much rain, not too much drought. We’ll end up with pretty good crops. Up in northern Alberta, up in the peace region, which often struggles with a short season and some tough growing conditions, thankfully this year has some fantastic crops and it’s great to see that for that big peace region.
(08:08):
And not atypical for Western Canada. It’s drier as you go south across the prairies. The brown soil zones, which are brown soil zones because they’ve developed under drier conditions, are having a tough go of drought this year, so western Saskatchewan and southwest Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, it’s a little dry and we have to feel some concern for their crops across that area. Manitoba, which is usually an area that struggles more with excess rain than the lack of rain, is actually a bit dry. One thing that is very consistent across Western Canada this year, whether it be wet or dry, is that the crops are very early.
(08:45):
We had a very hot June, hot in terms of Western Canadian hot, lots of plus 30 degrees Celsius days. Our crops in general across Western Canada are a week to two weeks earlier than normal. Right now, fungicide season is already coming to a close and we should just be starting to think about it right now. We’re going to see a crop that is going to be harvested probably 10 days to two weeks earlier than normal. That’s a good thing. I mean, in the end, one thing we always know in Western Canada is that winter is coming and harvesting an early crop is still going to be a good thing for us.
Mike Howell (09:23):
Lyle, one crop that we haven’t mentioned very much about, and some people classify it as a crop and some think it’s not a crop, but that’s forages are. There are a lot of forage acres in Canada?
Lyle Cowell (09:33):
There’s a lot of forage acres, and you’re right, we forget about it as a crop, and yet it’s true that there’s a lot of native prairie range land, but the seeded forage acre be that for hay or grazing or making silage or whatever it may be for is actually one of the major crops in Western Canada. There’s probably more acres of forages in Alberta than there is of barley, and we forget that. Unfortunately. We often forget about it in management too, and in particular fertiliser management. It can be very productive. It feeds an important agricultural system through cattle and other livestock. It makes good use of a lot of land that is not well suited to annual crop production, be they wet areas or saline areas or whatever that marginal condition might be. It is a very important crop, but like I say, we often forget about those acres in terms of agronomy and we often forget about them and right on the farm, we don’t manage them like we do the canola and the wheat and the other annual crops. It’s really unfortunate that that’s the case.
Mike Howell (10:38):
Yeah, that’s the way it is in most places. Now there are some people that really manage their forages and try to get good high yield and forage production and get the protein levels up, and we all know the relationship between nitrogen and sulphur and forming that good protein, but it’s going to take nutrients to make that crop perform to its best. Lyle, if growers are harvesting this forage for hay, how many hay cuttings can you usually get during a year in your part of the world? Where I’m from down in the southern US, we can get three to four good hay cuttings a year depending on the weather conditions. I’m betting that you can’t quite get that many.
Lyle Cowell (11:10):
We cannot. No, we certainly cannot. We’ve got two things going against us, one dry land agriculture, often with a little short of moisture and a short season. We will be looking at one or two cuts of hay and I would say there’s probably a lot more acres of hay that is cut once than there is twice across Western Canada. A lot of the alfalfa might get two cuts, but other than that it’s generally one cut of hay.
Mike Howell (11:38):
Lyle, talking about forages, I did want to mention if listeners are interested in finding out more about forages and the nutritional needs for forages, we do have a new publication on our economics website. It’s talking specifically about nutrient management in forages and there’s a lot of great information in there about the importance of fertiliser management and how to grow better forages. Anybody that has forages, I highly encourage you to check that out and get some more information on it there.
Lyle Cowell (12:05):
I really agree, Mike. It’s an excellent publication and it’s well written, it’s informative, it has the editing skills as the experts in the field. There’s some excellent publications on the economics website that really should be well utilised by agronomists and farmers, and that includes the forage guide. It’s very, very good.
Mike Howell (12:23):
Lyle, you probably remember me talking back a couple of weeks ago, I was in Fargo, North Dakota, was there for a couple of meetings and visited a few fields there, but one thing that really got my attention while I was in Fargo was how long the days were. Now I’ve always known that the further north you go during the summer, you have longer day lengths, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it until I made that trip a few weeks ago. Here in the southern US where I’m at, we may have 12 to 14 hours of daylight during the summertime, but I noticed when I was there in early June, they were already getting 14 or 15 hours of daylight. I think the days were still getting a little bit longer for a few more weeks anyway, but how does that change in photoperiod affect crops?
Lyle Cowell (13:08):
Day length is a big deal to us across Western Canada. Everybody knows when the shortest day is in December and everybody knows when the longest day will be in June because our short summer and our long winter, it’s always looking forward to the days getting a little longer in the wintertime, so we don’t have to drive home in the dark every day. June 21st in abouts that day, we all know that that’s the longest day of the year in Western Canada and it’s a long day. I was thinking about that just last night, Mike. I was sitting outside at 10 o’clock in the evening as the sun was just going down and that has a big impact on our crops. It doesn’t just make our summers a great summer with lots of time to be outside in the nice conditions, but that makes a big deal for our crops.
(13:51):
We’re a long ways north and we are in an area that has late frosts in the spring and early frosts in the fall. Why we can get crops successfully started and harvested in this short season is all about day length and we need to make good use of that day length, so that we can try to have our crops rapidly growing during the longest period, those long days in the end of June and early July. Those are going to be the crops that are most successful and it really has a big impact on us in the ability to get that crop off in good time. I mentioned we have very early crops this year. We had a lot of heat in June during a time period with a lot of day length, so that really allowed our crops to really rapidly progress maturity through June, much faster than usual, and that’ll continue on.
(14:37):
We still have long day length. Often we end our season struggling to have our crops mature as the days shorten in September. This year they’re going to be reaching maturity while we still have high heat and long days through the end of July and early August. It’s a very unique year this year in that combination of heat and day length that we’re making things progress so quickly. We can take a crop that in some regions of the world might mature in a hundred to 130 days, spring crops and they will reach maturity in often less than a hundred days. Some of the shorter season varieties might get very close maturity in only 90 days. It’s the key to success in this part of the world.
Mike Howell (15:22):
Lyle, you’ve mentioned the earliness of the crop a couple of times today, and you talked about some of the benefits of that, winter’s always coming as you said, but is that early harvest, will that also allow it to dry down in the field a little more, maybe save growers some money at the elevator in terms of drying these grains down some?
Lyle Cowell (15:40):
It sure will. It’s an early harvest is a good harvest all the time, so long as it’s a good yield. We often struggle across Western Canada, especially the northern prairies, even through a lot of Ontario and the corn belt where you’re still at the northern end of growing corn, you often have to dry that crop down and that’s expensive. It’s expensive to do in terms of just the natural gas or other or propane or whatever source of heat is used to dry the grain. It’s also very expensive in terms of time, having to stand out by your grain dryer in the dark after you’ve come in from a harvest. That’s tough in terms of time and the stress of harvest time. It should make harvest a much easier this year, easier, faster. It probably will lead to a good chance for higher quality of grain and just a much less expensive harvest time.
(16:30):
That’s one part of this year that we have to look forward to and this is going to impact even fall activity. So often in Western Canada, we get the harvest off in September, sometimes in October, and there’s not a lot of time to prepare for the next crop. This year, we should have some time this fall to make better preparations for the 2024 crop. Next year’s crop starts in June and the year before to starting to prepare for the next crop, and this year we’re going to have that window of time probably in late August and through all September to look at fertiliser application in the fall for next year crop to look at better weeded control this fall, just to be a little better prepared for the next crop.
Mike Howell (17:12):
Lyle, we appreciate you taking a few minutes to visit with us this morning. I know you’ve got a busy schedule coming up. We wanted to record this section prior to you leaving and headed out to the stampede, and once you get there and have a day or so to look around, we’re going to record another section and talk to you about what’s going on at the stampede, get some of your insights there. But before we let you go today, I’m going to throw you a little curveball here in way of kind of introducing you to our listeners. Lyle, tell us the most unusual thing you’ve seen in a field call. I know you get called to visit a lot of growers over the course of your career. What’s the most unusual thing you’ve seen?
Lyle Cowell (17:47):
Man, that’s a tough one. The one thing with being a field agronomist is you’re rarely asked to come out and look at a really great crop. Usually you’re going out to look at something that has gone bad. And with the sole fertility background, the things that I remember and find most interesting are always going to be nutrient deficiencies that we come across. There’s the simple ones like nitrogen deficiency, occasional phosphorus deficiency. Farmers generally make a pretty good job of covering those, including sulphur deficiency. Actually in Western Canada because of the preponderance of canola, we tend to apply a lot of sulphur, so I don’t really see a lot of nitrogen phosphorus or sulphur deficiencies, but in recent years, the one that really comes to light is more and more often seen potassium deficiencies in a part of the world that we usually have it in our mind that we have a lot of potassium in our soil and over the course my career rarely, rarely saw potassium deficiency in any crop over the years.
(18:46):
But in the past couple of years, potassium deficiency has become the common problem in crops. We don’t remove a lot of potassium, but over the course of my career, as I’ve said to farmers and agronomists, we’ve probably removed four or 500 pounds of the most available labile pool of potassium in our soils, and so no, we don’t remove much every year, but we also haven’t been applying much every year, more often none actually. And I think that that is something that we are going to have to face, that we know that we had severely deficient potassium deficient soils in some small parts of Western Canada, but it’s those marginal areas of potassium deficiency that I think is staring us in the face a little bit right now, that it’s a major nutrient and we’ve removed a lot over the course of farming here without replacing it. And although it may not seem like a unique or exciting problem, I think it’s one that I find actually currently most interesting in terms of farming conditions and management in Western Canada.
Mike Howell (19:50):
Lyle, we sure appreciate you joining us today. We’re going to let you get on the road and we’ll pick this back up as soon as you get to Calgary and looking forward to your insights on the Stampede and all the sites there at the Midway and some of the great foods that you’re going to sample for us and tell us all about.
Lyle Cowell (20:05):
You bet. Thanks a lot, Mike. The summer rodeo and fair season is upon us. We talked about the long days of Western Canada and we tend to make most of it. We’re either going to be at the lake or at the fair of the rodeo over the next few weeks and looking forward to every one of them.
Mike Howell (20:20):
Lyle, you’ve been in Calgary for a few days now and I’m sure you’ve got a lot to report on. First off, I understand that you got to visit Olds College a few days ago and visit with some of the researchers there and see what’s going on at Olds College. If you will, tell us a little bit about Olds College and what you were able to learn while you were there.
Lyle Cowell (20:36):
Yeah. Olds College is a really unique college. It’s a technical type college entirely focused on agriculture, so it’s really a working farm where students can learn every aspect of agriculture and they can offer a lot of different diplomas towards just about any angle of agriculture that you can think of. And they have what’s embedded within the farm, what’s called a smart farm, where they can on a practical level, look at the on farm use of new ideas and new technology. It’s not really what you think of as space level, new research, it’s applied research and bringing it to the farm field.
Mike Howell (21:14):
Sounds like a great place to go visit and learn some stuff about agriculture as well. Now, Lyle, I know you’ve never been to the Calgary Stampede and I understand you’ve had a chance to get out on the Midway and see all the sites and go to the rodeo as well. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve seen out on the Midway, what kind of foods are out there? What have you been forced to eat while you’ve been at the Stampede?
Lyle Cowell (21:36):
Well, Mike, it was the first time I’ve been to the Stampede. Some of it was what I expected and some of it was a surprise. Spent some time in the Midway in the morning, I think I’m still full two days later. The Midway has a lot of food and I don’t think we would want to call it healthy food, but a lot of diversity of food. I tried a lot of it, as much as I could. The classic Canadian foods like poutine, corn dogs, but then you get the things like mustard flavoured ice cream and hot dogs stuffed into pickles and things like that,
Mike Howell (22:06):
Mustard flavoured ice cream. You got to talk a little more about that. That just sounds disgusting.
Lyle Cowell (22:12):
I thought it would be too when I saw it. Both ketchup and mustard flavoured ice cream, soft ice cream, but it’s really good. Sometimes you think, man, this is going to be bad, but that combination of flavours is… Well, just like in Canada, we have ketchup flavoured chips, but I don’t think you’ve probably ever had, Mike.
Mike Howell (22:28):
No, I haven’t tried those yet.
Lyle Cowell (22:29):
We will get some to you. It was really actually quite good, and that’s a fun thing about something like a Midway is the wild and crazy ideas that people can come up with for new combinations of food can actually be pretty good sometimes.
Mike Howell (22:43):
Sounds good. I always like to travel to Midway and see what’s out there. Here in the south, everything is cooked in one of two ways on the Midway. It’s either fried or deep-fried. Is that the same way at Calgary or they do different cooking techniques as well?
Lyle Cowell (22:57):
There is a lot of deep-fried food anywhere from desserts like deep-fried Oreos and other deep-fried desserts. Yes, the deep fryers work overtime at a Midway and it’s not a place that you’re going to go get a salad. You might find some deep-fried pickles, but that’d be about as close as you’d get. That’s pretty much the theme. A lot of deep-fried food, a lot of very, very, very sweet desserts. You probably wouldn’t want to adopt that diet for too many days of your life, but you got to live once in a while.
Mike Howell (23:24):
There you go. Lyle, you mentioned the deep-fried Oreos. My kids all love those. They love them so much. In fact, we ran out of Oreos one day, had the Nutter Butter cookies there, so we decided to deep-fry those and I think they actually like those better than the Oreos now. Anybody at home that wants to try something new, deep-fry that Nutter Butter cookie, it’s really good.
Lyle Cowell (23:44):
You can deep-fry anything.
Mike Howell (23:46):
Lyle, what about the rodeo? Tell me a little bit about the rodeo and do you have a favourite event there?
Lyle Cowell (23:51):
Yeah, the rodeo’s good. We saw all the classic rodeo saw, the chuck wags and the barrel racing bareback and saddle bronc and the bull riding as well as the relay races in the evening, which are led by the First Nations of Alberta, which is a pretty cool event. One of my favourites, I do have my favourites. I’d say I like barrel racing. I like the waggons a lot and I like the relay races. If I had to pick my favourite things to see a Rodeo, that’s going to be the ones.
(24:16):
I also had a really nice chance of visit with some of the chuck waggon racers, the owners of the horses, the ones that care for the horses and visit their barn and have a chat with them, and that was pretty nice to do too, to actually… Much like chatting with the farmer, just to get to learn a little bit of what they’re doing and what makes it tick and why the horses are important to them and why they look after them as well as they do. That means a lot too, just to not just see it as a spectator, but to actually connect with them.
Mike Howell (24:41):
Well, Lyle, that’s a perfect lead in for next week’s episode. I’m glad you mentioned your experience doing that. Next week we’re going to be talking with one of the chuck waggon racers and spend a good bit of time talking with him about his animals and how he caress for them and the feed that goes into taking care of them and a lot, lot more. Lyle, we appreciate you taking the time to visit with us today. Well, listeners, as you know, it’s now time for our final segment of the episode where we talk about somebody famous in the world of agriculture.
(25:10):
Since we’re focusing on Canadian agriculture for the next few weeks, I thought it only appropriate that we talk about somebody that had an impact on Canadian agriculture. Today we’re going to talk about John Harapiak and usually I do this segment and sometimes we have the guests chime in a little bit, but when we started talking about this, Lyle told us that he had actually met Mr. Harapiak and had worked with him on numerous occasions. He had a really good knowledge of Mr. Harapiak and what he has done, and I’m going to let Lyle take over and tell us a little bit more about this man.
Lyle Cowell (25:43):
It’s an honour to really talk about John Harapiak. I knew John, he worked for Westco Fertilisers when I started my career with Westco Fertilisers, and he was a good person, a kind person and a very good scientist and extension agronomist. A little bit of John’s background. I talked in the previous episode about the grey wooded soils of northern prairies and they can be tough to farm on, and that’s where John grew up. He grew up in the small community of Cowan, Manitoba, and where’s Cowan, Manitoba? It’s north of Riding Mountain National Park and it’s in the forest fringe in terms of agriculture and on grey wooded soils. They’re low fertility soils in general. They need good farm management to do well on. You’ve got to be clever to do well on those soils, and John had probably had influenced his life and how he approached research extension and just dealing with farmers, just coming from cow in Manitoba.
(26:42):
From Manitoba, John came to Saskatchewan to go to the University of Saskatchewan, and there he completed a bachelor’s of science in agriculture, a BSA, and then did a master’s also in soil fertility at the University of Saskatchewan. From there, John was one of the very first people who had a career that was in soil fertility and agronomy in the fertiliser industry starting in the mid 1960s, so really fertilisation of Western Canadian soils just in terms of applying fertiliser was somewhat new idea even at that point. Fertiliser usage increased very, very rapidly through the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, and John was a big part of that rapid increase of fertiliser use. It was a new idea. It wasn’t just applying fertiliser properly, it was simply in some cases applying fertiliser at all and sorting out where the responses would be. He had a year where he worked with Cominco, but then his career went to Westco Fertiliser.
(27:43):
Westco Fertiliser was owned by the Prairie Pools. It was a cooperative, essentially fertiliser business that supplied fertiliser to the Prairie Pools for a number of decades, and John started his career and ended it over 35 years with Westco fertilisers. He finally retired in 2001. In the midst of that, he actually went back to school. He went back to the University of Alberta to work on a PhD, worked with Westco, and the research that he was doing with Westco interfered with his ability to finish that PhD, but it showed his commitment to education as well in wanting to work towards that level of science within the fertiliser industry and agronomy that he thought was the appropriate place. Now, Westco Fertiliser was a unique business. They gave John also an opportunity to create a large and important research programme, and they did this through a unique process.
(28:37):
They actually had essentially a checkoff and fertiliser they sold. So initially it was 10 cents for every tonne of fertiliser sold, which eventually increased to 50 cents for every tonne of fertiliser sold, and that went into a research fund. John was then able to create a very large research programme, actually ran by Westco Fertilisers and also co-fund other research through AG Canada and through the primary universities across the prairies and with the pure focus on better fertiliser management through most of it. I should give note to a fellow named Norm Flore. Norm Flore was the right-hand man of John Harapiak over most of this research period, and Norm should be credited as well, always with the work that John did in terms of research. Now, what did John focus on? Well, he first of all focused on to some degree just in responses if we apply nitrogen or phosphorus, what sort of response we should get, but he also was a pioneer in understanding what we now call the four RSRs of fertiliser application.
(29:42):
The right product used at the right rate, applied at the right time and in the right place, and he did this really before anybody was thinking about what are the four Rs. An excellent example of this is that initially the equipment wasn’t there to apply fertiliser in bands. We were broadcasting urea, primarily. Incorporating it, often using a lot of tillage in Western Canada, remembering that this is a dry land agriculture that is often suffering from drought, and yet we were broadcasting fertiliser, incorporating it, drying out the soil, and that became a problem. Farmers started to look at different ideas, and early on farmers started to look at the use of anhydrous ammonia, and of course ammonia as a gas has to be banded, and it was banded three or four inches deep, often much deeper in the early days, and they start to notice and express that anhydrous ammonia seems to be a better product than urea.
(30:41):
But John took a step back and realised that no, it was the banding that was better in terms of less water loss from the seed-bed, less immobilisation of that nitrogen, less gaseous loss of nitrogen, and he then saw this as the first step towards right place banding that nitrogen fertiliser. Now, there was a problem in that wasn’t much equipment to ban fertiliser, but also in Western Canada there were manufacturers starting to manufacture air cedars. Air cedar is being air driven, seeding machines to blow fertiliser down the tubes into the ground in a nice band. Initially, they were purely for the use of seeding, and John saw those though from a fertiliser angle and said, “Hey, those could be used to ban fertiliser.” John worked with the manufacturers and it is his work and it’s his driving of the manufacturers that has led to the way that we seed in Western Canada now.
(31:42):
I don’t think many people realise it, but the current method of seeding in Western Canada is primarily to seed and very often banned nitrogen fertiliser and all other fertiliser all in one single pass. And yes, we have some excellent manufacturers for equipment for that, but the idea was driven largely by the work of John Harapiak. He did a lot of other work as well. We mentioned forges in previous discussions, did a lot of work with forages across some of the productive forage land in Alberta, did a lot of work with just responses of phosphorus and potassium, worked with micronutrients in particular with worked with copper and boron. Boron for canola and copper for some of the cereals, so he had a very early understanding of where we might see responses. And also started to drive a little bit more research towards the intermingling of just agronomy, so not just fertiliser research, but how does that impact crop quality and a lot of the bigger world of agronomy, not just soil fertility.
(32:46):
It was a pioneer work that John was doing at that time, and he didn’t just do the work. He also extended the work, and where I saw the name John Harapiak first was I was very young and John used to write what was called the Fertiliser Forum, and each edition of the monthly edition of the Country Guide Magazine. My dad subscribed to the Country Guide. My dad wasn’t fortunate enough to have too much of an education, but he always learned through his life and he read the Country Guide, including the fertiliser form when it came, and he read John Harapiak’s message that we needed to ban fertiliser. And back in the early or mid-seventies, I remember my dad saying, “Well, I think we need to figure out how to ban the ammonia.” And he converted a cultivator over to banding ammonia. I still have almost all of the clippings of the Country Guide articles in the Fertiliser Forum that I clipped out over those years in a file folder.
(33:44):
That’s how important they were to myself and I think to farmers and agronomists across Western Canada at that time. And we still use, like I say, almost all the work that he’s done in terms of understanding banding fertiliser. He did a lot of work in safe rates of fertiliser and understanding how we can deal with that and narrow seed bands, and he extended that wherever he could. The Fertiliser Forums. He spoke at countless meetings in front of farmers and agronomists really took the word of his research and other people’s research, combined it into a good message and made sure that people heard what was the right way to apply fertiliser for our conditions, and the world has actually benefited from this. Manufacturers of air drills in Western Canada now export a lot of their equipment to… Well, especially a lot of the northern states, into Australia, into Europe, and so a lot of the banding work and understanding of best placement of fertiliser that John led is now impacting other countries as well, so it’s quite a big thing.
(34:49):
One other thing that John did was extension is education, and when the CCA programme was developed, John saw this as an opportunity to better educate agronomists in Western Canada, and he was the lead in really pushing the retail businesses across Western Canada to support and bring the Certified Crop Advisor programme into Western Canada. That was essentially the beginning of the Prairie CCA programme, which I believe is coming up on 30 year anniversary soon. He pushed it. He saw this as an opportunity for extension in education. If you can educate agronomists, they can then provide that message to the farm gate and it’s been successful. The Prairie CCA is the largest CCA area in terms of numbers in the programme, and that’s largely again to John’s incessant pushing of better messaging to agronomists and to farmers. Taking that science that he understood of his own and of others and making sure it got to the farm gate. And he was recognised as the distinguished agronomist in Alberta.
(35:56):
He became a fellow of the Agriculture Institute of Canada, but he was also recognised at the farm gate. If John were here with us today, he’d probably say that it was his recognition by the farmers for his work that would be most important to him. And just to wrap up, I will always remember the advice that he gave to the young Lyle Cowell when I started my career, and he said it often and over many times, and that was “What is good for the farmer is good for the industry”, and that was true then, and it’s true now, and it’s something that I’ve repeated to colleagues, to farmers within the industry that if it’s good for the farmer, it will be good for the industry. And that is advice that is not from me, that’s advice from John Harapiak. A fellow that we should remember and respect and repeat his methods in terms of extension. I really appreciate this opportunity to remember, John, an important figure in Western Canadian agriculture.
Mike Howell (36:53):
Lyle, we appreciate you talking about John Harapiak and his contributions not only to Canadian agriculture, but to agriculture worldwide, and I know you did a much better job talking about him than I could have done.
(37:05):
Listeners, we’re going to close this episode today. We really appreciate you tuning in. We hope you’ve enjoyed our first segment, talking about Canadian agriculture and the Calgary Stampede. Next time we’re going to bring you some more exciting events from the Calgary Stampede. You won’t want to miss next week’s episode. It’s going to be really good. We’re going to have one of the rodeo participants join us next week, and I’m really looking forward to next week’s episode. For more information on anything that we’ve talked about today, I want to remind everyone that you can log into nutrien-eKonomics.com. So until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
