Every fall, Jocelyn Velestuk grabs a shovel, goes out to the same field on her farm and digs up a sample from the top four inches of land.

“I like to feel the texture, see how it breaks apart in my hands. I just like to feel it myself,” Velestuk says. She farms with her husband, Jesse, and his parents on just over 50 quarters of land — more than 3,000 hectares or about 7,500 acres — in southeastern Saskatchewan, a scenic mixture of grain crops, pasture land, wetlands, rolling hills and natural habitat.

That rich four inches of dirt represents the “topsoil” and farmers, like Velestuk, have long had a deep connection with it. But today, more so than any generation before, farmers have data about their soils — seemingly endless supplies of it — made possible by modern technology.

Digital sensors measure soil quality. GPS systems guide tractors in fields. Drones can check the cows and sensors can monitor the fences. Artificial intelligence-powered weather forecasting has replaced The Farmers Almanac. High-tech options are increasingly present on the modern farm and advocates say they enable a level of precision not imaginable even 30 years ago. 

But Velestuk still likes to take her shovel to the soil. “Most of the magic happens in that top layer,” Velestuk says of topsoil and why she still likes to touch it with her own hands, despite the plethora of technologies available to check it for her. 

Indeed, that layer is home to microbes, concentrated soil organic carbon, and it’s where nutrient cycling happens — the exchange of nutrients from the soil to plants and living organisms and back again. It’s so busy in the topsoil, Velestuk likens its activity to Pacman, except instead of gobbling up power cookies, it’s nitrogen and carbon. 

That’s an analogy that was put in her head by one of her professors at the University of Saskatchewan in her first year of an undergraduate degree in agriculture — one that sparked something deep within Velestuk. 

“I was absolutely drawn in. It was just so cool. Since then, I haven’t been able to learn enough,” she says. 

She went on to finish a master’s degree in soil science and worked as an environmental consultant and agronomist before moving into a full-time farming and soil advocacy role.

It’s a good time to be advocating for soils. It has become clear in recent decades they have been underestimated and actually play an outsized role in storing carbon — and therefore mitigating climate change. Newer technology is also generating data about soil health that could allow for reductions in the amount of fertilizer used on crops, an important step as the federal government is developing a plan to reduce these emissions by 30 per cent in the next decade. 

In June, the federal government published a soil health study, recommending the development of a national strategy. This came a year after an industry-led national soil health strategy project, which aims to conserve soils within Canada’s 154 million acres of farmland, in conjunction with national climate change goals. 

But despite the optimism of these efforts, a few practical questions remain: namely, what impact, if any, will they have? How will this impact be measured? 

Increasingly, farmers like Velestuk are turning to technology such as sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to answer these questions. Soil monitoring systems and weather stations allow farmers to gather and analyze real-time, in-depth information about their soil nutrition, quality, moisture levels and more. Soil mapping technologies allow farmers to understand how the makeup of their soil varies throughout their farms. Velestuk believes tools like soil maps, which allow farmers to really understand the needs of their land, are the key to overall farm success. In a previous role as an agronomist (an advisor who helps farmers improve their efficiencies, sustainability and profitability), she helped clients adopt this technology on their farms. 

Mapping allows farmers to identify potential soil issues — such as compaction or salinity. Once farmers can identify the problem, they can adapt their management of it using precision agriculture tools such as variable-rate fertilizer applications — essentially, applying different types or amounts of fertilizer based on the needs of the soil in different parts of the field rather than just a blanket application. 

“Farms are getting bigger and with that, they’ll hire an agronomist and get more into the management of soil fertility,” Velestuk says, referring to the soil’s ability to grow healthy, high-yielding crops. “When it comes to farming, soil fertility is first and foremost in our minds, because that is how we get a healthy crop.”

In Saskatchewan, home to 40 per cent of Canada’s farmland, a growing community of soil-obsessed farmers like Velestuk and other industry members are invested in working toward these goals using increasingly high-tech solutions, which they argue are also in line with boosting farm productivity, efficiency and sustainability. 

On-farm weather stations: a deeper understanding of soil — and fun, to boot

Ten years ago, Jake Leguee thought buying a farm-specific weather station, with prices between a couple hundred dollars and upwards of $5,000, seemed like “a really good way to waste a bunch of money.”

But he did it anyway — and soon changed his mind. 

“I learned more about our soils in the first year of having that station than I have before, or since really,” Leguee says. He’s a partner in a 16,000-acre, third-generation family farm in Filmore, Sask., about an hour’s drive southeast of Regina. 

A tool of what’s known as precision agriculture — essentially, using data to be as efficient as possible with every product applied to a seed or crop — agricultural weather stations are designed to provide farmers with in-depth information about on-farm weather conditions like wind speed and direction, moisture, rainfall and humidity levels. This allows farmers to make informed decisions around what inputs — a term used for fertilizers, pesticides, water and more — to apply to their crops and when. 

For Leguee, who doesn’t have an irrigation system on his farm, a top input on his mind each year is water — and that’s where his weather station data has proven most valuable, showing him just how much moisture his soils will hold, and how deep their roots actually go. 

Data from one of his now-six weather stations, situated in a lentil field, suggested his lentil crops don’t draw water from deeper than 50 centimetres, while other crops will draw from 70 to 100 centimetres or more. 

“Now I know why it seems there’s always a little bit of extra moisture after a lentil year, because that water is still there. It’s just down a little bit deeper,” he says 

Weather stations are just one of a suite of new technologies that are facilitating a deeper understanding of soils for farmers. Leguee attributes his “early adopter” attitude in part to his dad, who is still active in the farm business and has always been “curious” about new practices and technologies. 

“This stuff is fun for me,” Leguee says, adding it’s also good business, as most farmers strive to use the minimum amount of inputs required for maximum efficiency. 

“I don’t want to put more stuff out there to enhance crop yield if I’m not going to get a return on that investment.” 

At the same time, there are a growing number of biological products on the market that use natural ingredients like bacteria and plant hormones to protect and nurture plant health. These aim to increase the efficiency of fertilizers in the soil, enhance nutrients and improve overall plant quality and yield while moving away from more conventional agro-chemical products, like synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. That includes glyphosate, the active ingredient in some of the most widely used herbicides around the world, including Roundup. 

Mike Palmier, an agronomist based in west-central Saskatchewan, believes biological products, combined with the right technology, could completely revolutionize farmers’ relationships with soil. 

“I honestly think we’re still at the starting stages of the revolution of soil health,” he says. 

Palmier leads a team of 15 agronomists gearing up to meet growing demand for technology to monitor soil health. They have a fleet of half-ton trucks with hydraulic probes, used to carefully extract samples from topsoil. Samples are then sent off for testing to better understand their biological composition. 

Palmier says there are only a minority of farmers and agronomists in the province exploring the potential of biological products at this level, but he believes that will change. He also believes this could represent a major shift for an industry that has been heavily reliant on chemical-based crop protection products for the last 50 years. 

“We’re still at the very beginning stages of understanding what’s possible with the biologicals.” 

Canadian farmers are already innovators — but there’s still room for improvement

There’s a lot of excitement around the potential for high-tech farming to drive environmental improvements in the global agriculture sector, with some estimates suggesting a potential 13-billion-tonne decrease in the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

There have already been significant improvements in Saskatchewan soils in the last 30 years, largely due to the move to no-till soil management, which rejects the idea that soil must be churned up after one crop has been harvested to make way for the next season. Because it minimizes disruptions, no-till farming improves carbon storage and biodiversity.

Recent research has shown Canadian farmers already have some of the most sustainable farming practices in the world. Canadian farmers already tend to be more innovative than their global peers, but there are still barriers to farmers adopting new technologies — most prominently cost and lack of knowledge. 

Indeed, there remain challenges to increasing sustainability.

There’s also the consideration that nearly 40 per cent of Canada’s farmland these days is rented, versus owned (and that number is increasing). That means those farming this land are likely less concerned with long-term soil-health initiatives — as opposed to on a family farm, like Leguee’s, where the mission is literally to leave the land in better shape for the next generation. 

Currently, only about 65 per cent of Canadian farmers report they are following best practices for optimizing their fertilizer use.

Jeff Schoenau, a professor of soil fertility at the University of Saskatchewan and an expert in the area of climate-smart farming solutions, believes that optimizing the use of these products is a critical goal for the industry. In his mind, this means: “really making sure that that nitrogen gets into the plant, where it’s needed, rather than hanging around in the soil or going through some type of transformation where it ends up being lost into the air, as a greenhouse gas or lost to water as a contaminant.”

And technology has a big role to play in that.

Schoenau believes any initiatives in soil health need to recognize the concept itself is complex. Having taught the subject for 35 years now, Schoenau defines healthy soil as having the ability to sustain and promote growth of organisms not only within the soil — but also those above it: plants, animals and humans. 

“It’s fulfilling the important role of acting as a reservoir for water, for nutrients — and also acting as an environmental filter for contaminants. I mean, I could go on and on.”

‘We’ve completely revolutionized the way we farm’

One thing that Schoenau believes firmly is soil health is a matter of public interest. In light of this, he is happy to see it becoming a more mainstream topic. 

“A couple years ago, people said ‘it’s just dirt.’ ”

For this reason, he believes, if nothing else, the public awareness component of ongoing national soil health initiatives will be valuable.

“Any effort to bring it to the forefront is really important. It brings awareness,” he says, adding he hopes it will also generate awareness of the link between healthy soil and healthy animals, plants and humans.

“What you find in food, in a lot of cases, you can trace back to what’s going on in the soil.”

For Velestuk, any attention given to soil health — by government, the public or the agriculture industry — is a win. But she also believes the key to driving change will be orchestrating a cohesive, long-term approach. 

“We can’t say, ‘We have to create a whole new way of looking at soil,’ ” she says. “We need to build on what we have already.”

Velestuk points to the progress made with advancements in recent years. “We have come such a long way with mapping, learning about soil organic matter and soil fertility and adapting our different practices and how we look at soil as our cropping systems have evolved,” she says. “Soil health, to me, is bringing it all together.”

“The Prairies have a really cool story. We’ve completely revolutionized the way we farm. And it is amazing.”

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