Thanks so much, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation. I'm really glad to be witnessing with some esteemed colleagues here today and I'm looking forward to a good discussion around this topic.
I'll start with some context. Around the Canadian forage sector, we're just about 70 million acres coast to coast, so it is the largest land use type in Canadian agriculture. It's important to note that and it impacts a lot of the other witnesses on the panel this afternoon.
There's a challenge though that we see before us, and I''ll give you a few numbers pulled from the census data here. Back in 2011, we had roughly just over 36 million acres of what we call native rangeland, which have been around for some thousands of years. And when we moved to five years later, 2016, we were looking at just over 35 million acres. It's about a loss of a million acres of native rangeland. I'll discuss a little bit later why that's so important.
Similar to the tame forage sector between 2011 and 2016, we saw just under a loss of four million acres of forages across Canada. That trend unfortunately has continued. So if we look into the latest census data, you're going to see that continued decline in the number of forage acres across the country. To compare to other annual type crops in the country, with the forage sector generally, the crops produced are fed here in Canada. It is part of the cyclical economy, so we're moving our nutrients back and through our livestock systems and back out onto the landscapes. It creates a resilient system that needs to be protected.
The forage sector in Canada [Technical difficulty—Editor] thousands of tonnes of dry hay products around the world into countries like the United States, Korea, Japan, China and numerous destinations throughout the Middle East, so it's an important contributor there to economic development or the total GDP of the country.
As we move into the environmental impacts, I'm going to reference a document and I will share this document as evidence for the committee. In 2012, we had a study commissioned that looked at the total economic value of the Canadian forage sector and also its environmental contribution. I'll mention a few numbers to note out of that report. These are coming out of Alberta and Saskatchewan respectively.
The total ecological goods and services value of the forage sector in Alberta was estimated from just under $400 million to somewhere in the $1.3 billion range. And, yes, that is a big range because markets fluctuate and the study is due for a refresh.
In Saskatchewan, there was the same value, about $890 million to $1.9 billion, so significant contributions from [Inaudible—Editor].
What are those contributions? We've got carbon sequestration. We know those 36 million acres of native rangeland out west contained billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalence that needed to be protected. And as we're seeing the conversion of those native rangelands into annual croplands, we are losing that carbon. So that's an important consideration that needs to be protected and we need to stem that reduction.
Also, there's the provision of biodiversity and habitat features. One of the richest habitat features in Canadian agriculture with respect to species at risk and species in general is Canadian grasslands. As we lose those grassland acres, so too we lose those habitats, and that creates additional pressure on our species at risk.
There is also water quality. Water that moves across that is not absorbed within agricultural soils typically finds itself into a forage of some sort. So we are offering significant water quality protection and those barriers are a natural filtration to our water systems, rivers and riparian zones as well as wetlands.
I'm going to close out here. In the larger conversation these days on soil health, forages, both annuals and perennials, are driving a lot of those contributions, so when it comes to climate resilience, the forage sector is the foundation for supporting that soil health.