Soils are the safeguard of the western Canada economy.  Every time you pass by an inland terminal, you should see the soil scientists who make sure that there is enough water and fertilizer to grow the wheat, canola, flax and lentils that fill those terminals.  As you eat you steak, chicken or pork tonight you should see the soil scientists who make sure that manure doesn’t get into our food or water.  As you drive home tonight, soil scientists will have made sure that the Canadian oil sands have a safe place to store their excess sulfur and that these oil sand operators can rebuild the forest are demolished to get to the oil sands.  Your house will have been built out of trees that soil scientists made sure could grow. Your home tonight will be heated thanks to soil scientists who figure out how to clean up soil that has been polluted by pipeline spills or test wells.  And finally, as you put your kids to bed tonight, you should know that soil scientists are working feverishly to prevent our world from reach the tipping point of climate change which would see the prairies dry to a dustbowl and the Lake of the Woods become a pond.

Soil scientists secure the foundation of our western Canadian economic juggernaut; we help renewable resource companies renew their resource, reduce environmental impact of our non-renewable resource companies and uncover key starting blocks for technology companies.  To do this, soil scientists go to the field and dig a hole.

In fact, you could say that our western economy is based on soil holes.  A soil scientist might dig over a thousand holes in one year.  At each hole, he or she will take some soil, throw it on the back of a truck, or a helicopter, or an ice breaker, or even a simple back pack.  Soil scientists have been doing this for a hundred years or more and the hard part has always been… what to do with the soil/plant/insect when you get back to the lab.

These days we have fancy machines in our labs that can tell us just about anything you want to know about the soil.  For example, some machines take 1 millionth of a liter of soil water, pressurize it to 4000 pounds per square inch, run it through a nano-engineered piece of tubing and then subject it to laser bombardment.  From this, I can tell you if your well water is going to be poisoned.

So the machines are useful but they are also… delicate.  So delicate, that we don’t like to bring our mud, boots and shovels into the same room as the fancy machine.  That is why we need a field building.  This is the building that from which we launch our Antarctic and Arctic expeditions, it’s also the same building we organize things to take to Tisdale for the week.  It is to this very building that we will bring our samples, dry them out, organize and store them, and clean ourselves up in.  Until our samples have been processed, our fancy machines can’t be used and we can’t tell you how much fertilizer needs to be applied this year.

Soil scientists are there when the rubber hits the road in Western Canada.  We are the field scientists who make sure that the western economy keeps on rolling. We need a bridge, a bridge between our university ivory tower and the real world.  The new field facility is that bridge. If you help build it, I promise you, we will be there.  For you. Your neighbour. Your kids.  Soil science secures the future.