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THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY

EVIDENCE

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OTTAWA, Tuesday, September 27, 2022

The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 6:30 p.m. [ET] to examine and report on the status of soil health in Canada.

Senator Robert Black (Chair) in the chair.

[English]

The Chair: Good evening, senators. I would like to begin by welcoming my colleagues, members of the committee, as well as our witnesses and those watching this meeting this evening. My name is Rob Black, senator from Ontario. I am the chair of the committee. This evening, the committee is holding its second meeting on its study to examine and report on the status of soil health in Canada. Before we hear from the witnesses, I would like to start by asking senators around the table to introduce themselves.

Senator Simons: Hello. I’m Paula Simons, senator from Alberta from Treaty 6 territory.

Senator Marwah: Sabi Marwah, from Ontario.

Senator Klyne: Hello and welcome. Marty Klyne, senator from Saskatchewan.

Senator Cotter: I’m Brent Cotter, senator for Saskatchewan.

Senator Oh: Senator Oh, from Ontario.

The Chair: Thank you very much. One more senator?

Senator Duncan: Senator Pat Duncan, from the Yukon.

The Chair: Our witnesses today are joining us via video conference. Today, I would like to welcome Laura Van Eerd, Professor of Sustainable Soil Management at the University of Guelph and Dr. David Lobb, Professor, Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Manitoba.

I’d invite our witnesses to make their presentations. We’ll begin with Dr. Van Eerd, who has kindly agreed to provide this committee with an overview of the fundamentals of soil health, so soil health 101. Her presentation will be about five minutes, and then David Lobb will join us for five minutes, and then Dr. Van Eerd will come back for the following five minutes. With that, Dr. Van Eerd.

Laura L. Van Eerd, Professor, Sustainable Soil Management, University of Guelph, as an individual: Thank you very much, Senator Black, and thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this important mandate. My research program spans from soil science to agronomy. I am really interested in carbon and nitrogen cycling in agricultural systems. I have built a career focusing on identifying strategies for farmers to improve crop productivity and soil health. So thank you for giving the 101 on soil health.

I also co-wrote the textbook chapter on the subject for the Canadian Society of Soil Science. I’m really happy to share what we found in writing that textbook chapter.

I will define soil health. What is it? How do we measure it? Then finally, I will end with some key soil care practices that enhance soil health.

The potential for soil degradation remains a constant threat to resiliency and sustainability of agricultural and natural ecosystems. When soil is degraded, so, too, is its health. But what is soil health? Soil health is the capacity of soil to function, to do stuff. Similar to human health, when you are well, you are able to function; you get stuff done. Same with soil. Soil function represents what soil does and how it behaves, rather than describing what soil is. So functions are sometimes called ecosystem services.

Now I will describe the functions that healthy soil does. Perhaps most obviously, a healthy soil is a productive soil. It produces food for people, feed for animals and fibre and fuel for national and global consumption. Soil stores and cycle nutrients. Soil is a water reservoir. A healthy soil stores more water. Last week, this committee had a nice discussion about healthy soil mitigating drought conditions.

I will add that the downstream — pun intended — impact on society is huge. A healthy soil can infiltrate and hold more water. This limits flooding and damage to homes and infrastructure. A healthy soil improves water quality, reduces erosion, stream bank erosion, and that’s just to name a few.

There are other outcomes of a healthy soil: climate and temperature regulation, biodiversity conservation, mitigating pests and diseases and erosion control.

So that’s what healthy soils do. That’s their function. We can also call it ecosystem goods and services. Thus, any efforts to improve or maintain soil health will not only benefit growers or land managers, but they will also benefit the environment. It is a win-win, made possible because healthy soils go hand in hand with ecosystem services and that supports life.

Next I will talk about how to measure soil health. There are a multitude of approaches that exist for measuring soil health status. It ranges from the narrow and simple to multifaceted and complex. Recent research of soil health samples taken from over a dozen long-term experiments in Canada, and over 100 sites in North America has recently been published.

While soil health is a topic of intensive research around the world, there is no global consensus on one ideal measurement of soil health. Ultimately, approaches to measure soil health have to be chosen on many different aspects. We choose which measurement we will use based on how easy it is to sample, the measurement criteria, the analytical equipment that’s available in the laboratories, the reliability and the cost.

Regardless of the debate, there’s a single rule of thumb: For a soil health test to be meaningful it should represent the soil function or an ecosystem service.

Excuse me. I’m not getting emotional. I just have a little tickle in my throat, although soil health does make me pretty emotional.

Let me go a little bit further. A soil test should include a visual assessment, chemical, biological and physical indicators. This requires both infield measurements and soil samples being sent to the lab for various analyses. Visual assessments are extremely useful for learning about soil. They are often overlooked. A shovel digging down 30 centimetres to look at the depth of the A horizon, or physically holding a soil sample in your hand, smelling it, feeling it for soil texture, aggregation, structure, looking for compaction, watching water infiltrate. Those are all great visual and physical components that can be done in the field.

And let’s not forget “soil your undies.” That’s a powerful indicator of biological activity. It was developed in Ontario by the Innovative Farmers Association, and that’s an organization that Mr. Lobb mentioned last week. So there are lots of things to do in the field. There are a lot of different tests to do in the lab.

So that’s what is soil health and how do we measure it? Now I would like to discuss what can be done to protect or enhance soil health. There are two main approaches, and they are pretty mutually inclusive. The first approach is to minimize threats to degradation and the second is to adopt practices that build or maintain soil health. I will talk about these now.

The first is degradation. Steps should be put in place that identify and mitigate threats to soil degradation. We know that human activities impact the soil. The goal is to minimize those threats to soil degradation.

So what are these main threats? In Canada, in agricultural ecosystems, the main threats are soil erosion, compaction, soil organic matter decline, depletion or excessive nutrients, biodiversity loss, salinization, urbanization and, to a lesser extent, desertification and soil contamination. These threats need to be identified and mitigated. These threats are farm specific and field specific.

The second approach is to adopt practices that build or maintain soil health. In our textbook, we identified and proposed the six Cs — the letter C — of soil care. You are familiar with 4R nutrient stewardship. Here, my co-authors and I proposed six management practices that begin with the letter C, and we emphasized the letter C due to the role of carbon in soil health. So it is not by chance. Think carbon; think these six soil C practices.

Those six practices are compaction reduction, crop and animal diversity, conservation tillage, compost and amendments, continuous living plants and cover crops. Collectively, these practices act to protect the soil. They enhance diversity and perennialization and, perhaps most importantly, all of these practices either minimize soil and carbon losses or they maximize gains of carbon.

These six practices are not in any order. There is no one best practice that best fits every farm. There are other farm practices, too, such as wind breaks, water control, structures and land retirement — to name a few.

Soil care practices can be implemented individually or, ideally, in combination. As you probably noticed, there are a lot of connections between these practices. For example, using cover crops will increase the duration of continuous living plants, and it adds crop diversity.

It’s important to note that each of these management strategies has benefits and challenges. Each of these soil care practices requires extra time and costs, and for many farmers, a change requires a change from business as usual. As we all know, change is not easy.

Moreover, the timeline for measuring responses to any new soil care practice ranges from years to decades, depending on the practice. It also depends on the soil characteristics, the cropping system and the local environment. But in general, adopting any of these big C soil care practices is expected to have a positive impact on soil health.

I’ll conclude by highlighting that soil health is an important concept because it requires us to consider the soil as a living system. This living system integrates biological, chemical and physical properties and, like all living systems, it’s complicated. For soil management, one size does not fit all. Soil science is continuously breaking new ground. Our knowledge of soil science and the tools we have to characterize it are expected to increase quickly. It is an exciting time, and I thank you for your interest in soil and soil health. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Van Eerd. I appreciate your comments. If we can’t all get there, maybe I should be dropping down to the University of Guelph and “planting some undies” on behalf of my committee members. We might talk about that.

Moving on to Dr. David Lobb.

David Lobb, Professor, Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Manitoba, as an individual: I would like to thank the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry and its chair, Senator Black, for inviting me to participate in these hearings. I did appreciate Dr. Van Eerd’s comments preceding mine.

In addition to my statement today, I have also provided my witness statement from the hearings this committee held on soils back in May 2019. I was able to listen in on the statements last week, and to the discussion you had with the first two witnesses. It was quite interesting, and I look forward to following the work of this committee over the coming months.

As noted in the first session last week, the Senate’s report Soil at Risk: Canada’s Eroding Future was a consequential piece of work. It was a critical study at a critical time, and as a result, it contributed to greater awareness of the threats to the sustainable use of soils and actions by industry and governments to conserve the soil for future generations.

It has been almost 40 years since the Soil at Risk report. My career in soil conservation has been just as long — that’s how old I am — almost as long as my dad’s. You had a chance to talk to him last week. In that time, tremendous efforts have been made to understand soils, soil productivity and soil degradation and to develop, promote and implement sustainable soil management practices across the country. These efforts continue today, as Dr. Van Eerd has just described. But to be absolutely clear, we do not fully understand the nature of the threats to the sustainable use of soils or the management practices needed to protect or restore soil productivity. We do not fully understand the problems, therefore we do not fully understand the solutions. I would like to provide a few examples related to soil erosion to support this statement:

One: It’s not just about wind erosion on the Prairies or water erosion in the other parts of the country as was described last week. When it comes to soil degradation and soil productivity across the country, tillage erosion is often more important. And when it comes to sustainable soil management, it is all of them: wind, water and tillage erosion — and their interactions. The processes are different, requiring different solutions. Sometimes these solutions are complementary, but sometimes they are conflicting.

Two: Traditional approaches to reducing wind and water erosion — that is, keeping the soil covered with plants and plant residues — do not ensure that water quality is protected. Vegetation on the soil surface — any vegetation anywhere on the farm— will contribute to increased losses of dissolved phosphorus and to eutrophication of surface waters. In some parts of the country, like the Prairies, this is the majority of the nutrients entering surface waters.

Three: What we think of as tillage has changed. Tillage includes all forms of field operations that disturb and move the soil as well as break up and bury crop residues. What we once considered conventional tillage systems and conservation tillage systems have changed with our understanding of the impacts of tillage on soils and crops and with developments in technologies. As an example, high-speed, high-disturbance seeders cause substantial soil loss, as does vertical tillage, both of which were mentioned last week. We need to rethink how such operations can fit into a conservation tillage system today and tomorrow.

Four: The cumulative effects of a long history of soil erosion and its consequential economic impacts — past, current and future impacts — have not been adequately studied. This is probably the most important point. As noted in my witness statement from 2019, in spite of all the conservation efforts over the past 40 years, our best estimate is that the severity of crop loss has not improved significantly. The economic loss has greatly increased. These findings have been corroborated by a recent study of soil loss, crop yields and economics in the corn belt of the United States.

None of the points I have raised are new. However, they are not widely recognized or acted upon. They highlight both the technical and social complexities of the situation. My last point, in particular, may provide some insight into why the majority of farmers are not eager early adopters of soil conservation practices. Farming is a business, and changes in management require a sound, meaningful business case, which I do not think we have provided.

If I were to assess the progress toward sustainable use of our soils as a teacher, I would say that we have achieved about 70% of what we need on the science and technology front, but only about 30% of what we need on the socioeconomic front. I am happy to discuss my statement.

The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Lobb. Dr. Van Eerd, did you want to wrap things up?

Ms. Van Eerd: Yes, I would like the opportunity to provide my testimony. Thank you for the invitation to provide my expert opinion on soil health. I, too, listened to last week’s discussion. I was very interested, and I agree with a lot of Dr. Lobb’s comments as well.

I definitely agree that, when I give a 101 primer, it sounds like these management practices are set, but Dr. Lobb is right in that we do not know the science behind it. We do not know when it works and when it doesn’t. So in my 101, it might have sounded like those are it, but that is not true.

Let me go back to my script. I would like to begin with “why.” Making a case for why we should all care about soil health is relatively easy. Soil provides for life and benefits all. The challenge is that measuring some of these effects is not easy nor direct. Further, the costs of implementing soil care practices are immediate, and they are solely the responsibility of farmers. In contrast, the on the farm benefits typically occur in the long-term while the more immediate benefits of soil care practices occur off the farm and are a benefit to the environment and society at large. That disconnect between immediate costs to the farmer and then potentially delayed benefits, combined with immediate benefits for off the farm, that disconnect is a real challenge.

To overcome this and other challenges that need to be overcome before we have widespread soil care adoption, I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Lobb; we need more research. I would add that we need more training of people with soil knowledge.

I will start with research. For almost a decade, my research program has focused on quantifying soil health. This has contributed to the larger global community understanding of soil health indicators. In fact, in the past five years, there has been exponential growth in soil health knowledge and research. Despite this advancement, there is still no global consensus on which indicator. What this means is that, first, there’s a need for more research. Second, that we’re still debating it means that soil type, the agro-system that’s being studied, the climate that’s being studied, the topography, the small-plot research where we’re studying soil health, they all have a strong influence here. A best indicator in one scenario might not be all that useful in a different scenario. More research is needed to tease out those factors that have influence on soil health. Context and site characteristics really matter.

Similarly, there is no one-size-fits-all for soil care practices. The specific soil care practice needed to mitigate soil degradation and maximize soil health needs to fit in the crop rotation, needs to fit in the farming system, and it varies with soil type, topography, climate and inherent field characteristics. Just as there are no two farms the same in any region, let alone Canada, soil care planning and policies need to be customizable. More research is needed to help explain the variability in the fields, the variability of the landscapes and differences across the nation. We need to quantify which soil care practices might have an impact. I feel like I’m repeating a bit of what Dr. Lobb just mentioned, but I think it’s good to hear it in a different way.

Let’s talk about some of the questions. How many samples are needed? What do we compare the soil sample to? What is the threshold? Once a farmer has a soil sample and has the test report, what action will be taken? What does the soil score mean, other than more or less healthy? What should the grower do about the soil health test? These and other research questions need answering.

Since the soil is living and complicated, there is a strong need for meaningful science and meaningful communication on soil knowledge. It’s critical for advancing knowledge. Given the site-specific approaches to soil care and the complexity of managing soil health, I’d lake to support and add to the discussion from last week. Last week, Mr. MacLeod and Mr. Lobb, called for more people on the ground. I agree. To make meaningful improvements in soil health at the landscape level, more experts are needed. For example, if more soil health samples are sent to the laboratory, we need more expertly trained individuals to do that analysis. There are many opportunities for people at all levels, but training in soil science is imperative and we need faculty to train these people. Moreover, the people on the ground tend to be in tenuous positions. They tend to be contract positions.

There are two things about policy that I would like you to know. One is about having soil care as a pre-competitive advantage for farmers, where global corporations purchase products. They only buy products that have been managed under soil care.

Finally, I’d like to invite you to the University of Guelph, Ridgetown Campus and Elora to the Soil Health Interpretive Centre. I’d like to invite you to see the research that’s going on and see what’s done. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Van Eerd. My apologies for interrupting. I will give folks a minute warning going forward.

Senator Simons: Thank you to both our witnesses. I will be quick.

I wanted to dive right into the controversy of nitrogen fertilizer usage. There are a lot of farmers who feel very strongly that nitrogen fertilizer is the thing that helps them to have fertility in their soil. At the same time, the government is asking farmers to see if they can find ways to quite dramatically reduce their use of nitrogen fertilizer. We’ve seen a lot of very angry response to that, a lot of people who are very afraid of what that could mean to their livelihood.

I wonder if the two of you could talk to us about whether, on balance, we are too reliant on artificial nitrogen fertilizers? Are there other strategies that farmers could be adopting that would be better for soil health as well as for emissions? Or, are we locked into a situation where we need those nitrogen fertilizers because the soil is depleted?

Mr. Lobb: I do not think that it is a question of whether we need the nitrogen fertilizers because the soil is depleted. We need the nitrogen fertilizers because we need food to produce. That requires a lot of nitrogen. There’s no way around that. I do not think that anyone should be foolish enough to say that we can eliminate or dramatically reduce nitrogen without consequence to our food production.

In terms of your ability to reduce nitrogen use, there are always some efficiencies that can be gained in the system, but we have to have a clear idea of what is realistic for given situations. Every situation is different, every farm and soil is different in each climactic region. That becomes a complicated thing, to come up with a blanket recommendation that we cut nitrogen by 20% or 30% — I forget what number they are using in which parts of the country. There is always room to improve efficiencies. Efficiencies that gain economic benefit for the farmer are probably quite reasonable and justified, but I do not think that those are anything near where the federal government is recommending nitrogen reductions be.

Ms. Van Eerd: I can add to that. I definitely don’t disagree. There are opportunities for efficiency. I understand the pushback; I definitely understand it. I think it is difficult to link soil health and nutrients together directly. You cannot say that just because your soil is healthy that now you do not need external inputs of fertilizers. That just doesn’t happen. Whether it is fertilizer or other inputs of nutrients, there is no way around it. There’s not enough research to say that with a healthy soil you can cut back by x amount per cent.

Mr. Lobb: But I think that it is fairly clear that if you look at the inefficiencies that exist in any field, because of the variability, that if you had a healthier soil and you had a more uniform soil, a more stable soil in terms of its production capacity, farmers could be much more efficient. It is a bit of an indirect link, but there is a link that could be made. It is just that we do not understand because we do not study soil health in variable landscapes. It makes it really difficult to make that connection, but intuitively, we know it does exist. A healthy soil would improve farmers’ ability to be more efficient, we just need more understanding of the system.

Ms. Van Eerd: And it offers protection.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Senator Klyne: My question is for Dr. Lobb, but of course, I welcome the opportunity for others. Last week we heard from Don Lobb and Cedric MacLeod who spoke at length about farming methods and practices that you have alluded to here as well. Those practices promote good soil management. They also noted that a framework came out of the Paris Agreement for agriculture, and they indicated during the meeting that there were early adopters of these practices and the framework and some late adopters. Unfortunately, there’s seemingly no late majority. This is unfortunate. It is also disappointing that laggards or non-adopters represent 50%, as I recall.

Are these holdout deniers or more focused on year-to-year profits? For those who have adopted it, have the adopters’ results not demonstrated the value of good soil management practices? What needs to be said or done to lever these holdouts into engagement and the use of good soil management practices? Do they understand why they need to engage and what the costs will be if they don’t? I would like a concise answer around those. Just the sense of it, not each and every question, but the general context of it. Because I have another question that I would like to ask about Soileos innovation.

Mr. Lobb: I will answer your first one very quickly because it is in my statement. It is the inability to provide a business case for many of them. I see this when I teach my diploma students who are farmers. They are very skeptical of the rationale for it without a business case. We have been completely ineffective in doing that. I gave it 30% progress on that front. So, a failure.

Ms. Van Eerd: I can add that we do not know. There are a lot of different motivators or demotivators for soil health. As Dr. Lobb said, there’s a need for social science studies. Getting to those non-adopters and what demotivates them can be pretty powerful information. Thank you.

Senator Klyne: In terms of the business case, would the early adopters and late adopters results not demonstrate the benefits?

Mr. Lobb: Not necessarily. A lot of the time, it is not necessarily based upon crop yields. In terms of measurement of soil health, I always tell my student that there is one measure of soil health, and that is crop yield and to see how it varies within a field. But that is never included. That generates a lot of skepticism.

Senator Oh: Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

My question for you both is, since 1984, the report on the last soil tests came out. Almost 38 years ago. So what happens now — ? Can you tell us how the conditions in Canada have evolved since the last report was published? How does climate change affect crop production?

Ms. Van Eerd: It is very difficult without data and research to determine the decline in soil health or soil degradation over that time period. The complicated part is over that same time period, genetics and breeding has really increased crop productivity. In my estimation, that really has passed any decline in soil productivity.

I think your second question about climate change, with extremes in weather, be it temperature, precipitation or lack of precipitation, that is when we are going to see the differences between degraded soil and healthy soil. That is where we’re going to see yields in our healthy soil and less in our degraded soil.

Mr. Lobb: I will just add to that. We’ve done a study, referring to my statement this time and last time, that the use of soil organic carbon is the best indicator we have for soil properties, and productivity would indicate that the state of the soil nationally is no better than it was in 1984. We have smaller areas that are now more severely eroded. The majority of the land has improved, but the small areas have gotten more severely eroded and caused greater losses of crop yield.

Ms. Van Eerd is absolutely right. When we look at the numbers nationally, the fact that crop yields have doubled or tripled in every crop in the last 40 years has masked any impact to soil degradation. As I tell farmers, if they had tackled soil degradation, their yields would be three to four times higher. So there is a lost profit there that seems to be not expressed, which comes back to the lack of information on economics.

Senator Oh: Thank you.

Senator Marwah: Thank you to both the witnesses for their great presentations.

Professor Van Eerd, you made an interesting comment that there is a disconnect between the immediate cost to farmers and the delayed benefit to society and the environment.

Professor Lobb, you also made the comment that the meaningful business case to prevent soil loss has not been made, and the farmers are not eager to go to this approach, which I find curious because surely they must understand that it is crucial to their long-term success and growth.

Have any solutions been implemented in any other jurisdictions that help solve this disconnect and come up with solutions that will provide an incentive for farmers to adopt these?

I keep hearing about successes in New Zealand, for instance. I do not know whether they would apply or whether they are on a different front.

Mr. Lobb: I will respond in terms of the economics. In North America, there are few good studies of the economics of soil loss as the major form of soil degradation and its impact on crop productivity and, therefore, profitability. One of the studies in Ontario was done in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987. That is the last published document. That is quite old. That creates part of this problem with information, and it is very difficult to make a business case when you are not collecting that type of economic information.

The government has not supported those types of data collection.

Ms. Van Eerd: I agree. How do you put a price on clean water, less soil in the water, less cleaning of phosphorous or nitrogen in the water? How do you put a value on clean air and air quality? What is the cost of biodiversity? We absolutely need those numbers to be able to do an economic analysis.

The costs are immediate for the farmer, and the benefits could be immediate for the environment. They are called “externalities” for a reason, because we say that they are external, and we do not put a number or a value to it, even though we need it, and we know we need it.

Senator Marwah: Have any jurisdictions corrected this or found a solution to solve this disconnect, globally?

Mr. Lobb: I sit on the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils working with the Food and Agricultural Organization or the United Nations, or FAO, and we struggle with this. Over the last year and a half, we have not been able to deal with the lack of economic information that farmers need. This is particularly in developing countries, where the small-scale farmers do not have the information they need to make sound decisions. It is just not available. So we have been trying to hire an economist to provide that information to us, within the global community. We have been unsuccessful.

Senator Marwah: If you were to recommend a solution to us to try to correct this, what you would recommend?

Mr. Lobb: If you were going to make a recommendation, we should talk to people at the policy branch. I made this argument to them two or three years ago that this is the way we need to go. You need to engage the people in the policy branch and the economists there to get them to refocus what they are doing.

Ms. Van Eerd: I would agree. Hire someone who can value ecosystem services. If you could put a dollar value on those ecosystem services or the functions that soils have, then the economists can take those numbers and apply them to different soil care practices and then demonstrate that to farmers. For some, that will be the motivator.

Senator Cotter: Thanks to both of you for your lucid presentations for some of us who are learning this as fast as we can.

In listening to both of your accounts, I want to pose for you what seems to me an almost impossible equation that we have here.

First, improving soil health will be a benefit at some point presumably to the farmer but significantly to society at large. That is the first part of the equation.

The second part is that in the present circumstances, the doing of that will be a private cost to farmers, and we haven’t made the case. Indeed, the case is a bit tricky given that the benefits are likely long term of how those economic benefits flow back to farmers. Some of that, if I understood, Dr. Lobb, you just observed by the returns for farmers that have been going up dramatically and not necessarily because the soil is healthier, but other kinds of practices have made that possible.

Third, we don’t identify the externalities well, that is, the societal benefits, and find ways to, from an economic point of view, thank farmers for moving in that direction.

Fourth, the decision authority in relation to all of these farmlands is left in the hands of the private producer, who is presumably motivated by a collection of things. One might be good environmental stewardship, but the other is not going broke and trying to earn enough money to expand their farm, make their kids able to become farmers and the like.

It seems to me that unless we kind of break that impossible equation in some fashion, we’re not liable to get anywhere here. Are there any comments?

Mr. Lobb: I am going to come back to a statement that was made last week by, I think, both of the speakers, and that has to do with the issue of land tenure and land ownership. This disconnect that you just described, that last part particularly with respect to the decisions and what motivates people, if you are in a business and you are farming your own land for your future generations, you are going to take a different view than if you are farming based on one year’s rent. As we’ve moved, as was described in the presentations last week, to a dramatically different land tenure situation than we had 30 or 40 years ago, we should expect that disconnect to become more severe.

In other words, there is little interest from any farmer to invest in the land, and that is what we’re talking about. We’re talking about improving soil health as a sustainability investment, which is going to provide them returns in the short term and hopefully in the long term.

But we are not in that situation right now.

Ms. Van Eerd: I agree. The additional way to look at it is maybe as management. I say, “soil care,” but maybe it is just maintenance. Farmers invest in their trucks, and they do maintenance on the truck. They change the oil. They check the fluids and the brake lines. They do that maintenance. It does not make them any money, but they do it because it prevents future costs.

What if we told the soil health story as, “Let’s eliminate your future costs by investing and maintaining soil now”?

Senator Duncan: I thank both our presenters for their excellent presentations.

I am new to this committee, and I appreciate the “Soil Health 101.” That was very helpful.

Since taking up my responsibilities in this committee, I did take the opportunity to read the Soil At Risk report from 1984. What struck me immediately — and forgive me, I represent the Yukon in the Senate — is that, north of the sixtieth parallel is completely missing from the report. I would just remind our soil health experts and my colleagues that Yukon farmers and ranchers have been providing high quality food for local consumption since the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896.

In 1915, the Dominion of Canada Department of Agriculture began conducting cooperative research with interested Yukon producers. In 1917, there was an experimental substation near Dawson City that confirmed that a variety of crops could be grown successfully at 64 degrees north. There was a successful experimental farm near Haines Junction that started in 1944 and operated for over 20 years.

The Yukon government has been conducting research since the 1980s to examine fertilizer rates, soil organisms, forage varieties and management techniques.

We need to include all of Canada. Are we including, in your studies, soil health or the Yukon research that is being conducted?

Following up on that, what struck me overwhelmingly in your discussion is that there doesn’t seem to be one party responsible for soil health. I am continually amazed that there seem to be a number of silos in government. Do you include north of 60 in your research, and whom do you consider responsible for soil health in Canada?

The Chair: I point out that it is our study.

Ms. Van Eerd: Located in the most southern region of Canada, I absolutely do not include research of the Yukon, although it is very interesting to me.

As to who is responsible for soil health, I think that for the most part in Ontario’s, Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, or OMAFRA, has taken leadership on soil health. Due to the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario’s report in 2016, which was Putting Soil Health First: A Climate-Smart Idea for Ontario OMAFRA has responded and has hired a lot of people to rejuvenate soil health research and extension.

Mr. Lobb: I deal with national soil erosion mapping, so I deal with Agriculture Agri-Food Canada in terms of analysis and mapping across the country.

You are right; Yukon is not included. It is not that we do not know that it is there. The problem is data management. There is not enough farming to allow us to report. There are a whole bunch of Statistics Canada, or StatCan, requirements for what the minimum area for each class of farming is, so it falls between the cracks.

You are not alone. Newfoundland has a similar situation. If you count Newfoundland alone, a lot of their data just cannot be reported.

So it is not that we don’t appreciate that these places exist. It highlights a huge, important issue about soil health. Soil health in the Yukon is a very different beast than soil health in southern Ontario. It needs to be treated differently and needs to be recognized, but it is very difficult report on or analyze data from any of it.

The Chair: I have one quick question to both of you: Do you anticipate that there will ever be one technique that will identify soil health in some capacity? Is it possible? Do you anticipate that we can get there?

Mr. Lobb: Yes. There are two, not one: soil organic matter and crop yield in a field scale interpretation.

The Chair: Thank you.

Ms. Van Eerd: I was going to say soil carbon, so the same as soil organic matter. Is it enough? It depends upon what function you are looking for. But I agree with Dr. Lobb.

The Chair: Thank you.

Senator Simons: Last week we heard a great deal about the problems with soil erosion, soil loss and farmland being taken up by urban development.

I want to understand what we have here, Dr. Van Eerd. If you are talking about soil itself, what are the component bits that you need to look for that tell you this is healthy soil?

Ms. Van Eerd: Soil organic matter. I will leave it at that. Soil is comprised of water, air, the mineral component and organic matter. If you just have a handful of soil, you want to think of those five things: the mineral part, the water part, the air part and the life part.

Senator Simons: And what is that? Are you looking for dead leaves, earthworms? Make it simple for the city girl.

Ms. Van Eerd: Yes, it is that and more. If I think of soil organic matter, I think of the living, the dead and the long dead. It’s life.

The Chair: There is a song there somewhere.

Senator Simons: That is the most extensional answer.

Ms. Van Eerd: It is all from life.

Mr. Lobb: She is absolutely right. One thing that I may point out is it’s not just organic matter. It’s the living organisms in the organic matter. You can take a handful of rich, organic soil from the bottom of a big mound they have when they’re putting up a residential area, and it is dead. If it has organic matter, it can come back to life and thrive. If it does not have organic matter, it will not thrive.

Senator Klyne: Yes. I’m wondering if you have heard of or know or have an opinion of Soileos, which is a sustainable micronutrient fertilizer made from peas, lentils and other plant-based hulls. Have you heard of that?

Ms. Van Eerd: No.

Mr. Lobb: Yes, but I have no opinion on it because it is probably not different than any other organic amendment.

Ms. Van Eerd: It falls in that category of compost and organic amendment. It is from life, organic matter.

Senator Klyne: I thought you might say that.

Senator Duncan: You have mentioned compost. Whitehorse operates a very successful compost program. We have great compost. I notice a number of cities and municipalities are doing this.

In the efforts that you are undertaking to study soil health, are you including studies of the municipal compost programs and their impact on soil health?

Ms. Van Eerd: Yes, many researchers are. I don’t specifically in my research program, but many researchers are.

Mr. Lobb: I don’t either, but there are a number of issues in taking municipal waste, because it is often contaminated with a lot of metals, et cetera. It has to be dealt with fairly delicately.

Ms. Van Eerd: There are regulations on its management and application, but it is a good source and one that I agree with land applying.

The Chair: Colleagues and witnesses, we have reached the end of our first panel, it being 7:30. I want to say thank you to our two witnesses, Dr. Van Eerd and Dr. Lobb. We very much appreciate your participation here this evening. At some point in the future, I hope that our paths will cross again.

For our second panel, we will hear from Nadir Erbilgin, Professor and Chair, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta and Angela Bedard-Haughn, Professor and Dean, College of Agriculture and Bioresources, University of Saskatchewan.

Folks, thank you for joining us. We will hear opening remarks from Dr. Erbilgin, followed by Dr. Bedard-Haughn. You will each have five minutes for your opening remarks. The floor is yours, Dr. Erbilgin.

Nadir Erbilgin, Professor and Chair, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, as an individual: Thank you very much. Greetings from Edmonton. I always wonder how people will pronounce my name and thank you very much for pronouncing it the way you did.

I would like to briefly introduce myself and then go from there. My name is Nadir Erbilgin. I am a professor and Chair of the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta. I obtained my degrees in the United States. I have a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

I have been teaching, conducting research, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students and serving the community at the University of Alberta since 2007. I became the chair last year.

My research focuses on forest health, so we are going to switch gears a little bit from a more agricultural to a forest perspective because soil health is a critical component of forest health.

So the question is, what is forest health? Perhaps I should define it. This is from a more management or human-centric perspective. Forest health is considered as the forest conditions that enable us to meet forest or land management objectives. It really focuses on understanding and managing insects and diseases in natural and managed forest ecosystems and characterizes how they interact to affect ecosystem properties.

These are critical aspects because we have recently seen large outbreaks here, mountain pine beetle in Western Canada and spruce budworm in Eastern Canada. This is happening throughout the world. I just came back from Europe where they have their own forest health problems.

Wider soil health is critical, and soil health is a critical component of forest sustainability. Forest sustainability is critical after harvesting or any insect outbreaks or fire they need to be able to come back. Soil health makes sure that this happens. It is a critical component of reforestation throughout the world, including in Canada.

So what is soil health? How do we link it? I think here the most important part is the soil organic matter, a really critical component of forest health, as indicated by the previous witnesses.

Soil organic matter is responsible for the majority of the soil’s physical, chemical and biological properties through the plant litter or anthropogenic impacts. It is also critical for successful reforestation and rehabilitation of forests after a disturbance such as wildfire, which is a common disturbance; insect outbreaks; harvesting and many other disturbances. But they are also vulnerable. They are at the top of the surface of the soil and they are highly vulnerable to disturbances.

Because of that reason, they are connected when we are talking about forest soils. As a researcher, I’ve done a lot of work in that component. Soil assessment is critical for understanding healthy ecosystems.

Evaluating forest soil health is really difficult because soils are dynamic and influenced by physical, chemical and biological properties. This means that there is no single forest soil health indicator that can be measured for assessing soil health. Because changes in one property, such as chemicals, could impact the microbial properties, for instance.

I think we need to see the big picture. Whatever discussions we have, we have to see the big picture, and we need to make investments. So I really suggest for you to consider that we need to establish — I think the previous witnesses also agree with me — a soil disturbance monitoring protocol throughout Canada to collect short-and long-term data on changes in soil physical, chemical and biological attributes.

This could, perhaps, be part of a national soil health institute as part of the Soil Conservation Council of Canada. I don’t know the details but that is an important institution. I think we really need it. Do we have the capacity in Canada? Absolutely. We have the necessary intellectual academic institutions. We have provincial and federal government institutions, non-profit agencies, as well as we have technological advancements such as all the “omics” — genomics, metabolomics and proteomics. We have the essential information to monitor our soil disturbances.

Okay, I will be quiet now. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you. Dr. Bedard-Haughn, thank you for joining us.

Angela Bedard-Haughn, Professor and Dean, College of Agriculture and Bioresources, University of Saskatchewan, as an individual: Thank you very much for having me. Good evening, everyone. I speak to you today from Treaty 6 territory, the traditional homeland of the Métis, and the centre of the Prairies, which are home to 80% of Canada’s farmland. We also have a whole lot of forest soils as well.

I grew up on a farm in rural Saskatchewan. I did my first two degrees here at the University of Saskatchewan, or USask, before moving to Davis, California for my PhD. I returned to USask as a professor of soil science and eventually became dean a couple of years ago.

I am past president of the Canadian Society of Soil Science and have served two terms on the Board of Directors for the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association. So I am a soil enthusiast and a passionate soil supporter.

I would like to start by thanking this committee for taking on this important work, which has an imperative not just for Canada but for global food security and global soil security.

I would like to reiterate Dr. Van Eerd’s definition of soil health. I want to emphasize that when I talk about soil health, I’m not talking about any one thing. I’m talking about the ability of a given soil to perform ecosystem services. But I want to emphasize that this is to the best of its potential. I think this is an important piece that we need to think about.

Soil performs many ecosystem services, as Dr. Van Eerd summarized, but some soils are inherently better at each of these ecosystem services than others. So what we need to be striving for — there is no one soil where we can say, okay, that’s the ideal for healthy soil, because each soil can only perform to the best of its ability in a given climate. So a sandy soil in southwestern Saskatchewan compared to a rich loamy soil in southwestern Manitoba, they’re going to perform very differently in terms of some of these metrics of soil health. But what we should be striving for is for them to achieve their optimum soil health.

How we manage a particular soil for its optimum health depends both on the soil and, as Dr. Van Eerd has highlighted, the desired services that we want to optimize.

The challenge, of course, when we talk about a national framework for soil health is given the dynamic and somewhat subjective definition. We’ve already heard about soil carbon; if we take two soils with similar textures in a similar climate, the one with more carbon or more soil organic matter will be healthier, according to multiple metrics. It will have better structure. It will have a more robust microbial community and be better able to grow plants, filter water, cycle nutrients and so on. So to an earlier question, if we can only measure one thing, it should be carbon.

Here on the Prairies, we celebrate the no-till success story where that widespread change in management reduced erosion, increased water conservation and nutrients and carbon storage, but we also know from the follow-up work that we’ve done since the adoption of conservation tillage, we’ve had a repeat study called the Prairie Soil Carbon Balance Project. And we know from that work that spatial variability, of something as fundamental as soil carbon, can be really high, on the order of within a few metres, as well as across climatic gradients from semi-arid to subhumid.

Also the temporal variability, so year-to-year variability on some soil processes can be high due to changing management practices and things like multi-year droughts that lead to crop failure. That has impacts on the soil health as well. If we are seeing these kinds of variability in carbon, these other soil health indicators will vary as well.

So I want to really emphasize — one of my key points for this group — is that understanding the current state of soil health will require some rigorous baseline measurement programs that recognize these key drivers, the spatial and temporal variability. It is not enough to just have one sample here and there. We need to understand that spatial and temporal variability.

I can’t overstate the importance of baseline data. If I want to lose weight, I need to get on the scale today so that I know where I am starting from. The next time I get on, has that number gone up or down? I also need to know some of that temporal variability. Did I get on the scale before breakfast or right after Thanksgiving dinner? It will look quite different.

To follow on the previous witnesses comments, I also want to emphasize that tracking Canada’s soil health over time will really require coordinated monitoring and data management, both regionally and nationally.

Over the past few decades, soil information management has become increasingly distributed. As one of the senators noted, we have multiple sectors. We also have industry collecting data and researchers collecting data. It is scattered all over. We have a lot of data being collected, but we have no way to bring that together and we are losing out on major opportunities to leverage the power of big data.

I want to close by saying we have got a lot of information being collected. Yes, I agree with the previous witnesses in terms of the need for additional research, but we also need to get more strategic and coordinated in terms of how we work with the results of that research and think about that across the country. Best practices are going to look very different whether you’re in the Fraser Valley, the Regina plains or the St. Lawrence lowlands, and we need to be thinking about that.

With that, I conclude my remarks and thank everyone for their attention. I welcome the opportunity to answer some of the questions that the first-round witnesses got, too.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Senator Simons: I will start with Professor Erbilgin. I am a University of Alberta graduate from Edmonton, so it is a good day for Treaty 6 here. Being from Alberta, I am all too familiar with the devastating impact of wild fires on our forests and the die-off caused by the mountain pine beetle. I’m curious to know, if carbon is good for the soil and helps to regenerate the soil, what are the impacts on the soil when there is that kind of destruction of trees, whether by parasites or by fire? Does it end up enriching the soil, or is that too simplistic an equation?

Mr. Erbilgin: This is an excellent question. The soil has the capacity to store as much carbon as it can store. If you look at the forests from below and above ground biomass, if the ground biomass is much higher than the above biomass they store a lot of carbon. When the insect outbreak comes and kills the trees, if the forest companies are lucky, they can remove those trees on time. If not, they stay on the landscape and in 10 or 15 years, they will become soil, more or less, and they will contribute a lot.

There are a lot of sources of carbon. Not just the woody biomass. Tree roots, for instance, release a lot of chemicals — phenols — they are carbon-based compounds that stay in the soil. They also contribute to changes in microbial communities.

Wildfire or insect outbreaks are definitely accelerating the forest soil being carbon sink to carbon source because they reach the capacity to hold so much carbon, and when they cannot do it, and they release, after a fire, some of the carbons into the atmosphere. That has a positive impact on global climate change. I hope this answers your question.

Senator Simons: Yes, I think so. It is interesting. When we were speaking to people from the agriculture sector, it is easy to see that if you have man-made agriculture, you are, as Senator Cotter used the phrase last week, mining the soil. But with forestry, we don’t have as heavy a footprint. What causes soil health in a forest to degrade?

Mr. Erbilgin: It is mainly the disturbances that you described; fire and insect outbreaks. Then really, again, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have to put ourselves above a little bit and try to see the perspective. Why do we have so many frequent insect outbreaks or fires? It really comes back to how we manage our forests.

For instance, I will focus on insects. I am a bark beetle ecologist, that’s what I do. Then focusing on soil components and tree components, what is critical? Whatever the beetle likes, we provide that. What do they like? They like aging forests, trees that cannot sustain and resist insect attacks. All this contributes to the carbon addition to the soil.

Senator Simons: Thank you very much.

Senator Oh: Thank you, professors, for being here. It is my understanding that Canada does not have any nationally determined commitments or targets for a national standard to increase carbon sequestration in soil. What policy systems would encourage farmers to sequester carbon in agricultural soil? How rapidly can carbon be absorbed by soil? What are the best methods for doing so?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: First of all, when we think about the reason there is no national policy for carbon, I want to re-emphasize my earlier point that not all soils can store the same amount of carbon. So we can’t set one target and have it make sense even for all of Saskatchewan, let alone a national target that would make sense for Saskatchewan, B.C. and the Yukon. Every area has different maximum potential. Our soils had different carbon storage long before any management practices were introduced. A national policy would need to look at that relative change, not at an absolute value.

The second point I want to emphasize is that there are areas — and Dr. Lobb alluded to this — of the province where there has been significant carbon increase since the 1980s. Certainly, in much of Saskatchewan that would be the case as a consequence of conservation tillage. The risk I see with a policy that does not take into account some of these historical pieces — I hear people talk about how it has to be an increase relative to where we are now. I worry that we are essentially penalizing those early adopters that we heard about previously. If I’ve been sequestering carbon for the last 40 years because I was an early adopter, and suddenly my neighbour who didn’t bother to adopt at all is getting a payout because he is switching practices now, that is not going to go over particularly well in the context of the agricultural community.

With respect to how quickly carbon can be stored, it depends a little bit. There are different pools. Today, we’ve been talking — for the sake of the audience — about organic carbon as a whole. There are different pools that we can measure within that in terms of different biochemical forms of carbon, but if we look at total carbon, we wouldn’t expect to start to see changes for five to ten years or more. It changes relatively slowly in terms of total carbon because in any given year at any given point in time, the carbon we are measuring in the soil is the net of new carbon inputs and outputs. That’s part just part of the biogeochemical cycling. There will always be both. What we’re going for a net gain in the soil.

Mr. Erbilgin: I think we need to promote agroforestry in Canada. What is agroforestry? It is a simple way of improving soil health. Agroforestry is an intensive land management practice wherein trees and shrubs are integrated into crop or livestock management. It really optimizes the numerous benefits arising from the biophysical and even biochemical interactions among the crops and livestock with the trees. Agroforestry practices were approved by the reforestation programs under the clean development mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol for carbon sequestration. That could be one of the practical mechanisms.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Senator Duncan: Thank you to our presenters. There was a mention and discussion of forest fire and its impact on soil health. I want to follow up on Senator Simons’ questions. After forest fires in northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the next season, there will be an invasion of morel mushroom pickers. I don’t know if that’s the same across the country, but there are very clearly morel mushrooms. We will see the pickers come. I wonder what this says about our soil health. Is it the same across the country? What does this sort of information provide us?

Mr. Erbilgin: That’s an excellent and very interesting question. Let’s see the biology of this fungi. What do they do? They utilize carbon. They are opportunistic. After the fire, trees are probably stressed and dying from the roots, and these fungi come and use this readily available carbon, which indicates it is very good. It is part of the decomposition process. That tree is not going to stand up — something is going to happen. Above ground, below ground, coprophilic and other types of fungi — even pathogenic — can play essential roles in nutrient flow from the soil to the plant and from the plant to the soil. That is part of the beautiful continuum. And that indicates health. I’m not worried about the fire. The fire is affecting so many people and companies, but in the long run, fire is good for an ecosystem.

Senator Duncan: And the mushrooms are only good for one season?

Mr. Erbilgin: Yes, probably they are forced out by the other pathogenic or saprophytic organisms. Competition is one of the key drivers of organisms on the planet.

Senator Duncan: Is it the same across the country, or is this unique to the North?

Mr. Erbilgin: I have seen it in part of Alberta. The mushroom also needs a certain amount of moisture if the moisture is available. That’s critical because when the trees die, there is nothing to soak up the water from the soil. They used to take the water and evaporate it — transpire. Now they don’t take as much water, so there is some water available. Water and available carbon make really good conditions. If this fire happens in very dry soil, then you might not be able to see such mushrooms growing.

Senator Duncan: Thank you.

Senator Cotter: My question, I think, is for both of you but perhaps primarily for Dean Bedard-Haughn. I think you will get the gist of my question because you were helpful in the guidance of what the policy dimensions of that international congress Senator Black and I attended are.

When it comes to research and research findings, is there a way of thinking about what could be the most valuable kinds of research that can guide public policy — or maybe guide farmers so that they can make decisions differently? I don’t want to be disrespectful, having dabbled in the academy myself. Some of the time, the researchers become skilled at identifying the “angels on the head of a pin.” That’s really important to one’s thinking and the progress of science, but the translation of knowledge into good public policy seems to me, in this area, to be becoming critical by the day. What could benefit that public policy decision making the most?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: I think that’s where Canada is in a really good position in terms of our agricultural colleges across the country. They’re really good at that type of research. Certainly, within our college, there are a number of faculty members whose programs go from that foundational, “angels on the head of a pin,” right out to the trial plots in farmers’ fields and the field days working directly with producers and asking how it is working here versus there and why it is working differently at site A versus site B. That full translational spectrum is one of the things that agricultural colleges are really good at across the country.

To follow up on that, I would repeat my call for the ability for us to bring data together from multiple sites — that synthesis piece. I’m thinking about how we can actually bring data together and use some of that big data capability. Because the collection of information right now is so distributed, it is labour intensive. By nature, it has to be distributed. We have to ask what we can do to make it easier for my data sets to be compiled with Laura Van Eerd’s data sets with David Lobb’s data sets with Dave Burton’s data sets out at Dalhousie. How can we bring that data together? Because that’s where we start to see some of those patterns emerging and figure out what is possible. Even if we’re just doing it on a regional basis, there will be more similarities within the Prairies. How can we learn from each other and translate that into policy?

If I were to pick one thing, it is that support for bringing data and information together. That would be most impactful.

Senator Cotter: Where in governments might those investments occur or come from?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: That’s the really tricky part. This is where I think having some sort of institute — I mentioned it earlier, and one of your senators mentioned it. Right now, we have data being collected across multiple institutions. Historically, I would have said that, of course, it should be Agriculture Canada. But we have information being collected through Agriculture Canada, Environment Canada, forestry folks and other folks that are doing work. A lot of the soil sampling that’s being done in the North right now is actually part of environmental site assessments for mining and exploration. So that data-sharing piece is actually a tricky piece because it is no one institute.

So if soil health is actually a national priority, we need all of those organizations to get together and say, okay, we will pull soil health — the little pockets that we have for soil — and we will pull this together so we can talk across all of those boundaries. Because one of the other pieces, when we think about a changing climate, is that we might suddenly see soils that were primarily for forestry becoming agricultural or vice versa, right? Suddenly we are doing more afforestation because we can’t grow crops on some of the soils anymore because the climate doesn’t support it.

I do think that it doesn’t fit in any one of our current government envelopes or any of the current structures right now, Senator Cotter.

Senator Klyne: Clearly, as we move along and listen to expert witnesses such as yourselves, it is clear that soil health in Canada is at risk. We have significant soil-management challenges whether it is soil degradation or soil erosion. We do have such a vast country of regional differences.

I want to focus on this in-depth research. It seems it will be difficult to move forward without it. When you think about that, you start talking about blockchain and big data and managing those. Across our universities, a lot of big data moves down pipes, and they have these huge computers that can do a phenomenal amount of math with. I think we are talking about a quantum leap here from where we are now to where we need to be with blockchain and big data and synthesizing the data results.

You kind of asked this question, but I will ask it now. How do we bring that together? What’s the call to action? At the point of this crisis, I think hard or easy has nothing to do with it. What do we need to do?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: Yes. The call to action is to recognize this as a priority. Poor David Lobb has probably heard me give this talk more than once, but I’ve been talking for quite a while and applied for grants to federal institutes over the years. I’ve been saying to them that it’s a national imperative that we need a national soil information database. We need it to pull things together and figure out how we can actually establish that.

It has been really tough because it hasn’t been the mandate of a federal organization — for example, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. We’ve had a loose collection of scientists, but we can’t do it without funding. We need that support. We have folks with the capability, the skill, the interest and the desire but without the resources to do it. Because it is a distributive problem, no one province wants to chip in for a national database.

I will leave it at that. I am conscious of the time, but I would be happy to have a whole other conversation about that.

Mr. Erbilgin: I would add that it is a two-step process. Step one is let’s see what kind of data we have across both the universities and the agencies. Let’s put what we have together, see what we have and then think about where we are going for the next step. We have to identify that. We may not need to collect soil samples from everywhere. Where are the areas, for example, Yukon? Let’s identify some gaps in the research and we can focus on some of those areas. That may require an action plan at the national level. I suggest again: Let’s establish a national soil health institute to gather all of the soil information under one institute and then let the researchers analyze this data.

The second step is to identify the gaps; where to go. I think those two steps are essential, in my opinion.

Senator Klyne: So we have these silos and what we really need is a whole-of-nation approach here and a call to action.

What does the picture look like if we do not make this quantum leap? How bad is the situation? Maybe we need to pull people together to get that whole-of-nation approach and the resources behind this in-depth research that is required.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: What it looks like is continuing into the unknown, basically, if we continue this patchwork approach that we have right now. You will have some areas with lots of information and other areas with no information. We won’t be able to really move forward in making the kind of informed decisions and policy moves that I think we’re talking about here around this table.

Senator Klyne: But soil health continues to deteriorate and degrade. We have a serious problem.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: Yes. It will move with those farmers who are doing it for their own good because they know it is the right thing to do because they’ve seen the economic benefits for themselves. As a whole, however, it will be hard to incentivize those late adopters without a more comprehensive picture of the path that we’re on as a country.

Senator Klyne: Thank you.

The Chair: Before we move on to round two, I have a question. I have a pretty good handle on our witnesses and previous reading on the current state of soil health in Canada with respect to agriculture. What is the current state of soil health under our forests? Could you give us an overview of the current state of health, please?

Mr. Erbilgin: That is difficult to answer because we really do not have soil data across Canada. It is no different from the agricultural system. We cannot use the data that is collected in B.C., in Alberta, in the Yukon or in other territories. We are facing the same problem. We have so much data in some portions of Alberta but not for northern Alberta, for instance, and some other communities. That is the biggest problem. To give you a short answer, I cannot really assess it because we do not know what we have. We do not know what is missing, overall, across Canada.

Overall, our source soils are really healthy compared to agricultural systems because from all indications we have a functional, resilient forest. After a disturbance — that is, after a fire or after an insect outbreak as has occurred here in eastern Canada, the spruce budworm outbreak — I can guarantee that trees will continue to grow. Why? Because the system is really functioning. That is the important thing. The chemical, biological and physical properties of soil in the forests are functioning. That is, unless you go to northern Alberta, where we have oil sand development or mining. They remove the entire soil, the organic matter that some of the witnesses talked about it. If you remove that living portion of the soil, it is very difficult to put it back again.

Those are really extreme examples. Overall, in the boreal forest I would say that, more or less, we have a healthy operating soil.

The Chair: Thank you.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: I would add one quick piece to that. With respect to the post harvest, where we have active forestry the nature of the forestry practices will be a key consideration with respect to the risk of compaction, erosion and things like that. That is one piece where we have some data and we can continue to build on that.

The other piece to think about is that historically, we have had acid rain issues out east. More recently, we have started to see some air quality issues affecting some of the forest health as well as the forest soil health in some areas with air pollution coming off of mining activities and things like that. So there are bits and pieces. It is much more localized. If we were going to do a comprehensive assessment of forest soil health, those would be some of the additional risk factors that we would like to think about in addition to fire and pest outbreaks. There are human-induced pieces, but they are more localized relative to the scale of forestry when we think of that versus an agricultural landscape.

The Chair: Thank you.

Senator Marwah: Thank you to the witnesses. These are very interesting perspectives.

Dr. Bedard-Haughn, you mentioned that it is hard to really make progress at a comprehensive level. Individual farmers can take action for themselves, but doing it over a macro level is much harder to do.

Are there any policy groups or is there a public policy response? Are any governments seized on this issue, saying that they have to take the lead in terms of getting some of these macro issues involved or is this being left to the industry and to the academics?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: At this point, it is being primarily left to the industry and the academics.

As we think of things like carbon credits as it relates to soil health for example, that is one area where people are talking more about other types of economic drivers that might motivate some change.

Earlier, I mentioned that there is a bit of an equity issue there in terms of early adopters versus late adopters when we think about that. There’s not as much policy of that type in place when we think about enhancing soil health. Part of that, again, is if we can’t track it, how do we do policy? If we do not have baseline data, how can we track it? If we don’t have a monitoring program, how can we track it? We are just hand-waving in terms of monitoring that.

Then you think of the scale of what we would be looking at monitoring. If I think about it from a prairie agriculture perspective, if it’s based upon practices as opposed to some sort of quantitative soil measure, which has higher spatial and temporal variability; or if we look at it from a monitoring practice perspective, there are some challenges there in terms of human power to say, “This farmer said that they were going to do this practice but their neighbour just phoned us and said that they aren’t actually doing that. They’re in there tilling the crop out of their field.” How do you actually enforce the carrot and stick policy approaches? There are some real challenges there in terms of how we approach that without the data to back it up.

We are getting more and more tools in terms of monitoring such as remote-sensing approaches, and so on. To have a really good sense of that is an area where we have a lot more potential for strategic investment and innovation in terms of research advances by coupling some of those remote sensing techniques within field research programs. I think there is real potential there for getting to that next level of monitoring.

Senator Marwah: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We’ll move on to round two now.

Senator Simons: I have a question now for Dr. Bedard-Haughn. We have spoken about the boreal forest and farmlands but there is another agricultural ecosystem that we have not discussed yet tonight: the ranchlands, the grazing lands.

I imagine there are issues with compaction and erosion, but what are the other challenges or stresses upon those grasslands? Who is responsible? It is one thing to monitor the soil on a farm or in a forest but who is looking after those acres and acres of grassland?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: Most of the grazing lands here in the Prairies are private lands, so it would be on the rancher or the farmer to oversee the health of that land. There is a vested interest, when we think about the drought last year and the dire straits that this put some of our ranchers in due to the lack of feed availability, it really behooves those producers, those ranchers, to have the healthiest soil possible, because that is what is going to produce the most sustainable and cost-effective form of feed.

When we talk about that economic imperative, I have often found that ranchers are among the most passionate soil health stewards in terms of producers, and they have a bit of an advantage in the sense of when you think about some of the factors that contribute to soil health — when Laura Van Eerd was talking about the various seeds and the continuous live roots in the crop — a lot of the ranchlands are under — whether it is native or managed — perennial forage. So those grasses and things like alfalfa and clover and so on, all of those have a lot of below ground contribution to soil carbon to help support a healthy microbial system and so on.

Then it comes down to really looking at the management practices that optimize that. I have actually got a new study starting up this spring in partnership with a colleague from the University of Alberta that looks at measuring carbon under forage under different management practices across Saskatchewan with the idea that we will capture the range of soil types that would also be representative for Alberta and Manitoba as well.

Senator Simons: We are going to be working on this study for a little bit, so I hope you will share your findings as they come.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: Yes.

Senator Simons: What are the real stresses, then, on those grasslands? Is it overgrazing? Is it the compaction of all those hooves? Those ranchlands were evolved to be grazed by bison.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: Yes. It really depends on the grazing practice. That is the question to ask. If you overgraze, if you keep the animals on an area of land that is not sufficiently large for too long a period, then they will ultimately end up overgrazing and compromising the health of the vegetative cover, which can lead to erosion. A lot of the pasture land will be on sandier soils, perhaps, that are more prone to that type of risk as well as the compaction piece you mentioned.

Those are absolutely the kinds of pieces, compaction, erosion risk, and once you start to get to that overgrazing stage, then you get to a situation where there is more potential for invasive species that maybe aren’t as conducive to a healthy microbial biomass as well. You might end up with some sort of nasty weed infestation, and some of those weeds are themselves allelopathic and kill off other plants that might be there, so you end up with a monocrop of some sort of toxic weed, which has its own impacts on soil health.

Senator Simons: That doesn’t sound good.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: No, it is not. It’s really not.

The Chair: It’s like my garden.

Mr. Erbilgin: I would like to add something on this one.

The Chair: Please.

Mr. Erbilgin: I think that Dr. Bedard-Haughn already mentioned it, but I think this invasive plant species is important information here. In Alberta, smooth broom is invading the grasslands and changing the chemistry and microbial communities of grasslands. Grass cannot really come back again because invasive plants create an environment that is only suitable for them and not the competing organisms, as is the case with native grasslands. I think this may be another stressor that researchers should be focused on.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Are there any other questions?

I have a final one, if I may. We have a couple of minutes. What is one thing that each of you would like to leave with us to consider as we proceed? What is the one thing you want to make sure we heard and heard well this evening?

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: Nadir, did you want to go ahead?

Mr. Erbilgin: One thing that you want to hear? I wish we had this hearing yesterday, not today, because soil health is very, very important. We really need to focus on it. If actions for the future are delayed, we do not know what problems we will have. Soil health is important for maintaining healthy ecosystems, agriculture, forest, or ranch; we need to get to the bottom of that problem. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: One thing I want folks to take away from this is that need for a national perspective that transcends our current organizational boundaries, whether it is a national soil health institute or some other structure that will allow us to get that true comprehensive lens that goes beyond agriculture, environment, forestry and mining. All of those pieces need to be coming together to understand soil health and how we can pull that information together to understand where we are now and where we want to go.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Senator Duncan: If I might ask a question, and perhaps it is to our committee analysts with the assistance of the witnesses to answer this.

We have in the Yukon a forestry research area, forestry research project that is located very close to where I live. I am wondering if there are similar situations across the country, if every province and territory has this kind of a forestry research project. If we do discover that there are, might we ask for the research from them? Thank you.

Ms. Bedard-Haughn: I will just comment. I don’t think they always have provincial oversight. I know some of the projects, some of the forest monitoring sites that we have here in Saskatchewan were started as part of national or provincial initiatives but have since devolved to university oversight. This goes back to your earlier point of who is in charge around here? We have data sets being passed from hand to hand because they recognize their importance, but I think that that is exactly the sort of thing that will allow us to track some of these changes over time when we have those long-term data sites.

Mr. Erbilgin: Here in Alberta we do have a provincial data set, but it does not really cover the entirety of Alberta, depending on the budget they have. They track the mountain pine beetle, for instance. I think B.C. has aerial photography that they’ve done for a really long time, but later on when they have a budget crisis, they had to minimize the area covered.

This is the problem. The problem is that even if Yukon, Alberta and B.C. all collect data, they do not have standards. They don’t even have what portion of the forest was killed, or how do you define an unhealthy versus a healthy forest? We don’t have a clear standardization, same as in soil health perspectives. I think that we need to establish these criteria.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

With no further questions, Dr. Bedard-Haughn and Dr. Erbilgin, on behalf of my colleagues, thank you very much for your participation today. Your assistance with this study is very much appreciated, and I hope you will follow us as we go forward, and we’ll look to have our paths cross again in the future, maybe.

I want to say thank you to our committee members for your active participation and your very thoughtful questions. I appreciate that.

I also want to thank the staff who are involved in making sure these committee meetings go well: the interpreters, the debate teams transcribing the meeting, the committee room attendants, our multimedia services technicians, the broadcasting team, the recording centre, ISD, our page, our communication officers, our analysts, our administrative assistants and our clerk. It takes a team to pull these meetings together, so thank you very much.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday of this week, September 29, 2022, at 9 a.m., where we will continue to hear expert witnesses on this study.

(The committee adjourned.)