In Alberta we now begin most public events with a land acknowledgment: a pointed, sometimes powerful reminder that our province lies on the traditional territory of the Indigenous nations who first called this place home. I begin this column with a different kind of land acknowledgment. I want to acknowledge the actual land on which we sit, the soil that gives life to our boreal forests, our prairie grasslands, our crops, our gardens. I want us to acknowledge the fragile, essential layer of topsoil which is Alberta’s greatest natural resource.
Canada is huge. But only about 5–7 per cent of our land mass is prime agricultural land, suitable for cultivation. Of that, one third is found in Alberta: 20 million hectares in total. Mountains in the west and muskeg in the northeast mean a good chunk of Alberta isn’t available for agriculture. That didn’t stop some 52,000 hectares of prime agricultural land from being taken out of production from 2011 to 2020, primarily to make way for urban infrastructure and housing developments.
We’re paving over our topsoil. Not only that, we’re polluting it, poisoning it, overworking it, compacting it and letting it blow away. We may think we have plenty of dirt. Most of us take it for granted, or worry more about water or air quality than the quality of the earth beneath our feet. But the rich topsoil, the good stuff where our crops and trees root, is a relatively thin layer.
And once it is degraded, it’s not just crops that suffer. Healthy soil helps filter, purify and store water. It’s more resistant to drought and erosion, better able to absorb water in floods. It’s a natural carbon sink, essential to our efforts to slow the impact of climate change. And soil is home to more than 25 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity, with over 40,000 different organisms in a gram of healthy, living soil, organisms essential to the biogeochemical processes that make all life on earth possible.
Only about 5–7 per cent of Canada’s land mass is suitable for cultivation. Of that, one-third is in Alberta.
At the very moment this column lands on newsstands and in mailboxes, the Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Forestry is due to release a major study of soil health in Canada and of the importance of healthy soil to carbon sequestration. For the better part of two years our committee heard from hundreds of expert witnesses: farmers and agronomists, forestry professors and geologists, microbiologists and ranchers, environmental groups and financiers trying to create viable carbon markets, horticulturalists and First Nations advocates, large-scale composters and fertilizer companies. We attended soil health conferences. We toured farms and ranches in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, visited the University of Guelph, the University of Saskatchewan and Olds College. We dug deep, plowed through documents, put our boots on the ground, and got the real dirt.
We learned that prairie farmers and ranchers have been leaders in adopting innovative regenerative techniques—they’ve stopped tilling their fields, started intercropping by planting two different crops in the same field, turned marginal cropland back to pasture for livestock, adopted strategic rotational grazing, or used precision soil mapping to reduce use of nitrogen fertilizers. But we also learned that more needs to be done to reward early adopters for taking chances and to incentivize the late adopters to enter the game.
We learned that most provinces, including Alberta, are lagging in soil research, despite exciting innovations in soil mapping technology. We learned that no central body brings together soil research and data from across the country so that Canadian academics and agriculturalists can learn from each other. We learned that attempts to create viable carbon markets haven’t yet borne fruit. And we learned some deeply disturbing things about climate threats posed by melting permafrost and health threats posed by hydrocarbon, heavy metal and microplastic poisoning of our soil.
Our report presents recommendations to the government for action. But we’re not interested in producing a dull soil sermon that gathers dust on a ministerial shelf. We hope our report will be a call to action not just for farmers and ranchers but for all Canadians. We want to inspire everybody who cares about having a healthy, affordable, sustainable food supply, everyone who cares about healthy forests and grasslands, everyone who cares about mitigating the impacts of climate change. Albertans are stewards of some of the most vital, valuable soil in the world. We all play a part in protecting and preserving it.
Once, we understood the debt we owed. The name of Adam, the Bible’s first man, comes from the Hebrew word for soil. The word human itself comes from the Latin word humus, or earth. The Cree, though, have legends of their own, about a great flood, and a brave little muskrat who dove down deep into the waters, and made his way to the surface with a fistful of soil from which to form the land anew. What we, as humans, need now is to find the courage and determination of that indefatigable muskrat, to hang on tight to the soil that gives us all life.
Paula Simons is an independent senator and the deputy chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
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