Ottawa (Rural Roots Canada) – The Canadian Senate has released its much-awaited Critical Ground report looking at the state of soil health in Canada.

The last major soil report was released in 1984, and the Senate felt it was essential to look at what may have changed.

Paula Simons, an independent senator representing Alberta, says much has changed in the last 40 years, including the new understanding of how important healthy soil is to climate change mitigation and carbon sequestration.

She says it was really important that this report examined the role of soil in helping to moderate rising heat levels on this planet in depth.

This report also included a chapter on soil pollution, which was not included in the 1984 report.

“Understanding not just the threat of hydrocarbons, but new kinds of pollutants that people weren’t thinking about in the 1980s, like microplastics and antibiotics,” says Simons.

Simons says they visited farms across the country as part of the study. Those visits gave the committee plenty of insight for their report.

“One of the places we visited on our trip was a mixed farm near Guelph, where they are raising pigs; they are using the pig manure to fertilize the fields, which grow the feed that they feed the pigs the leftover manure went into a biofuel system that heated the barns everything was a perfect circular system,” says Simons.

One of the most troubling discoveries to Simons was that we have been relying on data that is 40 years old, pointing to the reduction of soil mapping and soil analysis across the country.

“Over the last few decades, provinces have really pulled back in the amount of soil research they’re doing. In a lot of cases, we just don’t have up-to-date data. In some ways, our report is as much as anything a call out to say that’s not good enough.”

The report, the brainchild of Senate Agriculture Chair Rob Black, heard much testimony during the process.

“One of the most powerful pieces of evidence that we heard was from a scientist at the University of Ottawa who specializes in permafrost, talking about the catastrophic consequences to the planet if permafrost starts to melt at scale because the permafrost is a natural carbon sink, and it’s sequestering carbon that it has held frozen for tens of thousands of years.”

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Simons, who spoke about the report at the Western Canada Conference on Soil Health and Grazing in December, says attending the conference two years ago transformed her understanding of soil health.

“I came here not knowing much about soil health and, frankly, probably not caring very much about soil health. The people that I met at this conference two years ago didn’t just change my attitude towards this Senate study. They changed my attitude towards how we tend the planet we share.”

To read the full report, click here.