The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association's Sept. 17 report, covering growing conditions through Aug. 31, shows a wide spread in peat extraction across regions. 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 reported as significantly below expected levels.
CSPMA attributes much of the shortfall to wet weather. Just as important, the association says careful inventory management should allow producers to meet customer needs. That distinction matters: this is not a declaration of a peat shortage.
What "expected extraction" actually measures
CSPMA's "expected extraction" is not a measure of how much available peatland was harvested. It is the amount producers calculated they needed for the season — market requirements plus the desired year-end inventory buffer, minus the inventory carried into 2026.
The more useful question for growers, then, is not whether peat will run out. It is how resilient a growing-media strategy is when one of the materials it depends on becomes harder or more expensive to secure.
The risk is bigger than peat
Peat is only one part of a broader supply picture. Climate affects harvest and biomass availability. Labor affects harvesting, processing and transportation. 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 change the answer to a sourcing decision very quickly.
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 included.
That is why raw-material selection should stop being treated as a once-a-year purchasing exercise. It is becoming a risk-management and production-design decision.
Start with character, then back into ingredients
Growing media is often built in the opposite direction from what the author recommends. The usual approach starts with what is available — peat, coir, bark, wood fiber, perlite or another familiar component — and then builds 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 mix can then be backed into the ingredients and percentages that create that character. 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 make an important point: many new materials require processing, sanitization and stabilization before they can become reliable horticultural inputs.
Availability is not the same as suitability. But suitability is increasingly something that can be engineered.
Revisit the materials passed over five years ago
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 is true of regional agricultural residues that can be cleaned, screened, fiberized, composted or otherwise processed into more consistent horticultural ingredients.
This is not an argument to replace a proven substrate because something new is available, but to know what else exists 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, not a universal prescription, and any new component needs to be trialed and validated before commercial adoption.
Small trials become strategic here: trial an alternative wood fiber; look again at rice hulls, bark fractions, coir products or locally available biomass; understand what changes in irrigation, fertility, handling and crop performance. Building that knowledge before a supply disruption forces the decision is the point.
Local and global should not be either/or
Interest in sourcing closer to home is understandable. 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 make excellent contributions where the feedstock and processing are right. Other biomass streams may become increasingly useful as processing improves.
The 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.
Use 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.
Weather, labor, freight, tariffs and supply-chain disruptions over recent years have made it clear 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 2027 planning, a few practical questions are worth asking: Which raw materials are most exposed in my current formulation? What is their true delivered cost? Which characteristics are essential to my 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 there are still choices.