Callum Morrison, a graduate student at the U of M, created the survey alongside professor Yvonne Lawley.
“So back in 2019, my professor and I really wanted to know what was happening with cover crops on the Prairies,” Morrison said.
“And because we’re in such an early stage of adoption on the Prairies, there’s not really that much information available as to how farmers are integrating cover crops into their farms…So we went into this with no baseline knowledge of how many acres of cover crops we had, or indeed, where the farmers were located, and what type of farmers were using them as a group.”
Morrison and Lawley created a survey in 2019 detailing basic questions about cover crops and 211 farmers responded, much more than the team expected. They did it again in 2020.
“We had such a positive response from that first year, we decided we needed to go a lot deeper, ask a lot more questions which farmers want to know, including how cover cropping affects tillage, how it affects farm profit, these sorts of questions that are really important to be asked,” Morrison said.
This time, 281 farmers responded from across the Prairies.
Morrison said they had hoped to get 80 respondents, and were blown away by producers’ eagerness to participate.
“So I think this just shows how eager farmers are to take part and share their experiences so that everyone can learn about how they’re using cover crops.”
The 27-page cover crop survey report, published in October, lists the results found from the survey. This includes details such as the size of respondent’s farms; how long the producers have been growing cover crops; the type of farm (livestock or annual grain); cover crop species; how cover crops were planted, and how cover crops were ended, among other things.
Morrison said what surprised him most was how quickly farmers saw benefits from the cover crops.
“Over 70 percent of farmers said they saw benefits within three years of growing a cover crop,” Morrison said. “Many of the benefits that you’ll think of from growing cover crops are cumulative benefits that you may take a few years to see. But I suppose a lot of benefits, such as your grazing or increase in biodiversity or erosion reduction, these can occur very quickly.”
Lawley said cover crops haven’t been as popular on the Prairies because of the shorter growing season.
“What this survey showed us is that people are doing it here, and they’re figuring out ways to adapt this practice, like the idea of cover crops into our system,” she said.
There are other reasons why cover crops are becoming more widely practised in Western Canada.
“The survey results showed that largely the goals are to increase soil carbon, increased soil health,” Lawley said.
“I think that another factor is like, dealing with weather extremes, maybe dealing with increased fertilizer costs. And the desire to, you know, help build soil microbial populations that can cycle nutrients and cycle carbon that can make things more efficient.”
Although surveys were done in both 2019 and 2020, the funding for the project ends after the 2020 survey. However, Lawley hopes there can be more surveys done in the future.
She said she hopes Statistics Canada asks farmers specifically about cover crops in the next census.
