The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association's Sept. 17 report, which covers conditions through Aug. 31, shows that peat extraction varied sharply from one region to another. Alberta reached 56% of expected extraction, while Manitoba hit 79%, Saskatchewan and Ontario each reached 90%, and Québec's North and South Shores reached 77%. Southern New Brunswick came in at 70% and Northern New Brunswick at 85%. Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia were all reported significantly below expected levels.
Why the Gaps Are Not a Shortage Signal
CSPMA attributes much of the shortfall to wet weather, and it says careful inventory management should let producers meet customer needs. That distinction separates a weather-driven dip from a supply crisis. It is also worth noting what "expected extraction" means: it is the volume producers calculated they needed for the season — market requirements plus the desired year-end inventory buffer, minus the inventory carried into 2026. It is not a measure of how much available peatland was actually harvested.
Supply Risk Goes Well Beyond Peat
Peat is only one thread in a wider supply picture. Climate shapes harvest and biomass availability; labor affects harvesting, processing, and transportation; and freight can reshape the economics of a material long before its FOB price moves. Transportation is especially volatile 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 prices, driver availability, rail surcharges, and ocean freight all add uncertainty. For bulky inputs such as growing media, delivered cost can flip a sourcing decision quickly.
A Broader Cost Perspective
In a recent Greenhouse Grower interview, Dr. Charlie Hall made a related argument from the wider grower-cost angle, stressing 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 choice once freight, inventory, and operational impacts are counted. The implication is that raw-material selection is no longer a once-a-year purchasing task; it is becoming a risk-management and production-design decision.
Start With Crop Character, Not Ingredients
Growing media is often built in the reverse of the logical order: starting from what is on hand — peat, coir, bark, wood fiber, perlite — and then constructing a mix around those components. A better starting point is the crop itself. What does the root zone need in terms of water holding and air porosity? What structural stability must hold through the crop cycle? How must the material rewet? What buffering and chemistry can the crop and irrigation program tolerate? How uniform must it be for automation? Once those requirements are defined, the ingredients and percentages that deliver that character can follow.
A Wider and More Engineered Material Toolbox
The raw-material toolbox is expanding. Wageningen University & Research's 2026 work on the future of growing media identifies market-accepted materials such as coir, coniferous wood fiber, bark, compost, and perlite, along with less familiar candidates including other plant fibers, biochars, co-composts, and reused growing media. The researchers caution 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 the industry can engineer.
Revisiting Materials Passed Over Years Ago
Processing technology has kept improving across coir, wood fiber, bark, and other biomass streams. Materials that were once too inconsistent, wet, coarse, salty, hard to handle, or simply too costly may deserve a second look, and the same applies to regional agricultural residues that can be cleaned, screened, fiberized, composted, or stabilized into more consistent ingredients. This is not an argument for replacing a proven substrate with something new. It is an argument for knowing what else exists before it is needed. A material need not make up 30% or 40% of a formulation to matter; in some systems, a 5% or 10% inclusion may be enough to shift cost, water behavior, structure, rewetting, or supply exposure. The right rate is a crop and system question, and any new component must be trialed and validated before commercial use.
Local and Global as a Portfolio, Not a Choice
Interest in sourcing closer to home is understandable. Regional materials can reduce transportation exposure and add flexibility, especially when they can be processed near the point of use. But local is not automatically better, just as imported is not automatically risky. Coir travels long distances yet offers characteristics that can be hard to reproduce with some local materials. Peat remains an important and effective component. Wood fiber and bark can contribute strongly where feedstock and processing are right. The more resilient approach is likely 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 This Season as a Planning Signal
The lesson from this year's Canadian peat harvest is not that growers should abandon peat. CSPMA itself maintains that inventory management should allow producers to meet customer requirements. The lesson is that the conditions behind raw materials can change quickly while crops still must be produced on schedule. Weather, labor, freight, tariffs, and supply-chain disruption in recent years have shown that yesterday's dependable supply pattern is not guaranteed tomorrow. Demand for growing media is also rising: Wageningen projects global demand climbing substantially toward 2050, which implies a broader basket of materials and more processing capacity rather than a single winner in the peat-versus-coir-versus-wood-fiber debate.
For 2027 planning, a few practical questions are worth asking: which raw materials in the current formulation are most exposed, 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 is while choices still exist.