Snow Ridging

By Garry Mayerle, PAg

Conservation Agrologist

One of the crop inputs most limiting in Saskatchewan is water. This past growing season certainly showed us how limiting it could be. A father and son direct seeding on their grain farm in northeastern Saskatchewan have done all they can to conserve water during the growing season. They are now trying to perfect a method of trapping more moisture during the winter months. This method might aptly be called snow ridging.

Wayne and Rollice Gronvold have been featured in several of the Prairie Steward issues. They farm north east of Tisdale. It seems that they have the right combination of enough new ideas, machine shop skills, perseverance, and time to continue fine tuning their production system with new innovations. This idea of snow ridging has been in the back of Rollice's mind for 15 years. In fact he built a scale model of the little V plow they are now using out of cardboard and the grandkids have been playing with it for years.

The Gronvolds had observed several different methods of trying to catch more snow by creating snow ridges. One producer they talked to had a set of small straight walled V plows that were made to mount on the back row of shanks on a heavy duty cultivator. The cultivator was pulled through the snow to create snow ridges.

Also, a number of years ago there were several farmers in the area that tried "trapping" snow. They used bulldozer blades which leave a trap about 8¢ wide. They positioned these traps every 100 to 200 feet apart in the field. The idea was only tried 1 year. Rollice blames the lack of success on the fact the traps were too wide and too far apart. He also says that there was too much dirt pushed up with the snow. The Gronvolds feel strongly that dirt in the snow creates a rapid melt. They want to see the snow melt slowly and all the water soak into the soil. They cite an example of observing several places in a field where a pass was made with a bulldozer blade several times in the same track last winter to get to an area where snow traps were ploughed along a farm driveway. They noticed that during this very dry growing season where this single track / snow trap was made, almost no crop grew.

The Gronvold's idea was to have narrower traps which did not root in the dirt at all. These traps more closely resembled ridges and they would cover the whole field not just every couple hundred feet. The idea began to take shape last fall when they noticed an old cultivator in the fence line of one of their neighbour's. Here was the frame and the shanks needed to hang the plows on. Four plows were each built to resemble about a quarter size V snow plow put out years ago by the local welding shop Hesje's Welding. They were about 40² wide at the back and curved to lift and roll the snow out creating less drag than a simple straight walled V shape.

These plows were fastened on the front of the rectangular cultivator frame with heavy duty cushion spring shanks. The back of the center of the frame was equipped to be mounted on a 3 point hitch. The 3 point hitch that the Gronvold's used was pushed with their 9030 bidirectional Ford tractor. This 105 hp tractor is hydrostatically driven and the driver's seat and steering wheel swivel so that the tractor can be comfortably driven in either direction. The plows were centered in front of the wheels on each side of the tractor. This is about 80² apart. Another plow was hung on the frame on either side of the 2 center plows. Behind each of the 2 outside plows is a wheel which is set to run along the ground for height control. Wayne ran the plows about 4² off the ground. He adjusted the angle of the nose of the plows by lengthening or shortening the top connecting arm of the 3 point hitch. This year Wayne plans to put a hydraulic cylinder in this connecting arm so that he can have on the go angle adjustment. In harder snow, he will angle the plows down so there will be more suction to keep them from riding out of the snow. Wayne ran the 3 point hitch in float position so that the whole unit ran on the outside wheels.

Travel speed was selected so that the snow just rolled off the plows to create a ridge of snow. Wayne said this was about 5 mph. If you went faster the snow smeared or was thrown further out creating less of a ridge. The desired outcome was a plowed V shaped trough that was 40² wide at the top next to about 40² of undisturbed snow with plowed ridges on either side. This pattern was created across the entire field. Each pass covered about 26 feet. Wayne said he could cover a quarter section in about 11 hours. He could go through about 2¢ of snow before the bottom of the tractor began pushing snow. Because the wheels were driving in the ploughed troughs the unit did not push that heavy. Wayne said he burnt about 120 liters of fuel per quarter section. Wayne ran at an angle from west-southwest to north-northeast. The Gronvolds feel they will catch most of the prevailing winds at this angle.

By the time Wayne had this rig ready to go last winter, it was the end of January before he was ploughing. Wayne ploughed a number of fields and portions of other fields. However, the way the winter went there was not another heavy snow storm after he had done his ploughing and all but the outside ridges on all his fields remained empty. Wayne did observe several interesting things about ridging. When he was ridging a portion of one field, he noticed that the stubble was full of snow. When he came back later in the winter before any significant thawing, the unridged portion of the field had 3 or 4 inches of snow blown out of the stubble. In the ridged part of the field, the stubble in between the ridges was still full of snow. Another field he ridged had been sprayed out dehy alfalfa direct seeded into wheat in the summer of 2000. At combining he observed that you could notice the difference in the crop between the 40" ridged strips where the extra snow was piled and the strip or trough where the plow had cut and there was less snow. Several ½ m² samples of crop were cut and bagged to get side-by-side yield comparisons between these strips. Colleen Kirkham, an Agriculture and Agri Food Canada employee at the Melfort Research Station, agreed to thresh and weigh the samples. She observed that the snow ridged samples appeared quite a bit more plump. See table1 for the difference in grain yield between the two strips. Of course, this data isn't statistically sound but it gives an idea of the difference extra snow made this past season. If another snow storm had filled these troughs again, there should have been extra yield across the entire field.

The Gronvolds are convinced that it is worth ridging the whole farm this year. Dr. Malhi, a researcher from Melfort Reseach Station, plans to help set up a site where a scientific evaluation can be made on the results of ridging snow.

One change Wayne would like to make to his snow ridger is to try replacing the heavy duty cultivator shanks with heavier Noble blade shanks but these shanks are hard to find. Wayne aims to be out pushing snow this winter after there is about 10² of snow. He may try ridging some fields a second time depending on how the winter shapes up.

Table 1 -CWRS wheat yield comparison between ridged snow and unfilled trough.