Conservation management practices can increase sugarbeet yields over time—that’s one of the key messages from a 12-year irrigated cropping study that compared conservation and conventional management.
The study, which ran from 2000 to 2011, took place at the Vauxhall Research Substation of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in southern Alberta’s Brown soil zone. It focused on three irrigated row crops: sugarbeets, potatoes and dry beans.
“The acreages of potatoes, dry beans and sugarbeets were on the rise in the late 1990s, and there was a lot of support from irrigation farmers for some rotation research and also research to look at some soil conservation practices,” explains Frank Larney, the AAFC research scientist who co-led the study with his colleague, Bob Blackshaw. “We had a lot of input [in developing the study] from various farmers representing the Potato Growers of Alberta, Alberta Pulse Growers and Alberta Sugarbeet Growers.”
Soil conservation can be an issue with these row crops because they leave behind relatively little crop residue, they may involve intensive seedbed preparation, and root crop harvesting causes quite a bit of soil disturbance.
Larney and Blackshaw collaborated with a number of researchers on this study, including Peter Regitnig with Lantic Inc./Rogers Sugar Ltd., Jennifer Nitschelm, who was with Lantic/Rogers Sugar at the time, and Drusilla Pearson and Newton Lupwayi, both with AAFC. Funding for the study came from the Alberta Pulse Growers Commission, Potato Growers of Alberta, Lantic/Rogers Sugar, Canada-Alberta Sugar Beet Industry Development Fund, Alberta Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture Program, Alberta Agricultural Research Institute, AAFC’s Matching Investment Initiative and the Pulse Science Cluster.
Source: www.topcropmanager.com