Never Forget Suitability
While seeking profit is a part of doing business, never forget to compare your venture's requirements to your infrastructure's suitability
Recently there was a Twitter feed discussion about just how suitable are almond orchards to California. The answer? Not very. Almonds are a thirsty, water-hungry crop with a long lifespan that cannot be laid fallow in a major drought. Almonds, pistachios (check out this piece on the biggest farm in the USA) and other needy water-loving crops are draining California dry. Are tree crops suitable for the Central Valley? No. Do farmers plant crops for their profitability? Yes. Should suitability come before profit? I say yes.
2021 is basically providing North America with a case study on a farmer’s motivation. All you have to do is drive around and see how many hayfields got ripped up this spring as soybean and corn prices rocked the sky as my mother would say. Some of those fields should not have been touched. For some, harvest will be a challenge if the weather is less than ideal. Some of those farmers would likely see more money in their pocket if they had just sold the hay.
Canada Land Inventory
There’s a handy but old tool available for determining land quality, the Canada Land Inventory’s agricultural land capability classification map. The CLI ranks land from Class 1 through to Class 7. It includes subclasses to note issues like excess water and stoniness. These maps were drawn in the 1960s through to the early 1980s but they still contain valuable information.
The maps will give you a good general idea of the types of uses for the land in a particular area. It’s fairly good at highlighting poorer soils with less capability. Given the age of the maps, it’s also cool to see where older settlements were located that might not be there anymore. It also highlights just how much Class 1 farmland has been developed and paved over in the last few decades.
The CLI is slowly being replaced by the Land Suitability Rating System as it has it’s limitations. It ignores heat units, climate and regional nuances. Class 1 land in Saskatchewan means something different from Class 1 in Ontario. The LSRS is designed to address that. There’s a whole paper on applying the LSRS for Canadian agriculture. Unfortunately, it appears at this time the online access to the system is unavailable. The Canadian Soil Information Service has other maps and databases that can also be used in decision-making. Each province usually also has interactive maps with soil information, Ontario has AgMaps, Quebec has Info-Sols and Alberta has AGRASID.
Sustainable Vs Suitable
Often when ecologically-sound agricultural practices are discussed you’ll hear about sustainable ag, regenerative ag, and organic ag practices. However, just because a practice is considered sustainable does not mean it is suitable for a particular region. It might even do harm in that region. Suitability involves matching crops and livestock to the region’s climate, soils, weather patterns and even markets. Sustainable is about the practices used to produce those crops and livestock. They go together but they are not the same.
A prime example of this is grazing cattle. On the surface, grazing cattle is considered sustainable, regenerative and organic. It’s a good thing. The wrong methods of grazing cattle can be extremely damaging, making it less suitable for a region. Alderspring Ranch in Idaho follows a very sustainable model, however their grazing grounds are quite fragile. They do inherding as many areas of their allotment can only hold handle a single pass in a year or even less. Other approaches were not achieving the same kind of results for them so their ranch evolved to use adaptive planned grazing (APG) rather than simply rotational grazing.
When you are considering growing pretty much anything on your farm from cattle to cucumbers, suitability should come before sustainability. Choose crops and livestock that work well with your soil and climate. Then choose the most suitable sustainable practices to grow those crops and livestock. It’s fairly easy to know that citrus groves are not suitable for the Gaspé Peninsula. However, good old corn is just as unsuitable for many regions of Canada and yet, farmers still try.
Focus on Suitability
You can make choices and ignore suitability for a little while. Land is rather forgiving that way. Forcing something to work just because it looks profitable or you can make it happen with technology is not sustainable or a smart business move in the long run. Technology is how those almond orchards ended up in the Californian desert. Those orchards are very profitable for as long as they can pump water from other regions. However, in a major drought year, with record low water-levels, the unsuitablity of those orchards is rather obvious. So for the long-run survival of your farm, what you grow has to be suitable for your climate and soil conditions first and the market second.
Suitability must be factored in if you are shopping for farmland. If you have your heart set on being a cash crop farmer, you probably should not be looking at Class 4 farmland hours from the closest elevator in a place where frost in June is normal. Likewise, the math will probably not work on Class 1 farmland in southern Ontario if you want to be a beef farmer. Knowing what the land can grow and support most years and then honouring those limitations will save you a lot of stress in the long run. Download those CLI maps and compare them to the parcel you are considering.
Short-sighted Greed
If you plowed under land that hasn’t been farmed for cash crops in over a decade and it wasn’t part of your planned rotation prior to this spring’s prices, at least part of your decision was motivated by greed. Planting a crop that a specific peice of ground does not support in general purely because prices were up involves greed. Economic reality is that land sat fallow or in hay for a reason and it took high crop prices for a number of farmers to risk plowing under and planting those fields. Odds are pretty good the land is less than ideal.
Profit is not evil or bad, it’s just the end of the economic equation, income less expenses. And making decisions based on profitability is also not bad, in fact it’s a good thing. My concern comes from short-sighted decisions based solely on profit. Our farm is a prime example, it’s Class 3 farmland and basically beach sand with poor drainage. If I wanted to make a short-sighted bad decision, we would have planted corn and soybeans this spring. And then spent the entire summer hoping for perfect conditions and a half decent yield. It took us two years to get a decent forage stand established, I can only imagine how pathetic it would look under cultivation.
Land suitability is simply something you should never forget. It has to be the first part of your decision making process. Otherwise, you might find yourself really frustrated with the state of your financials come year-end. Mother Nature will always win. It might take one year, it might take 20 years but she will win. There is no solution for growing something your land is not suited for. Soil and climate can not be changed as easily as agricultural production choices.