For many of you, the desire for a more profitable farming operation was the primary reason for changing to a direct seeding system. Over the long term you expected to see your costs go down and your receipts go up. That is pretty much the message the SSCA has been spreading the last few years.
And then the September 9 edition of Ag World arrived at the farm kitchen tables. That's when the phones at the SSCA Regional offices began ringing. The reason for all the kafluffle was the headline on one of the columns that stated "Zero till costly in long run: study". Producers who have spent thousands of dollars upgrading equipment and many hours designing rotations were just a little concerned. Needless to say, so was the SSCA.
Since the arrival of the latest Ag World, SSCA staff has studied the research paper referred to in the U of S, Developments in Agriculture column. Its authors are Ahmad Gheidi and Suren Kulshreshtha of the Department Agriculture Economics, University of Saskatchewan. The study is actually entitled "Carbon sequestration in agriculture soils: An integrated analysis of economic & environmental trade-off".
In the study's abstract, it is recognized that soil organic matter is lost under an intensive tillage system and that this system creates greenhouse gas emissions. The authors indicate that conservation tillage systems have been suggested as one way of reducing those emissions. Based on two models the researchers linked together, they concluded that over the course of 150 years, conservation tillage will indeed store carbon but that it is costly to do so - more costly to the farmer than a system of intensive tillage. They suggest that society should help farmers by paying them to offset these losses but that given present circumstances, that isn't likely to happen. As a result, those that continue in a zero (no) till system will lose money. The next 21 pages of the report describe how the authors arrived at these conclusions.
The study looked at the area between Scott and Tramping Lake, an area comprised largely of Orthic Dark Brown Chernozemic soils. Two tillage systems - conventional and zero - and two rotations were incorporated into the models. The rotations consisted of canola-wheat-fallow and canola-wheat-wheat. Based on these systems and rotations, 4 scenarios - 25 % no-till, 35 % no-till, 45 % no-till and 55 % no-till, were applied to the models. And after much number crunching, the conclusions were drawn that farmers will lose money by practicing zero till.
As SSCA agrologists went through the study, they noticed a few flaws. First, in the Tramping Lake - Scott area, conventional till systems would most often have at least one fallow period in the rotation, there would be no continuous cropping. On the other hand, no-till systems would likely have continuous crop rotations including pulses. Fallow is not a typical practice for no-till farmers in this area.
The base year for the study is 1990. No-till systems practiced today bear little resemblance to farming systems practiced in 1990. Equipment and products have improved and so have the rotations and level of management.
It is also significant to note, the analysis of the 4 rotations did not compare no-till to conventional. Rather, the total area was analysed with different percentages of the area assigned to no-till.
The study author's notes in the final paragraph of their report should also be kept in mind. They cautioned: "These results are based on a single experiment and not under real farm situations. Management factors as well as site specific variability can vary and influence the economics of conservation tillage in the short - and long - run. Any indiscriminate generalization of these results should, therefore, be avoided."
Notwithstanding this caution, after reading the study the SSCA's conclusions were different than those of the authors'. We conclude that in order for more carbon to be stored in the soil, conventional systems must be converted to a no-till system using diversified rotations.
Despite what the writer implied in the Ag World article, the SSCA maintains the no-till system is a viable, economical land management system. Many Saskatchewan farmers would seem to agree after successfully making the switch from conventional intensive tillage based systems. If the no-till system was not profitable, as was suggested in the article, the trend would likely be an increase in tillage based systems. The opposite is true. Farmers are adopting this practical, environmentally friendly farming system as is evident by the six million acres converted to no-till from conventional farming systems since 1990. The SSCA supports this change and will continue to design programs to help farmers make those changes and to do so profitably.