Donald J. (Buck) Ross, who has years of experience with
cover crops, thinks the federal and provincial governments should offer farmers
an incentive of about $300 per acre to adopt the technology.
He figures that would cost about $1 billion a year, would be
much less expensive than some other carbon-reducing programs and subsidies and
would stimulate rural economies.
At $300 an acre, he figures farmers would plant cover crops
on about a third of the province’s 27 million arable acres. Those crops would
take carbon out of the atmosphere, which is better than alternative policies
which only reduce carbon emissions.
Ross uses cover crops mainly after harvesting wheat on his
700-acre spread between Moorefield and Arthur, but sometimes plants if he’s
able to achieve an early harvest of soybeans.
The mixtures he plants are combination of oats, yellow
semi-leafless peas, tillage radish, turnip, sorghum-sudangrass, sunflowers, rye,
clovers and phacelia.
The combinations depend on what he’s aiming to achieve.
He also routinely plants red clover with his winter wheat.
His cash crop rotation is the standard wheat, corn and soybeans.
He usually sprays glyphosate (eg.
Roundup) on the cover crops before winter, leaving the plant cover to protect
the field from wind and water erosion until spring when he tills before
planting.
He needs to till the cover crop,
rather than no-till planting, because he needs the spring soil warmth in his
relatively cool part of Southwestern Ontario.
Ross has always been keen about
conservation and soil health.
He and his family have planted miles
of shelterbelts of cedar and spruce trees. He figures the shelterbelts occupy
30 acres and, at $20,000 per acre for good farmland in his area, it’s a
contribution worth at least $600,000.
“Plus,” he says, “it costs us about
$15,000 a year in maintenance” such as trimming, removal and replanting.
He and his sons, who are partners in
Ross Enterprises, are all trained and licensed arborists and they run a
tree-trimming and tree-removal business to supplement farm income.
Ross is also one of the team that
investigated biodigester technology in Austria and has built three big ones –
at Elmira, Leamington and at beef farmer Carl Frook’s feedlot near Hanover.
The Bio-En Inc. plant at Elmira is now
supplying enough electricity to power all but the largest industries in the
town, all of it generated from waste material such as green-bin collections in
Peel Region.
Ross is one of the farmers who takes
the digestate that remains after generating electricity. It is a fertilizer
certified by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, mainly because the feedstock
is pasteurized during processing.
It has a relatively low, but still
valuable, nutrient content of .4 per cent nitrogen, .2 per cent phosphorous and
.08 per cent potash.
He stores it in a manure lagoon until
the timing is right for field application.
Adoption of these kinds of
technologies “is a win-win-win proposition for everyone,” says Ross.
But he is convinced that the cover
crop component needs a $300-an-acre incentive from governments to achieve
widespread adoption.
“I know there are farmers who think
they can do it for less,” says Ross. “But we have been doing this for long
enough that we’ve got a pretty good handle on what it costs.”
One of the major benefits is
much-improved soil health, but the profits from that are elusive, given the high
rate of variability in crop growing conditions from year to year.
This year the payoff was substantial,
he says, with yields for corn and soybeans that were well above the already-high
provincial averages.
One of the big reasons for that yield
boost was the moisture-retaining capacity of the increased organic matter in his fields.
There are other significant benefits,
such as increased worm populations because they thrive on tillage radish and
turnips, and increased populations of beneficial root-zone microbes.
Ontario’s Environment Commissioner,
Dianne Saxe, recently released a special report on agriculture that said the
same things as Ross, including a call for incentives for farmers to adopt
technologies that reduce greenhouse gases.
