Provincial livestock capacity a stinky question

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2010 (5745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ask a simple question, like how much livestock Manitoba can handle — and you might get a simple answer.

Precisely 598,802,395 nursing and weaner pigs. Or 7,142,857 calves less than a year old. Or 2.5 billion broiler chicks.

But as with most simple answers, numbers like these don’t come close to telling the whole story.

Don Flaten, a University of Manitoba soil scientist who spends much of his time researching nutrient management in agriculture, has a history of presenting teasers like these somewhat meaningless statistics to provoke a broader discussion.

A few years ago, Flaten presented a paper on the winter meeting circuit called “How to make $300 per acre with canola at $5 per bushel.”

It proved a great way to pack a meeting room.

Even though the equation was facetious, it illustrated an important point. Flaten added up all the promised yield benefits from various production aids farmers purchase. If farmers took the marketing pitches at face value, they’d be aiming for more than a hundred bushels of canola per acre, when a more realistic yield at that time was 35 bushels.

Most farmers understand that crop yield depends on weather, and how things like fertilizer applications and weed control interact with the seed variety. But while the yield doesn’t automatically increase proportionately with every input a farmer purchases, the cost of production does. In other words, instead of the theoretical $300 per acre margin, the farmer who used all those inputs might experience a negative return of $66 per acre.

Flaten appeals for a more integrated approach to crop management, a move away from “recipe” solutions focusing singularly on production issues, to field husbandry, a concept that incorporates both art and science when managing the land.

He tries to put a similar perspective on the debate over livestock production in Manitoba. The numbers don’t tell the whole story, nor do they consider the host of political, economic and social factors. For example, the livestock sector in Manitoba is in a severe state of contraction right now due to economic and political issues.

And even if the boom times were still underway, whether it could expand further is academic. The province has put a moratorium on further expansion in the eastern half of the province. Expansion in the west is limited by water shortages.

Flaten noted that while there is phosphorus contamination in some parts of southeastern Manitoba, and the potential in other areas, the province as a whole does not have a problem with excess nutrients.

If the only consideration was the amount of nutrients needed by crops, the province could have five to six times the number of animals it has today.

In fact, 73 per cent of the province’s soils are deficient in phosphorus, which makes it second only to Saskatchewan for having the highest rate of deficient soils in North America.

Annual crops in this province remove an average of 101,000 tonnes of phosphorus annually.

The province’s farmers add about 114,000 tonnes of synthetic fertilizer and another 17,000 tonnes in the form of manure, leaving a relatively small surplus.

It’s important to remember phosphorus is a non-renewable resource and it’s being exported every time we ship grain offshore. So recycling it in the form of livestock manure is an important source of replenishment.

That said, using livestock manure as a fertilizer is fraught with management challenges, mainly because the livestock population tends to be concentrated these days, rather than evenly dispersed across the province.

This is why Manitoba’s hog industry got into trouble after the province originally decided to regulate manure spreading by nitrogen content. On that basis, farmers in the “hog alley” south and east of Winnipeg could apply all they want close to home. But at the same rate, phosphorus is being applied at double the amount that crops can use, leading to a buildup and excess runoff.

If the manure could be hauled 160 kilometres west there would be no problem, but it’s not economic to transport it that far.

Cattle manure can also be a problem if applied at too heavy a rate because it contains relatively higher levels of phosphorus, although that’s not normally a problem when cattle are on pasture and recycling the nutrients.

But where there is concentrated cattle feeding, such as in Southern Alberta’s “feedlot alley”, there can also be problems finding enough “spread land” to absorb the nutrients nearby.

“Finding the right number of livestock in a given area will mean finding the right cropping system,” Flaten says.

So how much livestock can Manitoba handle? It remains a stinky question.

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 792-4382 or by email:

laura@fbcpublishing.com