Jake Leguee is a third generation family farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada. He grows several crops on his land including canola, wheat, durum, peas, lentils, and soybeans. We visited Jake during the harvest season to learn how he practices sustainable farming.
Jake and his family farm 13,000 acres, which is around 35 miles from one side to the other. This means the farm has many different land types and weather patterns.
Like many other farmers, weather is one of the biggest challenges that Jake faces on his farm. But with the right tools there are lots of things he can do to tackle this: “if we can maximize the crops water-use efficiency, we can make the best use of the weather we get. And the best way to do that is with good varieties, good nutrition, and taking care of pests in the crop.”
Jake follows integrated pest management (IPM) principles to ensure that he manages pests on his farm sustainably. Learn more about Jake and IPM here.
German beer is famous around the world. Most brewers in Germany still follow a 500-year old recipe that combines water, hops, malt and alt yeast.
Most German hop farms have been in families for many generations. Meet one of our food heroes- Georg Selmeier, a sixth-generation hop farmer. As his experience has taught him, hops are very vulnerable to pests and disease — “Every year we have a new challenge”.
And that’s where crop protection can help!
Florian Weihrauc is a plant scientist at the Hop Research Institute. He’s working to help farmers protect their hops from damage – he explains that knowing when to apply crop protection products is a crucial part of preventing disease.
“Take downy mildew. Because we know the disease, we developed a forecasting model that gives a control threshold that tells farmers when they need to spray fungicides, using as little as possible, but as much as needed to protect the crop.”
It’s research and tools from Florian and his colleagues that keep hops healthy and German beer flowing.
Cheers to our #FoodHeroes for working together to keep harvests healthy, so there’s more beer for everyone!
Read more about our hops and our German #FoodHeroes here
According to a recent study, as global temperatures go up, so will insect populations. These “creepy-crawlies” eat crops meant for human consumption and cause a host of other problems for farmers. Check out what could happen from more climate change:
With access to crop protection and plant biotechnology as part of an Integrated Pest Management strategy, farmers can beat the bugs.
Climate change can cause a host of problems for farmers including flooding, excessive heat, and drought. See how innovative technology and the right tools allow farmers to continue producing despite these changes:
To learn more about how climate change impacts agriculture here.
“We’ve shifted away from generations that were focused on food, that’s not their primary focus. People today care about the environment.” Paul Temple, is a third generation beef and arable farmer in Yorkshire. Running a family farm, legacy is extremely important to Paul, and he is always on the lookout for ways to make his farm more sustainable.
In the following video Paul talks about how the grassland margins on his farm give bees a place to forage and have helped to bring other species back to the area.
In the EU, farmers must maintain a 2-meter margin alongside their hedges. In Paul’s case this left him with a grass margin around all his fields. This might seem like quite a lot of land to go unfarmed, but what Paul found was that these margins have been extremely beneficial for the local wildlife.
“If you leave these grass margins, you get a lot more small mammals there. Two or three years after these have been established then you’ll get owls and other small mammal predators,” he explained.
Paul joined a high-level environmental scheme that increases these margins up to 10m. More used to farming crops, Paul found this to be a slow learning curve. “The tricky bit is you get one cycle a year. We’re eight years into our environmental scheme so I’ve only got eight years or eight cycles of experience.”
However, over time experimenting with different flowering mixes within his margins, and learning when to cut and manage this land, has helped Paul to make these areas more effective: “we are now finding owls back in the area that we never had when I was a child.”
We spoke with Jake Freestone, a Crop Protector and UK farmer about some of the ways he is maximizing biodiversity on his farm.
Why is biodiversity important on a farm?
Biodiversity underpins all of our food and ecosystems. The environment is so crucial to making food production run as smoothly as possible. Whether support that is helping bees to pollinate crops or helping to clean the water as it goes through the farming system, a biodiverse environment makes everything run smoothly.
Have you seen a species return to your farm because you are mindful about biodiversity?
We are finding more beetles and more earthworms in our soil. We started doing no-till in 2016, and within two years we started to get an increase in Rose Beetles and another beetle called a Devil’s Coachman. They are natural predators of slugs—one of our big problems here in the UK. By leaving plant residue, you promote a good habitat for the beetles.
Jake Freestone speaks about managing slugs
Also earthworms, we have fields with earthworm castings all over them and to me that is a really easy win for farmers. The more worms the merrier and if my earthworms are good in number, then I am confident that the things that we can’t measure or see with the naked eye are also in good health.
What about diversity within the crops themselves?
We try not to just keep biodiversity on the margins but integrate it into the actual cash crop we grow. For instance, in our oilseed rape, we grow vetches, buckwheat, and clover to act as companion crops within those fields. We think they can mask the emerging oilseed rape crops from flea beetle. They are leguminous and provide a degree of nitrogen while helping cover the field to reduce bird damage. They suppress weeds which saves on herbicides and gives us a net financial benefit of about $45 USD per hectare.
Can you tell me more about Linking Environment and Farming – the organization that promotes sustainable farming?
Some farming friends suggested it to me. They said LEAF is on the cutting edge of environmental sustainability, where they look to reduce the impact on ecology and biodiversity while still remaining focused on outputs.
LEAF has a helpful Integrated Farm Management handbook and they run a great event called Open Farm Sunday where as many farms as possible open their gates on the same day. We welcome the general public and our customers so they can see how we grow the food and look after the environment.
At a LEAF meeting the farmers are really positive people. We ask ourselves about the wider benefits to society and the environment from what we do on the farm and you always learn something when you go to one of those meetings.
What has been something that you have picked up on in one of those meetings that you have implemented in your farm?
We deepened and widened a stretch of ditch to create a silt trap and a little reed bed as well. Now we have reeds growing filtering the water and when you go down there, there are little birds, little wrens and threshes and all sorts of stuff making that their environment and their home now.
Can using pesticides help with biodiversity?
We have to be responsible and make sure to stick to the label. We need to have buffer strips around our fields and use the right product at the right time, with the right dose.
We used to use seed treatment to control cabbage stem flea beetle. Without that [now banned treatment] farmers now spray broad acre insecticide across the emerging crop to prevent damage. Unfortunately, there are huge losses from resistance and over the span of three days, the pest virtually wiped out my whole crop of oilseed rape in three fields. It was that quick and that invasive.
Brought together by plant breeding, agricultural biotechnology, and their shared goal to end malnutrition, The Nutritious Nine are a biofortified team of crops from all over the world whose powers come together to fight preventable vitamin deficiencies and other health problems.
Biofortified superheroes
Click here to see their stats and superpowers and learn about how all nine of them can help people every day.
Banana Boss, Golden Guy, the Lawful Lentil and more make up the Nutritious Nine! See their stats and superpowers and learn about how all nine of them can help people every day.
We spoke with Jake Freestone, a 
