Food and Water First
Food Water FirstThe Dirt on the Year of the Soil
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- Published on Friday, 30 January 2015 14:55
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In a few months, Ontario’s rich agricultural soil will start feeding us once again. The fields and orchards will emerge from another winter, ready to produce a bounty of fresh local vegetables, grains and fruit.
The 2015 growing and harvest seasons will be especially significant because they will take place during the International Year of Soils. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has declared that over the next 12 months every country should be paying more attention to the soil that grows our food, filters our water, stores vast amounts of carbon and keeps us alive.
The Year of Soils is an opportunity for us to stop treating this vital resource like dirt. We can start here in Ontario, home to the best soil and climate conditions in Canada. This vast country is comprised of just 0.5 percent of Class 1 soil, the rarest in the world. Just over half of Canada’s Class 1 farmland is found in Ontario. Lucky us. Yet, we’ve destroyed nearly 20 percent of it.
We continue to pave it over for urban sprawl or mine it for aggregate, ignoring the fact that once this soil is gone, it’s gone forever.
Soils don’t have a voice and few people speak out for them.