The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association's Sept. 17 report, covering conditions through Aug. 31, sets out extraction results that vary widely by region. Alberta reached 56% of expected extraction. Manitoba reached 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.
The CSPMA attributes much of the shortfall to wet weather, and it says careful inventory management should allow producers to meet customer needs. That distinction is central. The report is not a declaration of a peat shortage.
Equally important is what "expected extraction" actually measures. It is not a count of how much available peatland was harvested. It is the volume producers calculated they needed for the season: market requirements plus the desired year-end inventory buffer, minus inventory carried into 2026.
The Question Is Resilience, Not Scarcity
For growers, the more useful question is not whether peat will run out. It is how resilient a growing-media strategy remains when a material it depends on becomes harder or more expensive to secure.
Peat is only one part of a broader supply picture. Climate affects harvest and biomass availability. Labor affects harvesting, processing and transportation. Freight can shift the economics of a material well before its FOB price moves.
Transportation is especially difficult at the moment. 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 all add 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 case from the broader grower-cost perspective. In a recent Greenhouse Grower interview, he 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.
That is why raw-material selection is becoming less a once-a-year purchasing exercise and more 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 the crop requires. The usual starting point is what is available — peat, coir, bark, wood fiber, perlite or another familiar component — and a mix is assembled around those ingredients.
A better starting point is the crop itself. 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 can be chosen to create that character.
This matters because 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, alongside less familiar candidates including other plant fibers, biochars, co-composts and reused growing media. The researchers make a key 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 Materials Passed Over Five Years Ago
Processing technology has kept improving 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 holds for regional agricultural residues that can be cleaned, screened, fiberized, composted or otherwise processed into more consistent horticultural ingredients.
This is not an argument for replacing a proven substrate simply because something new exists. It is an argument for knowing 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.
Small trials become strategic here. Trialing an alternative wood fiber, or revisiting rice hulls, bark fractions, coir products or locally available biomass, builds knowledge about what changes in irrigation, fertility, handling and crop performance — before a supply disruption forces the decision.
Local and Global Are Not Either/Or
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 important and effective growing-media component. Wood fiber and bark can contribute well where the feedstock and processing are right. Other biomass streams may become more 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.
Treat 2026 as a Planning Signal
The lesson from this year's Canadian peat harvest is not that growers should move away from peat. The CSPMA itself says inventory management should allow producers to meet customer requirements. The lesson is that conditions behind raw materials can change quickly while crops still have to be produced on schedule.
The industry has had enough recent reminders — weather, labor, freight, tariffs and supply-chain disruptions — to know that yesterday's dependable supply pattern is not guaranteed to persist.
Growing-media demand is also getting larger. Wageningen research projects global demand rising substantially toward 2050, which points to a need for a broader basket of materials and more processing capacity rather than a different winner in the peat-versus-coir-versus-wood-fiber debate.
For growers planning 2027, the practical questions are: 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 I begin trialing now?
The best time to build flexibility into a growing-media program is while there are still choices.