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Jan 10, 2025 | 
no-tillfarmer.com | Monica Brusnahan |Les Henry |Jennie J. Kramer |Michaela Paukner
No-TillFarmer.com's top performing content in 2024 brought together the latest industry news, inspiring farmer stories, no-till best practices, and innovative solutions that are shaping the future of agriculture. This year, we featured video interviews with no-till innovators, pioneers, and experts like Jared Kenney, Jon Stevens, Dave McLaughlin, Steve Groff, and more.
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Jun 23, 2024 | 
no-tillfarmer.com | Les Henry
In March 1993 in Grainews there appeared a piece by a certain soils columnist titled “A Quiet Revolution in Crop Production.” It concluded that within the next two decades we’d see a revolution in the way we farmed. It came to pass much as predicted — but what made it happen was work in farm workshops, mostly in Saskatchewan where the need for zero till was the greatest. Openers were needed that would get seed and fertilizer into the soil with almost no soil disturbance.
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Jun 16, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
Editor’s Note: Les Henry, the esteemed Prairie soil scientist and our longtime soils columnist, left us on June 14 at age 83. Up until the day before his passing, Les was working on and revising this column for the next (July 11) edition of Grainews. We’ll still have this on paper for you in a few weeks, but we felt the many readers of his column would like to see this now. Les’s self-penned obituary is also available online at this link. Our thoughts and condolences go out to Prof.
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Jun 10, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
In March 1993 in Grainews there appeared a piece by a certain soils columnist titled “A Quiet Revolution in Crop Production.” It concluded that within the next two decades we’d see a revolution in the way we farmed.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
This column has dealt with this topic several times over the decades we have been scribbling. Recent sources have raised the nitrate issue again. It deserves repeating once in a while, to make sure no more infants die from the blue-baby condition (methemoglobinemia). The link between nitrate-contaminated farmyard wells and blue-baby was first reported by pediatrician Dr. Hunter Comly in 1945 in Iowa.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
I have been tinkering with climate data for about the past 15 years. Thanks to the folks at the Swift Current, Sask. federal ag research station, I now have complete monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1886 to 2023. That adds five years to my last summary, so we will now do the update. Weather and climateWhat we call “weather” refers to day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year to year data.
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Mar 17, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
Let us start with a mystery. Inga was raised on a farm near Loon Lake, Sask., west of Meadow Lake in the province’s northwest, so we have visited there many times in summer months. While driving Highway 26 north of Pine Cove nearby, I noticed what looked like peat sloughs. The trusty soil probe proved it was peat. But why should the peat sloughs be there? It was not that wet. At Pine Cove Resort there are many private wells documented on the Water Security Agency website.
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Mar 2, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
Many farmers in the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones of the Palliser Triangle have spent a few years now looking at the sky and hoping for rain. In some areas the snowmelt went straight to soil moisture and was a big factor in providing something for the trucker to do. But multiple years with little rain have resulted in many poor crops. The bottom line has taken a beating and something needs to change. In Saskatchewan, crop insurance has been a game changer, but that only lasts so long.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
To make a soil moisture map, you need to understand the soil moisture constants: saturation, field capacity, wilting point and plant-available water. Saturation (Sat) is when all soil pores are filled with water — in other words, the water table. Until recently we did not consider the water table to be high enough to provide water to plants, but we now know the water table does play a role in some areas in some years.
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Jan 1, 2024 | 
grainews.ca | Les Henry
Cover crops is a topic with a lot of ink spilled in many farm publications in recent years. Some scribblers seem to imply that a farmer is a laggard and an environmental hazard if she/he is not using cover crops on a regular basis. Cover crops actually include a wide variety of cropping sequences, and many do have positive effects. We usually think of the “shoulder” season as the main target for cover cropping. The shoulder season is the time after crop No. 1 is harvested and crop No. 2 is planted.
