The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association's Sept. 17 report, covering conditions through Aug. 31, shows wide regional variation in Canadian peat extraction. 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%, CSPMA reported. Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia came in significantly below expected levels.
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 cannot be fully insulated from weather. The association also notes that "expected extraction" is not a measure of how much available peatland was harvested. It reflects the amount producers calculated they needed for the season — market requirements plus a desired year-end inventory buffer, minus inventory carried into 2026.
For growers, the more useful question is therefore 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.
Risk extends beyond peat
Peat is only one part of a broader 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 changes.
Transportation is particularly difficult right 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 quickly change the answer to a sourcing decision.
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 because the cheapest input on paper is not necessarily the lowest-risk or lowest-cost decision once freight, inventory and operational impacts are included.
The implication drawn by the author is that raw-material selection should no longer be treated as a once-a-year purchasing exercise. It is becoming a risk-management and production-design decision.
Start with crop character, then ingredients
Growing media is often built in the opposite direction from what the author considers ideal: starting with what is available — peat, coir, bark, wood fiber or perlite — and building a mix around those ingredients.
A better starting point is the crop. What character does the root zone need? How much water holding? How much air porosity? What structural stability is required 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, the ingredients and percentages that can create that character follow.
This matters because the raw-material toolbox is getting larger. 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 can become reliable horticultural inputs. Availability, in other words, is not the same as suitability — but suitability is increasingly something that can be engineered.
Revisiting previously passed-over materials
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, as may regional agricultural residues that can be cleaned, screened, fiberized, composted or stabilized into more consistent horticultural ingredients.
The point is not to replace a proven substrate because something new exists, but to know what else is available before it is needed. A material also does not have to make up 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.
More growers and growing-media companies are taking a fresh look at their entire raw-material program — not because something is necessarily wrong today, but to understand what else is available, what it would really cost delivered, and whether another combination could deliver the same or better crop performance with less supply risk. Small trials become strategic in this context: trialing an alternative wood fiber, or revisiting rice hulls, bark fractions, coir products or locally available biomass, helps build knowledge before a supply disruption forces a decision.
Local and global sourcing in one portfolio
Interest in sourcing closer to home is understandable. Regional materials can reduce transportation exposure and create more 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 make excellent contributions where the feedstock and processing are right, and 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 the crop requires.
Using 2026 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 getting larger; 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, the author suggests using this season as 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? The best time to build flexibility into a growing-media program, the argument goes, is while choices still exist.