Manitoba Hosting Summit On Canadian Soil Health

The 2019 Summit on Canadian Soil Health is being held this week in Manitoba.

 

Jim Tokarchuk is the executive director of the Soil Conservation Council of Canada.

 

"We're trying to expand our audience a little bit to people who may not be as directly connected to soil health and soil conservation as farmers are," he said. "We're trying to, in addition to sending out most recent science information on soil health and conservation, we're trying to involve more people in understanding why soil and healthy soil does lead a direct path to their well being."

 

Tokarchuk talked about how the Manitoba soils are holding up with all this rain.

 

"We're doing a pretty decent job in most places in Manitoba of managing soil. I see a lot of crop residue staying on the fields this year, which is good. We haven't seen a lot of tillage that we've seen in previous years and maybe that's just the weather. I think that for most of the Red River Valley area, southern Manitoba, our soil is in good enough shape that this isn't going to cause massive sheet erosion or any sort of damage like that."

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.