Episode 2:

Marla Riekman

Transcript

Toban Dyck  00:03

This is the extensionist conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck and I’m Jay Wenner.

Jay Whetter  00:11

Hey, Jay, hey, Toban, how you doing? I’m not too bad. How are you good? Do you remember when we were in Halifax?

Toban Dyck  00:16

Yeah, I do. I do that was that was quite recent, and

Jay Whetter  00:22

I can remember that far back,

Toban Dyck  00:24

I can’t, I can’t. There’s like, there’s a line, and it’s just within that threshold. It’s like, but don’t ask me how I got there. What? What do you want to like? I just, there’s a mountain of things that I want to say about Halifax, but you brought it

Jay Whetter  00:39

up. Well, I mean, so we were there for the Canadian farm writers Federation, yes, annual conference, and it goes all around the country to different places, and it was out on the east coast. So Toban and I got to hang out in Halifax with 70 other farm writers. I went on a tour to see an apple processing plant. You were on a different tour, but it’s amazing how diverse Canadian agriculture is, like I was in this apple processing plant, thinking I have not seen anything like this before in my life, but I’m just going to give you the quick version, and then you can tell me your tour highlight and check it into onto Marla. But so the these, these flatbed trucks come in with, like, pallet boxes of apples, kind of like mini bulk bag, except it’s a wooden box. And then they very carefully dump them into a into water so there’s no bruising. And then they go through this sorting machine. It’s all automatic, so it sorts them by size, and it also gives them a quick scan to see if they have any blemishes and have the right color. And then they also has this thing that kind of looks through the apple to make sure there aren’t any internal bruising. And then so it kicks out the ones that are duds, and they go into, like sauce or apple juice. And then the the other ones go into into their bags, and those so they’re sorted by size. See like, there’s all kinds of different sizes of apples, but a bag is all consistent of the same size, that’s why. So they go through these sorting things that is really fun to see that firsthand. What was your tour highlight? So I ate

Toban Dyck  02:11

you gave me an apple, yeah. And I actually only ate it like yesterday. How was it? It was very good, yeah. But I also noticed in the markets, in my tour, we stopped in at a market that some, some entrepreneur had had created that kind of, you know, draws from, from the local farmers. We have lots of produce there. And so apples and pumpkins and other things grow in Nova Scotia. But I noticed the honey crisps in the display were like the size of small cantaloupes. They’re huge. Apples, They’re massive. They

Jay Whetter  02:39

talked that they had these big ones too in a separate box, and they said, nobody’s gonna buy that because it’s gonna be $3 an apple, right? And what do you do? We are in the farmers market, so I guess that’s what they do with them. They pawn them off on people like you.

Toban Dyck  02:51

I love the novelty of it. No, I actually did the size of my head. 

Jay Whetter  02:56

I’m gonna buy this. 

Toban Dyck  02:57

Gonna buy a whole bag of them. 

Jay Whetter  02:58

You eat three bites and you’re sick of it, yeah, and it’s

Toban Dyck  03:01

just too much, but, yeah. I mean, also, it was an interesting, it was an interesting conference. We ended up doing quite a quite a bit at it. You did. We

Jay Whetter  03:12

did a few presentations, yeah, I probably said too many things, me too. But anyway, can we move on. We can move on. All right, we’ve got Marla Rickman, and before we move on to Marla, which we’ll do in like 10 seconds, I just want to acknowledge SAS oil seeds, our sponsors. Huge thanks to SAS oils. Thank you so much for supporting our podcast. I mean, we’re off the ground in large part, thanks to them and their support. Anyway, on to Marla. Awesome. Sask oil seeds, new texting service delivers agronomy resources, event notices and urgent news right to your phone. If

Toban Dyck  03:51

you have questions, you can always initiate a two way conversation with the Sask oil seeds team.

Jay Whetter  03:56

Visit SAS canola.com/texting for details on how to subscribe.

Toban Dyck  04:00

Hi, Marla, 

Marla Riekman  04:04

hi. How are you good? 

Toban Dyck  04:06

Good. Thanks for joining us. 

Marla Riekman  04:07

You’re welcome.

Jay Whetter  04:08

I did the intro so

Toban Dyck  04:10

I can see you’re done. You can just sit here So Jay, out for the rest of the hour.

Marla Riekman  04:17

Marla, you know I am. Are you a Rough Riders fan

Jay Whetter  04:21

still, or are you converted to the good side? Okay, so

Marla Riekman  04:24

I always say that I still bleed a little green, because you can never really completely release that. But I have lived in Manitoba now longer than I ever lived in Saskatchewan growing up, so I am pretty much convinced to tolerate the Blue Bombers. Well, no, I do more than tolerate it. So it’s okay.

Toban Dyck  04:41

Like, are you a fan? Are you a fan of CFL, actually, I feel

Marla Riekman  04:46

bad saying no. I feel bad saying this, I watch more NFL than CFL, do you really I do? Yeah,

Jay Whetter  04:52

well, it is quite good football. And are you a fan of a particular team, or do you just watch because you like no

Marla Riekman  04:58

go chiefs. Do.

Jay Whetter  05:01

Chiefs about, like, mid No. Last year, no. Taylor Swift

Marla Riekman  05:07

became No, no, okay, no, no. But you know, I did hear that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend plays for that team. So, you know, it’s Kelsey, right? Thing, like, I don’t Travis Kelce, something like that. His

Toban Dyck  05:22

brother. Also plays in the NFL,

Marla Riekman  05:23

Jason, yeah, Jason, eagles, it’s fine. I know things. They have a podcast too. They’re very lucky

Jay Whetter  05:29

from us. Well,

Toban Dyck  05:31

yeah, there was that one game when Travis is and Jason’s mom, Donna, came to the game wearing, that was it, the jersey split in half? Yeah, you know her bifurcated self and her bifurcated loyalties. And it was interesting because it was

Marla Riekman  05:47

great, yeah, entertaining, very entertaining anyway, so

Jay Whetter  05:51

we’ll talk maybe a bit more about Taylor Swift later.

Toban Dyck  05:54

Okay, I was hoping we would, yeah, I got a lot to say, but

Jay Whetter  05:58

we need to go back to Marla as a high school student. And how do you say your hometown again? Roster, roster, yes, I always wondered what to say.

Marla Riekman  06:08

No, it’s just the to so. Roster, in Saskatchewan, all right, born and raised

Jay Whetter  06:14

high school, Marla. Less about high school, Marla

Marla Riekman  06:18

High School, Marla High School, Marla was a little nerdy. Oh, really, yeah, no, as in, you were so shocked, aren’t we, all I mean, come on. High School, Marla was into science and math and took all of them because she thought that that was apparently a good idea. She was not the kid who wanted to have all the spares High School. Marla was also a music nerd. It was like, yeah, it was into all the things, except for the sports.

Jay Whetter  06:49

And did you play a musical instrument? Or were you Yes? And what was which one?

Marla Riekman  06:58

I did bring it. I did not bring it.

Jay Whetter  07:00

I say you played the clarinet

Toban Dyck  07:05

Toban trumpet.

Marla Riekman  07:07

You’re both very incorrect.

Jay Whetter  07:09

Drums,

Toban Dyck  07:09

no, right? You have one guess, Jay.

Marla Riekman  07:13

Keep going. How many more symbols to No, not a phone. No.

Jay Whetter  07:20

This is a, like, a brass band, or did you have some strings? No,

Marla Riekman  07:24

I played in band in high school, in like, junior high, I played the flute. Yeah, exactly. It was because I had that option in my home. My mother was a music teacher, and she was actually trained as a band teacher, and had taught band and so she could teach any instrument, as long like, as long as it wasn’t strings, basically. And she was also a piano teacher and a choir director. And so I was choir kid, and I played piano and I played a flute because it was that or the trombone. Those were the two that we had in the house, and I didn’t feel like calling a trombone case round, so my brother got that one. My

Jay Whetter  08:06

friend Scott, he was the tuba player, so he had to take the tuba on the bus with them all the time. So I could see why the flute would be much more, yeah, much more compact. Marla, thanks for all being put on the flute. But we’re gonna move on. We’re going to talk more about science, and then hopefully we’ll actually get into some of the stuff you’re doing with farmers, maybe even talk about extension. Whoa, are we

Toban Dyck  08:30

going to get there? We’re going there. Okay, I’m excited. I’m excited.

Jay Whetter  08:35

We won’t take long on this, but you are now a soil scientist, but your first love when you went to university was more about but yeah, so

Marla Riekman  08:45

I, I started at University of Saskatchewan, because Saskatchewan and just because, and so I had an interest in entomology. Don’t ask me why. It was just something I was intrigued by. But while I was there, the at the time, the last remaining professor was retiring, and entomology was offered at the time through the biology department. And so I wanted to be in agriculture, because I always knew that I wanted to be an ag some way I had grown up in it, and that’s kind of where the passion was. And so I made this decision to when this person retired, because I had no other way to do entomology. I had to decide where else to go. And this was back. You know, do you? Do you remember dial up internet?

Toban Dyck  09:34

You remember that the sound of

Marla Riekman  09:37

the moment, well? And this is, this is like early, kind of like internet options, where there wasn’t a lot of stuff out there, right? And so it actually took me a while to discover that U of M offered an entomology program and actually had a whole department for it in agriculture, and I did not know this because information wasn’t as easily shared in that. Late 1900s and so and so. Then it was, it wasn’t

Toban Dyck  10:05

on the Encarta.

Marla Riekman  10:10

So I made, I made a choice to switch universities and so, as a result of that, I ended up in the agri ecology program. It was just kind of where I was inserted when I registered and transferred over to U of M, and as a result of that degree, even though I was focusing on entomology for all of my like, extracurricular classes and all that kind of stuff, I had to take a bunch of soils classes. And I have to say that when I had been in my first year at U of S and let first year egg, you have that course that everyone has to take that’s like, a little bit of, you know, soils, a little bit of plants, a little bit of livestock and everything, right? The soil section was the most boring thing that I had ever sat through. I could not stand it. It, I like, I slept through, I swear, the entire bit. I didn’t know why anybody would like this at all. And then I took a soils class with David Lobb and U of M when I had to take the soils class. And it was all about, you know, how soils developed, and all this stuff that you’d think is extremely nerdy and boring. And I was fascinated by it. I found it really interesting. So if you had told first year university Marla that she would end up being exactly where she is right now, you know, doing soil science and talking about soil science to people, she would not have believed you at all. And

Jay Whetter  11:33

do you think that’s the key with science? Is that it’s the person talking about the science, not because if, I mean, I’m assuming a lot of the subject matter was similar. Yeah, the U of S, proff and David lob, yeah, you just had the right person, or was it you at the right time of I think maybe it was a

Marla Riekman  11:51

combination of both. So I think there was a little bit of you know, me being at the right age, a little bit more mature at that point, I guess. And maybe mature might be an incorrect word to describe myself, still, but you know, like actually hitting a point in your life where you’re a little bit more kind of thinking bigger picture, possibly, and getting involved or learning about different things and seeing them differently. But I think it was a part, part of that. Part of it was probably the professor too. But the big thing for me was, for some reason, that class clicked, going back to, like my nerdiness of science in high school, I took chemistry and I took biology and I took physics and I took all the things, because I wanted to take all the things, and I found them all interesting. And I think the thing that spoke to me about soil science is that all of these are working together, and they’re all working towards kind of this goal of building soil and just something, yeah, something clicked with me and made it, it kind of made it more real, like taking all those kind of little bits of science and putting it together into this like thing that actually is supporting crop growth, supporting plants, supporting everything else. So that’s where it came from. I guess, when

Toban Dyck  13:02

you went to university and you took that soils course for the first time, was the climate around soils different than it is now,

Marla Riekman  13:09

raw, yeah, it was, like, these days, there’s a lot more focus around soil health, right? Like, that’s the that’s the topic. And we talk about soil being this kind of living, breathing thing now, whereas, you know, 20 years ago, it was a very different feeling around, like how we focused or talked about soil, so it was a bit more, not completely inanimate. But you know what I mean, like this idea of soil is this thing, you know, it just it gives nutrients, and it does this, and it does that, but somehow putting it all together and and things have changed a lot, yeah, getting more into this idea of soil as being a bigger focus of agriculture in

Toban Dyck  13:48

general. Not to take away from this, this chronological, you know, yeah, retelling of how you got to where you are now. But, yeah, I think that’s interesting, because I got when you got into it, and you chose to focus on on soils, where you’re where other people doing that too, or people were like, Whoa. Why would you do that? It’s so boring.

Marla Riekman  14:08

Well, luckily, I had friends who also were just as nerdy about soils, and also went on and did masters in soils as well after graduation. So like, I was still I was on the fence, like, I took my soils classes and found that I really liked them and was getting good grades on them. And I was like, Okay, this stuff is really cool. Still loved the bugs, though, and I almost did a master’s in entomology, like, so close. I was actually in conversation with the researcher at with ag Canada, and we had a plan and everything, but we had to get funding for it, and it was harder to get funding for this project to get up and running, and so it was going to take a bit more time, and I didn’t really have a lot of time, because I needed to enroll and have a project in the program. And so something came up, and it was like, Well, wait a minute, I could do something in soils too. And. I actually thought, thought it through. I was like, I want a job afterwards. Anything soil science probably could be was, yeah, he,

Jay Whetter  15:07

I mean, he was sucking all the air out of the entomology,

Marla Riekman  15:11

yeah, always gonna say he’s the guy, right? No, there’s no extra space. We’ve got John there, right? And I couldn’t wait long enough for John oblosky to retire. So, like, I would still be waiting. He’s still there. Yeah, I enjoyed the bug stuff. But at the same time, I was like, I want to get a job afterwards. And, you know, being the practical girl that I am, I was thinking, I don’t know exactly where I want to work afterwards. But, you know, I could end up in environmental sciences. I could end up in, you know, doing soil remediation. I could end up doing all these different things. Soil had these applications that had jobs all over the place, right? There was more opportunity in my mind, in soil than there was maybe focusing in on entomology. And so I, I made a decision to make that switch, and that’s how I kind of ended up doing a master’s in soil science.

Jay Whetter  16:06

I think, I think we should go into the soil remediation, because that okay Toban, like, Man, I’m jumping ahead, but this is a really key topic. I like how you

Toban Dyck  16:17

like, how you need my approval? Yeah, okay, we should get everybody’s approval.

Jay Whetter  16:23

Yeah,

Marla Riekman  16:25

okay, yeah, I do. I

Toban Dyck  16:26

do want to ask one more question, though, before

Jay Whetter  16:28

we get I know I was sleeping way ahead. That’s why I wanted to make sure I appreciate this, I appreciate this model that we have here.

Toban Dyck  16:36

Very nice. Did you at the time see the trajectory? Like you said, we talk a lot about soil health now, when you were in university and you were getting going into it and diving deep into soil, did you see that it was becoming a

Marla Riekman  16:52

thing? No, I don’t think that I saw it like from the soil health, like where it is right now, I can’t say that I saw that. I’m maybe a little slow on the picking up on things around me, right or something, but I can’t say that I did, and we can always delve into this later too, because I had a real problem with the term soil health when it first came around. And so I don’t know that I would have predicted that soil health would have been a thing because it’s been one that’s taken me many years to kind of get my head around and accept as being like the phrase that we use now. Yeah,

Jay Whetter  17:31

right. Part of it. Just let that slow sorry

Marla Riekman  17:35

to move on from your topic there. Jay, no,

Jay Whetter  17:39

we have, we’ll get there, trust me. But so David lob, I talked to him recently, okay, and he didn’t like it when I said soil health, because he was so frustrated with the notion of soil health, because nobody agrees on it. Yes, what was your first I

Marla Riekman  17:57

think that was my thing for it was, how do you determine that soil is healthy, right? Yeah, yeah. And to use that phrase, it’s still one that I mean, even in extension and stuff, when I’m asked to speak about soil health, we often have that conversation. It’s something that I bring up is around this idea of, how do you determine if something is healthy? And I think the issue that I’ve had with it all along, and have kind of come to terms with the use of it, but still ask this question, is, what is it that you, whoever you are, want in order to determine something to be healthy? Like, how do you determine health? How do you determine human health? Right? Right? So if a doctor is determining human health, they’ve got a whole list of tests that they’re going to subject somebody to, but even all of those tests have a different set of parameters or range of what those results should be, depending on whoever the patient is that they’re that they’re examining, right? And so if you’re looking at, you know, an 80 year old man versus a 20 year old man, or, you know, 45 year old woman versus, you know, a 14 year old woman. Whatever it is like the the parameter that they’re looking at is different, and how they actually interpret the results are different. And so you have to know a little bit more, or have a concept of what it is that you’re trying to achieve, I you know, if that makes sense around trying to figure out health, yeah. And so for soil, it becomes like, if you’re an engineer, a very compacted soil could be very healthy for you, right? But if you’re a farmer, it is not. And so what your end goal is? It has to be considered when you’re making a determination of then what makes it healthy for you as the person who’s using the soil for whatever, whatever purpose?

Toban Dyck  19:48

But is that? I mean, I’m like saying, is that true? Is it? Did you just lie to us, more or

Marla Riekman  19:52

less? No, I do that a lot.

Toban Dyck  19:55

Are there no internal metrics within like because if I think of. Put on my farmer hat, and I say, Okay, I want, I want healthy soil. I want soil that’s going to give me 90 bushel wheat every year, or 50 bushel soybeans every year, but it really that means pumping so much inputs into it and really kind of draining it on a regular basis. Yeah, if that’s healthy for me,

Marla Riekman  20:22

right? Exactly. So you have to, you still have to think about the soils capabilities to be able to, like, to actually achieve that too, right? So it’s a little bit like, think again, that whole, you know, is a is what you’re going to put or have an expectation, let’s say, of a 40 year old man versus an 80 year old man, right? Like, what they can actually achieve? So you’re gonna, you’re gonna go run a marathon, and you’re gonna compete with, like, somebody who’s in their 90s, yeah. Now, if you’re a slow runner, like I am, there’s a good chance you’re gonna lose that race, but, but again, it’s about putting, like, having some of that perspective, so recognizing that what you’re trying to achieve out of that soil, but what that soil can actually achieve needs to be kind of brought into the conversation. But if you were a forester, you might think different. Or somebody who is trying to, you know, use soil in a different way, that’s a non agricultural use, or a different type of use, you may have a different attitude towards what about that soil is then healthy? So I’ve kind of, like, said, I’ve kind of gotten over the use of it, because it’s the term that has become kind of an acceptable term everyone talks about and but nobody can define. There is a bit of a definition, but it’s, yeah, it’s a little bit trickier sometimes to have, like, soil quality is the old school way that we would talk about it. We know what the quality parameters are, and you can assess it that way. It’s just, I think the problem was, when you add the term health, it’s like you’re anthropomorphizing for sure, soil in such a way that it just made it a little bit harder for some of us to get our heads around, yeah,

Jay Whetter  22:01

that makes sense. And when you’re talking to farmers, and you use that, that example about the yield goal, and I think mean from your perspective, when you when you do talk to farmers about soil health in your job, it’s almost like, yeah, define for me your issue, or what’s your goal? And health doesn’t even have to enter into it. It’s okay. Well, let’s, let’s look at what’s this is your goal? The soil is not achieving that goal. Let’s dig into what’s going on, yeah, with this soil? Yeah,

Toban Dyck  22:34

what? No, that’s a good question. I just, I, yeah. I just think as, like, again, the farmer had, is, is like the learning the learning curve then, is, I know what I know what I wanted in my soil in terms of, you know, yields, or, you know, productivity. The learning curve for me is understanding what that other part is, right? And I mean, I know that’s where extension comes in, of course, but you mean part or no, like, what is the quality capabilities

Marla Riekman  23:00

of that soil to produce the thing that you’re trying to produce out of it, right?

Toban Dyck  23:04

That’s what I don’t want to and I don’t want to ask of it something that I shouldn’t like. It’s a very

Marla Riekman  23:10

responsible way to farm.

Toban Dyck  23:14

It’s easy to say it in theory, right? So in practice, it’s a completely

Jay Whetter  23:17

different thing. You’ve got that 20 acres that’s full of salinity and just grows kosher. I mean, we’re not, we’re gonna get to that. We’re not gonna get, yeah, okay, but you’re so you’re not gonna get 90. You want 90? Well, yeah, sure, you might want 90, but you’re not gonna get

Marla Riekman  23:33

90, unless we’re actually harvesting the Kochia, maybe you will get 90. Oh,

Toban Dyck  23:37

see, this is, see, this is interesting, but we’re jumping ahead. Now. Jay has a whole battery of questions that he’s being held.

Marla Riekman  23:43

So really we want to talk about the

Jay Whetter  23:44

landscape modification. And there was a phrase you used 20 minutes ago now that I wanted to ask a question about that. Toban totally derailed, and we’re back to it. We’re going to get to we’re going to talk about that, and then we’re going to talk about Toban case study, which you’re

Marla Riekman  24:00

gonna help us. I didn’t realize that I had to actually get technical advice here, but I’m working. I thought I was just here for fun. But okay, all

Jay Whetter  24:08

about flutes and your favorite food.

Toban Dyck  24:12

We haven’t even gotten to the favorite food yet. Anyway, all right, the landscape

Jay Whetter  24:19

modification

Toban Dyck  24:22

wasn’t it regenerate? Wasn’t it regeneration? Sorry, soil,

Marla Riekman  24:25

landscape restoration. There you go. That’s the phrase. I was like, yes, there you go. You’re welcome bringing it back. Yeah, no, I’m here for that.

Jay Whetter  24:33

I think this is a notion that Navy farmers could do more of but it’s still at a very low level. What is it about that that appeals to you? What is it

Marla Riekman  24:47

first? Yeah, okay, so soil, landscape restoration is essentially the concept of, I mean, the easiest way, I guess, to say it would be you take soil from the bottom of the hill and you put it back. On the top of the hill. But essentially, what you’re trying to do is restore the natural landscape, because tillage erosion drags soil from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill, just from the act of moving up and down and over it with tillage equipment, seating any kind of equipment that has any soil movement is going to move soil, and gravity helps to drag it down to the bottom of the hill. And so you have areas where you have maybe that Hillier kind of landscape, and you can have these eroded Knolls, and you end up with like, thick topsoil at the bottom of the hill. So the concept is to just scrape some of the stuff from the bottom and put it back on the top, and then you’ve restored that topsoil. And so, like David lobbs done a lot of work researching in on this area, it is not a new concept, but it’s something that a lot of people haven’t picked up on yet, or kind of heard about, or they have heard about it, but haven’t committed to the idea of it yet, because it’s cut it like it’s going to take some time, right? You’re going to go out there and you’re gonna move soil around, although, I don’t know many farmers who don’t enjoy spending time playing like Tonka Trucks again, right? Like being able to scrape soil around is actually kind of like, let’s do that. That sounds like fun. Harvest is done, right? Yeah, exactly. Scrapers. But, I mean, you also have to have, I don’t know, you know, open time after harvest, and not have five inches of rain fall great exactly right, as it just did in this area at an inopportune time, right? So it’s not something that’s just going to be easily picked up and done very quickly. It’s not a day’s worth of work. It’s, you know, a week’s worth of work to work on a quarter section, to move it around. So it takes time. It’s a commitment. It’s going to take diesel in order to get it done and a bunch of labor. But one of the neat things that David’s research has shown is that by restoring that land, you can get your yield back pretty much like immediately, and once you have that yield back on that eroded Knoll, you can actually make that whole practice pay for itself very quickly. So, like, the return on investment for that activity is somewhere between three to five years. It’s a really fast as a land management technique. It’s actually a really quick ROI. And

Jay Whetter  27:13

are you rate into higher productivity, or is there a bit of a lag in terms of, like, the soil needs to, yeah,

Marla Riekman  27:20

you can have, you potentially could have a, like, a little bit of a lag. You have to kind of prep that top where you put the soil back and do a little disking and things in order to just have a nice seed bed to seed back into at the bottom of the hill. You could potentially have a lag as well, just because you’ve taken that, you know, that kind of richer or more microbially active topsoil away. So there is a rule of thumb that you don’t want to take more than, you know, six to eight inches down at the bottom of the hill, because now you’ve taken all the microbially active soil out, and then you have to wait for that activity to start up again. Well, that’s

Jay Whetter  27:56

interesting. So you’re you’ve still got a nice thick layer of a horizon down there, but it’s like old very day. So where did how deep does that microbial it’s

Marla Riekman  28:09

usually six inches, like that’s where that the major activity is going to be. And so if you take more than that, you can you know it, they’ll re establish themselves. It’ll take a while. And so you actually get a bit of a lag in that period. What’s also interesting is that when you put the soil back on the top of the hill, four inches is the recommended thickness of topsoil to put back up there. You can put more on but more isn’t going to actually improve the soil beyond what the four inches essentially provides.

Jay Whetter  28:39

Well, I like that idea. I mean, it’s, it’s interesting. I think we’re just starting to discover what goes on in the microorganisms within soil. But maybe you knew all along, or maybe we’ve known all along that that top six inches is the most active, yeah, but now we’re just starting to learn about what all of this activity? Yeah, exactly.

Marla Riekman  29:02

And what happens when you start disturbing and changing that, right? Like, and disturbing it in a major, kind of a major way. So, yeah, so you end up with all this a horizon, like, there’s a ton of it, but, yeah, it’s, it’s buried, like the old a horizon is buried. So the microbial activity has kind of moved closer to the surface.

Toban Dyck  29:22

Okay, so, so let’s talk about what is the A horizon? Oh, yes,

Marla Riekman  29:26

the A horizon is the top soil. There we go, as I forget the soils we speak in ABCs and so soil has a, b and c horizons. The C horizon is the the parent material. It’s what the soil originally started as, essentially as the glaciers receded, then that was the kind of the mixed up material that soil developed on, and as organic matter and things start to develop, then you get that darkening of the soil that’s development of a top soil and a horizon. And with for. The soil development, you develop a B horizon as things kind of leech out of this the A horizon and kind of create a B horizon down below. And

Jay Whetter  30:08

we’ve come a long way in terms of erosion prevention on the prairies with no till and getting rid of summer following that kind of thing. But David described for me, David lob this notion that, yeah, so you’ve eroded all of your A horizon off your hills, and now you’re eroding B horizon and burying your old a horizon. So you’ve got all of your best soil buried in these low spots. It’s just when you see it described in a, in a, in a graphic diagram. So

Toban Dyck  30:38

that’d be very interesting. Isn’t that amazing? Like, is amazing. So, yeah, I

Jay Whetter  30:42

mean, what you’re talking about kind of brings everything back to sort of normal. But how do you extend that? Like, what is the challenge of getting farmers to seriously look into this? You

Marla Riekman  30:55

know, barriers, like, barriers to any kind of BMP adoption, like, it’s we need to get information out. Obviously, that’s always a critical thing is trying to get information out to people so that they understand things. But then we, you know, getting content or information to people funding quite often assists and funding, if for some things, like, you know, when we talk about the fact that it’s got a return on investment of three to five years. Do you need to fund it? Well, yeah, you do, because you need to be able to provide some kind of incentive for people to try something new, right, and try to, like, jump in and do something they may not have considered doing, so that can help to kind of get past the fear of, well, what if I do it and I don’t end up benefiting, what if the yield doesn’t come back? And so that can really help. Having those early adopters share information like that peer to peer, learning becomes a really big critical piece. So how do you get people talking and really, ultimately getting people talking about it? Yes, for us, like one of the biggest things that I think was very impactful for people. In 2018 for our crop diagnostic school, we actually did a demonstration on tillage erosion and this landscape restoration. And so David lob was speaking with me at the event that week, or for that two week period, and I had a lot of people come up to us because they never really thought of it. And this one farmer comes up and goes, Okay, Marla, you guys were talking about, you know, it’s going to cost this, this, and this, I just did some quick back of the envelope calculations. She’s got her piece of paper. She’s sketching it out. She’s like, I can do it for way cheaper, because I own my own equipment, right? I own, I’ve got a scraper. I can move this. Why am I not doing this? And so it was interesting, because, you know, this one person who is listening was able to walk away and say, Okay, now that I’ve physically seen it. Because sometimes we give these, you know, we give these extension presentations, you show numbers, you show pictures, you show all that kind of stuff, but standing in the field and looking at it and having that conversation is so big, and I mean, it was still small scale, but we had this demonstration where we put up like we had great scrape soil away to simulate the the loss of the topsoil. We left some kind of as it was, and then we added some from below, and we grew corn on there, and the corn where we had added, versus, like scraped on the top of the hill, it was like four feet taller. It was this huge impact, right? And so when people can see that, that visual makes a lot more sense, and when you’re seeing it in person, it makes a just a very different kind of feel to it. And

Toban Dyck  33:38

what like in your conversations with farmers and have these extension events, is there, is there something? Is there a gap there among farmers, and what is it like? What is the learning curve for them? I think,

Marla Riekman  33:50

Well, for me, personally, working in soil management and these soil related things, again, a lot of the gap for trying to not convince people to follow these things, but in order to kind of get them to think about the impacts of making these changes on their farm, it’s difficult to really kind of drive this home if you don’t have the economics behind it, because it’s really easy. You know, we, and I shouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s, you can, you know, make a difference. Say, a fertilizer decision. I add the fertilizer, I pay this much, I get this much yield, right? And so you can kind of see that, because we know that. But if it’s I cut out the tillage, or I cut back the tillage, and then this happens. But when that, this thing that happens is an improvement in soil health, and I am air quoting that right now. Right like soil health. How do you define what that final benefit is going to be to me as a farmer, as a producer, to be able to know that I’m investing in this thing that’s going to pay back somehow. What does that pay? Back look like, and this is always the tricky part. When we’re talking about soil management, talking about changing kind of concepts or ways that we’re thinking about the field, that we’re not thinking about the field as a square anymore, right? This like corner to corner field. We’re actually thinking about managing maybe the soil differently across that field, managing it by landscape, breaking it down a little differently. It’s a complex thing to change your way of thinking. And if I can’t say if you do this, then these are the benefits that you are going to be able to see down the road. It’s really hard to convince someone to do it. And so in a lot of ways, I guess, we soils. People tend to be very passionate about what we do. We have to have that level of passion in order to keep driving forward right through this, you know, this period of time where it’s it’s sometimes difficult to kind of capture, capture what this is going to look like. So, I mean, I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and in order to kind of get through to this, I’m still doing this for another you know, like, how much longer do I have to go before people are going to start listening sometimes, how you feel about it, right? I’m sure

Jay Whetter  36:13

that’s how people feel about integrated weed management, which we’re not going to get in. Yeah, exactly

Marla Riekman  36:18

the same. When we get to the Kochia, we’ll talk about the soil and the weeds. There’s lots of clients just

Jay Whetter  36:24

on this though, like I can see the challenge where a farmer is looking at a quarter section with 10 hilltops, and they know that those hilltops are very unproductive, and I just don’t know how you convince them. Okay, let’s spend all of this money fixing 10 hilltops that I’m not sure is going to work in the end, and this is only adding up to 20 acres. Yeah. So what’s the point of piecemeal all of this? And yeah, so, so how do you do you break it down on an acre by acre, and say, okay, you’ve got these, these 20 acres in this field that are almost not productive at all. Yeah, you’re spending this money. You could, you could spend a week and $10,000 doing this. Sounds like a long time. Sounds like a lot of money. But in the end, those 20 acres are now going to finally be profitable,

Marla Riekman  37:24

yeah, and that’s and the alternative is, quite often people say, Well, I’m just moving to no till, right? I’m going to move to no till, and I’m going to build the soil on the hilltop. And conceptually, that’s great. However, it took 10,000 years for the soil to be developed on that hilltop to begin with. You can’t expect to just stop tilling it and then no till, or put cover crops or do things on that surface and then say, okay, the soil is going to rebuild itself. It doesn’t work that way. I mean, it does work that way, but it depends on how many 1000s of generations you’re planning on waiting for, you know, this productivity, to come back to that

Jay Whetter  38:04

level, right? And when your hilltops only producing 10 Bucha an acre, and the rest of the fields producing producing 60, the biomass is, I mean, just

Marla Riekman  38:11

the biomass is, it’s not there longer than Right, exactly, and so, and those hilltops already didn’t produce a whole lot in the first place, which is why they have a thinner a horizon, thinner amount of topsoil, because they tend to be drier, or they just don’t, kind of grow the same amount of biomass as they do at the bottom, bottom of the hill, because water runs down to the bottom of the hill, so you can grow more plant material there. So on top of it, they were already held back, right, and then that little topsoil that was there you’ve stripped off, it’s asking a lot, essentially, of the plants that you’re growing there in order to fix the problem, if you want them to be productive again, the best plan is to move that soil back to the top and then adopt the no till practice. So there’s a there’s a lot going on right in terms of trying to get that up. I understand the conundrum of the question is, you know, how do you actually convince somebody to focus in on this 10 acre area, or these 10 acre little, tiny kind of spots that make up 10 acres? It’s not a large acreage, necessarily, over the whole field, but we spend so much time these days talking about variable rate and all of these different things that are really trying to manage the variability within the landscape. If we could cut back some of the variability and get some of that land productive before you know, would we not be also in kind of a better situation to begin with? So we can, we can spend a lot of time mapping and figuring out the variableness of that landscape, but again, until we kind of decrease some of that variability, we could focus our energy a little bit different. It’s just a it’s a mind shift, right? Like, it’s kind of shifting the perspective of what it is, again, that you’re trying to get out of the soil, and that’s where the soil health thing comes in too. Is like, what are we trying to. Achieve out of this field. What do you want to achieve out of that soil?

Toban Dyck  40:03

So I’ve had conversations about soil health with farmers, and have witnessed Eve dropped on numerous of them. And when you talk about increasing soil health on your farm, there’s a there’s almost a switch that goes off in some farmers minds where that’s almost like, that’s not really an ROI consideration. It’s like, it’s like altruism. That’s, that’s why you do it, because you just want to be a good person. And so it really kind of draws a line in the sand between people who are altruistic and just want to do good things for the sake of doing good things, and the hardcore economist who’s saying, No, I only do things that give me an ROI within like a seven year span. I think for some, as soon as you start talking about soil, they go to, well, I’m not an altruist, so that’s not for me. I’m not going to see, I’m never going to see the benefits of that. But what you’re saying is that’s not necessarily the case. Well,

Marla Riekman  40:56

so I think that we all like, there’s often this attitude of, you know, we’re stewards of the land, right? And we’re here, and we want to keep it in the family. We want to do all these things to it, but it’s still a business. Farming is still a business, and the business has to pay, right? You have to be able to feed the family, not just hang on to the land for the future generations at the same time. And so when you think about that, like, if we’re doing things that are maybe investments into different practices, and we we don’t know whether or not they are going to financially gain and get that financial gain back. It’s harder to make that decision. So there is that group who are very altruistic, who are very much thinking about like, I’m a Land Steward and I’m going to do this thing. But sometimes there’s also going to be people within that group who just jump in, like, head, you know, feet first. They’re just like, going going into this concept. And I sometimes want to hold them back a little bit too and say, Okay, I like the energy. I love the energy. I’m loving how you feel about this. But at the same time, I also don’t want to see somebody go into an idea where they’re just like, 100% gung ho. We’re gonna, you know, jump into this thing without considering the fact that there is an investment into it, and what are you gonna get back from that investment? So it’s soil health is an investment. It is something that we have to think about, treating the soil differently. But I 100% respect the fact that there’s a there’s a give and get, take or push and pull right around the need to be altruistic, to think about the longevity and that sustainability of that that farm, but also recognizing that there needs to be some financial kind of perspective put into the to the conversation too.

Jay Whetter  42:39

But I like that we can achieve both. So I think so. Do you do to Yeah,

Marla Riekman  42:45

I do think that there is, there is that? Because, again, we’re also at the same time not going to continue to get any benefit, you know, any yield, any kind of future, out of our soil if we’re not actually protecting it and caring for it at the same time, right? So we do 100% need to think more about that. But I guess I’m, I’m thinking more around this whole like the some of that short term investments and things, and maybe this is where I push a little bit more for, okay, if some of these gains are harder to put a number on, harder to see that there’s going to be a financial gain right now to a farmer, then, is that where funding should be pushed towards right is that where there should be more assistance than to kind of adopt these practices or move into some other kind of different way of Thinking about how we manage the soil, because you know that that can assist with the process and and that you know, then you step forward into the whole well, who benefits from the sustainability of the farm? Is the benefit of this of soil health and the sustainability of that soil, or how we manage the soil is the benefit just to the farmer and their future generations of farmers on that field, or is the benefit also to the public? Because not only are we continuing to produce food, but we’re also sequestering carbon and doing all these different things that come along with the activity on that field. So there’s public benefit to that as well. It’s not just private benefit. And so how do we reflect that and how we invest in those types of practices. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  44:24

and I mean, just to build on that, I think sometimes just doing the right thing on your farm, even though it might not, it’s not clear how it’s going to pay off for you within a decade or whatever, is a benefit to your operation in ways that just just that attitude is a benefit to your operation, like doing it doing the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. Yeah, we’ll see your farm likely become profitable in ways that you can’t necessarily reverse engineer, right? Yeah, exactly.

Marla Riekman  44:54

It’s an investment. It’s like taking out an RSP for your kid, right? Like you have no idea what that fee. What they’re going to choose, all this kind of stuff, but you’re still putting that investment in to kind of their future. And so, you know, making these changes, making these decisions, that’s exactly what it’s doing. It’s creating kind of that long term benefit.

Jay Whetter  45:15

A big thank you to SAS oil seeds for all the support. We really, really appreciate it. We couldn’t do this podcast without SAS oil seeds and the support they’re providing us. And you know, if anybody else wants to step forward, we’d welcome their support as well. But for today, saskoil seeds, yes, thank you. Big thanks. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  45:34

yeah. On to the show.

Jay Whetter  45:39

I grew up with a father who loved trees, and so we’ve got, and, you know, on the prairies, takes forever to get a tree row established. And, I mean, that’s really long vision thinking, but we’ve got new tree rows growing on our farm. I say our farm. I’m not involved my brother farms, but, but you don’t see that very often, but, and we don’t need to talk about trees, although I do like talking about trees, but like

Toban Dyck  46:02

that book about where the trees talk like it’s what’s the book called? Do you know that? You know that book where they tree the roots talk to each Oh, no. Oh that talk to each other. Not the kids book. Forget the name of it. That’s a great book anyway, okay,

Jay Whetter  46:14

but, but Marla, I do actually want to talk a bit about trees as a way to transition into a bit of a conversation about salinity, because I remember you and I had a had a chat about, you know, you’ve got these water flows that are broken up by roads. You might remember this. I’m not sure you do, but, but you talk to a lot of media people. So how could you possibly

Marla Riekman  46:39

remember? I always remember every single conversation we’ve ever had, Jay anyway,

Jay Whetter  46:45

but I do want to spend a bit of time at the end talking about Toban patch of salinity. But as a way to lead into that, you said you could, you know, you got, you’ve got, let’s just say, 20 acres of salinity at the edge of a field. And if you plant a strip of, say, forages, or, I think willows were one of the example you use around wetlands. Yeah. So you could actually use trees, in this case, to treat a smaller area, yeah, but that actually the wicking action, or the moisture removal, actually helps, yes, the surrounding land. So you’re dedicating, say, a 25% of the area to trees, which then, okay, so that productivity is completely lost, but those trees can can rescue the other 15 acres of my little

Marla Riekman  47:42

I’m glad you remembered that conversation that we had. Yeah, good job, yeah. But what, what I would have been talking about. So the early part of my career, before I started with Manitoba Agriculture, I managed the Manitoba zero Tiller Research Association farm back when it existed, and they did a like a riparian health assessment around all of the wetlands that were on that field, and the wetlands that were in the annually cropped fields and even in the forage fields, had salinity around them, and the few that did not have any salinity still had willows growing around so they were the places where, again, those willows were taking up water and intercepting that water, because otherwise that water is moving underground and it’s moving out, and it’s pulling the salt up. So yeah, you can utilize plants and trees and things like that in order to manage some of those salinity problems. But then it also means that you’re managing you have to farm around the obstacles. So when I say, like, I understand the need to be able to be a bit more kind of pragmatic, maybe, about how we view the landscape, like the management of the field. Having that wetland there and having those trees means you have to kind of spray back away from them, so you’re not spraying them out and stuff like that. But there’s so much benefit to having them there, because you can decrease that saline creep into the field and have more productive acres. So yeah, there’s great ways to be able to use, like deep rooted forages and and trees and things like that, in order to manage water, which is what you’re doing when you manage your salinity patch there Toban,

Jay Whetter  49:13

so this is what we brought you here. It’s a great, great segue for some free advice for Toban on how to manage

Toban Dyck  49:20

Yes, so I do, yeah, Jay and I were chatting about this before for the recording, and we were like, she was like, oh, you should definitely bring that up. You should definitely ask more live about this. I actually just on the, on that, on that note, though, I think, I think I sent you an email about this land like this is going back a few years. Do you remember this?

Marla Riekman  49:39

Did I respond, you did okay, did you do anything about it? I was getting Yeah, this is the right question, the

49:47

extension conundrum right here. Can

Marla Riekman  49:49

I just say yes? This is, can I just say that half of my job as a sole management specialist is like, here’s a solution to your problem. The other half of my job. Is, like, lay down on my couch and tell me all your problems like it’s, it’s therapy group therapy is what we’re in right now. So let’s talk this out. This is, this is your moment, and

Toban Dyck  50:09

then I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. Okay, right?

Speaker 1  50:14

I’m not doing that. So you can tell me all you want, but I’m not doing that.

Toban Dyck  50:20

So before we get into the case study, I have two questions that I want to get out there before I forget about them, even though I’ve written down, I can’t remember chicken scratches here. So farmers listening to this right now. They’re like, you know, they feel so inspired. They’re listening to our wonderful words. They’re just they’re on it. They’re like, how do I take control of the soils on my farm. So I’m going to turn that question to you. So say me, I’ve got a few acres here. What’s step one? How do is it soil testing? Is it? Is it, first

Marla Riekman  50:53

of all, I really love that you’re talking about total soil domination here, taking control of the soils on your farm. But

Toban Dyck  50:59

yeah, actually, I do appreciate that you call you called that out, because that is such a kind of colloquial attitude towards soil, that’s not a bad thing to actually talk about too. I agree that that’s part of how I talk. It’s not what I want, but

Marla Riekman  51:16

it’s how we think about it, right, right? It’s like, what? How can I get something out of this, right? As opposed to, like, what’s the soil get out of this relationship here?

Toban Dyck  51:25

But anyway, I do actually appreciate that that’s

Marla Riekman  51:28

soil testing is important. And the other thing for me is looking at soils reports, which I get, are kind of boring things to read, but you just reach out to somebody like me and I’ll read it for you and interpret it in some, hopefully language that everybody will understand by

Toban Dyck  51:42

reports. You mean, like the like those put outside Manitoba Agriculture, yes,

Marla Riekman  51:46

those ones where it tells you that you have a or thick, black chernism. And everybody’s like, what is that? And I say, that’s okay, it’s good, yeah, we don’t use words like churn is adding colisols around here. Get your head out of the gutter. So anyway, so

Jay Whetter  52:09

I’m clear, a farmer takes a soil sample, submits it, yeah, and you’re talking about looking deeply into the analysis.

Marla Riekman  52:18

So, yeah. So you’ve got, so you’ve got soil samples where you’re taking that, you know, two foot sample essentially, is, you know, looking at nutrients, you’re looking at organic matter, you’re looking at salinity, measuring for that. That’s a good one to be monitoring to depth all the time, because it gives you an idea, because it fluctuates every year based on whatever the weather is. So you want to, like, what the climate’s doing and how much moisture you’re getting. So you want to look at all of that kind of that kind of stuff, soil, pH, there’s a lot of really good information that you get out of that. But the other layer of it is actually looking at soils reports, the ones put out by Manitoba Agriculture. But these soils reports that can also because they’ve mapped essentially the soil. And if you’re lucky enough, like in Manitoba, 30% of agro Manitoba has detailed soil survey. So not everywhere has detailed soil survey, but even the reconnaissance scale survey can still give you some general information about your soil. But essentially what they’re doing is digging a pit, and they are classifying the soil essentially down to like the way that we would classify the animal kingdom, down to genus and species, right? So we classify the soil, and from that classification, then they use egg capability, or they can determine agriculture capability. So this piece of information, essentially, when you were talking earlier, about, you know, what? What are the limitations to my soil? What is it suitable for? That’s what we can use that information for. So it’s actually taking a picture or a snapshot of what that soil looks like from in the, you know, the top meter or so, and then being able to better understand things like water flow through that soil, you know, natural vegetation that would have been there, how productive that soil is. There’s all sorts of things that we can get out of that that can help someone understand what the potential for that field or that soil is within that field, in order to, you know, grow a crop, grow a forage, grow trees, whatever it is potatoes, like there’s all these suitability scales that come out of that soils report,

Jay Whetter  54:13

one of the things we’re trying to encourage farmers to do this is what the canola Council Is, is not just do your composite sample, but also then target, do one extra sample, yeah, in a problem area, yes. So Toban, have you? Do you soil sample or putting you in like, Would you be honest? Would you

Toban Dyck  54:33

No, I just laughing at his blatant attempts to get me to talk about my salinity, low balling all these segments, so,

Jay Whetter  54:42

so, and I’m really trying to, like, find a find a little wedge, and so now we’re talking about soil sampling. So have you’ve done soil sampling on this field? In question? I have, yes. All right, and then did you do a separate soil sample in this problem area?

Toban Dyck  54:58

Good question. I don’t, I don’t know. I think, I think one of the areas that they did, they took samples of various, various pockets of the field, and I think one of them was in one of those saline but you

Jay Whetter  55:11

don’t want to blend that into your composite, because then you’re not getting a good information from that target, right, right? So you want your composite in your productive areas, and then you wanted to send a separate sample in from this, and I feel like you’re reluctant to talk to us about this. Are you nervous? Are you

Toban Dyck  55:26

I’m a little nervous to share? Yeah, no, well maybe, but there is that, though, in the farming community, I think there is. I’m completely oblivious to it, because I really don’t care about, like, talking about, maybe solidity of my

Marla Riekman  55:42

field. I’m really enjoying watching you guys right now, as Jay has taken over my job of asking you these questions so I don’t have to do it like he wants me to talk about solution. Shay, yeah, exactly. Do you listen when you interview me on things? Have you figured out what the solutions are supposed to be? And

Jay Whetter  56:00

when I tell you what the solution is, will you actually go do it?

Marla Riekman  56:05

Or Yes, I could work for government, you truly are channeling your inner Marla. Nobody listens to me, but I’m gonna tell them anyway.

Toban Dyck  56:16

All right, okay, okay, so,

Jay Whetter  56:18

and we need to talk up just a little bit about Marla’s recipe for dealing with a saline area.

Marla Riekman  56:24

So As Jay mentioned, you should probably take a soil sample in that saline area that’s separate from the rest of it. Hey, fun fact. Did you know that if you accidentally mix that salinity patch into your composite sample, it can completely throw off your your sulfur levels, because there could be like, 15,000 pounds of sulfate in the top two feet per acre in that. It’s a fun fact, right? Because the salts that we find in our soils tend to be sulfate based, there you go. So

Toban Dyck  56:59

120 acre field just north of Morton. About 20 to 30 acres of that field are completely unproductive. Okay, two years ago, I grew barley, and that was able. Kosha didn’t stand a chance. This year’s barley, it did stand a chance, just because of the wet the wet spring. So that was the only crop where the kosher did not take over. So typically, what happens is, kosher looks good. Looks good mid season. You know, creeping on, mid season looks good, and all of a sudden, boom. Crop disappears. Kosha takes over, and that is completely unharvestable. You cannot run a combine through that at all. Yeah, really? I mean, it’s a relatively new parcel of land for me, so it’s, it’s really kind of struggling with, like, what, what are the best strategies for it? Like, there is this, you know, every fall we kind of, what do we do for tillage? What do we do? Do Do we just get, like, rent one of those big vertical tillers and go over it and mince it up? But what is the best? So right now, it’s harvested. Kosher. Is there looking healthy as ever as Kosha is apt to do? Yes, yet to have a strategy

Marla Riekman  58:15

for this. Okay, so decrease the tillage. Don’t tell it. Resist the urge to tell don’t do it. It’s great. Resist the urge to till and this is one of the hardest things, because it’s so it’s so hard, right? Because you don’t, you want to get rid of the weeds too. You want to get rid of all of this stuff. And you also don’t want to have to over spray. Like to spray it. And I will not get into that. This is not my area of expertise, but if you’re like over using the pesticides, and you end up having some kind of resistance popping up in that Kochia, then that becomes an issue, because we see resistance issues in Kochia and so, so tillage can be one of those tools to get rid of it, but the problem with tillage is that it brings more water to the surface because it causes more evaporation. So you want no evaporation, or, like, as little as possible. So tillage makes salinity worse. And we always feel like the problem went away, because the soil is black again when it was white before, and now it gets white again eventually, as that soil, you know, dries out. And so we want to resist the urge to tell so that’s like always my first thing to talk about. But then the other thing you want to do is use the water. The Kosha is actually doing a great job of growing and taking up water. Unfortunately, it’s actually beneficial to have the Kosha there. Better than nothing. It’s better than nothing, but the kosher being there is a Kosha problem, right, right? And so if you’re not trying to grow kosher, then that’s that’s really the issue. You can actually mow Kosha like flail, mow it, bail it off, things like that. There’s some good feed value to it, if there’s a use for it. But I do know this is one of my stories of. A number of years ago, we were doing a Kosha salinity kind of run around Southwestern Manitoba, and this young farmer comes up to me and says, you know, Marla, dad, and I’ve been listening to you for a while, and you kept talking about mowing the Kochia. And so we started doing that. And I was like, Oh, good. How is it working? Actually, it’s looking pretty good. And I was like, Oh, great. And I thought, How many years have I been doing this? And finally, somebody listened right like and did the thing, but he said it was looking good. So what he was trying to achieve with that strategy is the simple bit of keeping the Kochia in its vegetative form so it continues to take up water. More water draw down means you can actually kind of get the salts to kind of move back down too, because salinity is 100% of water problem. It’s really not the salt issue. It’s the fact that the water is near the soil surface. So you want to get the water down and let water kind of leach out further. So that becomes one of the things. And then the next one, like, the reason the barley does so good is because it’s got a high tolerance to salinity. And then in those years when you can actually get that barley established. It’s doing a good job of using up that water. So any strategy like simply put to manage salinity is, how do you get the water managed? So how do we get it drier or draw the water down? But if you send me the information on that field again, send me the first thing that somebody does if they send me a question about a specific field, and I’m going to ask you what the legal location of it is, and then I’m going to look up the soils map. And the reason I’m going to look up the soils map is I want to know whether or not this is like a natural issue that’s always there. Is it a mild issue? Is it a major issue? And what are the expectations, again, that we can put on that field or on that soil in order to remediate it? So can we actually get rid of the salts, or can we just live with the salts a little bit better,

Jay Whetter  1:01:50

right? Right? And at what stage would you have a conversation about tile drainage, like targeted tile drainage for those acres? I

Marla Riekman  1:01:58

would have the conversation if, if the soil seems to be the type of soil that’s going to be able to actually be effectively tiled, if tile is looking at being one of the solutions. But I’m also going to look at those soil tests that I know that you’ve already taken of that area, right? And I’m going to look at how high the salt content is to try to manage expectations, and how long it might take in order to leach those salts out. So if you have tile drainage, it can do a great job of lowering salt content, as long as water can flow through that soil profile and leach the salts out into the tile and out the tile. And so if you can’t get that leaching happening, then you aren’t going to see that soil kind of be remediated through tile that quickly. So if it’s a really mild salinity problem, then it could probably be remediated in a short amount of time. And if it’s a bad problem, it might be one of those situations where you’re investing in tile for future generations to maybe not have the problem. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  1:02:59

I fear it’s the latter, but I’ll get you some hard data.

Marla Riekman  1:03:04

I look forward to it.

Jay Whetter  1:03:06

But again, the the objective is that you’re, you would ideally make money off that land, but until that day comes, spend as little as possible.

Toban Dyck  1:03:16

Yeah, I’m also motivated to do the right thing for that, for that piece, right? Like, even if it’s, you know, planting different crops in those, those areas, maybe, or just some sort of, I just feel like a don’t have a sense of what the strategies are and what, where to go to get them. Like, that’s, that’s one of the roadblocks,

Marla Riekman  1:03:39

yeah, and some of those pieces of land, too, wouldn’t have become so saline. Now, if it wasn’t for annual cropping, because a perennial might is a perennial is often a big part of that solution, depending, again, on the size of the area and the use of it or and what can be used with it. So a perennial means that you’re going to have something that’s using water for a longer period of that growing season, and therefore you’re managing the water better. And that deep root, right? Can take, you know, plant growing longer as long as you are harvesting it, taking it off, you can keep that water use happening. And so perennials can be the most effective way to manage those. But again, when I always, I always try to be cautious when I’m saying, like, oh, thou shalt plant a perennial. Do you have a use for it, right? Do you have cattle? Do you have a neighbor with cattle? Are you in an area where somebody is actually because you don’t have the equipment to go in and cut and bail this stuff, and so is somebody going to come in, can you sell it as standing hay? So you know, what is the final end product, depending on how this how large that piece of land is that? What’s the goal that you can still achieve out of it, recognizing that we’re trying different kind of techniques in order to to manage salinity, I think that that’s why tile drainage is one of those things that. People are really looking at from the salinity side of things, because they can continue to seed annual crops and continue to manage it the way that they have they’re relying on the tile to do the work, and it does help. It absolutely does help. But we have to kind of set some expectations on it too, and not just assume that it’s going to fix itself overnight, because it can take many, many years, and you have to have years of excess water to flush the salts out of the profile. If you have dry sea dry seasons, the salts aren’t going anywhere. And so again, it’s it’s managing the expectations of the length of time that it might take to actually remediate through tile, right? So

Toban Dyck  1:05:39

even tile has to be kind of thought about in terms of a larger strategy. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. It’s not, it’s not a complete replacement. We have to wrap up. We’ve so much more to talk about,

Jay Whetter  1:05:51

I know. And this is the thing we could talk to Marla about a long time. And Marley, you’re such a great communicator. And this is what I want to end with. How

Toban Dyck  1:05:58

do you get you get the ending? No, well,

Jay Whetter  1:06:01

your can be part of

Toban Dyck  1:06:03

it. I like how that caught you up guard.

Jay Whetter  1:06:06

I just want to hear from you, like, in 18 years of doing this and feeling like you were saying the same thing over and over with every president, definition

Marla Riekman  1:06:14

of insanity, yeah. So what?

Jay Whetter  1:06:17

What is the most effective way to get farmers to change or adopt a new idea, you

Marla Riekman  1:06:26

know, if I had the answer to that, I wouldn’t still be doing what I’m doing right now, nor would you give it to us, right? Exactly like it’s the secret, if I knew what the secret sauce was? Oh, you know, I think continued that it’s really continued communication, like you can whether it’s money, whether it’s all those things like, that’s all important, right, but the communication and the relationship building that happens in order to have conversations with people about different ideas is still like, set for me, anyway, such a critical piece and a critical component to getting people to think differently, or influencing people to think a little bit differently. I want to say I’m getting them to do, you know, but like influencing people to think a little differently on how they want to achieve things on the farm and so, you know, if I think back of the conversations that I’ve had throughout my career so far and going forward, hopefully continue. You know, those are some of the biggest things. You know, you go to an event, you go to a crop Connect, you go to egg days, you go to these different things. You get up there, you give a presentation. The presentation is just the presentation. What it is is, it’s the start of something to engage in conversation afterwards, because people are going to come and they’re going to talk to you, they’re going to ask questions. And that’s really where the meat of it is, right. That’s where the big kind of the big talks come out of this type of extension, and these things that we do, that one on one relationship is still such an important thing and and the more that I find that people are a lot more open when they have a chance to ask their question, when they get a chance to say, This is my case study. This is my situation. Like I heard you talk about it in general, but this is my situation. Now, can we if we talk about this, then even though the message might be the same, it personalizes it, and now it’s more impactful.

Toban Dyck  1:08:23

So I agree with you. I think, I think that’s a great approach to extension. But say that, say, say that bottle doesn’t exist. And you, you, you’re here right now. You got, you got a microphone. All the farmers you want to talk to are listening to you, and their their minds are open. They’re poised to hear that nugget like, What? What? What is that? What is that message like, what do you want to say to all the farmers out there, farmers out there, in your catchment? So you’re like, Manitoba, yeah, you know, yeah.

Marla Riekman  1:08:53

But like, about soil and about thinking differently, if, if every farmer can do one, I mean, this is maybe taking it too simple, but if every farmer has a chance to do one thing, get in a soil pit. Yeah, yeah. Because some of the things, some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had when I get to go to, if you get to go to a field day where there is a soil pit, nobody has ever like, if you’ve never had a chance to stand in there and talk to somebody about it, and having done that many times, been in a soil pit with a bunch of farmers around and say, like, who? How many of you have ever been in a soil pit before? And there might be a couple hands come up, get in this hole with me right now. I don’t want to be standing in the hole alone. But there is, there is so much that you can see that we don’t ever get to this to see. And I think that we get more connected. And maybe this is where I got, like, really passionate about soils, too, but you get more connected with what the soil is and what it does for you, and how we manage it, and how we think about it as this. This object, if we’re not just looking at it from the surface, if you actually get to get down into it, see the colors of it. See the stuff that’s growing in it. See how deep your annual crop roots are growing, because they’re going four to five feet deep. And people aren’t always expecting that. And actually getting a chance to take a look at that soil, it to me that’s one of those things that has become very impactful. When I get a chance to stand in a soil pit and talk to a farmer about this and describe what they’re seeing, and talk about what the influence of these things that they’ve never really considered. And you know how you put it all together, and how that reflects within you know, soil management, and how that soil is going to perform for them. It’s, it’s one of the most intriguing kind of times that I get to spend with people. And so I highly encourage any farmers who are listening, if you hear that somebody is going to be, you know, doing a soil pit at a field event. Go, go, take a look and jump in the hole and and like, enjoy the process of learning a little bit more about what this soil is, and not just kind of considering it from that surface only. I

Jay Whetter  1:11:08

want to hear the 20. It’s a 2025, challenge. How many farmers could get in a soil fit with Marla? Yeah. Okay.

Marla Riekman  1:11:16

So this is, yeah. This is what it’s going to be. The record number of farmers that fit in a soil pit, I can tell you which farm would probably end up having that record. And so, you know, you know Andrew delgarno up in New Dale. So years ago, he did. He dug a soil pit for Manitoba Soil Science Society when we were doing our summer tour, and he decided he wanted to go as deep as he could to see if he could make it to the water table. Essentially, he wanted to find water. And so the soil pit, I mean, we usually dig four feet because, like, I always say six feet is a little too deep. I’m not ready for that yet, but four feet is perfect. Not yet. Four feet is good, because you can see what’s going on in that surface. And then, so there was a ladder inside the soil pit going down deeper because he just kept going, Yeah, and nobody wanted to get close to the edge of this thing, right? But we could have fit a lot of people in that soil. But I’m just saying

Jay Whetter  1:12:15

this is like the soil soil health disclaimer

Marla Riekman  1:12:17

at the end. Yeah, exactly. Don’t fall in a pit. Yeah. This

Jay Whetter  1:12:21

is really what soil health means,

Toban Dyck  1:12:25

where it’s safety gear when you enter soil, yeah, exactly.

Jay Whetter  1:12:30

Well, thanks. It was a lot of fun.

Toban Dyck  1:12:39

Hey, I really enjoyed that conversation. I was just gonna say the same thing. I could have talked to Marla for another hour,

Jay Whetter  1:12:47

you know, flutes and then soil pits, and there’s some other stuff in the middle.

Toban Dyck  1:12:54

So soil pits was interesting, yeah, yeah, yeah. I really, I really like that, that that sort that soil pit piece, you made a promise early in our conversation with Marla that you would come back to Taylor Swift. I

Jay Whetter  1:13:10

just totally forgot

Toban Dyck  1:13:12

you did not Hey.

Speaker 2  1:13:14

This is the producer, Abby. Just a quick side note to any Swifties who may be listening after this conversation, I did make them listen to a Taylor Swift song, and you can see the reaction video on Tiktok.

Toban Dyck  1:13:27

So now is your opportunity, Jay to just, you know, we have an audience that is like, what does Jay Wenner want to extend about Taylor Swift?

Jay Whetter  1:13:36

Well, I appreciate that she’s probably got a lot of talent. She’s incredibly rich. She’s been really successful. I don’t have a single one of her songs on my playlist, and I can’t foresee me adding one. Do

Toban Dyck  1:13:47

you know one of her songs? I know one, which, for me, is one of her new ones. But I was told that that’s like, 10 albums ago. I mean, oh yeah. It’s called shake it off. Okay, that’s 10 albums ago. I don’t know if it’s 10, but it’s a number of albums ago. She sang one about Jake gillenham, Jill and him, like, kill it. Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal, really? Jill and ham. I don’t know this song. I mean, maybe it is Jacob who I was talking about. Yeah. I mean, if there could be two people I was at so I was at a

Jay Whetter  1:14:27

at the bar in Winnipeg, and the the waiter came around, and then I was with three other people, and they were talking about Kanye West, and say, No, I don’t know. And they’re like, Do you know anything about pop culture at all, like, how could you not know about, like, a million Kanye West songs, right? I feel like the same way about Taylor Swift, so I guess I’m not really like, I like music for sure, and I listen to all kinds of stuff. I just don’t listen much to Taylor Swift or Kanye West, although, after that conversation, I did go out and listen to Kanye. Best first two albums, and I can see why he’s famous. Yeah, yeah, very good. He’s kind of fallen out of grace a little bit since. But yeah, yeah, don’t they all, don’t. We’re just waiting for the big fall from grace of from of Taylor Swift. Right, right, waiting for that. I think we’ve just alienated all the Swifties who we have might have been potential extensionists. We can

Toban Dyck  1:15:25

come back from this. Jay, I think we can come back from this. Jay,

Jay Whetter  1:15:29

never talk about Taylor

Toban Dyck  1:15:30

Swift. Don’t bring it up. Don’t bring up. We learned that Marla likes NFL over CFL, yeah. Well,

Jay Whetter  1:15:36

that was the only the whole reason why we’re talking about Taylor Swift is because that’s why she started listening or watching the NFL, and

Toban Dyck  1:15:43

you finally, is that right? What’s that? It wasn’t right. I was making a joke. You finally got me to talk about my my sailing land, yes, After many failed attempts,

Jay Whetter  1:15:54

right? I felt like I was a psychologist trying to just draw this traumatic experience,

Toban Dyck  1:15:59

just to dive into that whole thing about, if you’re a farmer and you just, you don’t know much about your soil, but you have an interest in starting that process now, like, she fleshed it out really well, just time constraints to these conversations, right? But like, like, that step by step approach, about, like, you know, is it you call your soil soil person to do the testing, you inform them about like where you want to test and making sure they’re grabbing the samples from the saline areas and from these problematic areas. And then, what kind of tools are you using to input that data and assess it over year over year?

Jay Whetter  1:16:38

Right? And it’s not just about the soil test recommendation that you might get back, but dig into some of those numbers, like pH in the soil. I don’t know what all you get beyond beyond that, like organic matter, content and those, you can often learn a lot from those and like you, like she said, in some cases, maybe the soil structure that some of these characteristics will dictate the action, because maybe there’s some soils that just are not fixable. They’re not fixable at a reasonable investment. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  1:17:11

I it’s soil is an interesting, interesting topic. I think there’s that’d be a hard one to extend like like, her job can’t be easy doing extension on soil.

Jay Whetter  1:17:28

Thank you so much to Marla Rickman with and SAS oil seeds. And SAS oil seeds are sponsors as of August, 1, SAS canola and Sask flax have amalgamated into a single organization, introducing Sask oil seeds. Stay

Toban Dyck  1:17:46

informed with Sask oil seeds, new texting service, and get agronomy tips event invitations and expert answers on the go. Visit saskannola.com to learn more about Sask oil seeds. About Sask oil seeds. That’s right.

Jay Whetter  1:18:04

This has been a burr forest group production. We also want to thank the people you don’t see. We’re here.

Toban Dyck  1:18:09

We’re chatting away with our guests, but there’s tons of people who work behind the scenes to make this podcast happen. Ryan Sanchez, our director, Ashley Robinson, is the coordinator and Abby walls, our producer and editor.

Jay Whetter  1:18:25

Thank you for listening. We are the extensionists conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. My name is Jay wetter, and I’m Toban Dyck, until next time you.