Steve and his wife Vanessa live near Three Hills, AB, with their three children. A Professional Agrologist and Certified Crop Advisor, Steve has supported farmers for over 25 years. He has a diploma in Crop Advisory and a B.Sc. in Agriculture Studies. In 2008, he received a Nuffield Scholarship to study controlled traffic farming. In 2006, Steve founded Beyond Agronomy, providing agronomic services and strategies to farms in Canada and internationally. He also ran businesses in carbon and ag technology and published The Spark newsletter from 2008-2019.
Steve and his wife Vanessa live near Three Hills, AB, with their three children. A Professional Agrologist and Certified Crop Advisor, Steve has supported farmers for over 25 years. He has a diploma in Crop Advisory and a B.Sc. in Agriculture Studies. In 2008, he received a Nuffield Scholarship to study controlled traffic farming.
In 2006, Steve founded Beyond Agronomy, providing agronomic services and strategies to farms in Canada and internationally. He also ran businesses in carbon and ag technology and published The Spark newsletter from 2008-2019.
A first-generation farmer since 2007, Steve operates a no-till research farm near Morrin, AB. He shares his expertise locally and internationally.
In his community, Steve enjoys making ice, coaching hockey, and winter activities with his family. He’s always ready for a brainstorming session.
Steve shares his vision for Nuffield Canada, including better communication and branding, and the goal of making the organization more widely known and impactful.
On heavy cracking clay, the tracks a machine leaves in a wet year are still visible in the crop three seasons later. Steve Larocque got tired of looking at them.
He is an independent agronomist near Morrin, Alberta, a first generation farmer, and chair of the Canadian arm of a global scholarship programme that sends people in agriculture around the world to study one question properly. His was controlled traffic farming, and he has been running it on his own ground ever since.
What's Inside
- What the scholarship actually is, who it is for, and what a family did with a year of travelling farms on four continents
- The gap that opened when a provincial government cut most of its extension staff, and the practice he built into it
- What controlled traffic farming requires in practice: matched axle widths, permanent lanes, and the equipment modifications to make it line up
- What happened to soil structure and bulk density in the first two to three years
- The difference it made to root architecture, measured in inches of taproot
- Why the lanes matter in a wet spring and again, differently, in a dry one
- His argument that farmers belong in the rooms where global food policy gets written, and what happens when they are not there
- Why he has kept most of the same clients for twenty years
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