crop biosecurity and it wasn’t like anything we had seen before.” After expanding his knowledge of the canola crop, Buchanan is excited to see how winter canola progresses in Ontario. “It could be a really cool opportunity to add a new crop into our rotation,” he says. A grain farm tour in southern Saskatchewan also impacted him. It is an area of tough ground where no-till and long rotation practices are common. “The farmer we met mainly had native grasslands but where he was farming, there was only an inch or two of topsoil,” he says. “Seeing that really stuck with me because we are taking the deep topsoil we have here for granted.” Diversification into other sectors or niche markets was also a theme across many of the farms toured. It got the nine students thinking more about the future of agriculture and the opportunity to farm differently. Thanks to Moore’s presence on Twitter, many OAC alumni followed along with the trip and shared memories of their own fourth year experiences. The group was congratulated on persevering and taking the initiative to plan their own tour within the COVID-19 guidelines. l The group mapped out a route to British Columbia and back and then planned a series of agricultural tours. KYLE FARQUHARSON, BRAYDEN GRAS, RICK VERHOEF, NICK DE JONG, ZACH BUCHANAN, GORDON MILLEY, OWEN RICKER, HUDSON BELL, AND SCOTT MOORE DURING A STOP AT A 3,000 ACRE CANOLA FIELD AT SERFAS FARMS BETWEEN LETHBRIDGE AND WEYBURN, ALBERTA. PHOTO COURTESY SCOTT MOORE. ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER 29 FEBRUARY 2022
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