Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. The council is very delighted to be able to take part in your study on soils because we are very interested in soils.
I am Alan Kruszel. I'm the chairman of this fine association called the Soil Conservation Council of Canada. I have a farm about an hour and half southeast of here, near Cornwall, Ontario, where we grow cash crops.
I'll say a little bit about the council. We are the only national soil care organization in Canada. We provide leadership, improve understanding, facilitate communications, encourage sound policy, and work collaboratively with anyone who wants to talk about soils. We are the face and voice of soil conservation in Canada.
We've done a couple of different things over the last number of years. I'll highlight them quickly for you.
We co-hosted the sixth World Congress on Conservation Agriculture back in 2014 in Winnipeg, where more than 400 attendees from more than 100 different countries all came together to talk about conservation agriculture and what we can do to improve things around the globe.
We hosted a conservation practitioners meeting with our friends from the CRSC, Susie's group. We talked with agriculture groups and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Ducks Unlimited to see if we could come up a shared vision for the ag landscape across Canada. We were very proud to be able to come out with a joint statement on that vision.
We've hosted national and regional soils summits. Our most recent one was held in Lloyd's riding back in August. We had more than 180 people come in to talk about the costs and consequences of soil degradation across Canada.
We have a really fun project going on called “soil your undies”. We'll talk a bit more about that later. It's actually a scientific test where you bury cotton underwear in the ground. You leave it for a few months, dig it back up, and see the results of the decomposition. If it is very decomposed, in general you can assume that there's some pretty healthy biological activity going on in your soils. It's lots of fun.
In French, it's called Salissez vos bobettes.