Canada's latest peat extraction figures give growers a reason to pay attention, though not, the industry association stresses, a reason to panic. The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association (CSPMA), in a Sept. 17 report covering conditions through Aug. 31, reported substantial regional variation in how much peat producers harvested relative to their season targets.
Alberta reached 56% of expected extraction, Manitoba 79%, Saskatchewan 90%, Québec's North and South Shores 77%, Southern New Brunswick 70%, Northern New Brunswick 85%, and Ontario 90%. Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia were each reported as significantly below expected levels.
What the Numbers Do and Don't Mean
CSPMA attributes much of the shortfall to wet weather, and says careful inventory management should allow producers to meet customer needs. That distinction matters: the report is not a declaration of a peat shortage. It is a reminder that an agricultural raw material harvested outdoors will never be completely insulated from weather.
It is also worth understanding what "expected extraction" measures. According to CSPMA, it is not a count of how much available peatland was harvested. Rather, it reflects the amount producers calculated they needed for the season — market requirements plus the desired year-end inventory buffer, minus inventory carried into 2026. A shortfall against that target signals a tighter buffer, not automatic scarcity.
The more useful question for growers, then, is not whether peat will run out, but how resilient a growing-media strategy is when a depended-upon material becomes harder or more expensive to secure.
The Risk Is Broader Than Peat
Peat is only one part of a wider supply picture. Climate affects harvest and biomass availability. Labor affects harvesting, processing and transportation. And freight can change the economics of a material long before its FOB price moves.
Transportation is especially difficult now. The Wall Street Journal reported in late September that U.S. contract trucking rates averaged $3.11 per mile in August, including fuel surcharges — up 29% from a year earlier. Diesel, driver availability, rail surcharges and ocean freight are all adding volatility. For a bulky input such as growing media, delivered cost can shift a sourcing decision very quickly.
Supply-Chain Agility as a Planning Discipline
Dr. Charlie Hall has made a similar point from the broader grower-cost perspective. In a recent Greenhouse Grower interview, Hall emphasized supply-chain agility, backup suppliers and working-capital discipline as growers plan for 2027. His Index of Prices Paid by Growers is useful precisely because the cheapest input on paper is not necessarily the lowest-risk or lowest-cost decision once freight, inventory and operational impacts are counted.
The implication is that raw-material selection should stop being a once-a-year purchasing exercise and start being treated as a risk-management and production-design decision.
Start With the Crop, Then Choose Ingredients
Growing media is often built in the opposite direction from what makes sense. The usual approach starts with what is available — peat, coir, bark, wood fiber, perlite or another familiar component — and builds a mix around those ingredients.
A better starting point is the crop itself. What character does the root zone need? How much water holding and air porosity? What structural stability must hold through the crop cycle? How does the material need to rewet? What buffering and chemistry can the crop and irrigation program tolerate? How uniform does it need to be for automation? Once those requirements are clear, a grower can work back into the ingredients and percentages that deliver that character.
This matters because the raw-material toolbox is expanding. Wageningen University & Research's 2026 work on the future of growing media identifies familiar, market-accepted materials such as coir, coniferous wood fiber, bark, compost and perlite, but also less familiar candidates including other plant fibers, biochars, co-composts and reused growing media. The researchers note that many new materials require processing, sanitization and stabilization before they become reliable horticultural inputs. Availability, in other words, is not the same as suitability — but suitability is increasingly something that can be engineered.
Revisit Materials Once Passed Over
Processing technology has continued to improve across coir, wood fiber, bark and other biomass streams. Materials that were too inconsistent, too wet, too coarse, too salty, too difficult to handle or simply too expensive several years ago may deserve another look. The same applies to regional agricultural residues that can be cleaned, screened, fiberized, composted or stabilized into more consistent horticultural ingredients.
This is not an argument for replacing a proven substrate just because something new is available. It is an argument for knowing what else is out there before it is needed. A material also does not have to become 30% or 40% of a formulation to be useful: in some systems a 5% or 10% inclusion may be enough to change cost, water behavior, structure, rewetting or supply exposure. The right inclusion rate is a crop and system question rather than a universal prescription, and any new component needs to be trialed and validated before commercial adoption.
Small trials can be strategic. Trialing an alternative wood fiber, or revisiting rice hulls, bark fractions, coir products or locally available biomass, helps growers understand what changes in irrigation, fertility, handling and crop performance — building knowledge before a supply disruption forces a decision.
Local and Global Are Not Either/Or
Sourcing closer to home has understandable appeal. Regional materials can reduce transportation exposure and create flexibility, particularly when they can be processed near the point of use. But "local" is not automatically better, just as "imported" is not automatically risky.
Coir, for example, travels a long distance but can offer characteristics that are difficult to reproduce with some local materials. Peat remains an extraordinarily important and effective growing-media component. Wood fiber and bark can contribute strongly where feedstock and processing are right. Other biomass streams may become increasingly useful as processing improves.
A more resilient strategy is likely to be a portfolio: dependable core materials, strong supplier relationships, some regional options, some globally sourced options, and enough formulation knowledge to adjust without losing the root-zone character a crop requires.
Use This Season as a Planning Signal
The lesson from this year's Canadian peat harvest is not that growers should move away from peat. CSPMA itself says inventory management should allow producers to meet customer requirements. The lesson is that the conditions behind raw materials can change quickly while crops still have to be produced on schedule.
The industry has had enough reminders in recent years — weather, labor, freight, tariffs and supply-chain disruptions — to know that yesterday's dependable supply pattern is not guaranteed to remain tomorrow's. Growing-media demand is also growing: Wageningen research projects global demand rising substantially toward 2050, which means the industry will need a broader basket of materials and more processing capacity, not simply a different winner in the peat-versus-coir-versus-wood-fiber debate.
For growers planning 2027, this season is a reason to ask a few practical questions: Which raw materials are most exposed in the current formulation? What is their true delivered cost? Which characteristics are essential to the crop? What other ingredients could deliver part of that function? And which of those should be trialed now? Building flexibility into a growing-media program is best done while there are still choices to make.
The piece was authored by Jennifer Neujahr, former Director of Horticulture Business for Profile Products and, with Ted Buis, co-founder of Next Step Solutions.