57 Better Farming | December 2024 Ontario Ag Marketplace GROW MORE WITH LESS by MORLEY WALLACE GPS Ontario THE SUSTAINABLE WORLD OF COMPACTED SOIL Office: 613-489-2932 | TF: 613-489-2932 | www.gpsontario.ca 6558 3rd Line Road South, North Gower, Ontario Morley J. Wallace Mobile 613-229-6375 Morley@gpsontario.ca Jordan J. Wallace Mobile 613-327-6377 Jordan@gpsontario.ca The summer of 2024 has us seeing a lot of heavy pounding rain. Our crops have grown well and we are seeing and recording better than average crop yields. Once all the crop comes off we are seeing excessive compacted soils throughout the country. The heavy clay, is equipment breaking hard, and most of the equipment I am seeing is creating a tillage seed zone of no more than two inches. Everything below that is solid and compacted with no room for air, rain or seed roots. Looking at the soybean roots, they are only two inches thick. They have grown as deep as they can and then they spread sideways. It is early for combining corn, so I have not had much chance to see what the corn roots are doing. But I am expecting to see the same results. Talk to your crop advisor about getting a compaction probe. It is a rod with a point on the end and a gauge on top. By pushing the rod into the ground it gives you a reading on the gauge. It will also show you where the compaction starts and stops. You may be surprised with the results. You as a farmer / land owner, need to deal with this heavy compaction. Your crop yields will be lower if left unmanaged. Ideally cropping seed needs light, fluffy, moist, fertile rich soil, to be able to grow quickly and remain heathy. The soil being light and fluffy, allows the tender roots to easily grow in all directions. This allows spreading out wide and deep into the soil, to capture the fertilizer plant food and moisture / water. Option 1 - If the ground is compacted and there are only 2 inches of loose soil, then the water from the rains will evaporate quickly, thereby starving the plant. Option 2 - The water can’t get away. Pools in low spots drown out the crop, killing the plants and the microorganisms in the soil. We have seen a lot of those spots this year. So with that information and what you are seeing, do you think you might have a compaction problem? It has been seven years of strip tilling on my home farm. I have talked in the past about the seagulls feasting on my earth worms. This fall we land shaped several of our fields. The first day on most fields, we had a field covered with seagulls. These fields after seven plus years, are alive with worms and microbial activity. I have a healthy soil. At the time of writing this article, I had only scale weights that gave me yield numbers of 1.75 to 1.87 mt average out of each field. I am quite pleased with my yields from these fields for 2024. By using my compaction probe I could tell how much density I had in the top 5 inches of soil. Because we wanted to re-level and land form these fields we did work up the soil. We loosened it so the GPS Controlled leveling blade could move soil around. We will see what effect we have had on the crop yields for next year. I’m expecting the low spots to be better and the high spots could take a couple years to recover. All in all we will gain with the total process. Dealing with compaction is another way to create sustainability on your farm. For more information contact me at the office and ask how we can help.
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