On its website, the University of Saskatchewan’s soil science department quotes former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said in 1937 that a “nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
By the same token, it could be argued that a nation that fails to understand its soil also fails to understands its true productive potential.
That belief, according to U of S soil scientist Darwin Anderson, was what prompted Saskatchewan and other provinces to conduct extensive soil surveys beginning in the early 20th century.
Read Also
Going beyond “Resistant” on crop seed labels
Variety resistance is getting more specific on crop disease pathogens, but that information must be conveyed in a way that actually helps producers make rotation decisions.
“The purpose of the soil survey, in Saskatchewan and other provinces, was basically to make maps showing the distribution of different types of soils and to prepare reports that described the characteristics of soils in the countryside,” Anderson said.
“Initially, it was done for the fairly practical reason of being useful in agriculture.… There was a feeling that in order to properly apply the results of agricultural research, that a soil survey was necessary. It stands to reason that if you’re going to have programs that deal with soils and agriculture, then you should also know the characteristics of the soils you’re dealing with and where they are located.”
Provincial soil surveys began in Western Canada in the early 1920s, with Saskatchewan’s first survey conducted near Moose Jaw starting in 1921.
The work was part of a royal commission aimed at classifying the province’s soils and determining their suitability for growing grain and raising livestock.
The survey covered four rural municipalities and was directed by professor R. Hansen, head of the U of S soil science department.
The commission also called for the completion of a more complete survey of the province’s soils.
Although Canada’s earliest soil surveys were modest, the importance of more comprehensive surveys became widely recognized as time passed.
Soil survey work eventually expanded to include large areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Important early work was conducted in Manitoba by J.H. Ellis, in Saskatchewan by A.H. Joel and in Alberta by F.A. Wyatt.
The three scientists collaborated in the production of the first zonal map of the Canadian Prairies, which was presented in 1927 at the inaugural World Soil Congress in Washington, D.C.
Anderson said Ellis, Joel and Wyatt’s work had a substantial effect on Canadian soil science.
Ellis directed Manitoba’s soil survey for three decades until 1955. Work began in the province’s southwest, where soil drifting was a major concern in the 1930s.
By the 1950s, the survey had covered most of the agricultural land in southern Manitoba.
Soil survey work in Alberta progressed steadily throughout the 1920s but slowed in the early 1930s, largely for economic reasons.
Survey work started again in the mid-1930s, eventually covering most of southern and central Alberta.
Work later moved northward to focus on soils in the province’s northern and western regions as well as the Peace River region.
In Saskatchewan, extensive survey work was conducted across much of the southern grain belt under Joel’s direction in the 1920s and 1930s.
By the early 1950s, more than 68 million acres of land had been surveyed and mapped at a scale of eight inches to one mile.
Soil Survey Report No. 12, released in 1944, was a seminal publication that included almost all the agricultural land in province, Anderson said.
“It was and still is a great soil map,” he said.
“It’s small scale – eight inches per mile – so you can’t show much detail, but to give sort of a regional picture of the province’s soils, it really was an excellent map.”
Anderson, who spent more than 20 years doing soil survey work in Manitoba and Saskatchewan starting in the 1960s, said Canada’s golden era of soil survey work began in the 1940s.
In 1945, scientists from all major universities with a soil science program gathered in Ottawa along with representatives from the federal and provincial governments.
This was the first meeting of the National Soil Survey Committee, whose primary objective was to develop improved methods for conducting soil survey work, including the adoption of a national soil classification system that could be used from coast to coast.
Until the 1940s, much of the country’s soil survey work had taken place on a province-by-province basis, often using different survey techniques and classification systems.
The 1945 meeting provided the impetus for a new nation-wide survey using standardized classification systems.
Work on the expanded national survey began in earnest in the 1950s.
“A decision was made at that time that there was a need for more detailed information so a systematic … resurvey was started,” Anderson said.
“The four to five decades starting in the 1940s were the glory years for the soil survey in Canada with well-funded and productive programs in all provinces and territories.”
Work on the new survey, which called for relatively detailed maps, continued for decades.
However, progress was slow and government support for the project began to wane.
“By the 1980s, they realized that the survey was taking a very long time so for about a decade, we had something … called the accelerated program and that did, by about the end of the 1990s … result in most areas having a pretty good set of soil maps at a scale of about 1:100,000, or something like two miles per inch.”
Anderson said mapping Western Canada’s soils involved decades of work by hundreds of dedicated individuals.
For years, it was common to see teams of researchers trekking across the prairie with notebooks, shovels and picks.
In the 1920s and 1930s, soil scientists would set up temporary camps with canvas tents, cook stoves and washing facilities.
Later, teams of soil survey workers based their operations in local hotels, often staying for weeks at a time.
“In the early days, it was mainly professors that used to go out and map soils in their Model Ts,” Anderson said.
“At that time, they would almost always go to an area where there was serious erosion or soil fertility problems.”
Later, when funding was more plentiful and the survey was being conducted in greater detail over larger areas, soil scientists would team up with summer students and spend weeks on the road.
Research teams would be dispersed to different parts of a province, where they would map the land, take notes and collect soil samples.
Samples would be sent back to a centralized lab to be analyzed and classified.
Over the decades, soil survey workers in Saskatchewan traversed almost every square kilometre south of the 54th parallel.
They also surveyed soils in forest reserves and remote wilderness areas as far north as La Ronge.
In an excerpt describing the Saskatchewan Soil Survey, the Saskatchewan Eco Network said soil survey workers spent 80 years travelling millions of miles over “prairie trails and dusty trails in the south and cut lines through the forest in the north” to complete the arduous task of classifying the province’s soils.
Anderson said decades of work conducted in the far corners of the Canadian Prairies spawned many interesting stories.
“There was lots of folklore surrounding some of the characters that worked on the soil survey,” he said, describing tales of soil survey workers who were left stranded in rural Saskatchewan, arrested by local police or stalked by wolves in the province’s north.
“In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, we’d be out in the field most of the summer,” Anderson said.
“We’d basically spend the entire summer out on the road, from May to October, mapping township after township and sampling soil.”
Surveyors would sleep in tents and cook meals over a fire if local accommodations weren’t available.
Researchers would always try to alert farmers that they were conducting soil surveys in the area.
However, farmers and landowners were often surprised to find university scientists digging in summerfallow fields or carting tools out of a densely wooded area among clouds of mosquitoes.
“Most of them weren’t too concerned with us trespassing on their land,” Anderson said.
“Most farmers, if they did happen to come along when we were doing our work, were interested and most seemed to welcome us. Of course, the pretty standard question was, ‘what are you doing, digging for gold?’ ”
Soil survey work continues in Canada but funding is small.
Anderson said many of the soil maps that were produced during the latter half of the 20th century have never been published.
Soil survey employees are continuing work to make the information available to user groups through an on-line database. The field work also helped change how soil science is taught at Canadian universities.
At the U of S, funding cutbacks meant that fewer students were involved in soil survey work during the summer.
“In the later part of the soil survey, when we didn’t hire as many students to help out with the survey, faculty members in the soil science department really started to notice how valuable that experience was,” Anderson said.
“In fact, we’ve changed the way we offer soil science courses and now we have several … field courses that attempt to provide in a week or two the learning experience that students used to get over a summer or two when they were involved in the survey.
“I think the students really loved that opportunity. I’m sure most did, anyway.”
