Five acres. That’s the measurement Quill Lakes-area producer Dwight Odelein figures is the sweet spot fellow farmers can use to maintain some wetlands on their fields while keeping stable profit margins.
“Standing water (from wetlands) causes salinity, saturation and compaction,” he said, which means "less crop growth in perimeter areas of wetlands. This in turn causes inefficient use of water and nutrients,” leading to wasted money.
Odelien spoke with the Leader-Post as concerned citizens groups, university researchers and some politicians have waded into the topic of wetlands drainage in the province over the past six months.
Unlike Manitoba and Alberta, Saskatchewan doesn’t have a wetlands drainage policy. A recently announced 40-acre research site the Langham-area is to study the effect of wetlands drainage on soils and downstream water users.
At the project’s announcement in July, MLA Lyle Stewart said a drainage policy is a likely outcome.
Odelien wants to add to the discussion by highlighting his five-acre plan, first implemented in 2015 and the product of his 35 years’ worth of farming.
It calls for preserving and enhancing wetlands with surface areas larger than five acres, about the size of two-and-a-half Canadian football fields; smaller wetlands can be drained and seeded over with crops.
“A smaller wetland adversely affects an area many times its own area, because of salinity (high levels of salt),” he said. “The smaller the wetland, the greater the ratio of the effected perimeter area there is … up to about five acres.”
Wetlands function as nutrient holding sinks where runoff nutrients (like phosphorus and nitrogen) from fertilizing and pesticide spray sit in the soil.
The high nutrient concentration bumps up the soil’s salinity, nixing any chance for annual crops, like wheat or canola, growing there.
The Saskatchewan Alliance for Water Sustainability (SAWS), a concerned citizens group calling for a provincial drainage policy, said Odelien’s five-acre plan could be a “starting point” for such a policy.
“We like the idea that wetlands that are five acres and larger will be restored and protected,” SAWS co-chair Aura Lee MacPherson said.
Odelien said he has also found a way to stop wetlands’ perimeter areas from impeding into productive crop areas: Grow hearty perennial forage plants (like hay, alfalfa or oats) in the moisture-prone perimeters around larger, permanent wetlands.
Such plants are “salt-tolerant,” he said, underscoring they use the high nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in the soil.
If removed in the fall, hay can reduce carbon emissions, he said, which “creates revenue from hay sales, increases organic matter, traps snow and is pollinator-friendly."
By developing the method, Odelein, who’s for keeping some wetlands, says he found there’s not enough research showing its benefits.
Watershed ecosystem researcher Colin Whitfield agrees, especially when it comes to forage plants. He works out of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute of Water Security.
“We haven't studied forage systems over long terms that might give us a lot of a confidence in terms of how they will behave with respect to nutrient dynamics and retention,” he said.
He agreed farmers are in tough when needing to decide whether to drain a wetland.
“There's a public benefit and a private cost to keeping the wetlands; or conversely if you drain the wetlands, there's a private benefit but a public cost,” he said. “That's a big part of the challenge; certainly the producers are under lots of economic constraints.”
eradford@postmedia.com
