Tips to establish alfalfa in Ont.

Apr 08, 2021

Careful management of planting and fertility will pay off in forage yield and quality

By Jackie Clark
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Farmers in Ontario who are looking to plant alfalfa this season should consider some key reminders.

Producers can choose to seed from now until mid-May for a spring seeding, or delay until early- to mid-August for summer seeding. The appropriate choice likely “depends on what’s your feed inventory,” Paul Hermans, area agronomist in Eastern Ontario for Pioneer, told Farms.com.

This year “we’ve got a really good early spring,” he added.

“If you’re a dairy producer, at the end of the day, forage, whether it’s alfalfa or corn silage, that makes the money, that puts the milk in the tank,” Hermans explained. “If you don’t have forage inventories, I would plant now because you can plant alfalfa on its own and get a good establishment in 60 plus days and start taking one or two cuts off.”

When growers plant later in the summer, success “depends on the weather, the rainfall, and what mother nature throws at us to get that alfalfa seed out of the ground and going,” he added. Winter hardiness and survival becomes more of a question.

Traditionally growers have used oats or other small grains as a nurse crop while establishing alfalfa. However, weighing advantages against some risk of competition for resources, “I would just do a straight alfalfa planting,” Hermans said.

If growers want straw, other options exist to source that material, he added. “We have a lot of great looking winter wheat this year in eastern Ontario.”

Alfalfa is susceptible to autotoxicity, which means if you try to thicken a thin stand by planting new seedlings, the older alfalfa plants will kill new ones that are too close, Hermans explained.

Instead, “I would be rotating to corn because it can utilize the nitrogen availability,” he said. Trying to plant alfalfa into alfalfa is “too much of a risk and I think most growers now would take that opportunity to rotate to something else.”

alfalfa diagram

Management will have a greater impact than genetics on plant characteristics that drive digestibility, says Hermans. Pioneer photo.

Finally, some producers have been focusing on stem diameter of alfalfa. Research shows that plant population has more of an impact on stem diameter than genetics, Hermans explained. “It comes down to how you manage and plant your crop.”

So, to optimize your alfalfa crop, shallow planting depth, adequate seeding rate, and fertility “have a lot more influence than genetics at the end of the day in terms of digestibility,” he said.

GoodLifeStudio\iStock\Getty Images Plus photo

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”