Windiana Farms is a family-owned farm in southern Alberta, committed to growing quality crops – potatoes, cereals and forage. It was started by Mike & Cathy Wind in 1989 when Mike left a successful partnership to venture out on his own. Starting with a small land base and potato contract, through much hard work and many blessings, the farm has grown in size and added two sons, Jeremy and Kevin, as partners.
For over 5 years, Jeremy has been incorporating AdvancedAg biologicals on his farm and using sound agronomy and data to start cutting back other inputs. His reason for going down this road was because he felt like he hit a wall... He was spending more on inputs and not producing more. Not only were his yields plateaued, it was clear that storage was becoming more of an issue.
Since Jeremy has put a focus on soil health using our microbes, there have been new developments and exciting results each year.
It started with a field of hay. Jeremy thought this was a great chance to run a trial late in the growing season. He noticed a major increase in tonnage, compared to the control side of the field.
In year two, he decided to treat more acres and more crops. After learning about the benefits ACF could have on alkali patches, he decided this was something he wanted to focus on. He had one area that historically never grew anything due to the soil alkalinity. After applying ACF heavily on this area, he was blown away that he grew a potato crop.
The picture below represents that exact spot.
Something we didn't expect to hear... In 2020, Jeremy's skid steer operator noticed half of his potatoes in one of his storage facilities had much more spoilage than the other half. According to Jeremy, it was a clear line in the storage facility where one side had literally zero spoilage. He had to go back to his office to find out the reason for this.
The only difference between the two sides of storage, was that ACF-SR was applied to half of the field. This was reassurance that he had made the right decision to go down this road of soil health.
Since then, Jeremy has been pushing the boundaries of what our biologicals are capable of on his farm.
The clearest path to start with was to look at cutting back synthetic inputs. Since using ACF-SR, his potatoes plants had elevated nutrient levels, so he knew cutting back was achievable. Year after year, he cut back his fertility by 5%, and in 2023, he was able to cut back his fertilizer usage by 25% on the entire farm with no yield or quality loss. This obviously resulted in a major ROI. Jeremy is one of the only potato farmers in southern Alberta that doesn't top dress his potatoes during the growing season.
SRP Trials
The next step was to start trialing SRP for overall plant health. This has been another groundbreaking revelation for his farm.
Jeremy split fields of potatoes, wheat and peas where he applied SRP through his pivot. The wheat and peas had zero sign of disease and required no fungicide applications, resulting in a huge cost savings for him.
On potatoes, he split 3 fields and the SRP fields not only had little to no disease pressure, these fields resulted in 10% less "smalls," 10% increase in count/lbs and an increase of 2.5 ton/acre of yield.
He did have an instance where one corner of a field had some signs of early blight show up. He applied SRP and within 12 hours, the blight was completely gone.
ROI
Jeremy has dedicated time and resources to move down the direction of soil health and using data to make his decisions for the short and long term benefit of his farm. We know there are no silver bullets, but it's clear that the pieces Jeremy has put around our biologicals have resulted in a much higher return on investment compared to growers in his area.
Let's look at some numbers from comparative growers in his area vs what Jeremy is doing from an input perspective:
As you can tell from Jeremy's journey, this wasn't something that happened over night. We have learned just as much about our biologicals as he has during this relationship and we look forward to continuing to push the boundaries on what our technologies are capable of.
Nobody loves sharing this data and information more than Jeremy. If you would like to chat with Jeremy directly, let us know. He has given AdvancedAg permission to pass out his contact information. Jeremy sees a future where the majority of Canadian producers are growing their crops more sustainably and he believes his story could help the next generation of growers.
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