By Lee Hart
Grainews staff

It was only a one-farm, one-year research trial, but a new process for evaluating crop production techniques may be as important as the research results, says an Alberta extension specialist.

The on-farm research trial, carried out in 2007, showed that added phosphorous did not improve yield in field peas, says Roger Andreiuk, a senior agronomist with Reduced Tillage Linkages in Alberta.

That’s useful information to growers, he says -- but then there’s the fact that the research trial was conducted under a new process, known as the Landscape Systems Research Network.

“We feel this network approach to on-farm research is a valuable tool, not only in Alberta, but we would like to see it expanded across Western Canada,” says Andreiuk (shown here at left), who spoke at the 2008 FarmTech conference in Edmonton.

“Wouldn’t it be great, for example, to have 15 on-farm research projects across Western Canada all looking at the same question? Sure, there will be some variables from site to site, depending on weather, weeds, soil types and other factors, but we have that now with the smaller research-scale plots. The beauty of this approach, however, is that it is all done under farm conditions, which hopefully makes the information that more relevant to producers.”

The focus of the Landscape Systems Research Network is to form a working partnership or network for producers, researchers, agronomists and private industry to test and evaluate new products, equipment or new practices, all on a farm field scale as opposed to small research plots.

In the pilot project, launched in 2007, working with producer Gordon Tuck of Vegreville, Alta., the research trial, laid out over a 60-acre field, looked at the question of whether phosphorous played a role in nitrogen fixation of a pulse crop.

A recent report from the Alberta and Saskatchewan Pulse Growers and Philom Bios said there was a need for on-farm research to address questions surrounding the optimization and capture of nitrogen fixation. And a show of hands among producers at the conference showed about half added phosphorous when growing peas and the other half didn’t.

“So based on that recommendation in that report, we figured this would be a good first trial,” says Andreiuk.

So Tuck, working with researchers, agronomists, other producers and industry set up this well-defined, well-monitored research project on his farm. The plan is to use this model on other farms to evaluate a wide range of issues and topics.

In this Alberta project they created replicated plots that compared sites with no added phosphorous to sites with 25 pounds per acre of added phosphorous and sites with 50 pounds per acre of added phosphorous.

Monitored by various players in the network over the growing season, results showed there was no difference in nodulation rates between treated and untreated sites (or plots) and, ultimately, no difference in yield.

“These results are only for one year, but we have a process that follows research protocol that shows that added phosphorous did not make a difference,” says Andreiuk.

“The next part of this project is (to) monitor this on-farm research site next year to see if there is any impact on the subsequent crop related to phosphorous levels. Again, it would be beneficial to have this type of research effort across Western Canada, looking at any and all research issues of interest to producers.”