Research Projects
Each year, IRDA's R&D Team conducts more than one hundred research projects in sustainable agriculture. What's more, IRDA is working with Quebec's key agricultural stakeholders to find concrete solutions.
Implementing a three-year sustainable forage crop rotation for potato and field crop farmers
This project seeks to create farmer partnerships in which participants work on implementing a three-year forage crop rotation protocol in potato and field crop fields.
Researcher: Richard Hogue
A status report on the labile carbon to total organic carbon ratio of Saguenay–Lac-St-Jean soils
A labile carbon input would displace some phosphorus into the soil solution, thus making it available again for assimilation into growing plants.
Researcher: Christine Landry
Projet for a Web app to facilitate the viewing and interpretation of potato soil health analyses
This project aims to develop an accessible and user-friendly web application that let stakeholders search the IRDA potato soil database, one of the largest in Canada, to visualize the impact of growing practices and protocols on the biological, physicochemical, and agronomic characteristics of soils cultivated with different cropping systems.
Researcher: Richard Hogue
Utilizing high-throughput sequencing to identify plant pathogens
Evaluating and developing a high-throughput sequencing-based diagnostic procedure to identify pathogenic organisms.
Researchers: Richard Hogue Luc Belzile
Using cesium-137 to quantify organic horticultural soil erosion
Project to quantify the long-term (60+ years) severity of erosion of organic horticultural soils.
Researchers: Claude Bernard Marc-Olivier Gasser
Developing a soil microbiome monitoring method to select potato crop management practices that reduce soil-borne pathogens and pesticide applications
Method to monitor and control telluric pathogens affecting potatoes that takes into account the interactions between these pathogens and other soil microbiome organisms.
Researchers: Richard Hogue Luc Belzile
The solutions developed by IRDA aim to...
Ensure the sustainability
and quality of soil, water, and air
Protect the health and well-being
of local communities by improving the quality of crop and livestock production, with an emphasis on animal welfare
Safeguard the economic viability
of crop and livestock production