The dirt on soil health: The Weston Family Soil Health Initiative awards $10 million in funding to support the adoption of soil health improving practices on Canada’s farmlands

Feb 13, 2023

TORONTO, - Although soils host a quarter of all global biodiversity, management intensification and habitat loss are generating a loss of biodiversity on agricultural lands at an alarming rate. However, there is good news and it’s right under our feet. Research shows that improving soil health on agricultural lands offers one of the largest and most immediate opportunities to improve biodiversity and mitigate climate change in Canada. Today, to support this effort, the Weston Family Foundation, through the Weston Family Soil Health Initiative, is announcing $10 million in funding to help promote more adaptive and resilient agricultural lands.

Launched in the spring of 2022, The Weston Family Soil Health Initiative, seeks to expand the adoption of ecologically based beneficial management practices (BMPs) including cover cropping, nutrient management (4R principles) and crop diversification/rotation that increase soil organic matter to improve biodiversity and resiliency on agricultural lands across Canada. Healthy soil organic matter helps to improve water retention, supports carbon sequestration, and makes agro-ecosystems more resilient and better able to recover and adapt to environmental stresses such as drought and floods.

“It is clear, through the high-quality applications we received, that soil health is of growing importance in the agriculture sector and that there are scientifically proven yet underutilized approaches to increasing soil organic matter on Canada’s farmlands,” says Emma Adamo, Chair, Weston Family Foundation. “Our Foundation is committed to supporting landscape-level efforts to find solutions to our environmental challenges and, ultimately, improve the well-being of Canadians.”

The $10 million in funding over five years has been awarded to eight agricultural and conservation organizations working to promote soil health BMPs through incentivizing stewardship, supporting outreach and education, and supporting market-based approaches towards adoption. Awarded projects include an innovative reverse auction model for BMP adoption, field-tested hubs to evaluate cover crop management strategies, and a first-of-its-kind network of First Nations soil health Learning Circles that will co-develop land-based training workshops with First Nations land managers and the farmers that farm their land on BMPs that can improve soil health, including crop diversification, reduced inputs and landscape diversification. Details on the funded projects can be found at https://westonfoundation.ca/project/weston-family-soil-health-initiative/

Improving agricultural management practices, particularly those that are nature-based, are now globally recognized as one of the most effective solutions to improve resiliency and to reduce biodiversity loss. “Agricultural lands represent 154 million acres of the Canadian landscape and Canadians should be increasingly concerned by the rate at which our agricultural soils are deteriorating,” says Michael Bradstreet, Chair of the Weston Family Soil Health Initiative external advisory panel and former Senior Vice-president, Conservation at Nature Conservancy of Canada. “We have an opportunity to address the gap in Canada by helping to mobilize the sector to increase the adoption of soil health improving practices.”

Source : West Onfoundation

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”