Eight soil health projects across Canada will be getting a multi-million-dollar boost in private funding over the next five years.
The Weston Family Foundation — the philanthropic arm of the Weston business empire — has slated $10 million for those eight projects through the organization’s soil health initiative, it was announced Feb. 13.
The initiative is tagged under the foundation’s “environmental stewardship” stream — a category mandated towards biodiversity improvement, research and sustainable agriculture. Other projects in the stream have funded ecological renewal around the Great Lakes and promoted grasslands.
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The new soil health initiative was launched in spring 2022. Successful projects would help spread practices like cover cropping, 4R nutrient management or diverse crop rotations to increase soil organic matter, according to the foundation’s website.
In total, 38 organizations made a bid for the funding, said Eliza Mitchell, chair of the foundation’s conservation committee. Of those, 16 were invited to make a full proposal, with the final lineup decided by a review panel.
“Several [reviewers] were active farmers, but they all had experience in soil health management, some were involved in conservation…and they were all in fair agreement of the outstanding eight,” Mitchell said.
Those standouts “had a really clear focus and a really clear way forward,” she said. “The projects that showed a defined and clear approach on how they would successfully help shift producers towards greater adoption were given more weight.”
The list of chosen projects includes digital soil mapping tools for better nitrogen management, a farmer-led peer network, a reverse auction model to incentivize small grain and cover crop acres, research into cover crop best practices, benchmarking soil in Ontario’s Greenbelt, soil health outreach, a registry to help underpin markets for ecosystem service credits and Indigenous-led education for managing First Nations farmland.
The project list spreads funds widely nationwide, although Mitchell said that was more happy accident than part of the selection criteria. First project assessments were largely blind in terms of location, she noted.
The final list also spans both industry and academic perspectives, she said, pointing to the split of producer groups and universities singled out for funding. Half of the awardees are post-secondary institutions.
“There’s a lot of complexity in soil health and in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil, so there’s lots of ways of going at it. But we wanted to find projects that would help promote beneficial management practices, not just to the individuals involved, but hopefully communicate it out into the wider farming community,” Mitchell said.
— Alexis Stockford reports for the Manitoba Co-operator from Brandon.
