Agriculture, Conservation

Forging success on the Prairies

Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Trevor Plews named winner of the Forage Industry Innovation Award.

By Linda Browne September 29, 2026

Brooke Howat (nominator) presents Trevor Plews with the Forage Industry Innovation Award at the Saskatchewan Forage Council’s AGM on June 24, 2026.

Thirty-six years ago, Trevor Plews started his career with Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) in Saskatchewan, first as a surveyor and then as an agrologist working out of the Wadena office.

This June, as DUC’s head of conservation programs for the Prairies, he was honoured with the Saskatchewan Forage Council’s Forage Industry Innovation Award—recognition for a career spent putting more forage on the landscape and more tools in the hands of the people who manage it.

“Trevor is the ‘ideas guy,’ constantly thinking of new and innovative ways to help farmers and agrologists in the forage industry,” says Brooke Howat, a conservation programs specialist with DUC in Saskatchewan who has worked under Plew’s supervision for the past few years and who nominated him for the award. “He’s really good at linking industry, non-governmental and governmental organizations together to work towards solving forage industry-related issues.”

Over the course of his career, Plews has seeded more than 50,000 acres of cropland back to forage. That land now does double duty, providing nesting habitat for waterfowl across the vital Prairie Pothole Region, and forage for the livestock producers who use it as hay and pasture.

Plews has also found new mechanisms to make forage conversion make sense for producers, from both an agronomic and an environmental standpoint. He helped develop DUC’s Marginal Areas Program (MAP), which encourages farmers to seed their least productive, often saline, cropland to forages, improving soil health and water infiltration while providing pollinator and wildlife habitat and increasing the productivity of the farmer’s best acres.

Plews worked alongside Farm Credit Canada (FCC) to support development of its MAP Sustainability Incentive Program, an option that encourages FCC loan holders to participate in the program, incentivizing innovation and adoption of sustainable practices.

And when he identified that producers found time, access and seeding equipment were barriers to MAP adoption, Plews’ “outside the box” thinking saw him advance a novel approach: drones. His work exploring drone seeding of forage on marginal land, tested and refined through demonstration trials at DUC’s Touchwood Hills Conservation Ranch, has opened up a practical alternative for producers who may otherwise miss the opportunity for targeted marginal acre management.

Drone technology is being tested at Touchwood Hills Conservation Ranch as a potential tool for efficient forage establishment on challenging terrain. © DUC

“I am honoured to be recognized by the Saskatchewan Forage Council with this award. Ever since I started with DUC in the 1990s, there’s always been something new to explore with agriculture on the prairies. Whether it was new equipment, new forage markets or different grazing management systems, DUC always wanted their agrologists to be current with issues and to be a resource for the prairie farmers,” Plews says.

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Our agrologists are very passionate about agriculture and conservation. Anytime we can provide information to farmers, we feel it is a win-win opportunity.

Trevor Plews

Plews has brought that same instinct for collaboration to two decades of volunteer service on the Saskatchewan Forage Council’s board, a decade on the SaskSoil board (where he helped develop the Marginal Areas Rehabilitation in Saskatchewan (MARS) program) and years spent helping organize the Saskatchewan Pasture Tour.

Outside of work, Plews has been the same steady presence in his community that he’s been in the field. He was a member of the Yorkton Rotary Club and the Yorkton Community Health Foundation for many years, in addition to coaching hockey and soccer.

The Forage Industry Innovation Award recognizes all that Plews has achieved in his career—one measured not by a single project, but by acres, partnerships and innovative ideas that last.