The Organic BC Podcast

This podcast was funded by the Climate Agri-Solutions Fund. Funding for the Climate Agri-Solutions Fund has been provided by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the Agricultural Climate Solutions – On-Farm Climate Action FundIn this episode of the podcast, the first of a two-part series about managed grazing for weed control. Managed grazing can take different forms with different names…rotational grazing, adaptive graving, management-intensive grazing, mob grazing, but the core principles of each are the same: don’t allow livestock to overgraze a given field or paddock, and don’t allow those animals to return until the field has sufficiently recovered.There are numerous benefits to well-executed managed grazing, and one of them is that managed grazing can be an effective alternative to the use of mowing, herbicides and tillage to control weeds in the pasture. And it’s this benefit that this series will focus on.In this episode, we focus on the principles of managed grazing for weed control.Guests this episode:Sarah Flack: Sarah has over 30 years of experience working with grass-based farmers on business planning combined with agronomy to improve forages, soils and pastures. Sarah also teaches workshops and has written books, articles and other publications with the goal to create more successful grass-based livestock farms.Greg Tegart: is a retired agrologist who spent much of his career working as a field crops & range specialist for BC's Ministry of Agriculture. He primarily focused on forage crops, field crops, and livestock production.Additional ResourcesWebinar about weed control with managed grazing featuring Sarah Flack produced by Organic BC & Small Scale Meat Producers Association

This episode was funded by the Organic Federation of Canada to highlight the work of the 2025 Review of the Canadian Organic StandardsBy the time this episode airs, the newest version of the Canadian Organic Standards will have been published. This is a big deal! We only get an update to the standards every five years, and only after a multi-year process involving dozens of people, many of them volunteers, collectively devoting thousands of hours of their time to the endeavor.To mark this momentous achievement, this episode we’ll take a look at the massive effort that goes into each cycle of updates to the Canadian Organic Standards, and we’ll learn why these updates are so important.My guests this episode are Rochelle Eisen, who chaired a working group of the 2025 Review of the Candian Organic Standards, and Nic Walser, who sat on the Technical Committee.If the updated standards have been published by the time you're reading this, you'll be able to find them here.

This episode was funded by the Organic Federation of Canada to highlight the work of Organic Science Cluster 4. The Organic Science Cluster is an industry-led research and development endeavour co-managed by the Organic Federation of Canada and the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada at Dalhousie University. It is also supported by the AgriScience Program under Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership together with over 80 funding partners. This episode, my interview with Dr. Juli Carillo, associate professor in the faculty of Land & Food Systems at UBC Vancouver.Together with her UBC colleague Dr. Claire Kremen, Juli’s Organic Science Cluster 4 research is exploring how on-farm habitat can be amended to intensify beneficial ecological interactions. Translation: how can we increase and support biodiversity on the farm that in turn supports farm production goals? Juli joins me to outline her project and her results so far.

This episode was funded by the Organic Federation of Canada to highlight the work of Organic Science Cluster 4. The Organic Science Cluster is an industry-led research and development endeavour co-managed by the Organic Federation of Canada and the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada at Dalhousie University. It is also supported by the AgriScience Program under Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership together with over 80 funding partners. This episode, my interview with Dr. Loren Rieseberg, Professor of Botany at UBC Vancouver about his Organic Science Cluster 4 research.Dr. Rieseberg and his team are combining genomics, ecophysiology, and participatory plant breeding with a goal of developing climate resilient veggie cultivars that are better adapted to organic production systems. Translation: this project wants to create improved, open-pollinated carrot and lettuce varieties for Canadian organic farmers, and Dr. Rieseberg joined me to tell me about combining traditional and technological breeding techniques in order to do so.

This podcast was funded by the Climate Agri-Solutions Fund. Funding for the Climate Agri-Solutions Fund has been provided by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the Agricultural Climate Solutions – On-Farm Climate Action Fund.This episode, a focus on cover cropping north of the 60th parallel, where long days and short growing seasons limit the applicability of the standard advice about cover cropping that was developed for farmers much further south. We’ll learn how the unique climatic and growing conditions in the north influence which benefits of cover cropping to prioritize and which species to plant, and the limitations to and challenges of growing a cover crop successfully. You’re going to hear from two people in this episode: an Alaska-based soil scientist and a Yukon-based veggie grower. Caley Gasch is a research assistant professor at University of Alaska Faribanks. She leads a research program focused on soil ecology, plant-soil interactions, how soils respond to environmental change and how we can build and maintain healthy soils.Sarah Ouellette grows mixed veggies at Sarah's Harvest, 50km north of Whitehorse.

This episode, the topic is biofumigation, a biological form of pest control that involves growing and turning under certain cover crop species that naturally suppress many weeds and soil-borne diseases and pests. In this episode:Tom Forge, a research scientist at the Summerland Research & Development Centre. Kip Cantrell, garlic grower at Thistle Farm in the Creston Valley.This document from Oregon State University Extension is a good primer on biofumigation.

This episode, the topic is silvopasture, a branch of agroforestry that purposefully combines trees, forage, and livestock on the same land unit to create a mutually beneficial, intensively managed system. Our guest for this episode is Lisa Zabek, Agroforestry Specialist at the BC Ministry of Agriculture, who joined us to explain how silvopasture systems work, the benefits these systems deliver when practiced well, and highlight examples of silvopasture in practice in BC. For more information about Silvopasture practices, this BC MInistry of Agriculture page is a good place to start.This podcast was funded by the Climate Agri-Solutions Fund. Funding for the Climate Agri-Solutions Fund has been provided by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the Agricultural Climate Solutions – On-Farm Climate Action Fund.

This episode, a look at the use of bale grazing as an alternative to tillage when attempting to manage field-edge encroachment by woody perennials like rosebush and willow.Farmer Rob Larson operates a mixed livestock operation that covers around 5000 acres Northwest of Fort St. John, in BC’s Peace country. The encroachment of wild rosebush onto some of Rob’s fields has been an ongoing challenge that Rob used to manage with repeated tillage. This approach is effective, but, as we’ll hear, also costly from both an economic and ecological perspective. So, back in 2017, Rob teamed up with the Peace River Forage Association to conduct a trial to explore whether winter bale grazing his cattle in areas of rosebush encroachment could suppress the advance of the rosebush and other woody perennials while improving his soil at the same time. In this interview, Rob will summarize the trial, as well as provide an update on the state of his field edges since then.Later on, we’ll hear from Sandra Burton, a soil scientist who worked with Rob on this project.

This podcast was funded in part by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the BC Climate Agri-Solutions Fund delivered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC.This episode features two compelling arguments for the use of cover crops in field crop or vegetable production. In the first segment, we’ll learn about a Fraser Valley Dairy Farmer’s experience with planting a relay cover crop once his silage corn is established, and the benefits he’s realized from that effort.After that, an Agriculture & Agri-food Canada researcher will tell us why it is so very important, if not imperative, that BC’s field crop and veggie farmers start including cover cropping in their weed management plans. My guests this episode:Holger Schwichtenberg of Holberg Dairy Farm in Agassiz, BCJichul Bae, Researcher at Agriculture & Agrifood Canada's Agassiz Research & Development Centre

This podcast was funded in part by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the BC Climate Agri-Solutions Fund delivered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC.This episode: the final chapter in our miniseries on rotational grazing in collaboration with BC’s Small Scale Meat Producers Association. This one features a long-form conversation with rancher Joseph Moilliet of Avely Ranch, a sheep and cattle operation in Vavenby, British Columbia. Management-intensive rotational grazing is a major pillar in Joseph’s approach to sustainable livestock management. Rotational grazing is the main focus of this conversation, but you’ll also hear Joseph talk about other practices he uses to improve the health and productivity of his soil, such as winter bale grazing and an avoid-tillage-at-all-costs approach to pasture rejuvenation. Mentioned in this episode:Check out the Small Scale Meat Producers Youtube Page!You'll find lots of videos about fencing and rotational grazing at the SSMPA Youtube page.

This podcast was funded in part by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the BC Climate Agri-Solutions Fund delivered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC.This episode: the next chapter in our miniseries on rotational grazing in collaboration with BC’s Small Scale Meat Producers Association. In the first two episodes, we learned about the fundamental principles of rotational grazing from forage specialist Woody Lane. Woody described the ideal approach to management intensive rotational grazing if we want to get the most out of this system. But! It’s called ‘management intensive grazing’ for a reason. Conducting our grazing this way is labour intensive, which can make it difficult, when things get busy, to avoid violating the fundamental principles that Woody described.My two guests in this episode are here to tell you that that’s okay, sometimes at least, to break the rules, and to give examples of how they break the rules on their own farms. My guests this episode:Joseph Moilliet of Aveley Ranch in Vavenby, who we'll hear a lot more from in the next episode. Steve Meggait of Fresh Valley Farms in Spallumcheen, who also featured in episodes 44 & 45 of this podcast.Mentioned in this episode:Check out the Small Scale Meat Producers Youtube Page!You'll find lots of videos about fencing and rotational grazing at the SSMPA Youtube page.

This episode, a look at cover-cropping in the vineyard context. My guest this episode is Lisa Wambold. Lisa has spent a lot of her career in vineyards consulting with farmers on beneficial management practices, including cover cropping. She’s a big believer in the positive role cover crops can play both in both the mid-row and under the vines, and so I asked her to join me to summarize the benefits of cover cropping in the vineyard. We also talk about species selection, the tools required, circumstances where she advises against the use of cover crops, and plenty more.