A Soil-First Agricultural Policy is a doorway through which lies better farms, better food and a better planet.

For anyone reading what I’m writing in this space, it’s no secret that I have a passion for soil health.

I know. It sounds downright odd. Even dorky. How can a guy who lives in a major North American city be interested in soil?

It comes down to the food I eat. I started maybe 15 years ago learning how to cook different foods from different cultures. In sourcing my ingredients, I became interested in where those ingredients came from, who grew them and how they grew them. I was searching for better taste, better quality in the means I put in front of my family.

I make a point now of sourcing food from farmers and producers that are as local as I can find. Some things will never be from local sources. If I have a hankering for Sea Bass, well, it’s likely imported from Greece, or Italy. I just have to ask my fish monger if they’re sustainably fished.

For most of North America and Western Europe, we are disconnected from our food. We buy what we eat in gleaming palaces of product. Most of that product (some of which cannot truly be called food, because it isn’t) is highly processed, far removed from the farms where the essential ingredients are being grown or produced.

Farmers are a very small part of the total labour force; in Canada, there are just 271 thousand farm operators in the country, out of a total labour force of 18.5 million. That’s barely 0.14%. And its declining.

But for the rest of the world, it’s a different story. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), almost 2 billion people derive their livelihoods from agriculture. The vast majority of the farms are small or very small — an estimated 72% of all farms globally are less than one hectare in size; in India, for example, half of the population is involved in the cultivation of food.

Food, how it’s produced, and what is produced is of paramount importance for most of the world as they don’t enjoy the same access to food as most of us in the North do. Nor have they implemented our industrialized way of farming.

As we move forward into the future, ensuring that we can continue to grow the food we want will have to take a number of factors into account, such as the effect of climate change on our current growing regions; growing herbicide and pesticide resistance; overall declines in soil health; water and soil pollution caused by run-off from large farms dependent on chemical inputs; high levels of farm debt, and uncertain succession for family-run farms.

Our industrialized farming sector is an anomaly in the world. We cram animals into immense feedlots and feed them grain and antibiotics in such large quantities its giving rise to antibiotic-resistant disease and is the cause of enormous pollution problems in the neighbouring environment. We waste fully 30% of the food that is produced, either on the farm itself, in transport, in the transformation process or at home, once we convert that food into our dinner. In North America, huge swaths of land (in Iowa alone, some 23 million acres) are dedicated to the production of a crop that has nothing to do with food: corn for ethanol and animal feed; soy for the junk food industry. Those monocrops are completely dependent on chemical inputs, inputs which have to be increase year after year as they gradually degrade the soil to the point of being dead.

And once soil is dead, it’s just dirt. Lifeless grains of inorganic matter that do nothing for farmers.

It’s a grim picture and it’s getting worse.

But there is something that we humans can do about it. And there are signs that government is listening.

We can start by reorienting our agricultural policies to focus on the health of the soil. What does that mean?

Equiterre and the Greenbelt Foundation co-authored a major report on the issue of soil health, and released it to the public on March 1st, 2021. The summary report itself is over 50 pages in length and contains a thorough overview of what soil health is all about, the federal and provincial policy responses to date to encourage soil health, and a number of detailed recommendations to government to make soil health the core of future agricultural policy.

Power of Soil Report Cover Image (Courtesy of Equiterre).

The Power of Soil report tackled the question in three ways:

• identifying what soil health is, and how farmers play a role in improving it;
• the reasons behind how and why farmers adopt soil health practices; and
• a comprehensive review of current Federal and joint Federal-Provincial policies and programs addressing soil health and helping farmers join the soil health movement.

After completing a thorough literature review, the Power of Soil report identified four perspectives to assess and describe soil health:

1. Enumeration of the five principles of soil health, which are: build soil organic matter; minimize soil disturbance and compaction; keep the soil covered as much as possible; diversify crops to increase diversity in the soil; and, keep living roots throughout the year as much as possible;
2. Understanding soil degradation, focusing on the problems and issues related to soil functions and characteristics. Soil degradation is characterized by things such as erosion, salinity levels, decline in soil fertility, soil acidity and pollution of the soil;
3. Understanding basic soil functions, such as water flow and retention, cycling of nutrients and buffering and filtering of toxic materials; and
4. Understanding basic soil characteristics, such as composition, structure, chemical composition and colour.

The latter two are clearly very technical and would rely on the farmer implementing actions related to the five principles of soil health, and using the technical indicators around function and characteristics as a way of measuring progress in bettering their own soil health.

There is a long list of actions that farmers can implement on their way to making their soil healthier, such as conservation tillage, cover crops, crop rotation, the addition of organic ‘amendments’ (manure, residual organic matter post-harvest, etc.), nutrient management and the establishment of buffer zones to increase diversity and augment insect and animal life on and around the farm.

But one of the key areas the report identified was the issue of adoption. What influences a farmer in adopting — or not — the actions necessary to improve soil health?

Some of the issues that influence farmers were conveniently placed into graphical format, to understand the interrelated and multiplicity of factors that influence a farmer into taking a decision to better their soil. This is represented below.

Framework of the behavioral factors that influence a farmer’s adoption of Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs)

By breaking those factors down into three categories — dispositional, social and cognitive — provides insight for policy-makers to better focus government support programs for farmers.

For example, ‘resistance to change’ is a common one that could be addressed by exposure to actual farmers successfully implementing such practices through one-to-many, informal sessions to gradually introduce farmers to the basic concepts, as well as showing them examples of successes.

Gabe Brown, a farmer in Bismark, North Dakota who was one of the pioneers of the soil health movement in North America, spends countless hours educating farmers on the pitfalls, issues and key learnings of how he converted his 5,000 acre farm from monocrop corn and soy to a completely diversified farm with cover cropping, rotational grazing and a high diversity of income crops. He’s even formed his own consultancy organization that is now working with General Mills on their plan to convert 1 million acres to regenerative agricultural practices.

Farmers, in general, are conservative in outlook. As a result, when implementing better soil health practices for the first time, the Power of Soil report found that they generally go through stages before they’re widely adopted:

• Awareness. They first become aware of particular practices, from neighbouring farmers, or from programs or organizations such as Regeneration Canada;
• Information collection. Once aware, they begin the process of collecting information on various practices, assessing which ones are applicable to their particular farm;
• Testing. Once they have all the relevant information they think they need, they’ll begin to test certain practices, usually on a small plot, to assess their effectiveness.
• Adoption. Once the testing is completed, and depending on if the results are positive, they’ll begin adopting those tested practices more widely over their entire farming operation.

In addition to these stages, farmers are also highly sensitive to the business case of integrating such practices into their operations, want ready access to information and expertise to assist them on their journey to more sustainable soil management practices and require the ability to track progress over time.

Based on the practices and particular characteristics of the farming community, how can public policy and programs be designed to assist farmers in the goal of adopting better soil health practices?

After all, converting from one recipe of farming — monocrop production of either corn or soy, fed by fertilizers and protected by pesticides — to a more regenerative farming regime emphasizing crop diversity, integration of hooved animals, cover cropping and other methods, is not an easy step. Farmers need help to make the transition.

There are signs that Government is listening. As I pointed out in my overview of both the Quebec and Canadian Budgets, programs are being introduced to assist farmers financially in making the transition.

However, the Equiterre/Greenbelt Foundation report goes further. In anticipation of a major review of Federal-Provincial-Territorial Agricultural Framework scheduled for 2023, they are using the Power of Soil report to lay the groundwork to recommend some major changes, including:

• Making soil health the priority. All three levels of government ought to make soil health a priority in all future agreements between them. Each of these agreements should spell out how soil health will be improved and advanced on Canadian farms. This should be backed up with increased funding to assist more farmers to take the transitory steps.
• Develop a Pan-Canadian soil health Strategy. By rallying farmers, agriculture groups, conservation groups, agri-business and all three levels of government, start by conducting an assessment of existing soil health, and build on that with programs to quickly improve it over time. Develop indicators to measure progress and empower an independent organization to implement the strategy and report back to government, and Canadians.
• Standards. Currently, there are many initiatives with a focus on improvements in farming methods (Canadian Organic Standard, 4Rs Nutrient Stewardship Project, Responsible Grain, Certified Sustainable Beef Framework, Farm Sustainability Assessment, Field to Market Canada, amongst others). While all these initiatives are good, they require more emphasis on soil health, and governments, industry, farmers and other partners should strive to align these initiatives to include soil health practices so they are all working in the same direction: improving soil health.
• Climate Change programs. Soil health initiatives ought to be integrated into current and future climate change mitigation programs. There is some evidence that this is starting with the recent Federal Budget, but more needs to be done in setting targets for transitioning farmers to better farming practices as well as increasing the funding commitment over time. That being said, the emphasis on any programs should be to help farmers be better farmers and land stewards first.
• Sharing knowledge. There is plenty of knowledge out there on best practices, but it needs to be shared more widely — through the creation of a soil health network — to increase the adoption of soil health methods.
• Business Case development. Gabe Brown’s emphasis for changing his farming practices came down to money, and how to make enough income to not just survive, but to live honorably. If farmers can see the positive business case of implementing soil health practices, more will be willing to adopt those practices. Existing efforts run by the Soil Health Institute and American Farmland Trust are good examples that could be emulated for implementation across Canada.
• Training for Advisors and Farmers. Re-orient the training and mission of agronomists to assist farmers with their efforts to move to more soil healthy practices. Because of one agronomist whistleblower in Quebec, efforts are moving this way in the province now.

This list goes on so there’s plenty to chew on for policy-makers in advance of the development of the new Framework. Implementation of even half of the more than 19 recommendations would be a good start, helping to cement the concept of soil health into future agricultural practices and programs.

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

The time is now. By some estimates, we have about 30 years to reverse current soil erosion trends and destructive farm management practices before we begin to severely impact our ability to produce enough food to feed humanity.

The recent Federal budget, plus the elaboration in Quebec of a Sustainable Agricultural Plan — one objective of which includes the improvement of soil health through the use of cover-cropping or organic amendments, as well as measuring soil health through the percentage of organic matter in the soil — are indications that Government is getting it.

These steps can be built on through the development of more soil-health friendly policies and programs contemplated in the upcoming review of the Agricultural Framework.

We’re at the beginning of a movement and if we can give it a bit of a push, it’ll snowball as more and more farmers embrace the challenges — and the opportunities — to farm better, grow better food and as a consequence, help our planet.