OACC Prairie Coordinator’s Report – March 2005

By Brenda Frick, Ph.D.

We’ve had a challenging winter at the Prairie office of OACC (Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada). Organic Connections was a huge effort and a huge success. It brought farmers, researchers, and visionaries together to learn, to celebrate and to reinvigorate the organic community. Our next huge effort was less successful. In the late fall we learned that our request for continuing funding for OACC was only partially granted. Funds were not granted to cover Prairie office. We have spent much of the last several months seeking funds to make up the short fall. Some applications have failed, some are still outstanding. We heartily thank the province of Alberta and the Canadian Wheat Board for their early, positive responses. At this point, funding for the Prairie Coordinator’s salary is secured for a further year. We are still working hard, hopeful of securing funds for the technical position and for operating funds for travel and communication.

Our plans for the coming field season are thus still tentative. We are very pleased to be able to participate directly in a project initiated by Kirby McCuaig through the OCIA Research and Education committee. This project will be run in partnership with Kirby and with Norm Bromm. We will look at annual green manures as an alternative to black summerfallow. Kirby and Norm will seed strips of different green manures, as well as maintain a summerfallow strip and a weedy or green fallow strip. Jill Clapperton, of the Lethbridge Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada station promotes no-till green manure management. We will test this suggestion by mowing one portion of the test strips, while using tillage to incorporate the green manures on the rest. Next year, we will compare the performance of a common crop on areas managed differently this year. Watch for these projects to be highlighted on field tours organized by OCIA SK#8 and SOCA this summer, and of course in updates on our website.

We will continue to collaborate with researchers across the prairies, to facilitate research for organic producers on cover crop options, cereal varieties, post-emergence mechanical weed control and phosphorus management.

Several graduate student projects are newly completed, or approaching completion, and we look forward to reporting these results to you in the near future. These projects include research on annual green manure seeding rates; competitive ability and yield of wheat varieties under organic and conventional management; alternative management of alfalfa for fertility and weed control; and soil erodibility under different cropping systems. We will also bring you more details of the wheat seeding rate experiment that involved a dozen prairie farmers last summer.

Watch the OACC website and UofS organic website for research reports, events and newspaper articles. The web savvy are encouraged to add their names to our e-zine mailing list. The e-zine is a summary of the new material on our website, sent as a monthly email. The website is a very cost-effective means of making information available. If this does not work for you, please call me and we will try to find an effective alternative.

At Organic Connections, we established a committee of farmers to set up an Organic Prairie Research Coalition. This setup group met by teleconference to determine terms of reference for the new OPRC, and how it would be constituted. OPRC will be a committee of organic farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with an interest and involvement in organic research, who meet to discuss research priorities and methods of funding research. The inaugural meeting for this group is planned for May 2005.

As ever, my job is to serve the organic community. I invite you to contact me with any recommendations, advice, comments or suggestions at brenda.frick@usask.ca or at 306-966-4975. I thank you for your support and kind words in the past, and I continue to look forward to hearing from you!