About Us

Who We Are And What We Do

Adapting Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices for the Canadian Prairies will require us to reimagine plants as both resources and tools to build healthy and productive soils. The Prairie Cover Cropping Strategies project is developing scalable strategies for cover crops integrated into annual grain crop systems. This is a bold step towards driving adoption for this new paradigm in climate-resilient Prairie cropping systems.

The Prairie Cover Cropping Strategies project evaluates the suitability of CSA practices for use in Canada's eastern Prairies through small plot, field scale, and on-farm experiments located in Manitoba's Red River Valley and southeastern Saskatchewan. Agronomic research will be used to identify promising regionally adapted CSA practices and to quantify their impact on subsequent crop yield, grain quality, soil health and fertility, and environmental services.

To ensure that stakeholder and producer perspectives, questions, and concerns are integrated into the project design on an on-going basis, CSA practices will be co-designed with on-farm trial participants.

The project emphasizes close collaboration between researchers at the University of Manitoba and South East Research Farm (SERF), an implementor organization with a long track record of direct engagement with farmers.

This project is funded jointly through the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and PepsiCo's AgMission initiative and runs between September 2023 and August 2026.