Special Senate hearing kicked off new study on soil health in Canada.Ottawa—Higher crop prices and the trend to increased use of rented land is leading to abuse of the country's valuable farmland, warns long time soil health advocate Don Lobb.Lobb, a former farmer, was part of a panel testifying to the Senate agriculture committee, which is launching a study on soil health at the urging of Ontario Senator Rob Black.Back in 1984, the Senate released its Soil at Risk report, which Lobb said lead to good progress in supporting soil care and awareness. “Then funding and focus disappeared. Programs ended. Soil research lost favour. Technology transfer programs like the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in the West and Provincial Soil Extension in the East were diminished or withdrawn.”Rented farmland is “being treated as a commodity to be used and used up,” he said. “Too many in the agricultural community accept soil degradation as a cost of doing business.”He was joined on the panel by his son David Lobb, Professor of Landscape Ecology in Department of Soil Science at the University of Manitoba, David Burton of the Faculty of Agriculture at Dalhousie University, Gabrielle Ferguson of the Rural Ontario Institute, and Cedric MacLeod, Executive Director of the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association.Their messages about the state of soil health included a call to move responsibility for it from Agriculture Canada to the Natural Resources Department where it would receive proper attention.While the move to no-till farming is widely credited with improving soil health, Don Lobb said soil across the country is in trouble. “Most Eastern no-till cropping is done intermittently. This does not provide optimal carbon storage or demonstrate commitment to soil care and improvement. Misuse of the terms direct seeding and no-till adds further confusion to the story. Our soil care progress is overstated.“During the past decade, we have experienced a return to more tillage. Farm machinery companies have capitalized on recent high-crop returns with the flashy promotion of shallow high-speed tillage,” he said. “This results in accelerated carbon loss to the atmosphere and creates soil instability, which puts water quality at risk. Long-term benefits to soil productivity have not been shown.”David Lobb said in the 1980s soil loss through erosion was pegged at a half billion dollars a year, which gave soil health well-deserved attention.” However no assessment of the cost of soil degradation has been carried out since.“More aggressive measures to increase soil organic matter levels and restore productive capacity of eroded soils are needed, such as use of soil landscape restoration. Simply adopting less intensive tillage practices is only half the solution.”While more is known about soil erosion conservation, he said “This knowledge has yet to make its way into the development of soil management equipment and practices or government policies and programs.”The federal government needs “to regain its leadership role in collecting and coordinating soils data and related land resource information,” he said. That would include a national team of permanent staff in areas of soil survey terrain analysis, database management and GIS analysis. “This is a role that only federal government can play and it is one that it has been completely neglected.”Ferguson said urban sprawl consumed 220,000 hectares of dependable farm land between 2000 and 2011, most of its Class 1. That makes the management of the remaining farmland all the more crucial if agriculture is going to be sustainable.“For good decision-making, existing soil management information could be used more effectively if it was aggregated, analyzed and shared,” she said. “A targeted, prioritized the soil-management strategy for Canada can help to ensure sustainable soil practices occur across varied agricultural production systems in different geographies.”MacLeod said cultivated forages should be part of crop rotations and crop and livestock producers should explore ways of working together. More land is in forages than wheat, the biggest crop.Forage land can also provide environment benefits such as erosion prevention and carbon storage, he said. His association is trying “to develop policies and programs that can incentivize producers to keep grasslands on the landscape and keep that carbon locked up securely, for the benefit of all Canadians.”Alex Binkley is a freelance journalist and writes for domestic and international publications about agriculture, food and transportation issues. He's also the author of two science fiction novels with more in the works.