Early results from a multi-year University of Manitoba study suggest it might be possible to shave nitrogen fertilizer rates by 10 per cent or more when paired with the right products.

To read the whole article, please visit Manitoba Co-operator.

To read the entire article, please head to Winnipeg Free Press.

A University of Manitoba soil scientist is using AI and satellite data to explore how Prairie landscapes respond to long-term stress — and how they bounce back.

At a recent presentation, Nasem Badreldin, who teaches digital agronomy at the U of M, explained how his team is using simulations to study landscape resilience. The model they built uses 25 years of daily satellite data to show how vegetation and soil systems shift under pressures such as drought, erosion or the loss of organic matter.

To read the whole article, please follow the link to Grainews

Dr. Don Flaten, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Soil Science at the University of Manitoba, has been announced as the 2025 recipient of the Les Henry Award. The official presentation of the award from Dr. Jeff Schoenau to Dr. Flaten took place during Ag in Motion in the soil pit at the University of Saskatchewan booth near Langham, SK.

Jeff Schoenau presents Don Flaten with the Les Henry Award – photo: Pat Flaten.

The Les Henry award recognizes an individual in Western Canada that demonstrates excellence in soil and water science and its application to the farming community. Flaten is the second recipient of the award, which was established by the late Les Henry himself in 2024. The award will be presented to Flaten in recognition of his outstanding and lasting contributions to the study of soil fertility and crop nutrition across the Canadian prairies. Henry’s legacy, passion, and integrity in agriculture is carried forward with this annual award.

“Receiving the Les Henry Award is a very special honour for me,” says Flaten. “In addition to being an excellent soil scientist, Les was a fantastic mentor and friend of mine for nearly 50 years and I miss him dearly. Every time Les and I chatted by phone, exchanged emails, visited a field, or met in his office, it was a personal tutorial where I learned something valuable. In addition to my respect and appreciation for Les’s outstanding contributions to prairie agriculture, I am also personally grateful for the interest and effort he invested in me and my career.”

Over his distinguished career, Flaten published nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers and delivered more than 300 extension presentations. His work has advanced nutrient management practices and bridged the gap between scientific research and on-farm practice, exemplifying the spirit of leadership and impact that the Les Henry award celebrates.

The inaugural 2024 Les Henry award recipient, Dr. Jeff Schoenau of the University of Saskatchewan, presented this year’s award to Flaten. Dr. Schoenau commented, “Dr. Flaten has made exceptional contributions in his soil and water research activities on the Canadian prairies. In particular, his work on developing fertilizer and manure phosphorus management strategies to enhance crop recovery and reduce phosphorus losses in run-off has contributed to better yields while protecting water quality in prairie landscapes.”

Henry was a renowned soil scientist in Saskatchewan and Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan. He received many honours and awards throughout his career including induction in the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame. He authored “Henry’s Handbook of Soil and Water” and contributed columns to the Grainews newspaper for 48 years.

There’s been growing interest in precision 4R fertilization over the past few years, said Mario Tenuta during the Canola AgriScience Cluster Research Roundup webinar in June.

The 4R movement has been key framework for Fertilizer Canada, gotten official support from Manitoba Agriculture and has been touted and incentivized by various provincial and federal commodity groups, funding programs and organizations like Farm Credit Canada.

But Western Canada and even individual farms have a lot of variation in their soils and topography, Tenuta noted, and that’s a challenge for farmers looking to adopt 4R.

To read the entire article, please follow the link to the Manitoba Co-operator.

Dr. David Lobb, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences

A new research project is set to provide solutions to improve Lake Winnipeg’s water quality. Led by UM’s Dr. David Lobb, Professor in the Department of Soil Science, this project will investigate a critical missing piece in the decades-long effort to reduce harmful nutrient pollution by fingerprinting the sources of airborne phosphorus that affect water quality in the lake.

Funded by a grant from the Canada Water Agency, this work will help inform long-term plans for water management to improve the future health of Lake Winnipeg.

Lake Winnipeg’s deteriorating quality impacts many groups, including fishers, cottagers, rural municipalities and Indigenous communities. By developing effective solutions to mitigate excess phosphorus, the team hopes to improve water quality, aquatic life and provide certainty for local communities about the future of the lake.

“Lake Winnipeg and surrounding waterways are vital to the social, cultural and economic well-being of Manitoba. They are essential for generating hydroelectric power, supporting tourism and recreation, and sustain important industries,” says Lobb. “Our findings could shape effective land management strategies, identify actionable climate change mitigation efforts and ultimately improve the water quality in Lake Winnipeg.”

Algae blooms in Lake Winnipeg, September 2024

The problem with phosphorus

Phosphorus is a major contributor to the growth of algae in freshwater, affecting fish, wildlife and local communities who depend on the lake. Because Lake Winnipeg is shallow, it struggles to effectively process high phosphorus levels.

Sources of dust containing phosphorus include boreal forest pollen, wildfire smoke and wind eroded agricultural fields. Understanding how these sources interact with land and water surfaces, and how they contribute to the lake’s phosphorus loads is crucial to mitigating resulting damage. With climate change impacting the frequency and severity of wildfires, this work is particularly timely.

The research team includes Masoud Goharrokhi (Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences), Shawn Clark (Price Faculty of Engineering), Tim Papakyriakou and Greg McCullough (Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources), along with researchers from Brandon and the University of Northern British Columbia. This project is supported by the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium, Inc., which plays a critical role in facilitating research on the lake.

Algae blooms visible from the research ship M/V Namao

A scientific leap: phosphorus fingerprinting

Using an innovative phosphorus fingerprinting approach, the team will collect robust data from a large area of the lake. The team will collect samples from five areas on Lake Winnipeg and other locations across the watershed, including agricultural research field stations and communities as far away as Swan Lake First Nation.

Dr. Masoud Goharrokhi on the research ship M/V Namao

“The samples we’re collecting will help discriminate the relative contribution of phosphorus from sources like smoke, pollen, insects and mineral sediment from eroded soils around the lake,” says Masoud Goharrokhi. “They will determine if certain sources affect the water in the centre of the lake differently than the shores, for example.”

This new data will provide insight into opportunities for sustainable changes to land and water management.

“Work such as this is vital to the ongoing efforts of numerous organizations dedicated to understanding and addressing the challenges posed by excess nutrients entering the lake,” says Julia Patrick, Associate Executive Director at the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium Inc. “We support this collective effort by providing safe access to this often-unpredictable great lake aboard the research ship M/V Namao.”

Lobb’s research aligns with UM’s commitment to research in water and food security outlined in Change through Research: UM Strategic Plan 2024-29, and in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. By advancing our understanding of phosphorus pollution, this study could help secure a cleaner, healthier future for Lake Winnipeg and its surrounding communities.

This project was undertaken with the financial support of the Canada Water Agency. Ce projet a été réalisé avec l’appui financier de l’Agence de l’eau du Canada.

Rather, it’s weather, and your wheat variety, that will make the biggest difference.

The research was led by Katherine Dorian, then a master’s student at the University of Manitoba, with support from a multidisciplinary team that included cereal chemist Harry Sapirstein and agrometeorologist Paul Bullock.

To read the full story, please visit the Manitoba Co-operator article.

Xiaopeng Gao is on it. The University of Manitoba researcher and his team of half a dozen graduate students are examining how nutrients flow through soil and plants. That includes both macronutrients like the nitrogen required to grow crops and micronutrients like iron and zinc required for human health. 

“[It’s] about how you can manage your soil nutrients better in terms of productivity, in terms of how you can protect the environment better, and also in terms of how you can improve the producer’s economic return,” says Gao. 

To read the entire story, please follow the link to the Canada Foundation for Innovation Innovation news blog.

“I don’t believe this, except in the extreme, like where nitrogen levels become so high that they are toxic,” says Harding. “Studies I’m familiar with show that excess nitrogen is not advantageous or detrimental to yield. I do believe that excess nitrogen is a waste of money, so it will rob profit, but not yield. It is also possible that the lack of other nutrients may rob yield, but excess nitrogen will not.”

To read the entire article, please follow the link to Grainews. 

Tell us about yourself

I’ve been with my wife Kendra for 23 years, and I have two sons, Asher and Jude, who are 16 and 13 respectively, and our dog Ollie who turns two tomorrow. I am a mass spectrometry method validation specialist. I got my BSc (Biochemistry) from the University of Winnipeg in 2013, and PhD (Chemistry) from the University of Manitoba in 2019. In my post-doc, I developed analytical methods for federal compliance under the Cannabis Act (2018), after which time I worked with Environment and Climate Change Canada studying the impact of different retention structures on nutrient loading into the Red River Basin. During the pandemic, I made several courses for the Department of Environment and Geography, after which I was solicited to create the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences’ Manitoba Analytical Solutions (MASS) Lab in the Richardson Centre for Food Technology and Research. Now I have made numerous additional methods for several faculties, in addition to Health Canada.

Why did you get into this area of study?

I used to want to be an orthopedic surgeon, then a cancer researcher in my early 20s. Then during my undergrad, I took ecotoxicology with the Canada Research Chair Dr. Charles Wong at the University of Winnipeg. That completely opened my eyes to how humans and other organisms are exposed to environmental contaminants, whether water, food, air, or soil. The entire field of epigenetics fascinates me – how toxicants can alter gene expression in addition to their baseline toxicity. This led me to become an analytical chemist who specialized in water, whether surface water, wastewater, groundwater, or drinking water. Water security is critical to not only the health of the environment and agriculture but also vulnerable peoples such as our Indigenous communities. From that point on I have expanded to many different matrices.

One of the most nuanced aspects of environmental chemistry is contaminant fate, sorption, and transport via solids, soils, and sediments. Just because something is not found in the water doesn’t mean it is not in the environment. Conversely, just because something is found in the environment doesn’t necessarily mean it is a threat to aquatic biota. It is all about your perspective, values, and understanding of risk calculations.

What are you seeking to explore with your research?

The main objectives are ultraviolet filters (e.g. sunscreens), pesticides and their transformation products, and perfluorinated compounds in the environment. There is essentially no freshwater data on UV filters in Canada including environmental fate and toxicity, so we don’t know how dangerous they are and they are used everywhere at high levels. Also, we will be quantifying pesticide transformation into different environmental forms to get a better picture of the true inventory that can impact human and biotic health. The biobed at the Ian N. Morrison Farm will degrade pesticides during remediation, so determining the extent will also be critical to estimating environmental loads. Lastly, I will build upon my perfluorinated compound research experience and explore leaching into Canadian soils via buried textiles.

Will you be teaching?

I currently teach Introduction to Environment and Health, and Advanced Issues in Environment and Health. I will be looking to teach the Soil Science pesticides course this winter; and I would love to develop a senior level/ graduate applied mass spectrometry interdisciplinary course relating to agriculture, engineering, food, and environment.

I fundamentally believe teaching is the cornerstone of higher education, not it being a business. The most effective teacher is knowledgeable, translatable, and approachable. This means you have to know what you’re talking about, translate it in different ways to different students, and create a culture of safety where students feel comfortable to talking to you. Shout out to CATL for helping train faculty to achieve this!

Any interesting stories you’d like to share about your field of study?

The hallmark feature of me as a professor is how I got here. After stopping halfway through my BSc at UW in 2000, I became a carpenter and then fuel trucker for Petro Canada for 13 years. Along the way I got married, bought a house, and had two sons. I went to grad school when they were one and four years old, so I sort of did everything backwards. I am a fan of growing good people, not just cranking out publications – focusing on execution, not results.

Second, as I stay rooted in Manitoba I realize that there is a significant knowledge gap in my field of applied mass spectrometry. It is much more common in more biotech centered areas such as California, the Eastern seaboard, and the GTA, but Manitoba has the opportunity to become a great hub for forensic mass spectrometry and environmental contaminant analytical chemistry. This is especially true when committing to the principles of Anishinaabe Nibi Inaakonigewin (water law) and reconciliation with our Indigenous communities.

What you like to do in your spare time?

I am a restless soul who never stops. I love to coach Kids of Mud mountain biking with Woodcock Cycle for the past seven years. I have coached hockey in St. Boniface for years, I volunteer with several scientific societies and their conferences, and I serve my political party at provincial and federal levels. I travel around North America mountain biking, and I serve on local trails organizations to grow our infrastructure and community in Manitoba when I am not fixing or custom-building bikes for others. I have also rekindled my love for the gym in the past five years. I go three to four days per week. Whether it was trucking or now in the office or lab, this life will break you if you don’t fight back.