Q&A: A look into the challenges of Alberta agriculture and climate change

It’s the start of March and we are already hearing about droughts and wildfires. All Albertans will be dealing with the coming effects, but farmers and agricultural producers are on the front lines of these environmental changes.

The Calgary Journal spoke with Ken Coles, executive director of Farming Smarter, for a deeper explanation of how droughts, wildfires and climate change impact agriculture, crops and more.  The non-profit organization is based in Lethbridge and their board of directors is more than 50 per cent farmers. Their mission is to promote innovation in farming, which they do by conducting research, connecting producers and sharing best practices.

Coles has a background in agriculture research, earning a bachelor of chemistry, then a master’s degree in environment and management. He has been with Farming Smarter since their inception in 2012, when two like-minded agricultural groups came together to form the new group.

Connor Balsillie: Alberta just went into a drought, what have you seen over the past couple of years that could be correlated to climate change? 

Ken Coles: Drought is on the top of everyone’s mind right now, but it is not just one year of drought. We probably had about eight to nine years of drought. The data shows here in southern Alberta we are seeing a warming trend, but more towards the winter months. 

Wind erosion is probably the number one challenge. We’re getting stronger winds, which has been a challenge on the farming side. We’re doing work towards helping farmers adopt a new type of cropping system where you do not disturb the soil. 

In other areas, it’s water erosion. You have to adapt the cropping systems to whatever those challenges are. You create a more rugged and resilient system that mimics nature as much as possible. It’s not something we can just all of a sudden say OK, we’ve solved this one and we move on… we always have to keep changing. 

The next area we’re working on as an organization is how can we better protect these high-value soils. Some of the crops require tillage. If you grow a root crop like potatoes or sugar beets, you have to dig them up and that creates a disturbance and increases the risk of erosion. 

Do you mind explaining more about what wind erosion is? 

We tend to get strong winds coming over the mountains. The intensity of these winds are increasing, particularly in times when the fields are vulnerable. Imagine you’ve got a field and you’re growing a crop that doesn’t have a lot of residue, like leftover trash from that crop, since it’s a drought here, you don’t have good ground cover. It happens in the springtime when there’s no snow covering the ground, sometimes in the winter too. That wind is so intense that once it starts to erode a field, you’ve got small particles that start to move. There’s something called the saltation effect where one particle hits another and it’s like a chain reaction. All of a sudden you’ve got topsoil moving off and completely blowing away, then we get soil drifting into ditches which can go into roadways or irrigation channels. 

And what about water erosion? 

If you don’t have good soil structure or have enough residue or cover: intensive rain events can cause water erosion. Again, it’s just picking up the soil and moving to a place downstream. Sometimes you won’t get any rain for the entire season, then you’ll get a dump of four to six inches within a two-day period, it just takes the soil with it and erodes these streams right through a field. Those two things are definitely a challenge associated with climate change: just invariable weather. 

You mentioned high-value crops and how you have to protect them, what is your process of protecting those high-value crops?  

Because of the opportunity that irrigation has, we tend to have much higher-value crops. The potato is the highest-value crop here in Southern Alberta but it requires tillage. You’ve got potatoes, sugar beets and other crops that are competing for irrigation. 

All of these different high-value crops and more diverse challenging rotations. So part of the efforts in protecting those soils is not just in the year we grow potatoes but it’s the rotation. Rotation is a very powerful tool, it’s managing risk and resilience. Some of the farmers prepare their soil in the fall, which would mean they would till it off, fertile and put it into rows, which would lead to the risk of erosion. A lot of wind erosion happens either in the fall or the spring. A lot of it is challenging because we don’t have a long growing season here in Canada: it’s basically four months.  

Is there any impact from wildfires? Do these hotter and drier summers impact your organization’s work at all? 

The heat and the timing of the heat can really stress crops. We’re growing crops that are called C3. C3 crops are basically cool-season crops like canola for example. If we have above 30° weather while the crop is flowering, it will actually make the plant abort, it’s called flower blasting that can impact the yield in a big way. Even the smoke from forest fires has a negative impact on a number of our crops, they don’t like smoke and they don’t like high temperatures. That’s why we grow a mix of different types of crops that can withstand the heat. 

Some crops are deeper rooted and use moisture in the soil profile, there are perennial crops that are even deeper rooted, some of them are shallow crops that fix their own nitrogen and use less moisture. It’s really quite an intricate balance coming up with systems that are resilient to climate change. 

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.