Making Use of the Margins: Habitat Strips, Pivot Corners, and What the Perennials Are Doing at Perry Farms

Perry Farms | Regenerative Alberta Living Lab

In an irrigated operation, pivot corners are easy to write off. Harold Perry has been doing the opposite.

At Perry Farms near Chin, the corners and a 15-foot buffer strip along the edge of the cropped circle are in permanent perennial grass and hay mix, hayed roughly once a year and otherwise left alone. The original thinking was insect habitat. A stable perennial edge gives ladybugs, lacewings, and other beneficials somewhere to establish, and Harold has watched them move from the strips into the potato crop. Beetle pressure in those fields has been consistently low, hard to find one, as Harold puts it. He doesn't overclaim it. There are other variables. But it's held up across enough seasons that he keeps the strips in place.

There's a resistance management angle in there too. Every time beetle pressure stays low enough that an insecticide application isn't needed, that's one less selection event for resistance in the local population. Harold is conscious of that math.

The more striking result is in the soil data. Across Perry Farms, the land under permanent perennial cover is showing the highest carbon storage of any land use on the operation. For a project whose core mandate is understanding how management decisions affect carbon sequestration, that is a meaningful signal. Perennial cover, left largely undisturbed and hayed once a year, is outperforming annually cultivated ground on the metric that matters most to the Living Lab's research question.

The blend itself is built for diversity. It runs alfalfa, cicer milk vetch, sainfoin, single- and multi-cut red clovers, tall fescue, festulolium, slender and pubescent wheat grasses, and smooth and meadow brome, legumes and grasses together, each rooting at a different depth and doing a different job in the soil. That range of rooting depths is part of how perennial stands build carbon through the whole soil profile rather than just near the surface, the same principle Gerald Vandervalk describes in his reseeding work at VXV (see Diversity in the Ground).

Within the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab, Perry Farms is integrating all six soil health principles across the operation. The perennial habitat areas are where the principles of increasing diversity, maintaining soil cover, and keeping carbon flowing belowground converge most visibly. The one principle where the farm operates within a structural constraint is reduced tillage, potatoes require it, and Harold is straightforward about that. But the potato year is one in four, and the rotation built around it, cover crops going in late summer, relay cropping, green manure incorporation in spring, and permanent perennial margins present in every field every year, is designed to maximize soil health across all six principles through the full cycle. The tillage event is part of the system, not an exception to it.

Seeing that carbon result on the map changed a decision. With the data showing perennial cover storing more carbon than any other land use on the farm, the Perrys found the case for more hay acres compelling, and have been moving ground in that direction. It is a small but telling example of how the Living Lab is meant to work: the project measures something, the producer sees it, and the measurement shapes what happens next on the land. The practice spreads not because anyone pushed it, but because the result made the argument on its own.

Harold describes what he is working toward in simple terms: a farm that cycles nutrients well, infiltrates water, and supports plants healthy enough to manage pressure without constant intervention.