Bleeding Edge or Leading Edge?

What I Learned in my Conversation with Lana Shaw from the Southeast SK Research Station.

Perhaps the first step for someone in the agricultural research business is to justify why it's being done.

So why should we research innovations in ag off the farm?

Lana Shaw, manager of the SE SK Research Farm has to answer those questions all the time.

"Haven't they been doing research for many decades? Haven't they already finished doing the research? Can you just let us get on with the farming and do our own trials ourselves?

Look, I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to help you answer questions that you might have, or bring up issues that you might not have thought of. I amplify cool things that other people are doing. I can answer questions more effectively and efficiently than a farmer can on their own. And just because you satisfy yourself that you've answered a question on your own farm, it doesn't mean that everyone else will be able to. Does everyone else have to go and do the exact trials that you've done in order to determine for themselves what they think they're going to do by doing replicated trials? We can get much greater precision and repeatability and actual statistical analysis on that.

We've got hugely variable environments. Locations in the province vary vastly on soils and climate. Then you have year to year variability in weather that can make it really hard to determine ... are you seeing a real effect or was this just chance that something weird happened that year?

By having multiple sites, multiple years replication, and statistical analysis, we can do things on a small scale to be an adjunct to farmers elsewhere. They can be doing their own trials concurrently. It's better if we do have research trials and farmer field scale trials going on at the same time on the same subjects.

And the other thing is for some of our trials, we're collecting 80 to 100 data points per plot on some of these trials. Some of my treatments, we have 22 different treatments for intercropped trials. So we're collecting thousands of data points on just one trial, analyzing them and determining what was consistent about it, or what wasn't. That's not something that farmers have the training or the time to go and do that level of detail. And that's not even including all of the analyticals that we're sending a lot of this stuff for at the end of the year. We're sending samples for analysis and we're able to get funding from various sources to pay for all of that vigorous analysis. I really do feel there's value in what I'm providing to farmers. If I didn't think that what I was doing was useful and it was just self-serving to keep myself employed, I would probably go find something else to do."

Justifying off farm research is one thing, but how much should you be doing on your own farm?

"I've heard people say that there's some percentage of their operation that they should be allocating to research and development. And if that's a percentage of your acres that you can say,"I'm going to take more risks on these acres and the vast majority of the acres I'm sticking with things that I know will put money in the bank." Maybe that's 10%, maybe it's 5%. It depends just how bleeding edge you want to be.

I think you can take some risks and be more adventurous on a field that's close to home, and make that your experimental field. I think some of the people that are doing really exciting things have taken that approach. They're going to keep doing those trials on farm and taking the time to realize that it's not going to be a win all the time. If you only ever try things that you're sure will work, you're probably gonna be missing out on some opportunities. So you try them in a controlled way. Try them in a way that you can afford to fail at and then have backup plans, have a plan B and a plan C."

Lana is clearly passionate about her work, but she said something towards the end of the conversation that really made me think, especially after this year. As a farmer, sometimes you just have to accept that you don't control the actual end outcome because you do not control the weather and are dealing with a ton of variables.

"We strive to have as much control as possible over agriculture over our fields because of how little control you have over the weather. And some of these techniques are releasing some of that control that we do still have, because just because you plant two crops or to a cover crop or something, that doesn't mean it's a predictable outcome.

It's still pretty unpredictable. What is going to happen? That's an uncomfortable feeling until you really get used to the fact that our control is kind of an illusion"

You can catch my entire conversation with Lana at growingthefuturepodcast.ca or wherever you listen to podcasts.