Organic reality - living with weeds

By John Dietz

Ian Cushon

Battling weed outbreaks with high-powered sprayers and chemicals is very effective, and on the surface, satisfying. However, it also left Ian Cushon with 'issues' he didn't like. Today, he's a certified organic grower who's come to terms with the weeds in his life.

Potholes, sloughs, bush, wildlife, thin black soil and long, gentle hillsides dot the landscape where Ian grew up in southeastern Saskatchewan, near the town of Oxbow.

Ian started farming with his brother in 1981, three years after graduating from high school. Four years later, Ian took over the whole farm after a tragic accident. A train had collided with the tractor his brother had been driving. A year later, Ian recalls, he set aside some land "to see if it was possible" to grow crops without chemicals or fertilizers. "I wasn't sure whether our inputs of chemicals and fertilizers were paying off with the dry weather, at the time," he says.

There was more behind it. "I guess it was philosophic, as well as economic. I'd always wondered about our adoption of chemicals and fertilizers, whether it was a good idea or not. I didn't think it was a sustainable thing, in the long run."

Four more years went by, and Ian received organic certification papers for his first two fields through the new Saskatchewan chapter of the international Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA). Today, Ian and his wife Jo-Anne have two young children and are making a sustainable income that supports them, plus a part-time hired hand, from annually harvesting about 1,100 acres of certified organic crops.

It generally takes about 2,000 acres of conventional production to fully support a small family in this corner of Saskatchewan.

They get along without pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, sprayers, chemical fertilizers and without new equipment. Their land isn't blowing. The soil is doing at least as well, and "probably better," than it has for the past 50 years. Their farming life isn't 'fancy,' but it is sustainable.

Managing weeds
Primary crops for the Cushon's on a total of 1,920 OCIA-certified acres include wheat, oats, flax, peas and alfalfa seed. They've also grown, at various times, sunflowers, lentils, buckwheat, caraway seed, yellow mustard and other crops. "We plant almost all the 1,600 cultivated acres every year, and we harvest 1,000 to 1,100 acres of that," he explains. "The longest rotation would be wheat, peas, flax, and then peas for plow down. That's a bit flexible. Depending on weed problems, we may shorten it." The other 320 acres of the farm are not cultivated, and include sloughs, woodlands, old farm yards and fence lines.

Ian plows down 500 to 600 acres of crop each summer for green manure, using a 23-foot offset tandem disc. Peas and alfalfa are his primary plow down crops; sometimes he plows down other crops. He's even been known to incorporate alfalfa on some fields for three or four years in a row, just to get good weed management.

Plowing down aids in weed management, fertility, organic matter content and soil tilth. It often takes more than one pass with the disc. Ian and a part-time helper are busy with tillage most of the summer, working in the green manure and controlling weed flushes. Still, he admits, "Weeds are a major issue for us. Understanding the biology of weeds is very important." Conventional farming almost dictates a simple pre-seeding burnoff now for one-step weed control. There's no such option for the organic grower. He works hard to manage the weeds throughout the growing season. They're the biggest production problem he has, and probably will keep that title.

Some weed management requires direct attack with tillage. As a line of defense against weeds, he broadcasts alfalfa and flax seed. He also 'out-maneuvers' weeds with careful crop rotations and timing techniques that increase crop competitiveness. Ian says, "We use tillage, spring and fall, to stimulate weed growth. We try to have a flush of weeds as many times as we can before we seed, especially for a non-competitive crop like flax." Every acre, after harvest, gets fall tillage to control annual and perennial weed patches. Ian likes to work the field to a four-inch depth with narrow shovels, but will use sweeps if the soil is soft or if perennial weeds like Canada thistle are the main concern. On the dirtiest fields, he may do a second trip in the fall.

He normally does an early spring cultivation - depending on weed growth and soil conditions. If it's dry, he saves moisture by direct seeding into the pre-worked stubble. "If you get wheat established into good moisture on green manure fallow, you really don't have to worry much about the weeds. Wheat is very competitive."

At the other extreme, for flax, he may do three trips for weed management in spring before seeding. He often seeds flax between the first and second week of June. Timing varies. Early seeding sometimes work well. Other times, late seeding seems better, depending on field history and weeds in the individual field.

Wild mustard has become his Number One weed problem. "We find it very elusive, although wild oats is certainly an issue, too. Delayed seeding will manage wild oats. For wild mustard, it has to be very delayed," he says. That's one reason flax works well in his rotation. "You can delay seeding flax quite late. By that time, we've had several flushes of mustard."

His other tillage tool is a rod weeder. The rod weeder is critical for weed control in the window between seeding and crop emergence. Effective weed control in that window, up to the day a crop emerges, can spell a big difference in end-of-season harvest yields.

An older 41-foot air seeder with 16-inch sweeps is his primary seeding tool. It also can be set up as a deep tillage cultivator with 12-inch spacing and as a broadcast seeder. "We sow alfalfa or flax through the broadcast seeder in front of the cultivator. It's best if they're seeded very shallow. If we have moisture at that time, we find we get a better stand establishment," he explains. Broadcasting these crops, which probably are the least able to compete with weeds, eliminates rows where weeds could thrive. His emerging alfalfa or flax, scattered, covers the ground better from the first day of emergence. It's called seedbed utilization, and provides extra competition against weeds.

Other techniques on organic farms that aid with weed management are mowing and intercropping. Ian has tried intercropping, but doesn't use it on a regular basis. As for mowing, he says, "Our farm has way too many sloughs, but that would be a good strategy where roadsides are the main source of weeds. Here, it would be a tremendous amount of work."

Rotation choices
Someone coming out of conventional production probably can seed flax on a field that's been fallowed with green manure. It worked very well for Cushon at first, now he wouldn't try it. His crop rotation today, based on experience, is carefully developed and extremely important to the success of the whole farm.

Green manure plowdown is his only source of fertility for replacing or building up crop nutrients. Now, after the green manure plowdown, he seeds wheat. "When there's lots of nitrogen available, wheat does really well," he says. The next year, there's less nitrogen and lots of wheat residue. "That's where we put our peas," he says. "Peas fix their own nitrogen, so in the rotation that year, they have the advantage over weeds." In it's third year after a green manure plowdown, the soil is even more depleted of nutrients. Weeds as well as crops are less likely to do well. That's the time for flax.
"Flax is less competitive, but it can be sown quite late and it's not a heavy user of nitrogen," Ian explains. Flax 'tolerates' the third crop position fairly well. It has some nitrogen deficiency and lower yields than on 'conventional' non-organic farms in the area, but it's reliable because Ian has seeded it late after controlling the weeds that already were struggling for nitrogen. "We don't get record yields out of flax, but they're decent," he says.

And, what are the yields?
Wheat is "pretty consistent" at 30 or 31 bushels an acre, similar to the area average for conventional growers. Oats, Ian's alternative to wheat, yields 60 to 70 bushels an acre. Cushon's peas and flax both yield below the area average. His peas average 23 or 24 bushels an acre; his flax averages 10 bushels an acre. He says, "You don't always see a good return (on investment), but there are years when you do a lot better, when prices are substantial and yields are good." In late 2003, organic markets were paying producers an organic premium of about $8 -$9.00 bushel for wheat, about $8 for peas for human consumption and about $20 for brown flax.

Source:

Ian Cushon
Oxbow, Sask S
PH 306 483-5034
E-mail: coldridge@sasktel.net

See more photos and information on Moose Creek Organic Farm's website