Lana Shaw manages the Southeast Research Farm at Redvers, Saskatchewan, a farmer-directed research organisation, and has spent twenty years running replicated crop trials. She makes the case for what rigorous trials can answer that a single on-farm test cannot, then works through soil health from the ground up: why bare soil is starving rather than resting, why topsoil is still being lost even under reduced tillage, and why the current understanding is that most organic matter is microbial biomass rather than broken-down residue. The back half is a long producer question round on intercropping, where she is candid about storage, separation, disease and the trials that did not work. Her frame throughout is that agriculture is a craft rather than a recipe, and that control is largely an illusion.
Lana Shaw went through a crop science degree and a master's with a soils minor and never took a class on soil biology. She learned soil chemistry and soil physics, and what she knew about biology was that some bacteria convert fertilizer into something a plant can use and others make it disappear.
What changed since is the understanding of where organic matter actually comes from. Not straw breaking down, as most of us were taught, but microbial biomass. The carcasses of the soil life, fed on sugars the plant releases through its own roots.
Shaw manages the Southeast Research Farm at Redvers, a non-profit, farmer-directed research operation in the far southeast corner of Saskatchewan. She has spent twenty years running replicated trials, and she is straightforward about what research can tell a producer that their own field cannot.
What's Inside
Why replicated trials across multiple sites and years answer questions a single on-farm trial cannot, and what her intercrop trials actually measure
How much of an operation she thinks belongs in the experiment column, and why the field you pick should be close to home
What happened to southeast Saskatchewan soils through the wet years, and why she says soil sitting bare is starving rather than resting
Why the culture treats a second species in a field as a weed problem, and what that costs
The simplest test a producer can run themselves to know whether their soil is getting more functional, using a pipe and a bucket of water
Why she thinks the old extension model, research to agronomist to farmer, is broken, and what her Nuffield work found instead
The second half is an Ag Twitter round where producers push back on intercropping, covering storage, separation, marketability, disease pressure and whether any of it works in a dry year.
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