Kroeker Farms’ Focus on Conservation and Soil Health

By Harry Siemens

Kroeker Farms is one of Canada’s leading potato producers and Manitoba’s largest grower of organic potatoes. It is widely known and respected for its progressive approach to tillage, land stewardship, innovation and quality.

Wayne Rempel, the CEO of Kroeker Farms for over 20 years, participated in a panel discussion at the recent AGM of the Keystone Agriculture Producers (KAP) in Winnipeg, MB on the various Manitoba farm programs to help increase sustainability. With emphasis on agrisustainability farmers are looking for ways to improve productivity and make the most out of the land.

Rempel described Kroeker Farms’ as a potato grower and some other vegetables with about 6,000 acres of fresh and seed potatoes for the fresh market in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and recently in Minnesota.

It continued to diversify over the years from French fried and chipped potatoes and now focuses on fresh potatoes divided into four categories. One-quarter of about 1,500 acres is dedicated to seed potatoes, 1,500 acres of baby potatoes, another quarter is organic potatoes, and the remaining quarter is for fresh potatoes. Added to the mix are organic onions, hemp, and other crops.

Rempel said to imagine the fields in spring with 6,000 acres of certified organic land.

“When you have 6,000 acres of land, you can’t spray herbicide; weeds growing everywhere, so you have to be on top of it,” he said. “So it’s a very interesting, challenging operation.”

When potatoes first emerged as a significant crop people knew potato farmers as the cause of soil erosion.

When the wind blew and soil drifted it was always the potato farmer’s fault. Because of that, it became his passion to eliminate soil erosion and enacting conservation on their farm.

Kroeker Farms has planted six to seven miles of trees every year and focuses on cover crops to the point of getting the Conservation Award.

“This is unusual for a potato farm, but we are very proud of that and worked hard and continue to talk about conservation and to take care of our soil,” said Rempel.

They are pioneers in irrigation and water development with most of the water sourced from self-built water ponds over the years thanks to some help from the government at the time. Ninety per cent of their land is drain tiled, an orderly way of handling excessive water.

Another goal said Rempel is to ensure drought-proofing because of the farm’s irrigation land levelling and tiling.

“We don’t use much crop insurance because we’ve invested in that side of things,” he said.

With pressure on carbon sequestration and thinking environmentally, Rempel said he attended a meeting of CEOs in Canada from some of the biggest Canadian companies in late 2022 with the goal, “How do we solve the carbon credit problem, and how do we deal with that thing?”

His next meeting is to attend Syngenta’s world leader’s conference in Switzerland, addressing the same issues with 200 leaders from across the world.

“And myself and two other large farms from across the world, a person from Ukraine who farms 200,000 hectares of land, and another from Brazil who farms a little bit more than that, around 300,000 hectares,” said Kroeker. “So these are massive, massive farms.”