Better Soil

Better Soil Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Better Soil, Business service, 1122 3 Street SE Ste, Calgary, AB.

🌱 Honest, soil-first agronomy for Southern Alberta growers who'd rather heal their soil than feed it more products.
💬 Carefully chosen inputs — if it doesn't pay, it doesn't stay.
📅 Book your free soil review.

07/01/2026

WHY
FOLIAR FEEDING
MATTERS
AFTER HEAVY RAIN

Saturated soil isn't just slowing your crop down — it's starving it. Standing water pushes oxygen out of the soil, roots go anaerobic, and nutrient mobility shuts down. The nitrogen and phosphorus your crop needs is still in there — your roots just can't get to it.

Corn's going to feel this hard. When soil-applied nutrients go immobile right when a heavy feeder needs them most, that's where foliar feeding earns its keep — getting nutrition to the plant when the roots can't.

If your fields are sitting wet and you're wondering what it's doing to nutrient uptake, give us a call. www.bettersoil.ca

Walked any fields this weekend or past week? Here's the framework that turns “this looks rough” or “why does my crop loo...
06/19/2026

Walked any fields this weekend or past week? Here's the framework that turns “this looks rough” or “why does my crop look pale” into an actual decision.

After a heavy rain, every emergence call comes down to one of three: manage what you have, patch the worst areas, or replant.

Manage is the most common — and usually the right one. If your stand is at or above the low end of the target with some delayed plants that aren't too far behind, the better play is to push the crop you've got: tight w**d control, a tissue or sap test to catch the post-rain nutrient gaps, followed by a thorough foliar program built around what that test actually flags. Not product for the sake of product — just what the field is asking for.

If it doesn't pay, it doesn't stay!

Patch and replant are the exceptions, and the calendar past early June makes them unforgiving calls.

The system is simple, and it's the same on every field, every year:

1. Walk the field, quadrat or tape measure in hand
2. Count 4–6 spots — including the ones that looked off from the truck
3. Note population, uniformity, delayed plants, crusting and gaps
4. Pair it with a tissue or sap test on the same trip

That one dataset drives every fertility, fungicide and harvest call you make for the rest of the year.

We built a free printable field checklist so you can walk it properly — it's linked in this week's post 👇

https://bettersoil.ca/soil-insights/crop-emergence-after-heavy-rain

Count first. Decide second.

The cheapest yield-saving tool you own: a 1 x 1-foot square and 5 minutes.Most emergence decisions get made from the tru...
06/18/2026

The cheapest yield-saving tool you own: a 1 x 1-foot square and 5 minutes.

Most emergence decisions get made from the truck. But a field that looks terrible from the road can be carrying a perfectly good stand once you actually count — and a field that looks beautiful can be hiding real variability underneath.

So count.

→ Toss a 1x1square made out of PVC or a tape measure.
→ Count every plant inside - you want approx 18-25 plants.
→ Repeat 5 to 10 times across the field.

Two things that keep the numbers honest:

→ Toss it BLIND. The second you start aiming for a “representative” spot, you're sampling the good part of the field.

→ Line up the square so a row runs corner to corner — that way one square catches several passes of the drill at once.

And watch the spread, not just the average. One toss at 16 and another at 22 tells you more about your stand than the average ever will.

The full crop-by-crop targets — cereals, canola, pulses, corn — are in this week's post 👇

https://bettersoil.ca/soil-insights/crop-emergence-after-heavy-rain

What are you using out there — square, hoop, or eyeballing it?

“The crop looks rough — better re-seed it.”It might be the most expensive sentence in farming, and it's almost always sa...
06/16/2026

“The crop looks rough — better re-seed it.”

It might be the most expensive sentence in farming, and it's almost always said from the cab of the truck.

Here's the reframe:

A field that looks terrible from the road is often carrying a perfectly acceptable stand. And the field that looks great can be hiding gaps and delayed plants that'll cost you during harvest. As you drive by your field at 60 km/h, you genuinely can't tell the two apart.

The second reframe worth contemplating:

When a crop struggles after a big rain, the instinct is to feed it — more product, more passes. But the problem isn't necessarily a fertility issue, It's emergence and crusting issue that you can't fertilize your way out of when a plant doesn’t make it to daylight.

The answer isn't more product. It's better information. Count the stand. Read what's actually there. Then decide.

This week's post walks through exactly how, crop by crop 👇
https://bettersoil.ca/soil-insights/crop-emergence-after-heavy-rain

Be honest — how many decisions have you made from the road?

Two fields. Same 5 inches of rain. One still hits its yield target. The other never recovers.The difference usually isn'...
06/15/2026

Two fields. Same 5 inches of rain. One still hits its yield target. The other never recovers.

The difference usually isn't fertilizer. It's what happened in the first 10 days after the rain — down at seed depth, where you can't see it from the cab.

Right now, somewhere in your fields, a crust could be setting over seedlings that germinated just fine and can't punch through it. The yield loss doesn't announce itself. It shows up quietly — as thin patches, lagging plants, and a stand that “looked fine from the road.”

The hard part: the window to catch it is closing. Symptoms tend to show up 4–10 days after a big rain, and the call gets harder and more expensive every day after that.

If you took a soaking this past week, read this before you make any decisions 👇

https://bettersoil.ca/soil-insights/crop-emergence-after-heavy-rain

***How much rain did your fields take last week?***

I only take a limited number of fields each month — and a few spots are open.Here's what a Free Soil Review actually is:...
06/15/2026

I only take a limited number of fields each month — and a few spots are open.

Here's what a Free Soil Review actually is:

Send me a soil report that you’ve recently taken and you get a plain-English read on as to what your soil is doing, what's limiting it, and what's already working.

No jargon. No sales pitch. No obligation.

What it's not:

a setup to sell you something, though I may recommend products that are known to provide value in the field and to the grower.

Whatever the plan ends up being, it's yours — take it to your retailer, get it bid out, or sit on it. The advice is independent because my only agenda is your soil and it’s performance.

Typically, most soil reports won’t come with a biological assessment, you just get the chemistry.

If you really want to move the needle and figure out what is really going on beneath your feet then make a booking for me to come and take a full comprehensive test.

Clarity before recommendations. That's the whole idea.

Takes about 30 seconds to book 👇
🔗 bettersoil.ca/book-soil-review

Walked a field near Fort Macleod last week where the grower was convinced he had a fertility problem.He didn't. He had a...
06/13/2026

Walked a field near Fort Macleod last week where the grower was convinced he had a fertility problem.

He didn't. He had a compaction problem.

The penetrometer hit a wall at about 2” with roots hitting this compacted layer and not travelling further down towards moisture and nutrients sitting right below them. He'd been adding product for three seasons to fix a "shortage" that was really just locked behind a hardpan.

No amount of fertilizer fixes that. You can't feed your way past a layer the roots can't get through.

This is exactly why we walk the field and put a probe in the ground instead of reading a lab sheet from behind a desk. The number on the test was fine. The story under his boots was the whole problem.

If your yields are flat in spots that "should" be producing, it's worth checking what's happening below the surface before you buy another input. Happy to take a look.

📞 (587) 678-9885

"My soil test says I need more. So I add more. And nothing changes."I hear some version of this on almost every field wa...
06/11/2026

"My soil test says I need more. So I add more. And nothing changes."

I hear some version of this on almost every field walk. And nine times out of ten, the soil isn't short on nutrients — it's short on the ability to use them.

Think of it this way: you can keep pouring water into a bucket, but if the bucket's cracked, you're just buying more water.

Compaction, pH imbalance, and reduced biological processes are the cracks. Until you deal with those, every dollar of fertilizer works harder for less.

This is why "add more product" so often disappoints — it's treating a symptom while the real limitation sits untouched.

A proper soil read tells you which it is: genuinely hungry, or just inefficient. Most of the time, out here, it's the second one.

The math that keeps you up at night:Fertilizer's up. The land payment's the same. The forecast won't commit. And the one...
06/08/2026

The math that keeps you up at night:

Fertilizer's up. The land payment's the same. The forecast won't commit. And the one number you can actually control — what you spend per acre — only ever seems to go one direction.

So you lie there doing the arithmetic. If inputs cost what they cost and the price comes back soft, where does that leave the year?

Here's the part nobody at the counter will tell you: spending more isn't the only lever. If your soil is tying up nutrients you've already paid for, the answer isn't another pass — it's finding out why the ground can't use what's already there.

That's a different conversation than the one you usually get. And it's the one that actually lowers the number that's keeping you awake.

What's the cost worry sitting heaviest on you going into this season? 👇

I'm John Turner, and I started Better Soil because I got tired of watching good growers spend more every year and get le...
06/08/2026

I'm John Turner, and I started Better Soil because I got tired of watching good growers spend more every year and get less back.

Here's what I kept seeing across Southern Alberta: the bill keeps climbing, the soil test says "add product," and the yield doesn't move. Another pass. Another pail. Another invoice. And the farmer starts to wonder if he's the problem.

He's not. The system is.

Most fields out here aren't hungry. They're inefficient — holding more nutrients than the last recommendation assumed, locked up behind compaction, imbalance, or tired biology. You can keep feeding a field that can't use what it already has, or you can find out what's actually going on down there.

That's all Better Soil does. I read your soil and provide a plain-English fertility crop plan with recommendations. Ultimately, the plan is yours — take it to your retailer or don't. Better Soil also provides specialized inputs that will benefit your soil but the takeaway is, if it doesn’t pay, it doesn’t stay.

I provide forensic independent agronomy, built for growers, not retailers. If that's the kind of straight answer you've been looking for, follow along. I'll be sharing what the ground is actually telling us out here.

📍 Serving Southern Alberta
📞 (587) 678-9885
🔗 bettersoil.ca

Address

1122 3 Street SE Ste
Calgary, AB
T2G0E7

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Tuesday 7am - 6pm
Wednesday 7am - 6pm
Thursday 7am - 6pm
Friday 7am - 6pm

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