Agriculture Committee on Dec. 12th, 2017

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I think it's a question of adaptation with the farming community.

I keep telling this story, but both my colleague and I were at a farm show, and one of the sales guys said that if we were going to do precision farming, the first thing we would have to do was a soil test. It took three years for that particular person to get a soil test done.

The guy would put fertilizer across the whole land because his old man did it and it was the way he'd been taught. It produced good yields. In that third year, he found that, oops, maybe he didn't have to spend all that money to put fertilizer everywhere, and he finally adopted precision farming.

That tells me that a lot of education still needs to be done. Any recommendations on what we can do as a committee to ensure this information is out there would be helpful— and I'm cut off.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Unfortunately, Mr. Drouin, we'll have to live with the good conseils de départ.

It is now Mrs. Nassif's turn, and she has six minutes.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My thanks to our witnesses.

Mr. Michaud, I represent Vimy, which is an urban constituency and not really agricultural. I am new to the committee, but I have been trying to learn more about your project by visiting the website of the Institut de recherche et de développement en agroenvironnement.

I would like to have more information about sustainable water management in the context of climate change. Can you share your comments on that with us, especially on the current water management situation in Canada, both on agricultural land and elsewhere?

[Dr. Aubert Michaud]

Thank you for your question.

There are actually two types of issues. First, there are issues in quantitative water management. Earlier, I expressed some concern about excess water, the winter flooding that results from precipitation onto frozen ground and from melting snow. Clearly, that issue concerns rural areas, but it can also concern urban communities that are next to the outflows of rural watersheds. So it is a major issue for everyone.

Water deficits are also an issue. We talked about that earlier. The issue arises a lot more in western Canada than in Quebec, perhaps. Concerns are being raised, for example, about the quality of the water used for irrigation. In some areas, it is a problem because they no longer have access to surface water for irrigation, which creates additional pressure on the water under the ground. In addition, there are other users, of course. So the issue really is in reconciling water use.

The other issue, clearly, is water quality. Hotter seasons may well increase the number of cyanobacteria and the processes of eutrophication in bodies of water. A number of bodies of water are already affected in eastern Canada and in Quebec.

I feel that we have to be even more vigilant in terms of controlling the increase of phosphorus in our soil. We have to work on structures for livestock that contain phosphorus in its solid form, manure. Above all, we have to work on cultivation systems to develop manure spreading windows that are less problematic in terms of compacting the soil, and we have to recycle nutrients better. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, but everything can be turned into win-win propositions for farmers and for the downstream communities.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you.

Ms. Bennett, if you have anything to add, feel free to share your comments. I am all ears.

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

I think Mr. Michaud has mainly covered this aspect. I'll just say that understanding where we're at with respect to the natural capital that's driving these agricultural systems is quite important for soil, water, and all of the other mechanisms that are driving agriculture.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Ms. Bennett, my next question goes to you.

Do the government or the private sector have practices or policies that are harmful to sustainable water management?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Are there policies that are having a detrimental effect on water management? There are certainly policies in place that I think are probably keeping farmers from doing what they know or believe is best for water quality—even, for example, some of our regulations about how we manage buffer strips. There are quite rigid ideas of what that should look like and what that should be like, even when it's maybe not the best for a farm. You can see here there's a trade-off between making things strict and conformed enough to give people a sense of what to do versus making them loose enough that people can adapt within those bounds.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

You are conducting an investigation into the trade-off between agricultural production and water quality. I would like to have an answer from you about that investigation. Can you tell me about the investigation, please?

[Dr. Aubert Michaud]

Is that question for Ms. Bennett?

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Yes, it is for Ms. Bennett.

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

In the trade-off between agriculture and water quality, there are great trade-offs there, because a lot of the way we increase agricultural productivity is to increase fertilizer, and that has obvious implications for water quality. That's something we face every day, and certainly we've been applying.... There was the case that was mentioned before of the farmer who was applying more fertilizer than was needed simply because he didn't have a soil test.

The vast majority of our farms, because fertilizer is relatively cheap, are applying far more than they are taking up in crop production, and it's just sticking around. That's like a bucket of fertilizer uphill from all of our waterways, just waiting to get into our water quality. Over the last 50 years, we have set ourselves up for quite an issue with all of this phosphorus stored in our watersheds, just waiting for the big winter rains and the big spring storms to send a lot of eroded soil with a lot of phosphorus in it into our waterways.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Ms. Bennett.

Thank you, Mrs. Nassif.

Now we have Mr. Falk for six minutes.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure for me to be here as a substitute on this committee today. Thank you to our witnesses.

Ms. Bennett, I'll start with you. Summer fallowing used to be a very common practice among a lot of farmers, and then we moved to minimal till, and now zero till. Farmers used to incorporate a lot more mature forage crops back into the soil. That obviously doesn't happen when we're doing zero till. Can you give me a few of your thoughts and comments on the positives and negatives of doing or not doing that?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Yes, whether to use zero till or to incorporate crop parts back in depends on what you're trying to manage for. Zero till is great for managing for phosphorus and some aspects of water quality, but it turns out to be less useful or sometimes even detrimental in managing nitrogen. Again, this is a case of getting the right balance between flexibility and rigidity to allow farmers to do the right thing in their particular location, whether the issue in their location is phosphorus or nitrogen.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

What are your thoughts on summer fallow? Is there a place for that? Is that a practice and philosophy that's no longer relevant in the day and age we live in?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

That's actually not a part of agriculture that I know that much about, so I don't want to categorically say there's a place or not a place in Canadian agriculture.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Okay. You also talked about this phosphate that's waiting in a bucket up there for a flood or torrential rain. Are you familiar at all with tiling?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Yes.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

What are your thoughts on tiling?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Tiling, basically, is a system for delivering phosphorus straight to our waterways.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

That's in the absence of retention ponds on the particular property that's being tiled.

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

That's right, it's in the absence of retention ponds. Most of the soils work that I've done is in Quebec, and what I've seen there is that most of it's going pretty straight into drainage ditches. We need to do it in many areas when we have compacted soil and we have relatively wet, low-draining soils of the kind we have around here, but it is certainly delivering more nutrients to waterways.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Okay. In comparing natural fertilizer, such as livestock waste, to artificial fertilizer, what are your thoughts there?

[Dr. Elena Bennett]

Well, there are a lot of differences in livestock fertilizer, depending on how we're applying that, when we're applying it, and what sorts of quantities we are talking about. Is it from grass-fed pasture beef, or are we talking about a feedlot system?

In the area around here, a lot of animal production is happening in feedlots, and the issue there is that there's more manure than we know what to do with. It's a great fertilizer, but we have more of it than we have land available to spread it on. It does reduce the amount of purchased fertilizer, but it can be problematic, especially if we're spreading in early spring or late winter, which can be quite damaging.