Agriculture Committee on Feb. 17th, 2011

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Who keeps that separation?

[Larry Black]

The certifying agency determines it.

[Arnold Taylor]

The organic farmer keeps it. We pay the costs. We should be the conventional farmer, because we were here first. Conventional agriculture, the chemical farmer, shall we say, has no responsibility other than to worry about the wind, because he could contaminate me, or spray me out, and I could sue him for damages.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

You implied, maybe not intentionally, that GE alfalfa is here in Canada.

[Arnold Taylor]

It's an approved event.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

No, it has not been approved for Canada. It's approved in the U.S. but not here. I have to tell you, I don't have a bias on this. I do not see the benefit of having Roundup Ready alfalfa. That's a personal opinion. I don't have a bias towards it, but I don't like misinformation, intentional or otherwise, because it creates fear mongering. I just want to point that out.

[Arnold Taylor]

I beg to differ with you a little bit. My understanding is that it's an approved event in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

No.

[Taylor]

But they don't have their variety trials done, so it hasn't been released in Canada. But if somebody brings Roundup Ready alfalfa from the U.S. and it catches in my field, there's no problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

If it blows across the border....

[Arnold Taylor]

Yes, but my understanding is—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I just wanted to be clear. They can apply, but as of today, it's not approved for sale or use in Canada.

Mr. Eyking.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's quite the conversation we're having here today. I think back when I was a young fellow driving a tractor with my dad. When we were putting fertilizer on, we used to love to spread the chemical fertilizer. It was easier. You spread 10 acres in an afternoon. Neighbours didn't complain. It was subsidized. In Nova Scotia, they subsidize fertilizer.

We had a mixed operation, so we left the manure in the yard, just buried it, mixed it up. But we've gone past that, where our yields were dropping. I took a course in sustainable agriculture from the University of California, Davis. Once we started storing the manure, it was an asset instead of a hindrance. We had to educate the public a bit about spreading manure. Instead of putting more fertilizer on areas where crops weren't growing, we put more manure on.

We're trying to talk about biotech, but GMOs keep coming up. My colleague used the term “sustainable agriculture”. Where are we going to go in the next 25 years, with 10 billion people on the planet? How are we going to coexist with...?

It seems there's a clash of ideals here between the GMO stuff and the organic farmers. What we as a committee would love to see is coexistence, but it doesn't seem to be happening. I was interested in your articles about the soil and how we can improve the it. You also mentioned the green revolution and how it brought all these Asian countries from feeding themselves to producing, and it brought their GDP up. But they're hooked on fertilizer and chemicals. They're in a precarious situation.

How can we move forward on feeding the planet, mixing technologies, and doing what's right for the good of humankind, so that our farmers can take advantage of it? I'm throwing that out; it's a bit of a challenge. How do we go there?

[Arnold Taylor]

Something dear to my heart.

They have in Regina, Saskatchewan, the Farm Progress Show, where they show off their 80-foot air seeders and all the new biotech equipment—all the great farming equipment—and they talk about this progress. There are farmers on the Prairies who grow 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 acres on one farm. When I grew up, in the 1950s, we raised eight children on a section of land--one section, four quarters--with about a 12-foot cultivator. This was in the 1950s, and we were using sprays and stuff like that. The rinks were full, the schools were full, and the communities were full. Now the communities are emptying. So is farm progress, progress? Is it progress for whom?

These same farmers, when they have a bad year, are up and down their highways with their hand out for the federal government to pay some money to bail them out. So it isn't working. We somehow have to find a way...we're talking about getting young farmers on the land. It's how we do agriculture. You have to zone farmland and keep it as farmland so that a young farmer doesn't have to compete with the industry to buy food. Once that land is under concrete--

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

I want you to focus on my questions, with all due respect. I want the other gentleman to answer some of it. I want to focus on my question, because my time will be limited.

[George Lazarovits]

Yesterday, I gave a lecture at the University of Guelph about my vision of the new green revolution. It's stolen from the Brazilian sugar cane industry. In 1971, a lady named Johanna Döbereiner was tasked with developing Brazil's independence from importing oil. She did something so revolutionary that we in Canada would fall down just hearing it. She selected Brazilian sugar canes, which were brought into Brazil in the 1500s, and selected the varieties for production, based on virtually no fertilizer being applied to the soil. She went to the poorest farmers, took their varieties and tested them.

Today, Brazil uses about 50 kilos of fertilizer per hectare, versus the U.S., which uses 350 kilos per hectare. This is because they selected all their varieties based on high-energy inputs. This difference, of course, translated over millions of acres...you can calculate the value; it's enormous. Because of that, Brazil produces bioenergy at 10 units of energy coming out for every unit going in. In our case, we're lucky to reach one, two, or three ratios. In some cases, some people say that we put in 10 units of energy to get one out. This is what we need to change.

Globally speaking, one of the ways that people have improved crop yields in horticulture crops.... There are now 1.5 billion grafted tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, just to take advantage of these better root structures in these systems so you don't have to apply these really toxic fumigants to kill organisms in soil. Who would have thought that...? You know, we always had grafted trees and grafted roses and things like that, perennial plants, but never annual plants. The root systems are going to become a major component of the future productivity in agriculture and the reduction of inputs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

If I could just continue on that, George, you made the comment comparing Brazilian inputs on the sugar cane, and I found that interesting. I forget the exact number, but it was quite significant.

How do the yields in the U.S., with their much higher inputs, compare to Brazil? Could you comment on that?

[George Lazarovits]

As far as I know, the yields are more than sufficient to support the growers. If the yields are less, and the input costs are insignificant, the farmers still make more money. They have enough acreage in Brazil, I guarantee you that, to find as much as they need.

Let me just add one thing. The reason they can get away with 50 kilos of fertilizer.... It has been discovered that five bacteria live inside the sugar cane, and these bacteria are now known to be involved in producing nitrogen, releasing phosphorous, and all those beneficial impacts that this plant needs to survive in nature.

My son one day asked me, when we were walking in a meadow, “Hey dad, who fertilizes these plants?”--they were about six feet tall--and I said, “Nobody.” He says, “Well how come they grow so big?” So to some extent we have to go back to ecology and see what supports plants out there, because we've gone away from it in a long way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Storseth, you have the last five minutes.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My first question is for A&L Canada Laboratories. I want to thank you for coming today.

You talked about higher yields and less input costs, potentially. One of the big problems we have on the Prairies is water, and it's a growing problem. Do you think you'll be able to find—or is it possible that one of the benefits is going to be—a more robust seed or plant so that it doesn't require as much water?

[George Lazarovits]

The people who developed the grafted plants were the Israelis. They developed them because they don't have water. They graft watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and all of these plants.

Grafted plants cost about four times more than a non-grafted plant, so it's very substantial as far as that goes. We'll get that down, but in any event, one of the things they discovered is that these roots can go down to a metre deep, whereas the conventional roots only go down six inches. So you've got a lot more area that you can tap into, and they do find that it's much more resistant to drought.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Excellent. That would be very beneficial to our farmers.

Mr. Taylor, I want to thank you for coming, and I want to thank everybody for coming.

My family farms as well. I've got to tell you that I just got off the phone with one of my producers, and they very much disagree with your opinion on the increased yield with canola. They feel that the GM products they use have substantially increased the yield they have, which increases the amount of revenue they have on their farm.

I guess that's not my biggest concern. I have to say that I really disagree with your comments about farmers walking down the road with their hands out. I've got to tell you that my farmers don't do that. My farmers go and take a second job, then a third job, and then their wife goes out and works. These aren't guys who can control the fact that we've had droughts; these aren't guys who can control the fact that we've had floods. At the end of the day, I don't think organic is going to be the answer to mother nature's creating these problems, because my organic farmers, when we are in a five-year drought, have the same problems, if not more problems, than my guys who are using GM.

You talk often here about it coming down to the consumers and consumers need to have the knowledge. I agree with that. I also agree, though, that producers need to have choice.

I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about consumer knowledge.

I've heard that an organic farmer doesn't necessarily have to use organic seed. Is it true that he just has to have tried, so many times, to obtain organic seed?

[Arnold Taylor]

Yes. Under most standards, it's got to be readily available within a reasonable distance, and you've got to make an honest effort to try to buy organic seed, because part of our principle is to use our own seed, to use as many inputs from the farm, such as manure, seed—

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

But the answer is that you don't necessarily have to?

[Arnold Taylor]

The answer is yes, you're right.