Last week I attended the Manitoba Soil Science Society‘s 53rd Annual Meeting.
I felt that I learned the most from the first two speakers.
Henry Janzen of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Lethbridge’s key point was “What will our descendants wish we had recorded or started?” He gave examples of studies in the late 1800s and early 1900s that turned out to answer questions posed in the last 10 years. Who would have thought that a soil sample collected in 1920 would answer questions about carbon levels today?
Con Campbell emphasized the impact of long-term trends on studies. In the fields that he’s been studying for 50 years there’s been a wetter trend for the last 18 years. The temptation is to attribute improvements in crop production on those fields to better crops and practices but it’s also quite possible that a lot of the change is simply do to that shift in weather patterns.
Yi Zhang’s presentation on soil surveys and agricultural drainage in Manitoba was interesting. Over 1/4 of the land in Manitoba benefits directly from drainage. 37% of the crop insurance claims are due to excess moisture.
I hadn’t thought that the Atmospheric Concentrations of Currently Used Pesticides in Relation to Wetland Water Quality in Manitoba would be very relevant. As it turns out, it answered a nagging question from a damage claim we did a few years back. The plant tissue tests showed the presence of some chemicals that had not been sprayed on a particular field or on any of the surrounding fields. After hearing this presentation, what we think happened is that there was atmospheric deposition of the chemicals on the field – not enough to affect the yields but enough to register on the tests.
Some of Don Flaten’s students had a poster on the actual nutrient uptake from manure. Unfortunately there wasn’t a handout with the poster and I didn’t write down the details. The conclusion was that a significant portion of the calculated available manure nitrogen was not being taken up by the plants, leaving them deficient in nitrogen compared to plants fertilized to the same target levels with commercial nitrogen. I’m hoping to get more details on this.
Those were the highlights from the conference for me.
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