FEATURE STORY
An Innovator At Heart
By David Morris

“Innovative” is an adjective that truly fits Barry Newcombe, President of the Innovative Farmers’ Association of Ontario (IFAO). He always seems to be trying something new on his cash crop farm near Alliston.

Newcombe grows about 1,300 acres of his own crops (corn, soybeans, winter wheat, white beans and barley) and custom farms roughly 1,000 acres for other farmers in the area, with the help of one full-time hired man. Except for some of the land that he custom plants, all crops are planted no-till.

In the first few years after switching to no-till, most changes that Newcombe made were to his planting equipment, as he worked to refine a no-till system that suited his operation and range of soils. Today, most of his innovations relate to information gathering and management. Rather than making more equipment changes for relatively little gain, he prefers to emphasize improving the management of his current system. Newcombe believes the key to success in no-till for most people is not mechanical, but mental. He feels that with the equipment now available producers can succeed with no-till almost anywhere, providing they have the right attitude. As well as taking a “can do” approach, producers must become skilled at collecting and applying the best information available, whether it be about the latest techniques or about their own fields.

Newcombe sees precision (or site-specific) farming as the way of the future, but is quick to caution that there is still much to learn. He has fitted one of his combines with GPS and yield monitors so he can collect yield data from his fields and develop an information base for making management decisions. Three years worth of yield maps from many of his fields clearly show that crop performance is below par in some parts of each one. As a result, Newcombe believes there is the potential to improve profits by varying plant populations or nitrogen application rates within a field. However, he has not yet begun to use variable-rate technology, although he has equipped his planter and nitrogen applicator to do so. He feels he needs yield data from another year or two to be sure he has a clear picture of crop performance over the long-term, before confounding it with variable-rate management. If he were to begin to change things too soon, he would not know whether differences observed in yields resulted from variability in the field or from management.

Newcombe’s recognition of the need to be continually learning led to his involvement in IFAO. He has attended IFAO events since 1987 connecting with like-minded people for sharing experiences, information and expertise, through projects, publications, workshops, tours and annual conferences (the 1999 Innovative Farmers’ Conference will be held February 16-17, at the London Convention Centre). For him, participation in the association has been a key that opened doors to the people with the information he needs.

IFAO has its roots in a kitchen somewhere in midwest Ontario. In the early 1980s, the number of farmers committed to no-till or ridge-till comprised quite a small group, who felt pretty much alone in their quest to make these systems work. They became aware that their best source of information was each other, and a dozen or so of them began to gather informally to share their experiences and ideas. As interest in conservation tillage grew and the expertise of these innovators became more widely recognized, the kitchen meetings eventually grew into conferences attended by several hundred people. An informal approach no longer was adequate and the IFAO was incorporated as a legal entity in 1994. Barry is the third person to serve as president, following Bob McIntosh and Jim House.

In addition to providing opportunities for information sharing, IFAO helps provide a farmer voice on a number of committees and coalitions. Newcombe and another director, Bob McKinnon, recently traveled to Saskatchewan to participate in a national workshop, sponsored by the Soil Conservation Council of Canada, on the role of agriculture in combating global warming. Specifically, this event brought together representatives of farm organizations, agri-business and government to begin developing a discussion paper on soil carbon sequestration (i.e., reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by increasing the amount of organic matter stored in the soil). To achieve the targets set in Kyoto for emissions will have to be reduced or ways found to remove it from the air. Storing it in the soil may be one way of doing the latter. Newcombe notes that some Canadian companies that generate electricity using coal are already sufficiently convinced of the potential of this method that they are approaching farmers in the U.S. to negotiate “carbon rights”. The companies appear willing to pay farmers to store carbon in the soil to counter-balance at least a portion of the amount that is released during power generation. Treating carbon rights as a commodity is a concept that Newcombe views with concern, because there are still so many unanswered questions about the implications for agriculture. He feels that farmers – and agriculture as a whole – should not be too quick to make a deal that they might someday regret because of the limits it could place on their management options.

Nevertheless, Newcombe feels that soil carbon sequestration is a topic worth pursuing. Although many questions are yet to be answered and many hurdles are yet to be overcome, he is hopeful recognition of the potential of conservation tillage practices in reducing greenhouse gases could be a turning point in helping the non-farm public again view agriculture as an environmentally friendly industry.

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