A Shortfall, Not a Shortage
The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association (CSPMA) released a report on Sept. 17 covering conditions through Aug. 31, and its numbers deserve growers' attention without inviting panic. Extraction varied substantially by region: 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, and 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. The association's "expected extraction" figure is also not a measure of how much available peatland was harvested. It represents what producers calculated they needed for the season — market requirements plus the desired year-end inventory buffer, minus inventory carried into 2026.
The Risk Extends Beyond Peat
For growers, the more useful question 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. Peat is only 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 particularly difficult at present. 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 precisely because the cheapest input on paper is not necessarily the lowest-risk or lowest-cost choice once freight, inventory and operational impacts are included. Raw-material selection, in this view, is no longer a once-a-year purchasing exercise; it is becoming a risk-management and production-design decision.
Start With the Crop's Needs
Growing media are often built in the opposite direction from the way they should be. The common 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 and 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, growers can back 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 note that 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 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, as may regional agricultural residues that can be cleaned, screened, fiberized, composted or stabilized into more consistent inputs.
The suggestion is not that growers replace a proven substrate simply because something new is available, but that they know what else is out there before they need it. A material 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, in that sense, become strategic: an alternative wood fiber, rice hulls, bark fractions, coir products or locally available biomass can reveal what changes in irrigation, fertility, handling and crop performance — building knowledge before a disruption forces a decision.
Local and Global Are Not Either/Or
There is understandable interest in sourcing closer to home. Regional materials can reduce transportation exposure and add 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 travels a long distance yet can offer characteristics that are difficult to reproduce with some local materials. Peat remains an extraordinarily important and effective growing-media component, and wood fiber and bark can contribute strongly where feedstock and processing are right.
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.
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. Weather, labor, freight, tariffs and supply-chain disruptions have provided enough reminders in recent years to show that yesterday's dependable supply pattern is not guaranteed to remain tomorrow's.
Demand is also growing. Wageningen research projects global growing-media 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, that points to a few practical questions: Which raw materials are most exposed in a 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 is while there are still choices.