Agriculture Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2011

[Dr. Bruce Roberts]

Food safety at this point is most important. For another presentation I gathered some information, and almost half of the projects we've funded since CPRC started have some sort of food safety component. It goes to the credibility of our food system and our production system. There's not a livestock-based organization in this country that isn't vitally aware of that and working hard on it.

Somewhat associated with that is reduction in the use of medications. That goes along with food safety, but there are also major potential cost savings to farmers. Those things are not inexpensive. Poultry welfare is also a big one.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Do I have any time left?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Frank Valeriote]

Your time is up.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Can he give a short answer?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Frank Valeriote]

Sorry, go ahead.

[Jacob Middelkamp]

We are working hard on research into antimicrobial resistance for human health.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Frank Valeriote]

Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and everyone.

That was an interesting presentation, Mr. Lintott, in the sense that those who are farmers will think about forage all the time, but those of us who are not won't necessarily. One takes it back to the elementary principle of city slickers driving down the road seeing a farm animal actually grazing, and nobody thinking about what they're actually doing besides just sort of wandering around, nibbling when they feel like it. They don't understand that if I have a better nutrient level coming out of the ground, my cost of production, the quality and health of the animal itself, and ultimately the safety of the food might be enhanced.

It's a rather simplistic message from someone who doesn't farm, but nonetheless we quite often seem to get lost in science and innovation when we start thinking about gene splicing and recombinant RNA.

If I'm hearing you correctly, Mr. Lintott, you're saying there isn't a private sector operator out there who really sees value in doing it. In other words, there's no direct means to enhance their bottom line. It's something we need to take on as policy makers. Am I hearing that correctly?

[Jim Lintott]

Yes, that's exactly what's happened. In fact, we had a researcher from Barenbrug out of Holland. It's the largest grass seed breeding company in the world. They focus mostly on turf grasses, but they are by far the world's leader in forage grasses. When they came to North America about 10 or 15 years ago with both seed production and research of varieties, they didn't come to Canada; they went to the central U.S., where they saw the market potential. They have a plant breeding program that is targeting the warmer climate of the U.S. If you think of everything below the snow belt, that is where they are thinking about.

What we know from our own experience is if you look at Manitoba, eastern Manitoba is in a funny zone. We can do things that you can't do in the rest of western Canada. I can grow varieties of alfalfa and grasses that you won't grow in Brandon, which is only a two-hour drive away.

We know from the experience in our community that these types of forages have tremendous potential. What we have to do now is apply our science and innovation to overcome what mother nature hasn't given us. So we need to go to the research community, to the plant breeding community, and encourage them to come to us with their tremendous level of knowledge and to partner with us to solve that problem.

If you could take that 30% of our land base that's in undeveloped pasture land and boost it by 50% of its carrying capacity, think of what that does for the livestock industry, which is 25% of our agriculture. Get a grip on where you're spending your dollar and where it ends up at your tax base. That's a tax base; you'll get those dollars back. If you can take the marginal farmer in western Canada and turn him into a non-marginal farmer who you can tax to death, like you can a dairy farmer, then let's do that. Let's take those marginal lands and make them into a profit centre.

That's what you need to look at. It's a profit centre that you're trying to create out of land that is currently not.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you for that.

It seems all so simple, doesn't it--but it's not simple to do; don't get me wrong. The thought process to it is it's an elementary principle. That's how we used to actually raise animals the first time, before we got into how we decided to do it over time, thinking there was more efficiency the other way. Maybe there's more efficiency in actually making some things that are marginal more efficient.

Ms. Broklebank, you talked earlier about the gaps in funding and the fact that you can't pay somebody $10 for a lunch, so it becomes difficult to bring folks in.

I used to be a municipal councillor at one point in my life, and the better the person who wrote the proposal, the better luck you had about getting the money. And they weren't actually the people who actually ended up doing the work the proposal was around; they were simply proposal writers. It almost seems that as you get bigger you need somebody to actually do that who actually just does that and manages things for you. I don't want to build a bureaucracy for you. Don't get me wrong. It's either that or we need to give you flexibility so that you can actually get some of the things done without being waylaid doing the things we're asking you to do--not discounting accountability, because you've agreed that you must do that.

We're asking you to do other things, other than doing the things that enhance the ability of the industry you represent to actually get ahead. That's what we're asking.

I know I'm out of time, so I'll ask you to respond to that if you would.

[Andrea Brocklebank]

When I spoke to the research proposals, I'm talking about the researchers themselves, who have the technical expertise, because ultimately they have to develop these research proposals. We don't do that. We go to them and say this is what we need and ask them to tell us how to do that.

Hiring isn't a solution, because it's those researchers. But we're looking at being able to say if you provide the desired research outcome we'll give you five years of funding and we'll give you enough so you're not going to four other research funders who have different report formats, all of that. That's what we're looking for, because that reduces their needs, and they also are able to hire the staff. They can do all that and they don't have the limitations.

On the limitations in terms of administrative hurdles, we can handle them, and we can hire the administrative bureaucracy to do that, but industry is really lean on that side, and I'll say that we don't have that. When it comes down to it, there's a bit of a principle there where we're trying to adapt to Agriculture Canada rules sometimes--actually I will state that it is Treasury Board guidelines--and that's difficult. On these restrictions, we can make sure we hire enough accountants to do it, but at the end of the day that is not helping improve our research efficiency. That is the point.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Frank Valeriote]

Thank you.

Mr. Trost, for five minutes.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just to get a little bit of clarification on what Mr. Lintott said when he was talking about the Dutch grass seed company not coming up to Canada.

If I understood you correctly, you are effectively saying that because our market is not big enough, we tend not to get the research targeted at our particular crops. If that's true, how big a research area do we need, and where do we start to go with the specializations?

You noted you're from what we refer to as the “banana belt of Manitoba”, which is going to be a bit different from the Peace district up in Alberta-B.C. Some crops will grow in that entire region, other things will be much more specialized.

How specialized do we go with our programming for targeting and nuancing particular crop varieties? Do we go all of western Canada? All of Ontario? All of Atlantic Canada? How do we break down the subspecialties in there?

[Jim Lintott]

The first part of your question is why they didn't come here. They didn't come here because I think they visualized that they could get the biggest, fastest bang for their investment dollar by focusing on that southern U.S. market.

They are testing some of their cultivars as far north as Minnesota. I believe what it takes is for Canada, whether it be other private industry or governments—provincial and federal—or a group of them, to go to them and say that they have identified this as something they want to happen in our climatic zone. You might invite them to try to develop varieties for the parkland belt. This is the one that I would target first. If you're successful with that, you might turn around and ask them to target the drier, more arid parts of the Prairies.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Okay. So there are ways of prioritizing, and you'd turn it over to our agriculture scientists. And I'm sure everyone in the industry would have a way of campaigning for their particular area.

I'm also very curious about all the groups here. Have you looked at different ways of arranging the funding so that there would be—how shall we say it?—market-driven mechanisms for deciding who or what would get the funding? For example, there might be some way of prioritizing funding for projects where there is more private sector funding.

We always talk about three-P projects in infrastructure—public-private partnerships. Have you looked at models that would spread the funding out in that respect, where you would partner with business or with industry associations like yourself, with matching funds, etc.?

Whatever groups would care to respond in my two and a half minutes.

[Travis Toews]

I'm going to let Andrea respond. If I can take just 20 seconds, I would reinforce Mr. Lintott's point on the importance of forage research and the vast potential it would hold for Canadian agriculture.

Right now in Canada, we have very low cow numbers. In the U.S., they're going down at a much quicker pace yet. As we've evaluated the key issues that are playing into herd size, I believe in Canada we have an opportunity to really take advantage of a disproportionate share of the growth over the next 10 years in the cattle industry. Part and parcel of that is ensuring that we are as productive and competitive as possible, and forage research is critical to that piece.

I'll let Andrea answer the detailed question.

[Andrea Brocklebank]

We have. I mean, that's probably the next step in our strategy.

Part of our efforts right now have just been trying to get the provinces to coordinate provincial funding, government funding. To be honest, on the beef research side alone there are 30 research funders, provincially, federally, and even across the federal government. That's one of our biggest challenges. We focused on that because greater coordination of our public investments is a good first step to ensure that we get that. But then, of course, private sector investment attraction helps leverage those funds.

[Dr. Bruce Roberts]

One of the directions we're going—and this came out of a major research conference that the CPRC coordinated in 2010—is we're moving to outcome-based research, in the sense that we want to achieve something first and then we will go to the researchers. Historically, the researchers come to us with their idea, in a lot of cases, and we look and say, "Well, how does that relate to what we want to do?” It's not us saying, “This is the outcome we want”, and then going to them and saying, “Okay, make proposals on this.”

That's what happens in business. Business doesn't go out and ask consultants if they've got any great ideas. They go out and say, “Here's the result we want, go out and study this.” And I'm an ex-consultant, so I can say that.

That's the direction we're going.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Frank Valeriote]

Thank you, Mr. Roberts.

Mr. Trost, your time is up.

We'll go to Mr. Atamanenko.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thanks all of you for being here.

My first question is for Mr. Lintott.

We talk about research, and we know that often a lot of it is driven by the private sector. We have seen in the past, often, research that has backfired on farmers. The last time we spoke or that you were at the committee we talked about triffid flax and the research that had happened. It cost farmers and exporters a lot of money. At that time, we were discussing my bill on market analysis.

You also mentioned that Monsanto was pushing a Roundup Ready alfalfa. The Manitoba Forage Council wanted this to stop because of the effects it would have and because of the fact that the introduction of unwanted GMOs is affecting not only the direct sale of crop and seed products but the sale of value-added products.

We don't have any bill. We didn't pass the moratorium on G alfalfa. Is there a way that groups such as yours and farmers can influence, for example, Monsanto, in this case, to channel its research from pushing Roundup Ready alfalfa to other areas, such as filling the gap in forage grasses that you were talking about?

We know that alfalfa has been approved for release in the United States. Do you know what has been happening on the ground in Manitoba, for example?

[Jim Lintott]

The company is always going to be driven by its potential to earn a profit for its shareholders. Monsanto has proven to be very good at that, at any expense. They generate some tremendous benefits, and they generate some tremendous harm in agriculture.

On a worldwide basis, the problem you have in agricultural research is that it's very hard for someone to own the outcome. This is why canola research, the plant breeding of canola, is so huge compared to all other sectors of plant breeding in western Canada. It is because they can own it, as I described earlier. In the beef industry, it's impossible to own it. We're cognizant of people who want to register breeds of cattle, just as you would register a variety of seed, and we can't do that in Canada, because they believe they have a perceived value. You can do that in the United States.

If you don't provide a mechanism whereby a corporation can invest a dollar and see a way of protecting that dollar, it's not going to work.

The main reason the canola industry is in fact spending 80% of the research dollars, which I think is over $80 million, on variety research and development is because it's for hybrids. If it's a hybrid, you can own it. If I grow that variety on my farm, the seed I harvest isn't going to grow a crop next year. It will grow a crop, yes, but it will only produce 50% of its potential, because half of the seeds are going to produce plants that are sterile. They will grow a plant, but the plant will not produce seed. There's a built-in scientific, biological mechanism that allows a canola breeding company to be successful. You can't do that with a pound of beef and you can't do that with a bushel of wheat. The canola and the corn industries are very unique, because they're hybrids.

Look at the soybean industry. The soybean industry has had a wonderful time--Monsanto, in particular--in South America, where it's almost all Roundup Ready soybeans. But nobody's paying the TUAs. They tried to force the government of Brazil to tax the TUA as the soybeans were being exported from the country. That failed. That's a perfect example of where a company invested a lot of money and was very successful in producing a product that was taken up by agriculture almost 100%. It's almost all Roundup Ready soybeans. But they can't get the TUA dollars out of it, so there's no incentive for that company to go there again and revisit that whole thing.

You can only do that where there's a mechanism that prevents someone from stealing your product. That's why we have patent law. If you are making a Dyson vacuum cleaner, you can patent your Dyson vacuum cleaner until your patent runs out. Of course, that's what's happened with glyphosate. Glyphosate now has lost its patent. You can buy glyphosate for $3 a litre. It used to be $40 a litre.

That's the reality of the business world. You have to understand what allows a company to take huge volumes of dollars and drive them into something they're not sure is going to happen.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

So what's happening--

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Frank Valeriote]

Sorry, Alex. Your time is up.

Mr. Lobb, go ahead for five minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

My first question is for Mr. Toews and Ms. Brocklebank.

From what I heard today so far--and correct me if I'm wrong--overall the programs that were within the first phase of Growing Forward, or the science and innovation side, were good. One area for improvement might be the timeframe, which could be a little more flexible. As well, the application and the reporting process could be streamlined.

Is that fair to say? Is there another sentence or a paragraph you'd like to add?

[Travis Toews]

First, I would agree, from the standpoint of moving to the science cluster approach. I think that was very positive. We talk about using resources more efficiently and ensuring that research is coordinated. That was a very good step in that direction.

I think, as Andrea has noted, there were some growing pains in such things as the way the programming is administered and the lack of flexibility in how funding is allocated for research done at AAFC and universities versus for research the Beef Cattle Research Council might be able to direct and steer.

So there needs to be continued work to streamline that process. There needs to be more longer-term predictable funding. And I would suggest that beef cattle and forage research is severely underfunded in this country when we look at the economic contribution the industry makes. Our national check-off agency conducted a third-party study, and the conclusion was that basically check-off funding from the cattle industry that was earmarked for research was providing a 46 to one return on investment, which really points to the fact that investment in that area is underfunded right now in Canada.

I'll ask Andrea to add a comment.