Agriculture Committee on Dec. 12th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Good afternoon. Welcome to our committee's last meeting.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we continue with a study of climate change and water and soil conservation issues. Today we have a video conference with the Research and Development Institute for the Agri-environment, and Aubert Michaud, soil and water conservation scientist.

Good afternoon.

As well, we have as an individual Elena Bennett, associate professor, natural resource sciences, also by video conference.

She is speaking to us from Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec.

Welcome, Dr. Bennett. Can you hear us?

[Dr. Elena Bennett, Associate Professor, Natural Resource Sciences, As an Individual]

Yes, I can hear.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Great.

To begin, I will give each person seven minutes.

Dr. Bennett, go ahead.

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

That's great. I can start.

As mentioned, my name is Elena Bennett. I am an associate professor at McGill University, based here in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.

I have been studying agriculture, especially soil and water quality with respect to fertilizer use, for 20 years. For the last 10 years my research has increasingly focused on land management in agricultural areas and understanding the multiple benefits that communities receive from agricultural lands, which include not only food production and its concomitant economic benefits, but other benefits as well: places to recreate, flood control, water quality, climate regulation through carbon storage, and more.

We call those benefits “ecosystem services”, a term that has become of great interest to the research and management communities for the past 10 years. I'll be talking about that today.

I want to start by thanking you very much for the invitation to speak. I'm really pleased to see that the government is taking climate change seriously and is considering how that's going to affect important Canadian sectors.

I want to share one overarching idea today that leads to two recommendations you might consider. The overarching idea is this: that we have to think beyond food production when we think about agricultural landscapes. While it's undoubtedly true that Canada's agricultural landscapes are important for food production and for Canada's economy, it's also true that these landscapes provide many other benefits to Canadians that are undervalued, if they're even considered at all.

If you think about your favourite Canadian agricultural landscape, it might be potato fields of P.E.I. or canola in the Prairies; it might be corn soy here in Quebec, or maybe fruit orchards in British Columbia. If you picture that landscape in your mind and try to list the benefits we get from those landscapes, the ecosystem services, probably the first ones you think about are things like food and water, or maybe fuel wood and maple syrup around here. If I push you to think about it a little longer, you might also consider aesthetic beauty, opportunities for hiking and recreation, or maybe the inspiration they deliver for people to make art or other things of cultural significance.

If I really push you further than that, then you might finally recognize that these landscapes are providing flood control, that they're regulating climate, that they're storing carbon in their trees and soil, and that they're providing high-quality water for drinking and fishing and swimming.

The problem is that thus far our fairly single-minded focus on increasing efficiency of food production in these landscapes creates dramatic declines in these other ecosystem services that are provided in agricultural landscapes. To explain that a little bit, there are trade-offs between ecosystem services. For example, if I want to produce more food or produce more food more efficiently, I might increase the rate of fertilizer use, but that's probably going to lead to declines in water quality, and those sorts of trade-off interactions are the case across a great many agricultural landscapes.

A few years ago the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was a UN-sponsored, five-year, 1,000-plus-person effort to assess the state of the planet in terms of its ecosystem services, found that services of food and fibre production are increasing, but other services, especially those that have trade-offs with agriculture, such as flood control or water quality or recreation, are declining. At the same time, this Millennium Ecosystem Assessment found that demand for all types of services is increasing.

We're facing a very intense pressure right now to expand agriculture, to intensify agriculture, to increase production for economic reasons, for reasons of food security. Because we can very easily quantify the economic value of food production, I think we sometimes get caught up in policies and decision-making that focus only on that food aspect of agricultural landscapes, but it's incredibly important to Canadians that we remember all of these other things of value, all of these other ecosystem services that are provided in these landscapes, before it's too late.

How can we do this? This question leads to my first recommendation to you, which is to think about enacting policies and creating funding for and generally taking steps that encourage the following four things: measuring the biophysical production of these other non-food delivery services; measuring demand for those, measuring how much are people wanting from their landscapes; estimating the benefits that are delivered to people in agricultural landscapes from more than just food; and then finally, ensuring that farmers and farm communities have a way to benefit from the fact that they are providing these services to other Canadians.

Any efforts to measure this or to ensure that farmers are benefiting will help to make sure that we remember that those benefits also come from agricultural landscapes and that these agricultural communities continue to take the kinds of actions they're taking now that ensure we can keep benefiting from these things that our agricultural landscapes do.

Let me move on to my second recommendation, which touches on the issue of resilience more directly, and it's in many ways related.

A lot of our efforts go toward sustainably optimizing crop production while taking sustainability into account. However, that's not enough. When I talk about this, it's strategies like more crop per drop, which aims to get more crop growth per water irrigation, or increased yield per unit input of fertilizers, or reduced greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product produced. Those are important and necessary, but it's not going to be sufficient, and it is probably going to reduce the resilience of these communities to climate change in the long run.

In other words, we've been very good at increasing agricultural productivity in areas with access to fertilizers and with access to technology, but there's a lot of evidence that these steps we're taking, which increase this narrow-sense efficiency of agricultural production without thinking about resilience, are leading to highly damaging fluctuations in food production and food costs and environmental outcomes.

For example, native pollinators of crops are declining around the world, including in Canada, because of land-use change, because of pesticide use and other changes that are happening, but managed honey bees aren't adequately compensating for that loss.

What I would encourage instead is that we think about aiming for resilient agriculture. How can we meet demand for agricultural products and economic growth over the short and long term without undermining—

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Madam Bennett, we're running out of time. I will give you a chance to conclude, if you can.

Thank you.

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Okay. Yes, that's great.

I will just conclude by saying that if we want to think in that way about resilience, we need to think not just about persistence, which we're quite good at, but also about adaptation and transformation. In other words, how do we help the communities on these lands to have the capacity to create entirely new types of agriculture that are resilient to climate change?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you very much, Madam Bennett.

We will now go to Aubert Michaud, who has seven minutes.

[Dr. Aubert Michaud, Soil and Water Conservation Scientist, Research and Development Institute for the Agri-environment]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon.

First, I would like to thank the members for their invitation, and I would like to thank them for their interest in the research activities of our institute. My name is Aubert Michaud. I have been a soil and water conservation researcher at the Research and Development Institute for the Agri-environment, the IRDA, since the institute was founded in 1998.

The IRDA is a research institute that has about a hundred regular employees. Eighteen research teams work on various issues relating to soil and water conservation, air quality, and biodiversity in the agricultural sector.

My team and I work mainly to support concerted actions of rural communities focused on water quality management issues.

Our first finding follows from climate projections, and it is obviously the longer growing season. Of course, this has many opportunities and benefits for the farming community.

Climate change is also an issue, particularly in terms of the distribution of water surpluses and deficits.

I will now present four major issues that deserve our attention and, most certainly, adjustment measures.

Our first issue is related to increased winter rains. Clearly, the season will be longer and the spring will be earlier, but large amounts of runoff will be managed because of the effect of precipitation on frozen and snow-covered soils. We need only think, for example, of the 2011 floods in the Richelieu Valley and, more recently, those of spring 2017, which occurred in several regions of Quebec. Unfortunately, this has shown the devastating effects of rains on abundant snow cover. Ground frozen or saturated with water is then vulnerable to surface runoff.

For 20 years, our hydrometric monitoring with small watersheds, tested in Quebec, show that, every other year, the largest runoff volumes are actually observed in winter and early spring. As a result, there is a real need to adapt our hydrological criteria for the design of agricultural structures to this situation.

It should be noted that the current criteria are mainly focused on peak flows generated by intense precipitation in the summer. In addition, many investments are made each year in Quebec to maintain 30,000 kilometres of watercourses. In some regions, particularly in Montérégie, the recurrence of work is worrying.

Several municipalities are expressing concerns about increasing peak flows or increased sedimentation. This is an opportunity to do things differently and to act in a concerted manner, not only in terms of watercourse development, but also in shoreline and farmland development. The techniques are known. The challenge arises especially on a human scale, in the co-operation of stakeholders and in the technical, financial and regulatory support of these interventions.

Long-term conservation of soil quality is another major issue for climate change. It is particularly a question here of preserving the physical condition of our soils and ensuring the conservation of its principal fertility capital, its organic matter.

Soil compaction and drainage problems are high on the list of concerns of Quebec field crop producers. Currently, several agricultural companies are doubling agricultural drains in their fields. In fact, this concern is not new. Already in the late 1980s, a large inventory of soil degradation resulted in a degradation of the soil structure on more than 400,000 hectares.

More recently, the portrait of the grain industry in Quebec shows an average decline of 15% in the organic matter content over just 10 years, between 1998 and 2009. In central Quebec, the average decrease for the same period reached 30%. And this problem has motivated the funding by the Quebec ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food, or MAPAQ, of a province-wide soil health study. The study began this year and is coordinated by IRDA.

A longer growing season offers a great opportunity to restore the physical condition of our soil and to ensure the preservation of organic matter. The introduction of cover crops is certainly one of the most effective ways. Cover crop is a crop that is grown with or after the main crop. It has the advantage of improving the soil structure, bringing organic matter, storing nutrients and protecting the soil against erosion. These benefits are particularly important when cover crops are planted with a small grain, such as wheat, for instance.

This crop allows the cover crop to have more time to grow, compared to corn or soybeans, which accounts for the central interest in bringing small grains back into the corn-soy rotation in Quebec, which currently dominates the landscape of major crops.

As for water quality, one of the main issues facing the agricultural sector is the eutrophication of water bodies and the proliferation of cyanobacteria. Several bodies of water in rural areas are affected by swimming bans or by contamination of intakes. So it's an important public health issue. Phosphorus intake is considered the main factor behind these phenomena. In agricultural areas, runoff and land drainage generally contribute the largest share of diffuse phosphorus inputs to water bodies.

In concrete terms, the first line of defence for retaining phosphorus on our farmland is the control of soil enrichment. As such, let's remember that the issue is first of all in terms of farm manure. In fact, farm manure constitutes 65% of the phosphorus used in agriculture in Quebec, which is about 95,000 tonnes, compared to 35% for mineral fertilizer. Overall, phosphorus intake is about 30% higher than crop removal. So the soil is enriched.

For example, in livestock concentration zones in Montérégie, the critical soil fertility rate, namely, 7.7% phosphorus saturation, is reached for 40% of crop acreage. Disposing of farm manure becomes problematic. An effective solution to the problem is to reduce phosphorus slurry content at the source by separating solid and liquid fractions in livestock buildings. The techniques, which are known and effective, are widely used in Europe. They have been evaluated in Quebec by some of my colleagues at IRDA. The nitrogen-rich liquid fraction can then be used on phosphorus-rich soils.

The fact that the majority of farm fertilizer applications occur during periods when runoff may occur, in the spring and fall, is another aspect of the problem. Because of wet soils, these run-offs contribute to soil compaction. Here again, the cultivation of small grain makes it possible to use our farm manures, to reduce soil compaction and, as a bonus, to store nutrients.

Finally, the anticipated climate changes will result in larger water deficits during the growing season. Two factors are at play: warmer seasons and more intense rainfall. This will ensure that a lower proportion of the rains are stored in soils.

With regard to the water supply for agricultural production, a long-term vision needs to be developed and should take into account the availability of surface and ground water, as well as the consumption of all users—

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Dr. Michaud, you will have to finish your presentation.

[Dr. Aubert Michaud]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

You can wrap it up quickly.

[Dr. Aubert Michaud]

In addition, there are currently gaps in the technical support of farm businesses for water management. So we need to develop technical and vocational training for agricultural advisers, in order to help companies use irrigation water more wisely.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Dr. Michaud.

We will move on to questions, but first I would like to welcome Mr. Deltell, who is replacing Mrs. Boucher.

and thank Mr. Falk as well for being here today.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

We'll now start with a six-minute round of questions.

Mr. Barlow, you have the floor. Please indicate who you want to the question to go to, because we're on video conference.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Certainly. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate the time of the witnesses today and their great information. I look forward to hearing some more details from you.

I'm going to start with Mr. Michaud, please.

A witness in a previous meeting talked about some of the concerns with our water use in Canada. I'm from Alberta, and I have to apologize for not being familiar with every other provincial jurisdiction. I know that in Alberta and some of the other western provinces, we have a real problem with what's called “first in time, first in use”, which means that whoever had the original water licence can hold on to that water licence in perpetuity, whether they use it or not, while there are farms, ranches, or other users that are really struggling.

Is this a missed opportunity for us or something that we as a federal government have to start taking a look at in terms of who has the water licences and who has access? Do we have to take a stronger look at best use and best practice for those finite water resources?

[Dr. Aubert Michaud]

I understand that the problems in western Canada are very different from the ones in Quebec, for instance.

Water licences aren't yet in use in Quebec. We don't really know the extent of the problem. A link needs to be made between the availability of surface and ground water, and future irrigation needs.

There is definitely a potential conflict of water use. Moreover, IRDA is currently participating in a major study on potential water use conflicts for all of Quebec's agricultural regions. This is the RADEAU 2 project, rolled out almost a year ago.

In concrete terms, the tools are not in place. Knowledge about needs is lacking when we talk about developing visions in this regard. The basic data have not yet been collected in Quebec.

What is more problematic logistically speaking is that technical data or technical support are not present to ensure the judicious use of irrigation water. I am thinking of some irrigated crops, such as vegetable production and a part of potato production.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

That leads me into my next question, as it seems they may be intertwined. Again, Mr. Michaud and Ms. Bennett, if you want to add something, please do so.

The Soil Conservation Council of Canada told us that one of the most important things we should be looking at in this study is the fact that a detailed, in-depth analysis of the soil situation across Canada has not been done since the late 1980s. Obviously a lot has changed in the last 30 years, not to mention our growing season, the crops we grow, water usage, and those types of things. It's hard to say where we want to go if we don't know exactly where we're starting from. Should we be looking at a national in-depth analysis of the status of our aquifers as well as the status of our soils?

[Dr. Aubert Michaud]

Your question is quite relevant.

An inventory of the state of soil health has just been started in Quebec. This initiative is coordinated by my colleague Marc-Olivier Gasser, from IRDA, and is entirely funded by MAPAQ.

The concern is clearly there. I agree with you on the relevance of documenting the state of the health of our soils. As I mentioned, Quebec agricultural producers in the field crop sector are expressing concern about the problem of compaction and degradation of soil structure. We see it in the doubling of agricultural drains, among others. The concern is there, and I think it's relevant to quantify the problem.

On the Ontario side, there is a lot of concern about soil health. Unfortunately, I am not aware of initiatives similar to those of Quebec in other provinces

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

I think that really exemplifies our issue. Each province seems to be doing things on its own, but on a national scale, I think we're missing some important data.

Dr. Bennett, you were talking about some of the issues in the increase in efficiencies and the impact it has on soil. Can you expand on that a little? When we look at some of the innovation and new steps in technology that our agriculture producers are doing now with crop rotation, we see that in many jurisdictions they're growing pulses that would never have been grown in some of these areas before as a means to protect their soil. We're spraying much less because of some of the new tools they have, such as new seed technology and those types of things. It seems as if agricultural producers are having much less impact on the land than they had maybe 10 to 20 years ago, but I may have misunderstood.

You were saying the opposite, that some of the things they're doing to improve efficiencies and ensure they're physically driving on their land less than they ever have before are in some way detrimental. Was I misreading that a little?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Let me just clarify a little bit, because I don't think you're misreading. In fact, there have been improvements in efficiencies, and some of those have been quite beneficial in terms of reducing the amount of fertilizer we need.

With regard to resilience, which I understand is part of the report the committee is looking at now, even though we're increasing sustainability, we may be reducing resilience at the same time if we're creating a system that is more rigid. In other words, if you are dependent on lots and lots of technology to go exactly right in order to be able to, say, plant your crop or irrigate your crop or whatever you—

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

I'm going to have to cut you off, Ms. Bennett. I'm sorry. We're a little bit over time. Monsieur Breton perhaps will give you a chance to finish.

Mr. Breton, you have six minutes.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I can let you finish your answer, Dr. Bennett, if you like.

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Sure. It's just to say that you are creating a system that is less resilient. If it is more efficient, more tightly controlled, you will be less resilient to shocks, including climate change, including economic change, including anything else that happens suddenly. There is quite a considerable amount of evidence of that, so as we implement these new technologies, we need to be careful that we're not creating a rigid system.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Great. Thank you.

I would like to welcome you, Dr. Bennett and Dr. Michaud.