Arcola's Prairie Place Hall played host to the 18th Annual Moose Mountain Ag Day where producers got to discuss a number of different topics from what the weather in Saskatchewan is doing to automated agriculture.
One if the biggest areas people were speaking about was the rise of intercropping, growing two types of plants together in the same field, in Western Canada and the benefits it has. Lana Shaw with the South East Research Farm (SERF) in Redvers has been collecting data on the practice since 2012 by growing plots of mixed chick peas and flax seed.
"Being able to test this across a lot of wet and dry environments has given us some really good data on that. It seemed like we were better off having more chick peas and not a lot of flax on the dry years and that's really good information to have."
With land prices on the rise and it being more and more difficult to find land in Saskatchewan, Shaw says intercropping could be a way for many young farmers to get more for the most they can out of every acre of land.
"If you can get more profit off the same land base, then that enables the younger generation to actually look at that land and say this is a viable option for me."
There is still more research being done on the topic, including comparing growth between an organic crop grown without the use of pesticides and herbicides compared to conventional growers.
"We've done one year of an organic type of trial and there was good results witht he intercrop, but it's harder to have controlled conditions for research trials. You may be able to get more data off of the weed growth, but with a non organic situation we've got a little more controlled conditions."
Lorne Klein with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture was one of the organizers of the event and had his own thoughts on the growth of the practice.
"It appears that it's got some agrinomic advantages to doing that, so we're just going to have to follow that practice and see how that evolves over time."
Klein was also one of the speakers at the event, where he highlighted the use of canola straw as a potential food source for feeding livestock.
Source : Discoverestevan