Pasture Management During Severe Dry Conditions

Dec 21, 2023

Multiple years of drought can result in lower overall forage production on pastureland. Impacts of the prolonged drought not only reduce the amount of plant material available for livestock consumption but reduce the amount of plant material retained as carryover litter on the soil surface at the end of the grazing season.

Litter refers to the old plant material left over from previous years of grazing; it can be either standing, recently fallen to the ground or partially decomposing material. Litter benefits pastureland functioning through nutrient cycling, improved water infiltration and better moisture retention (i.e., snow trapping or slowing soil moisture evaporation by reducing direct solar energy). When moisture is scarce during a drought, rangelands with adequate litter will produce more forage than those with low to absent litter levels. On native pastureland in the southern prairies, litter is so important that approximately 50 per cent of the yield in any given year can be attributed to litter.

Click here to see more...

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids