Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, this is something that I have a great privilege to speak about. It is deeply close to me and deeply personal to me. I grew up on a farm. I live on a farm. I have had the pleasure of working for 30 years on five different continents, promoting soil health and consulting on soil health and animal genetics. They say that all life on earth comes down to the top six inches of soil we have. This is true. This is something we should not take for granted. We have seen, through the very poor farming practices we had early on in Canada, that it is very easy to degrade the soil, but it is also possible to regrow the soil, to improve it. There are many things we are doing now that are of great use. I come from Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan is famous for having eight feet of topsoil. We always hear stories about when the settlers came and dug the basements for their houses. They never hit anything but black dirt. That is no longer the case. A lot of that soil was lost in the 1930s or 1920s, when we had a lot of erosion during dry years. Due to plowing and basically the powderization of the soil, we lost a lot of good topsoil. However, there has also been a lot of great innovation. Think about the topsoils that we had. They were developed over millennia, in partnership with the bison that would come in. Sometimes they would graze heavily and take everything off. They said when the bison left, there was just black dirt; there was no grass left. Sometimes those bison did not come back for two or three years, which gave ample time for the soil to rest and the microbes to regrow. It was like pages in a book. We had soil that would grow grass. The bison would come. They would trample the grass, eat some and leave their dung and urine behind, which would increase the organic matter in the soil. That was like another page. They would do that over and over again. That is how we developed the rich black soils we have today. That is the same thing that has happened all over the globe. When we look at seasonal grasslands, there are about three billion hectares in the world. We can think of the Prairies, the Eurasian steppe, the savannahs in Africa and the pampas in South America. They all developed exactly the same way. Large groups of herbivores would come in, take about half of what there was, trample the other half and leave their fertilizer behind. That would grow incredible soils. With the advent of modern agriculture, we decided that we would manage agriculture. We would have cattle in a small fence and would just let them eat whatever they wanted. Animals are lazy. Cows especially are very lazy. They eat what they like, and they leave what they do not like. By having cattle go back constantly to the same plants they like, they weaken the root systems, which gives an advantage to the grasses they do not like and they soon take over. The cattle do not like those grasses, so they leave them. When they leave them, the plants die. They do not get trampled or eaten, and they are not in contact with the soil, which helps them break down. What happens when the grasses are left standing is that they have to break down by oxidation. That can take years sometimes. When we see two- or three-year-old grass plants in a park, for example, that are silver, that is the oxidation I am talking about. They need soil contact to break down. We used to do that in agriculture by locking cattle in, say, a 160-acre parcel of land in Saskatchewan. That was typical. We would put them there in the spring, leave them there for the whole year and bring them off in the fall. The animals would eat what they liked and leave what they did not like. That caused a problem in the grasslands. We would see a big space between the plants. However, we changed that. Canada is a world leader in something called regenerative agriculture, especially when it comes to livestock agriculture. What we have done is used cattle as a proxy for the great bison herds. We do what is called rotational grazing or cell grazing, where we lock animals in a very small, specific area so they have to eat everything there, or at least eat every plant there, hopefully leaving half of them or a little bit more and trampling the rest. Then we move them to other parcels. If we do this management correctly, the grass that was grazed will not get regrazed at all until, perhaps, 60 or, even better, 90 days after that. This has made huge differences in our soil’s capacity to hold water. We are seeing it on my own farm. We used to have small potholes that would fill up in the spring and then the water would go away by June and nothing would really grow there for the rest of the year, and now those potholes do not develop at all because all that water can filtrate into the soil. We are seeing a much healthier water table that way. Also, it keeps the temperature of the soil much cooler. This is something that was pioneered in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and it has been exported all over the world. I have had the great opportunity to do a lot of this work, particularly in Central Asia. When we look at the great Eurasian steppe of Kazakhstan, Siberia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, that whole area, and Mongolia, there is so much potential because they have had years and years of nomadic herders who built the beautiful soils they have now. However, because of the Soviet system they had to endure with Soviet farms, the Communist farms they had, the management was so poor that they have desertification on a scale that people just cannot imagine. By using some of these great principles we have developed in Canada, such as rotational grazing, the proper management of moving these animals in the right place, and most importantly, allowing for adequate rest of the grasslands after they have been grazed, they are seeing huge responses. The spacing between plants is getting better. The soil temperature is going down. The organic matter is coming up. Water filtration is improving. Water filtration is something that is so important, especially in the seasonal grasslands, which are known for not having that much rainfall. It is typical in the regenerative agriculture world for someone to say, “How much rain did you get?” On our farm, we say, “all of it,” because we do not have runoff. All of it goes into the soil. All of it is there to keep the soil temperature down in order to grow our plants. Allan Savory, who is the founder of the Savory Institute, claims that if we were to take half of the world’s seasonal grasslands and we were to use proper management, if we were to use rotational grazing as a proxy for these wild herds of herbivores that used to roam, we could bring the carbon levels in the atmosphere down to pre-industrial levels. That is the power of soil health and proper soil management. This is not a pipe dream. This is something we can do. The health of the soils is extremely important. It is a fact that there is about 2.5 tonnes of carbon in every hectare of grasslands right now. Third party studies in Saskatchewan have already shown that a lot of people are sequestering up to six tonnes of carbon per year in their grassland. By managing it properly, by doing what we do here and exporting that to the world, we can make a huge difference. This is something that I think is so important. However, I am a little confused by the Liberals promoting this bill so much. I appreciate that they are, but I do not know why they would do something like close the research centres we have in Canada that have promoted, developed and pioneered some of this technology. I think of the Indian Head research centre, which is right next to me in my riding. A farmer named Jim Halford partnered with Guy Lafond at the research centre, and they were the original pioneers of zero-till technology. That has been exported all over the world, and now we are seeing about 270 million hectares of grain land in the world that is now under zero-till. This was developed, and I am going to take the credit that it was in Saskatchewan, at Indian Head, and was all pioneered at the Indian Head research centre. It costs about $3 million to keep the Indian Head research centre open, yet the government decided it was not worth it. It decided that scientific innovation and agriculture was not worth it, yet it gave $8.2 million to study gender-neutral rice in Vietnam. I appreciate this bill, but I also want the Liberals to understand that scientific research in Canada is very important, and the world is relying on us for it.
