Evidence of meeting #85 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 great.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Ruth Ellen Brosseau NDP Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Thank you, Chair, and I'd like to thank the witnesses for their expertise and their help with this study we're doing at the agriculture committee.
From what I understand, 12 farmers got together and formed this group in 2015. You recently received about $900 million...it wasn't $900 million.
5:05 p.m.
A voice
We'll take that, though. That would be good.
5:05 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Ruth Ellen Brosseau NDP Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Okay. Sorry, but wouldn't that would be great? Wouldn't we love that?
How long will this project last? Can you go into details about it? I want to understand it better. I'm sorry that we couldn't have access to your slides, but all materials have to be bilingual.
5:05 p.m.
Board Member, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
Would you like to answer that, Jason, or Andrea?
5:05 p.m.
Vice-Chair, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
I don't know if the committee will allow it, but we have our project manager with us here in the crowd. She could answer that question better than either of us, but I don't know if that's.... We can answer it too, if you want.
5:05 p.m.
Vice-Chair, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
Andrea, would you come up for a second to answer this question?
5:05 p.m.
Andrea McKenna Manager, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
Thank you very much.
We received just a little under a million dollars to do a greenhouse gas mitigation project. We're planting willow trees not in but near the buffer zones on our farms. That's to do two things.
One is to sequester the carbon in the soil. We're working with a professor from Dalhousie University and we'll be hiring two master's students who will look at the greenhouse gas emissions from the trees and do measurements on the sequestration of the carbons in the soil.
We're also using this as an agroforestry best management practice. It's fairly easy. The willow trees are easy to plant, and they grow fast. With that fast growth, they're cut every three years. After they're cut, they grow back even more rapidly. They create more habitat within the fields for wildlife species.
We were pushing this project because we see a lot of environmental benefits, and it's also a very easy and cheap practice that can be adopted by the farmers. With this project, we're working on 12 different sites across the province. We have 12 sites planted. The testing and the research will be going on over five years for this particular project.
What we're hoping for at the end of this project is that we will have demonstrated to farmers that this is a very easy thing for them to do within their grassland areas. These are areas that have already been taken out of production, so they're not taking anything away from their existing crop production areas. Also, willow trees are easy to plant and easy to manage.
One of our researchers who we work really closely with on two other projects has just made a proposal to extend that project to look at the biomass. You're cutting the trees every three years, and he's looking at applying that biomass back to the potato fields to combat disease and build organic matter in the soils. Right now, he has proposed that research for five to 10 years as an extension of this project.
We're hoping that at the end of the day there's an agroforestry best management practice that will be easily adopted by most of our potato producers across the island and elsewhere.
5:05 p.m.
An hon. member
How long is this...?
5:05 p.m.
Manager, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
It's a five-year project right now.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Ruth Ellen Brosseau NDP Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
That's amazing. I'm very happy that you were able to come and help explain what the project is.
Is willow being used more in P.E.I., or is it being used in...?
5:05 p.m.
Manager, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
No. Actually, there's a lot of work like we're doing in Manitoba.
5:05 p.m.
Manager, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
Yes, and one of the specialists we worked with when we were developing this project was Bill Schroeder, who did a lot of research. He used to work with AAFC and has since retired. He was in Manitoba, right?
5:05 p.m.
A voice
Yes.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Ruth Ellen Brosseau NDP Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
That's perfect.
In the last meeting we had on our study on climate change and soil, we had witnesses who talked a lot about what was being done in the States for agroforestry and about having a five-year plan. I think it ended last year.
Would you be of the same...?
Would you agree?
I'm thinking in French. I'm really tired.
Would you agree that we would need a national strategy to incentivize farmers to invest more in agroforestry and to do what is being done in the other countries that are our major trading partners?
5:10 p.m.
Manager, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
Yes, definitely. We had discussions yesterday at the U.S. embassy and we were talking about just that. If there are incentives provided to our competitors in the U.S., we'd like to see the same here.
As producers, these 12 farmers came together to talk among themselves about how they wanted to lessen their footprint on the environment for the sake of their own farms and future generations. They're all younger producers with young families, and they're quite concerned about the future and about public perception. Their willingness to adopt these practices is unique, so I think there would need to be some incentive to encourage the rest of the industry and the rest of Canada to do this.
I'd like to see more research projects that are focused like ours and would prove that there's an easy thing you can do. That encourages the willingness, and then the incentives on top of it I think would put it over the top.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Thank you so much, Andrea, for your intervention.
Thank you, Ms. Brosseau.
Go ahead, Mr. Longfield, for six minutes.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.
Andrea, join the table. It's great to have you here.
I was really interested in the five-year project. I read online about the environmental impact of willow—Minister MacAulay was there to make the announcement—and trying to sequester carbon faster during the growth cycle of the willow, and then getting rid of the willow and getting more carbon.
I know that every province and territory has its own climate change mitigation pricing systems. Have you looked at the economic impact of sequestering carbon? Are you able to get credits from the P.E.I. government on any of that?
5:10 p.m.
A voice
No.
5:10 p.m.
Vice-Chair, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
I don't think that's quite been decided yet on P.E.I.
5:10 p.m.
Manager, East Prince Agri-Environment Association
Not yet, but it's something we've proposed. We've said that we'd like to work towards that with our provincial government so that we would be able to have credits for sequestering, but of course we need to find a way of measuring it. That's one of the things our students will be working on.