Change is hard. Uncertainty can be stifling. And there is always risk in the unknown. So when we at Prairie Son Acres, a 4th generation family farm in central Saskatchewan, Canada, decided to transition from a conventional farm to a regenerative one it felt like a big deal. Prairie Son Acres (https://www.prairiesonacres.com) is an 11,000 …
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Regenerative Farming: Why the Focus on Soil Health?
A hundred years ago, Canadian pioneers could break a fresh plot of land and grow a healthy, high yielding wheat crop just by putting seed in the ground. Fifty years ago, second and third generation Canadian farmers began to realize that the land just wasn’t producing like it used to. Lucky, synthetic fertilizer was now …
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Pioneers of Regenerative Farming: The Miraculous Dr. Northen
“Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which our foods come are brought into proper mineral balance?” These words were spoken by Rex Breach, a gentleman farmer from the state of Florida, in his 1936 address to the …
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The Chaos Garden: Year 1
Some call it a mess. Others contend it’s natural order. Technically, it’s referred to as polycropping but we call it a chaos garden and it’s the perfect microcosm of a regenerative farm. Regenerative agriculture is focused on restoring natural nutrient cycles in the soil by emulating the natural ecosystem. The goal is to create an …
Rethinking Success: Soil, profit and regenerative farming
Traditionally, farmers have correlated yield to success. That is to say, on a field by field basis, yield is often the primary determining factor used to judge whether a crop was successful or not. And for good reason. To begin with, yield is fairly easy to measure (e.g. bushels/acre) and can be calculated during harvest. …
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The Rise of the Middle Class Farmer: The Inception of Western Canadian Agriculture
In 1946, just after WWII, Canada signed a contract to deliver 600 million bushels of wheat to a war-weary UK within 4 years. Despite the huge quantities of grain needed, Canada was able to meet the demand, largely because of the massive grain reserves the country developed during WW2 — grain that was originally produced …
Soil as an Ecosystem
Healthy ecosystems produce healthy organisms. It’s really that simple. From gardeners to agriculturalists, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand the role of the soil microbiome in relation to soil health and land rejuvenation. Traditionally, farmers tend to disassociate their target crop from land that it is grown on, focusing on production processes which produce immediate …
Risk, Reward and Regenerative Farming
In business, risk is often associated with reward. The general idea being the greater the risk, the greater the return. In agriculture, this is generally taken to mean that by increasing your input costs (i.e. fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation, etc.,), your yields, and thus your profits, will increase correspondingly — simply put, the more you spend …
In the Wake of the Better Farming Train
Probably forty per cent of settlers who go on our pioneer farms have no knowledge of agriculture in any country, let alone prairie agriculture, and many make distressing and expensive mistakes largely for want of some person to confer with and advise them. – W.R. Motherwell in 1913 Way back, in 1914, when twenty horse power …
On Cold-Pressed Canola Oil
Cold-pressed canola oil is to regular canola oil as extra virgin olive oil is to regular olive oil. Except, it’s healthier, tastier, more sustainable and just all around better. Okay, there is a clear bias here. But that seems only right and fair as we are a Canadian blog and most farms in our country …
The Prairie Serf 