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Keeping Soil Conservation on our Radar Screen | |
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| | From AESA Council’s Chair
By Larry Kitz
Northern Regional Committee
As the Alberta Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture (AESA) Program enters into its 10th year, we can look back on the successes the program has enjoyed so far. Beneficial management practices (BMPs) are being adopted across Alberta, and some practices that were rare at one time, like swath grazing and direct seeding, have become so commonplace that we forget how difficult producer acceptance once was. My congratulations go out to AESA Council and Regional Committees, municipalities and producer organizations and their rural extension staff, the many other partners in the AESA Program and AESA/Alberta Agriculture and Food staff for their efforts over the past decade. We all share a Premier’s Award of Excellence and an Alberta Emerald Award for Environmental Excellence acknowledging our accomplishments. Soil conservation remains near and dear to many of us involved in AESA because it was one of the first issues carried over from the previous initiative, the Canada-Alberta Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture (CAESA) program, to the AESA Program in 1997. It was also one of the first issues to have key BMPs, like direct seeding, with measurable rates of adoption in our producer surveys.
Efforts in soil conservation extension have their roots over 25 years ago when researchers identified a gap in soil quality between the virgin soils our first settlers farmed and agricultural soils in the 1980s. Since then, thanks to advances in technology and programs like CAESA, AESA and Reduced Tillage LINKAGES, that gap has narrowed. Many Alberta producers have adopted BMPs like direct seeding, forage rotation and continuous cropping, and have seen their soil’s health improving. Organic matter, tilth, nutrient availability and moisture retention are all on the increase, far sooner than researchers expected.
Although we have made important strides forward on soil conservation, a new threat is developing…. the marketplace. The recent rise in grain prices and the reduction in cattle production could shift perennial forage acres on highly erodible soils to grain and oilseed production, possibly for biofuels. These unintended consequences of the biofuel strategy are real, and producers should be careful in managing erosion-prone soils should there be a shift to more annual crop production. The AESA-sponsored rural extension staff are a wealth of information on conservation issues and are available to consult with producers as to the sustainable management of these soils.
This Green Matters issue addresses some recent topics in soil conservation including training of rural extension staff in soil salinity control and investigating the links between agricultural practices and soil organism communities. It reminds us that, even though we may sometimes take soil conservation for granted, we must keep it on our radar screen so as to protect this most precious resource. |
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For more information about the content of this document, contact Roger Bryan.
This document is maintained by Deb Sutton.
This information published to the web on March 23, 2007.
Last Reviewed/Revised on March 16, 2009.
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