Evidence of meeting #84 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was change.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Good afternoon.
I call the meeting to order.
Welcome, everyone, to our meeting on a very popular subject: climate change and water and soil conservation issues.
I wish to welcome Pierre Desrochers, associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, and Mr. Naresh Thevathasan.
Welcome to both of you. Thank you for your presentations to our committee today. You have up to seven minutes for opening statements.
Go ahead, Mr. Thevathasan.
Professor Naresh Thevathasan Associate Professor, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, As an Individual
Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, my name is Naresh Thevathasan. I'm an associate professor and leader of the agroforestry research and development and woody biomass research initiative at the University of Guelph.
I would like the thank the standing committee honourable members for the invitation extended to me to make this presentation today. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, for his vision and leadership in the agricultural sector, especially with respect to the implementation of the agricultural greenhouse gases program.
Agroforestry is a globally recommended land use system where trees are deliberately integrated into agricultural ecosystems in order to derive environmental, economic, ecological, and social benefits. However, its impact on climate change mitigation and adaptation in Canadian agriculture systems has not yet been fully realized. This is irrespective of the Canadian government's commitment to research in temperate agroforestry through the agricultural greenhouse gases program.
If you exclude classes 1 and 2 agriculture lands, and if you integrate trees into classes 3 to 6 agriculture lands, we are blessed with about 46 million hectares in Canada. Integrating trees in those lands could significantly increase the terrestrial carbon sequestration potential for Canada.
In this context of introducing trees into the agriculture landscape, I would like to recommend three temperate agroforestry land use systems to this committee. I will quickly present some visual representations of these land use systems in order to enhance understanding of what types of land use systems I'm talking about. I will not describe the photographs, but when I mention the names of the land use systems, I will quickly flip through the photos that I brought.
The first land use system is a tree-based intercropping system. The second one is a riparian buffer system. This shot was taken in P.E.I. The third land use system is the windbreak system, commonly seen in the Prairies. The fourth land use system is the silvopastoral system, and I can assure the committee that these cows are not tied to the trees. They are resting. In peak summer months, they get heat stress, and therefore they look for shade. The fifth system is a biomass production system, or bio-energy. The sixth land use system is the forest farming system, where you integrate economic crops into the woodlots.
Here are some of the overall research findings. Irrespective of the type of agroforestry land use system, all can contribute toward climate change mitigation and adaptation while providing ecosystem services. Agroforestry land use systems are not a choice between environment and economics, as they enhance both. Agroforestry systems are not a choice between food versus fibre. If properly integrated into agricultural systems, they provide both. Therefore, I have listed some of the major outcomes, both economic and environmental, that can be derived by adopting these land use systems in Canadian agricultural landscapes.
First, the photographs that I showed, irrespective of the type, all enhance system-level carbon sequestration. If you compare with a conventional agricultural system, they can sequester between 200% and 300% more carbon.
Second, they provide better utilization of the soil nutrients via nutrient cycling mechanisms that result in less residual inorganic soil nitrogen, which is a precursor for nitrous oxide emissions from the agricultural landscape.
Third, they help with nutrient leaching reduction, which contributes towards maintaining water quality.
Fourth, they all enhance biodiversity.
Fifth, they can create climate-smart and resilient land use systems, thereby increasing economic returns to farming communities across Canada.
Globally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recent COP22 conference, held in Morocco in November 2016, highly recommended agroforestry land use systems to be adopted in developing countries in order to promote climate-smart agricultural systems, while contributing to climate mitigation efforts by sequestering carbon both in trees and in soils. The same sentiment has also been echoed by the Food and Agriculture Organization in its policy paper released in 2013.
With regard to the challenges and opportunities for Canada, it has no specific and targeted policy in place for agroforestry land use systems. As such, agroforestry adoption rates in Canada, irrespective of the government’s commitment to research in temperate agroforestry, are low. In the United States, there is a targeted policy put in place by the United States Department of Agriculture. The policy is an agroforestry strategic framework, and is called “Enriching our Lives With Trees That Work”.
As I speak, field shelterbelts or windbreaks are being removed in the Prairies. Field windbreaks have become a farm operational issue, and, in some cases, trees in the windbreaks are also dying. This trend needs to be addressed with urgency. There is a lack of riparian plantings along the agricultural streams across Canada, especially in eastern Canada, where heavy non-point sources of pollutants and soils are entering the water bodies.
Tree-based farming systems are historically familiar to many first nations communities. Therefore, a concerted effort should be taken to initiate dialogue with them in order to reintroduce agroforestry land use systems on first nations lands to bring about food and income security for them.
Introduction of silvopastoral systems in the developing agricultural lands of the clay belt regions of Ontario and Quebec should be given urgency to enhance terrestrial carbon sequestration.
I would like to leave some recommendations with the standing committee.
Number one is that a Canadian agroforestry strategic framework policy is required. This should be led by the federal government in consultation with researchers across Canada, federal and provincial government officials, first nations communities, conservation authorities, and landowners. This document is required to provide the strategic guidance for science, adoption, and integration of agroforestry practice into agricultural landscapes.
Federal leadership in agroforestry is required, such as that provided by the former Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's agroforestry development centre at Indian Head, Saskatchewan.
Programs that promote the integration of trees into agricultural landscapes are needed if Canadians wish to economically and environmentally benefit.
Finally, appropriate agroforestry education, research, training, and knowledge transfer protocols should be developed to promote sustainable agroforestry systems in Canada.
Thank you once again for the invitation and for the opportunity to make this presentation.
Liberal
Dr. Pierre Desrochers Associate Professor, Geography Department, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Thank you very much for the invitation. Again, my name is Pierre Desrochers. I'm an associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. The remarks I prepared for you were co-produced with my colleague Joanna Szurmak, who is an electrical engineer and information specialist by training. I did send you images but I cannot unfortunately display them on the screens today, so I hope you have the images with you. With apologies to the translators, I will describe my talk around the images rather than follow the script that I sent you.
Obviously there are three points that I want to address. The first is climate change, considered in broad, historic terms, and then soil and water conservation.
If you look at the third image, you see that the point I want to make should be an obvious one. It is that climate has always changed. Whenever we go back in the geological record, we see that climate has changed in the recent past. Obviously, if we had tried to schedule this meeting here 20,000 years ago, which is really a blip in terms of geological time, we would have had a minor problem as we would have had to deal with a glacier that was nearly two kilometres thick. Again, that's only 20,000 years ago; that's nothing.
Because climate changes all the time, the next image shows you that climate change is a consideration for every generation. I have some quotes from The New York Times. In 1895, people thought that another glacial period was about to begin. In 1952, it was a “Next Great Deluge” because the ice cap was going to melt. Then in 1959, we have “Rising World Heat”. In 1974, the “Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea”. Again, climate changes all the time and every generation rediscovers the problem.
If you go back to the past, you used to throw virgins into volcanoes or else you would burn more witches as the climate was changing. People have always blamed themselves for climate change, but a few things to keep in mind in the context of this committee is that if you look at the majority of models that have been made in the recent past, they all tend to predict favourable outcomes for Canada. That's because obviously more heat and more CO2 will benefit most growing regions in the country. In terms of formulating policy, I believe this is a general consideration that we should keep in mind.
The next image is about the increase of corn yields historically. The point I want to make is that it doesn't matter what the climactic change trend is. As long as you have economic development, agriculture tends to prosper. You can see that you got very few bushels per acre when Europeans showed up in North America, but then, whether you had cooling or warming trends, yield tended to increase. You can see the big spike, the sort of hockey stick. The blade begins really with the development of hybrid corn in the 1920s, and it goes up whether the climate is warming or cooling.
One thing that people tend to forget today is that there was actually a cooling trend between 1945 and 1975, roughly, which is why people used to worry about global cooling in the 1970s. If we were to stretch that line today, we're at roughly, these last few years, about 160 bushels per acre in terms of corn, so again warming or cooling, agriculture tends to become more productive.
What we observe also for agricultural production is that we produce more and more food on less and less land. These are American data, but you could see similar results, perhaps not as spectacular but the same trend, in most countries. You can see that corn production has been going through the roof these last few years, but the amount of land used to produce it has decreased overall. Again, warming or cooling, we produce a lot more food on a lot less land.
Just so that you don't believe that I'm making up data, I have again this cute little graph from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that shows that in agriculture, as in every business, it always makes sense to do more with less. Whatever line of agricultural work you look at, you produce more outputs using less inputs. You don't need any government policy to do that. You just need old-fashioned competition where people have an incentive, again, to use their inputs as efficiently as possible.
The key point I want to make in the committee is that many people have declared a war on carbon fuel and petroleum products today and we view only their negative effect. But none of these advances would have been possible without a heavy diet of carbon fuels to power the engines that make this progress possible or else petroleum products, everything from plastics to seed coating to irrigation systems. Petroleum products were absolutely essential in achieving those results.
The longer document deals with this issue in more detail than the little summary that you might have, but historically, climate change has not really been a problem for farmers. The problem is singular weather events. Again, you have pictures of drought, frost, and floods. This is historically what really has been problematic for agricultural production, and this is why, throughout human history, you've had famine and malnutrition everywhere, either in the tropics or in temperate regions. It was only long-distance transportation, meaning at first steamships and railroads, that put an end to famine, at least for the advanced parts of our planet, as the surplus of regions that had good years could be shipped economically and in large enough quantities to regions that had bad years.
Again, we take our agricultural system for granted. Today, we don't worry about famine and malnutrition, but again, this would not have been achieved without carbon fuels, and trying to go cold turkey without modern technologies would obviously be a problem.
Another thing that we should keep in mind is that farmers have to adapt all the time, climate change or not, and I would argue that, in the grander scheme of things, climate change is a minor consideration compared with economic considerations. For example, there has been a lot of adaptation in the tobacco belt in Ontario, because people smoke less tobacco than in the past, but you might have diseases or you might have competitors emerging in other regions.
I know that some of you are from out west, so pulse production in this country is a nice success story. It's an opportunity that emerged and proved better than other alternatives. Again, just for economic reasons, or perhaps because you're dealing with pests or better competitors, as a farmer, you have to adapt all the time, and climate change in that context, in terms of adaptation, I believe, is a minor consideration.
The next image is about ethanol. Before creating new policies, I would suggest that we consider repealing bad ones, and I believe that a lot of things that have been put forward in the name of fighting climate change—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Mr. Desrochers, could you speed up, because we're already seven and a half minutes?
Associate Professor, Geography Department, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Are we?
Associate Professor, Geography Department, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Okay, I apologize for that. That's not what my stopwatch is telling me. Oh, it is.
Associate Professor, Geography Department, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Fair enough. I'll be quick.
Soil degradation has been a concern since the beginning of farming. This was the climate change issue of the 1920s, with everybody bothered about that. What has happened in the last few decades is that forests have made a huge comeback in advanced economies, and the key issue here is that people have replaced resources produced from the surface of the land with resources that came from underneath. Because of petroleum products, we've seen the abandonment of marginal agricultural lands and the reforestation of most advanced economies. If you care about soil conservation, this is really the way to go.
In terms of water, water is like everything else. For economic reasons, farmers have used less and less of it over time, and if we want to adapt to climate change, again, we should have more trade liberalization so that regions like Canada that have a lot of water are able to ship products that use a lot of water to regions of the world that have less of it. Again, by building resiliency with more long-distance trade and more petroleum products, we should be able, overall, to better adapt to climate change.
I apologize for that. It didn't take that much time when I was rehearsing.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
That's fine. It was very interesting, but I have to respect that time.
Associate Professor, Geography Department, University of Toronto, As an Individual
My apologies.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
You'll probably have a chance to elaborate as we have questions.
We're going to start with Mr. Lloyd Longfield for seven minutes.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for coming here.
Naresh, it's really good to see you again. I had a chance to visit your research centre this summer. You've attracted researchers from around the world to work in Canada, and in turn, you're taking your research around the world, which is a very good use of Canadian investment in technology.
I want to focus on our study where we're looking at carbon management within the soil system. We're looking at the economic opportunities that policy around carbon management brings. Yes, there's a cost to farmers on carbon inputs, but I'm thinking that the trees that you're showing are an economic opportunity for farmers. They also sequester carbon up to a certain point, but some trees that you showed me this summer are no good after a certain age. They stop sequestering carbon, and they need to be harvested in order to continue the sequestration cycle.
Could you speak to that, the economic opportunity as well as the sequestration that trees bring to the soil?
Prof. Naresh Thevathasan
Yes, Mr. Longfield.
Each tree species has the capacity to sequester carbon to some extent. The tree species that I showed you at the research site are hybrid poplar. They have a tendency to sequester carbon rapidly, but only after 15 years, so there should be a continuous planting of hybrid poplars. Those trees can be harvested for energy. As long as they are replanted, you can get a continuous sequestration of carbon in trees.
We should also understand that there's carbon sequestration below ground, in soils. In the study we are currently conducting, we are assessing woodlot carbon and soil carbon in the adjacent fields. That woodlot has not been disturbed for many years, so we can fairly assume that in terms of the maximum level of soil-carboning of woodlots, it is the capacity that the particular soil type can carry forward. For the agriculture systems or abandoned land adjacent to a woodlot, if the soil carbon is less than the carbon that is seen in a woodlot, then those soils have an enormous amount of capacity to sequester carbon.
In terms of economic returns, the landowners can integrate nut trees. They can integrate sugar maples, whereby they can get additional revenue from selling maple syrup. Christmas trees are another economic return for the landowners.
We also have to understand that when you put trees into the agricultural landscape, there's a certain percentage of land that is taken out of production, but if you look at the agriculture revenue that came from the land that is lost, it is insignificant. When you get a profit of 20¢ to 40¢ on a bushel of corn, even if you get 100 bushels less on the land where you have integrated trees, we are looking at $30 or $40 in revenue loss. That revenue loss can be easily obtained by the selling of nuts and by syrup production and other economic returns.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Thank you.
You also talked about the riparian buffer, which I had to look up. You received some funding this year from the federal government for riparian development, which takes the nutrients or the excess nitrogen coming from fields into the trees before it goes into rivers and streams. It protects the stream and the wildlife around the stream from contamination.
You mentioned that this wasn't part of our agriculture policy or that we need to develop some policies around trees, similar to that in the United States, which is something that we might include in our report as recommendations to the government.
Prof. Naresh Thevathasan
Yes, certainly. What is happening in the Essex County-Chatham area now is that most of the lands have been rented, and the riparian buffers are being plowed down in order to get more land under agriculture. This means that the ecosystem service you just mentioned, sir, is no longer going to be there. What is going to happen is that the nutrient loading is going to start to continue into the water bodies. They are removing riparian buffers mainly because they want more land area and more productivity.
If that area is dedicated to perennial trees and if the landowners can be compensated for the revenue loss that they could derive from that small parcel of land, I'm sure they'd be very happy to have the trees in that portion, which will not only contribute to the ecosystem services and water quality, but will also sequester carbon. If the carbon trading comes about, they could also get some revenue from carbon trading.
The main point is that there are no incentives now for any landowners to have trees.
Prof. Naresh Thevathasan
It could stimulate that. In the U.S. policy I mentioned, they provided incentives for them to plant the trees. They had to sign.... They can hold the trees for 10, 15, or 20 years. They provided incentives in order to—
Prof. Naresh Thevathasan
—to make up the loss. Exactly. That loss is not great. Even if it's 100 bushels of corn, the profit margin is—
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Finally, for the class 3 and class 4 land, we've just finished a study on food policy for Canada. Land use was a big part of what we got in terms of testimony. When we look at class 3 and class 4, I go back to my growing up in Manitoba. Between Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg, it was all class 3 and class 4 rock farms.
What's the opportunity to develop more agriculture by using trees as a resource in class 3 and class 4 land, and could that help us to grow crops other than trees?
Prof. Naresh Thevathasan
Yes. I mean, the silvopastoral system that I mentioned is one land use system that can be integrated. If there are lands that can be developed for livestock, then they will contribute not only to animal welfare issues but also to carbon sequestration as well.
The other aspect is bioenergy plantations, biomass for bioenergy. It need not be only for energy. It can also be for bioproducts and biochemicals. Those industries are being developed in Canada now. Revenues can be derived from having biomass crops. When you talk about biomass crops like poplars, willows, and to some extent, conifers, they can be easily established on marginal lands. Actually, poplars and willows are weed species. They are early successional species. They don't need fertile land to be established.