While intercropping, or planting more than one crop together, might be common practice in some types of agriculture, it is not the norm in mainstream farming.
Research is being conducted on different combinations of crops to find what works best for Prairie growers.
Maryse Bourgault, an assistant professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Plant Sciences and Soil Sciences, has shown flax holds promise as a good intercropping option with pulse crops.
Bourgault, who is also the Western Grains Research Foundation Integrated Agronomy Research Chair, said research has shown good results for both chickpea/flax, faba bean/flax and lentil/flax intercrop combinations.
“One of the farmers I work with that’s north of Saskatoon does a lentil/flax and that really works well for them,” she said. “They really like it because you don’t have this excessive amount of residue that you might have by growing a mono crop of flax, but you do get some. With pulses often we don’t have a lot of residues anyway, so we kind of get to that nice, optimal amount of residues for these intercrops.”
Intercropping flax had fewer soil benefits than if the pulses were seeded on their own. She said the hypothesis was that if there was more diversity, perhaps, you’d have more microbial life and soil health indicators might actually be higher in the intercrops than you might have in the monocrops. That’s not the case, according to Bourgault.
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