In a one-hour presentation at the Western Canada Conference on Soil Health and Grazing in Edmonton, Alta. on December 12, he passed some of that knowledge on to conference attendees.

“If you own soil, we have to be able to look at what we’re doing and be able to see the changes. The power of observation is many times much greater than the data that goes with that observation,” Bieber said at the start of his presentation.

Bieber is a retired farmer from South Dakota, U.S. He travels the world, talking and teaching about soil health. Though his son has now taken over their operation, known as Soil Care, Bieber is still passionate about farming and soil.

When he started, though, it wasn’t to fix his soil – it was to cut costs and increase profits. The benefits to his soil came along with that.

To him, the most important part of soil health is letting the biology in the soil do what comes naturally.

“I’m just basically asking my soil biology, ‘do your job,’” Bieber said.

He said he saw the most success on their operation by doing a combination of long-term no-till and cover cropping. It’s important to keep the soil covered, to protect the biology, he said. If the soil is exposed, then the  soil’s biology will be disturbed by things like rain and chemicals.

“Look at tillage as being a disturbance, and it is,” Biever said. “That’s a physical disturbance. But we also have our biological disturbances, the herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, pesticides, they’re biological disturbances that cause the biology to not perform in balances.”

Bieber also used a version of adaptive rotational grazing, with both pastureland and on their cover crops. He said cows help with soil health because they move organic matter around with their grazing.

“These are our biological distributors because they’re taking what’s out on that native range land, and they’re bringing it out, and they’re spreading it very uniformly throughout our field,” he said. “That’s all we need. We don’t need to have that full coverage of manure out there, as long as we have it like that.”

Bieber said in addition to the cattle, the diversity of the plants grown has to support what the livestock bring to the land. He says it is important to listen to what your land is telling you and then to respond.

“We keep getting told, ‘Do it here, do it there. This is how to do it.’ But we never get the answers of why, and your soils will tell you the why.”

The Western Canada Conference on Grazing and Soil Health ended Thursday afternoon after three days and over 15 speakers. Topics ranged from cover crops and intercrops, grazing methods, types of forages to use, microbes and microbiomes and more.

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He spent much of his time as a kid with cattle in sales barns with his brother and his father, who worked as an order buyer but was originally from Elkhorn, Man. He was comfortable around cattle at a young age and learned the ins and outs of the industry from his father. 

That’s why, during university, Canart found himself leaving the mild weather and gently rolling hills of Kamloops for the cold, flat prairies of Virden, Man., with his brother.

“Some land came up for sale here with family ties,” Canart says.

While they were still in university, Canart and his brother would travel back and forth to Manitoba to sow grass, put in water lines and fences, and ensure the operation was ready. Then, after graduating, Canart moved to Manitoba permanently. 

“In 2002 I graduated university with a natural resource management degree and came out here and had grandiose ideas of setting up an agroforestry silvopasture operation,” Canart says with a laugh. “And so we’ve been operating it for about 24 years now.”

Yearling operation

All of the animals on Canart’s operation are yearlings. He purchases them in the spring and sells them in the fall. Often, Canart only has cattle on his land for 110 days of the year.

“That’s kind of the business model that Dad had been in up in Kamloops,” he says. “And actually both my brother and I had visions of just setting up an operation and not staying here. So, it wasn’t ever kind of like a traditional cow-calf operation. I had never been exposed to that. Dad hadn’t really, either.”

There are positives to running a yearling operation, Canart says. One for him is being done in 110 days and not having to deal as much with winter conditions, whereas cow-calf producers must deal with the environment year-round and brave Canadian winters.

There are also negatives, however. Canart is “at the mercy” of the yearling market, and he’s not on the other side of selling or buying.

He says there are effects on the environment, as well. Running between 900 to 1,000 yearlings every summer can be hard on the land.

“I lose out on the opportunity to get all the benefits of swath and bale grazing. I don’t get the chance to improve the soil in that respect.”

Despite this, Canart is doing what he can to improve his soil.

Rotational grazing

While presenting at the University of Manitoba’s Sustainability of Canadian Agriculture Conference, Canart emphasizes his passion for rotational grazing.

“I really want to use the cow as a tool to increase my ecological resiliency and buffer against the extreme weather,” he says during his presentation.

Canart’s pastures are broken up into small paddocks, and he aims to move his cattle daily, timed around the high point of the sun.

“That’s when the sugars in the plants are the highest. And so, you’re trying to mimic the bison’s activity but also harvest the highest-quality forage and put weight on cattle as best you can.”

Because his herd is so large, Canart usually divides the yearlings into three or four groups.

He has extensive piping on his land to bring water to all his different paddocks. Each paddock contains water bowls. This is another reason why Canart splits his herd up into groups — too many cattle in a paddock strain the watering system. 

“The major constraint there is standing water supply,” Canart says in an interview. “A 1,000-gallon trough doesn’t really last long when 400 head walk up to it.”

When he’s tried to run bigger groups, he had headaches such as wrecked troughs and cattle standing around, bawling.

When Canart first started rotational grazing, he rested his paddocks for around 30 days. Now he rests them for 50 to 60 days and sees a benefit from the increased amount of time. He also doesn’t allow his cattle to graze the grass all the way down and instead leaves a lot to increase soil organic matter.

“Both of my grandfathers would lose their minds if they saw how much grass that we leave on the landscape nowadays. I grew up in Kamloops outside the influence of the agricultural system in Manitoba. So, I came into it as kind of a disruptive force. I hadn’t come up under my father, my grandfather in that respect. So, I learned about grazing from a textbook, and that’s kind of maybe been a good thing.”

He says he has seen benefits to his land from rotational grazing, such as increasing the soil’s ability to withstand drought.

“I think it’s becoming more and more well established that proper rotational grazing can reduce emissions, or (add) more carbon on the landscape than other forms of grazing.”

Day job

Rotational grazing isn’t the only thing helping Canart improve the land on his operation. His day job as the conservation district manager at Upper Assiniboine River Conservation District has allowed him to learn a lot about soil health and ecology, as well.

“I’ve been able to go to conference after conference because I am trying to pick up ideas for work. But I can also implement concepts at home.”

In his role with the conservation district, Canart promotes a healthy and sustainable landscape. This allows him to think about sustainability and water on his operation, as well as to speak to other farmers and ranchers in his area about issues that concern them.

At the conference, while presenting on the different programs offered through the conservation district, Canart spoke about the intersection of his job with the work he does on his ranch. One program through the conservation district currently supports rotational grazing infrastructure, something close to Canart’s heart.

“The goal of this program, again, is to reduce emissions and increase carbon storage. And I believe that this high-performance grazing does both. But again, I’m a little biased. I’m a cattle guy.”

With a full-time job and an operation that is very active from the spring to the fall, Canart says it isn’t always easy to manage everything he does.

“My hair’s on fire until August,” he says with a laugh.

However, the chaos of that time is something he wouldn’t change for anything. And, as a rancher, Canart emphasizes his passion for keeping as much of the land in grassland as possible.

“I think people need to realize that those cattle are protecting the native areas.”

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When most people think of British Columbia, they think of white-capped waves on the Pacific Ocean off the Sunshine Coast, the sweeping, snowy Coast Mountains of Whistler, or trees hung heavy with fruit in the Okanagan. 

Most people wouldn’t think of a landscape very similar to Alberta, with gently rolling hills divided by cropland, the whole region split by the Peace River. According to Nadia Mori, it’s a region that’s often overlooked.

But the area is being acknowledged with the Peace Region Living Lab.

Announced in July by federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, Living Labs is a federal initiative to have producers work with scientists and other collaborators and organizations to test innovative practices and technologies. Previously, the Living Labs were only in Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island. Now, they have been expanded across the country, with an emphasis on agri-environmental issues.

The Peace Region Living Lab is unique, however, because it crosses the border into Alberta. Mori, the extension co-ordinator for the Living Lab, says pairing two provinces for a program is uncommon but is being done in the Peace because of the agricultural similarities of the regions in B.C. and Alberta.

Previously, Mori worked for 10 years as a forage and range extension specialist in Saskatchewan. When she got involved with the B.C. Forage Association, she saw an opportunity to continue the work she loved with the Living Lab.

“I was quite passionate about putting on things that could possibly be useful for farmers and ranchers,” Mori says. “And just help them have the knowledge that they need to make things go better on their operations.”

The Peace Region Living Lab focuses on a variety of different topics, such as lime application and vermicomposting. There’s also a large emphasis on the cattle industry, with the Living Lab exploring topics such as intercropping, cover cropping and rotational grazing.

Research topics 

Mori says the mission of the Living Lab is “enhancing agro-ecosystems in the Peace region,” while focusing on carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emission reduction.

“The carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emission is sort of the overarching sheet that binds it all together,” she says.

Producers usually bring forward projects that they would like to see researched.

“The 55 producer projects that we have there, I would say every one is unique,” Mori says.

She says there are a variety of projects being done on many different topics. While some are seeing how they could rejuvenate a pasture or hayfield without breaking the soil to reseed, others are taking a deeper look at multi-paddock grazing and how quickly it might make an impact on the land. There are also projects comparing very dense bale grazing to a lower-density bale graze. These are some of the things producers in the area have expressed interest in learning.

Each project always comes back to the environment, however. Along with the greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration focus, the Living Lab will be doing other things to focus on the environment, such as environmental co-benefits, which is finding other benefits that are a result of applying the best management practices, Mori explains.

Producer role

Living Labs take a unique approach to research by directly involving producers. The producer commits to joining the project for however long it may go on, and they provide some of their land to be used to conduct the experiments, trials and samples. In return, the producer gets to express exactly what they would like researched.

“The special thing about the Living Labs is that it’s producer-focused and driven,” Mori says. The producer works with a research team, which is assigned by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Mori says they can also pull in additional expertise, if need be, such as from agrologists or experts from nearby universities. 

Mori says the Peace Region Living Lab is also doing something different, with what she calls a “learning cluster.” This means that if something isn’t going as expected for a producer, the Living Lab can bring an expert to go out to the field with the producer. Neighbours who are also interested in the topic can join, and as a group, they can discuss what may be going wrong.

“Then we can have just a little session looking at what might be going on on that parcel,” Mori says. “And so, again, each producer can make this a very tailored experience, what would be helpful for them.”

Karin Schmid is a beef production and extension specialist with Alberta Beef Producers, which is heading the Alberta AgriSystems Living Lab, currently focusing on the Peace, west-central and southern Alberta.* She says the Living Lab gives researchers and industry experts a chance to work directly with producers in the field.

“It’s about looking to see what’s happening on the ground under actual production conditions,” Schmid says. “And so it also has producers involved every step of the way with their experts.”

Schmid adds the lab demonstrates the ways that beef and forage farmers, alongside crop producers, can expand on the work they’re already doing on their operations. Hand-in-hand with that, the Living Lab provides an opportunity to show whether what researchers say should work does work in the field and if geography or production systems play a part.

“I also think it could really create a community of like-minded producers interested in trying new things or tweaking existing practices who can share experiences, learn from each other and better others,” she says.

Soil sampling and mapping

Although Food and Water Wellness is more involved with other Living Labs in Alberta, Kimberly Cornish, director of the organization, says they also wanted to provide the same service to the Peace Region Living Lab as the other ones: predictive soil mapping and metre-deep soil sampling.

To map the soils, they use their soil samples to create maps of soil variables from 60 sites in the region. Cornish says they use 60 layers of data to determine the most efficient places to sample.

“When that sample is taken, it can be extrapolated without a lot of noise, because it’s already kind of correlated to all of those layers of data,” Cornish says. “And then we add in another 200 layers of remotely sensed data across the growing seasons to create those carbon maps and bulk density maps.”

They will take samples from all the different sites in the Peace region, as well as a few additional sites.

“They’ll be able to have a carbon map for the entire peace region as an outcome of the project, as opposed to just data on the specific farms and the Living Lab that they’re working on,” Cornish says.

The future

The Peace Region Living Lab is just starting. The first year of the five-year project was spent as an establishment year, gathering baseline data. Mori explains funding was approved late in the year, after farmers had already made plans and the cropping season was well underway.

However, 2023 will see the practices implemented. Mori says they will also have at least seven or eight field tours every summer, put on by the different groups involved with the lab.

Schmid says there are indications the Alberta AgriSystems Living Lab could get extended past the five years, but even with only the five years, she believes they can create change with the work they’ll do through the lab.

“I think, hopefully, we’ll eventually be able to provide some direction around government policy solutions to climate resilience that are practical for producers.”

As a resident of the Peace region, Mori takes pride in the work taking place on the Living Lab — both on the B.C. and Alberta sides. Although the government has emphasized the importance of the environmental work that will come out of these Living Labs, Mori says it’s also important to recognize and build on the environmental work producers are already doing.

“I feel as a producer, you always get these new buzzwords shot at you, like very recently it was ‘regenerative agriculture’ and before that it was ‘sustainable’,” she says. “I sense that producers are pretty tired of this … I think at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is just help the producer have an easier time to make the bottom line work, as it’s not easy being out there, with all the change that’s being thrown at you.”

She says if they can find ways to help producers improve how their farms operate, then that is just as important.

“If we can help a little bit with that, then I think we’ve been successful.”

*Update: This story originally stated the Alberta Beef Producers (ABP) were involved in the Peace Region Living Lab. ABP is not involved with the Peace Region Living Lab, but is heading the Alberta AgriSystems Living Lab, which is present in the Peace region, as well as southern and west-central Alberta. We regret the error.

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For ranchers counting on boosting plant diversity through intensive rotational grazing, a recent study may yield disappointing results.

Jessica Grenke, a PhD student at the University of Alberta’s department of biological sciences, found through an observational study that highly intensive rotational grazing does not benefit plant diversity more than less-intensive rotational grazing.

“This is not an experiment, per se, this is an observational study. We’re able to speak directly to what is actually happening across Canada, across the northern Great Plains. There’s really very little theoretical about this research,” Grenke says. “It’s quite firmly applied.”

In her study, Grenke and her colleagues, Edward Bork, Cameron Carlyle and Mark Boyce, along with her supervisor, James Cahill, looked at adaptive multi-paddock grazing, or AMP grazing, where one paddock is grazed with dense herds of livestock for a short period, then left to recover.

According to Grenke, AMP grazing was created to mimic historical grazing patterns. Producers who use the AMP method are often drawn to the idea of grazing in a way that is natural between the grasslands and grazers and can therefore maximize production.

However, the reality of modern life likely constrains how closely today’s ranches can imitate the grazing patterns of the original bison herds.

“We live in a very different world, obviously. Our knowledge of what grazing looked like back then is also, of course, limited. But even if our knowledge was perfect, we live in very, very small, contained ranches, relative to those historical migratory grazing systems.”

 To conduct their study, Grenke and the other researchers found pairs of producers across the Great Plains — one who didn’t use the AMP grazing method, and one who did. They surveyed 18 ranch pairs and examined vegetation in the pastures.

In the end, what they found was that AMP grazing does not increase plant diversity. Grenke speculated on why this could be.

“I think the simpler answer is that perhaps AMP grazing acts as an ecological filter — it is a more extreme grazing disturbance by definition. And under that definition, you would expect there to be fewer numbers of species able to withstand that kind of disturbance in the long term.”

Grenke says this research, funding by Agriculture Canada, is important to maintain the grasslands and the sustainability of ranchers.

“There’s so much value to knowing what’s actually happening on the landscape,” she says. 

“We can speak directly to policymakers about what this kind of grazing management is doing in this ecosystem. So that kind of ability to more directly answer a question is pretty rare in science… (adaptive and intensive rotational grazing) is very globally widespread, and it’s increasing in popularity. And there is a lot of harm that can occur when this kind of practice is being sold with a limited understanding of what it’s doing to the landscape. I think this can make or break people’s ranch sustainability in the long term.”

U of A researchers have found other benefits to AMP grazing over less-intensive rotational grazing, including improved water infiltration and carbon sequestration.

This article is part of a series. For more see:

• Grazing can AMP up carbon sequestration, U of A researcher says
• Longer rest period drives water infiltration in grazed pastures, researcher says

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