Jim Halford

Jim Halford, born in 1941 in Indian Head, Saskatchewan, is celebrated as one of Canada’s foremost pioneers of soil-conservation agriculture. He earned his B.Sc. in Agriculture (1963) and later an M.Sc. in Agricultural Economics (1966) from the University of Saskatchewan. He worked in the winter months in Saskatchewan as a provincial Farm Management Specialist as well as farming his family’s Vale Farm operation. There, early in the 1970s, he recognized that conventional tillage was eroding prairie soils and began exploring zero-tillage methods.

Jim Halford’s work earned him an induction into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame in 2020. The citation with his portrait in the Hall credits his Canadian Nuffield Farming Scholarship study in 1976 with increasing his confidence to pursue his farming career and soil improvement activities.

Halford’s defining contribution was the invention of the “Conserva Pak” seeding system in 1983, a one-pass, low-disturbance air drill capable of placing seed and fertilizer precisely in high-residue fields. He launched manufacturing in the late 1980s and sold the seeders in western Canada. In 1993 he started selling in the US and four states in Australia. In 2007, he sold the technology and patents to John Deere, which today markets the design as the 1870 Conserva Pak series.

Beyond machinery, Halford has been a leader in advocacy and institutional change—he helped establish the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association and opened his farm as a field-research demonstration site. His work also earned him induction into the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame and Canada’s Conservation Hall of Fame, among other honours. Today, Jim Halford’s legacy lives on through more sustainable cropping practices and healthier soils. Thousands of acres are seeded annually using his innovative system.