John Kolk hasn’t ironed out all the wrinkles involved in getting a crop seeded and growing while reducing or eliminating the risk of soil erosion, but the southern Alberta farmer has made “significant progress.”

In recent years, a combination of practices that include cover crops and strip tillage have helped to hold the soil in place as row crops grown under irrigation are established on his farm near Enchant, about 45 minutes north of Lethbridge.

Controlling weeds can be a challenge, but he’s hoping in future, as more herbicides are registered for use for drone application, he will have the option to make spot spraying treatments. “Or maybe there will be robotic weed whackers we can program and send out to the field,” he says.

Kolk, who along with family members, owns and operates Kolk Farms Conrich Ltd., says he was pleased with erosion control measures applied on their farm in 2024.

“We didn’t have any soil moving this spring,” says Kolk. “By the time the canola emerged, the barley cover crop was already up and the barley protected the canola. We had howling winds but the barley saved the canola. I know others in the area who had to reseed. These aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions. You have to figure out what works for your farm, with your crops and your growing conditions.”

The issue at hand is that conventional tillage practices, required to work down crop residue and prepare soil for seeding row crops such as corn, dry beans and seed canola, can leave the soil exposed to prevailing southern Alberta winds. Those winds can rip across Prairie farmland with intensity ranging from 50-70 to even 100 km/h or more. The winds pick up soil that literally sandblasts crop seedlings; wind shear can cut cotyledons off at the stem.

Kolk started looking at strip-tillage and cover crops in 2020 and now, four seasons later, he uses different practices depending on the crop. He uses strip tillage for seed canola, dry bean and grain corn crops.

Kolk went with a Yetter Maverick HR Plus strip-tillage tool to prepare the soil for row-crop planting. It’s 22 feet wide, with 12 rows, which matches the width and row spacing of his planter.

On each row of the strip-tillage toolbar is a 20-inch diameter cutting coulter, to manage residue. It’s followed by a row cleaner blade — and that’s followed by a knife opener that can be outfitted for liquid and dry fertilizer application. His unit included roller baskets at the back that further till and condition the soil.

Ultimately the strip tillage tool disturbs about an eight- to 10-inch strip of soil in each seed row, leaving the area between seed rows undisturbed. The value is that the treatment exposes only about 30 per cent of the field to the risk of erosion, instead of the whole field.

Kolk tries to follow a four-year crop rotation that includes grassy (corn or cereal), broadleaf (flax or canola) and pulse (beans or peas) crops, then back to grassy (cereal or corn). He grows a seed canola crop, under production contract, about once every five years.

Grain corn, seed canola and dry beans are all row crops seeded on 22-inch row spacing with a vacuum planter. Crop fertility is applied at different times. All irrigated land receives manure in rotation, which needs to be incorporated.

Along with manure, a liquid starter fertilizer is applied at seeding with the vacuum planter. Then, in-crop, more fertility is added as needed through the irrigation system. With corn and seed canola, fertilizer can be applied during the strip tillage operation, which places fertilizer six to eight inches deep, with the crop to be seeded three to four inches above the fertilizer.

“We try to follow the four Rs when it comes to crop fertility,” says Kolk. “The right rate, right source, right placement and right timing.”

Row-crop production results in a feast or famine when it comes to crop residue at harvest. With grain corn, for example, there can be too much crop residue after harvest, making it difficult for planters to work through corn stalks the following year, so tillage is needed to work down the corn residue.

With other row crops such as dry beans and seed canola there is often very little residue to provide ground cover.

While Kolk didn’t go overboard with conventional tillage, depending on the year some fields were treated with a vertical tillage tool, and manure also needed to be lightly incorporated into the soil. Generally after harvest he tried to leave most fields undisturbed.

Then in spring, depending on the field or crop, there could be a pass with a cultivator along with a heavy harrow packing before seeding.

“Row crops require some tillage but we are doing our best to minimize that,” Kolk says. “We try to get by with one tillage pass instead of three, and use strip tillage so we’re only disturbing soil on one-third of the field — treatments like that.”

Using a combination of a cover crop and strip tillage with seed canola appears to have a good fit. For weed control, he applies and incorporates granular Edge herbicide before the canola crop is seeded. In that pass, he broadcast-applies the herbicide along with barley, which will serve as the cover crop — both are lightly worked into the soil.

“We seed the barley with the Edge application,” Kolk says. “Then about a week and a half before seeding we make a pass with the strip tillage tool. The barley is up just as the canola is emerging and there is enough barley growth to keep the wind off the canola.”

With seed canola, the strip-tillage tool runs about six inches deep, to loosen, as well as firm the seed row and in the process creates just a strip of blackened soil, to warm up where the planter will follow.

Depending on the type of canola seed being produced, he’ll either spray out the barley before the canola emerges — or, if it’s a Roundup Ready canola variety, he can spray it out after the crop emerges.

Kolk uses the strip-tillage tool on fields seeded to seed canola, dry beans and corn. With the cover crop working to protect canola in the spring, Kolk says cover crops might also be used to protect soil on some fields in the fall.

With dry beans, for example, usually harvested mid- to late August, the plan after harvest is to seed a winter cereal as a cover crop to help protect the soil over winter. Kolk will seed winter wheat or fall rye, to either be terminated in the spring before the following crop is seeded, or left as a grain crop.

“We are just trying to keep something green and growing after the beans,” he says. Depending on the harvest conditions and crop, there may not be enough of a seeding window on some fields after harvest to get a cover crop established before freeze-up.

While it’s still early days, he says the new system seems to be working.

“The strip-tillage is doing something,” he says. “I think the fact that we are only disturbing the soil over one-third of the field, is helping to improve soil health — providing some refuge for soil microorganisms. We are not seeing our soil blow, and our yields on these fields are hitting pretty close to what we’d see under conventional tillage — sometimes more, sometimes a bit less, but pretty much on average.”

Kolk says adding manure to cropland is helping to improve soil quality. “Fortunately we are in an area where manure is available,” he adds. “We have applied manure over the past 10 to 15 years on land we bought and have done regular soil testing. So in that time we have seen soil organic matter increase from 1.4 to three percent.

“That improvement in soil organic matter is happening sooner than many experts expect, but the combination of a proper rotation, use of cover crops, and use of manure is increasing the soil organic matter which we can measure through soil testing.”

Kolk was honored earlier this year by the southern Alberta applied research association, Farming Smarter, as he was presented with the Orville Yanke Memorial Award, in recognition of soil conservation efforts over the years.

The award is named after a long-time Medicine Hat farmer, Orville Yanke, a leader in some of the conservation efforts that introduce farmers to reduced and zero till farming practices. Yanke died in 2007.

“It’s an honor to receive the award, but you feel a bit intimidated by some of the other people that have been awarded it in the past,” Kolk said at the award presentation.

He noted that since those early days of zero-till farming producers are now living in different times with different challenges. “I guess the challenges that I’ve worked with in my farming career are now also recognized as important.”

Kolk is also involved in a number of farm organizations, with a keen interest in farm policy. He says one of the weaknesses in adopting technology is that industry and government assistance programs come along after much of the early on-farm research and development has already been completed.

“Industry and government programs get on the bandwagon and provide incentives for producers to adopt new practices and technology after many of the early adopters have already spent their nickel during the early trial-and-error phase.”

It would be helpful, he says, if compensation was available for those involved at the start.

In the meantime, Kolk says he feels it’s important to share his experience with other producers.

“Farmers are always interested in what other farmers are doing,” he says. “Some producers are real pioneers when it comes to trying new practices. I don’t consider myself a pioneer. I like to see what seems to be working and then see if it has a fit on our farm. I try to share the results of what we have learned in terms of what works or hasn’t worked.”