Wheat is harvested in Cremona, Alta., in 2022. In 2021, a drought cut Prairie wheat production by 37 per cent in a single year.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Asim Biswas is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Digital Agriculture at the University of Guelph.
Canada has released its first National Food Security Strategy, and for a plan devoted to feeding the country, it has little to say about the ground in which that food is grown.
The strategy is needed, and overdue. Backed by more than $3-billion over 10 years, it sets out to loosen the grip of the five chains that control three-quarters of the grocery market, build food terminals and hubs, process more of what we grow at home, and expand year-round production under glass. The diagnosis is correct and the plan deserves credit for treating food as national resilience.
Yet one absence is striking: the word “soil” scarcely appears. There is a plan for the terminals, trucks, processing plants and greenhouses, and almost nothing for the thin layer of living topsoil that produces most of what Canadians eat. A food strategy built on everything but the soil is a house designed without a foundation.
The strategy is candid about where food dollars go. By its accounting, farmers receive about 11 cents of every dollar Canadians spend on food, processors 23 cents and retailers 16 cents. Ottawa reads those figures as a reason to invest downstream, and the logic is sound. But that 11 cents isn’t just a cost to be cut with cheaper fertilizer; it’s the soil’s productive capacity – which we can build up or let erode.
Food security expert urges Canada to invest in agriculture, not just military capabilities
The case for looking upstream is one the strategy itself makes. It cites the OECD’s estimate that climate change could reduce global corn yields by 16 per cent by mid-century and recalls the 2021 drought that cut Prairie wheat production by 37 per cent in a single year. Its main response is $750-million for greenhouses and vertical farms – worthwhile, but limited. Greenhouses excel at cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers; they do not produce the wheat, canola and pulses, the backbone of what Canada eats and exports. The most cost-effective insurance against the next drought is soil that holds more water and carbon, on the open acres where most of our calories are grown.
Fertilizer illustrates the point. The strategy notes that Canada imports roughly 35 per cent of its fertilizer, and that a quarter of the world’s traded nitrogen passes through one chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz. The instinct is to secure more supply. The complementary, often faster measure, is to reduce demand: A farmer working healthy soil can grow the same crop with less imported nitrogen. Lowering what we need is itself a form of sovereignty.
The strategy’s most valuable opportunity is one the government has already created elsewhere. In March, the same Agriculture Minister, Heath MacDonald, committed Canada to a National Agricultural Soil Health Strategy, developed with the Soil Conservation Council of Canada and reinforced by Senator Robert Black’s Bill S-230, the National Strategy for Soil Health Act. That bill, which has passed the Senate and now sits before the House of Commons, would recognize soil as a national asset essential to food security. Yet the food strategy barely references it. Two initiatives from the same department, aimed at the same goal, advance on separate tracks. The single most useful revision would bind them, so the food strategy rests on the soil strategy, not beside it.
Analysis: Why it’s time for Canada to consider a national fertilizer strategy
The clearest place to begin is data. The soil strategy already names improved data collection among its priorities. The food strategy’s organizing promise is “more choice, more control, more Canada,” yet control depends on measurement, and Canada estimates rather than measures how much carbon its farmland holds, whether that store is rising or falling, or which soils are most at risk.
We map our minerals and inventory our forests in detail, but we largely estimate the asset beneath the food system. A national soil-information system, modern digital soil mapping paired with credible measurement and verification, would turn “control” into something a farmer in Saskatchewan and a minister in Ottawa could act on.
None of this requires reopening the strategy. It requires connecting it to the soil work already under way, and funding soil health as the climate and productivity investment it is.
A country’s capacity to feed itself rests on a thin layer of topsoil we have long treated as free and permanent. It is neither. The terminals and the greenhouses are worth building. But a food-security strategy that omits the soil has overlooked the one thing on which all the rest depends.