Agriculture Committee on June 8th, 2021

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Okay.

I want to get into verification. When I have conversations with stakeholders across the country, that becomes a big piece. Obviously, your company is in that space. I presume there are others who might also be in that realm in the private sector.

Do you see it as government's role to play a helping hand with farmers, or is this something that the private sector can take a leading role in, in terms of the verification of farmers' meeting some of these protocols, to take advantage of these opportunities?

[Wade Barnes]

We've had experience in both the regulatory market in Alberta and now the voluntary market. In both cases, you need an independent verifier in order to ensure that these credits are credible.

Government can play a role to ensure that a third party is verifying it. That would be helpful when it comes to even corporate clients buying those offsets and having some governance around that.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Mr. Barnes, beyond the regulatory approach of actually auditing the pieces, it's the tools, on farm, for farmers to be able to illustrate some of this work that you're talking about.

I hear you on the regulatory piece, but in terms of the actual tools on farm, is that best delivered by private companies like yours that can help digitize some of this, or does government have a role in incentivizing that behaviour?

[Wade Barnes]

It depends on how you look at it. One, the investment on the farm, to be able to digitalize that, to get that data so that data is verifiable, is critical and Canada can play a huge role in that.

The question is that our friends south of the border are essentially using crop insurance as a way to incentivize farmers to implement those practices.

Does government have a role to play? Possibly. If you want to speed up the digitalization at the farm level, it could. The other side of it is to not get in the road of a transaction between a farmer and a corporate client to create value, because they'll make those investments on their own.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Okay.

Mr. Gilvesy, I appreciate your testimony. One of the things you talked about is that we need to make sure there is technical advice in our local communities. You obviously highlighted the work that ALUS is doing in that domain. If there isn't an ALUS, let's say, perhaps in my own community in Nova Scotia, how do we make sure that the technical expertise exists? What advice would you have for government to ensure that happens?

There was a lot in the budget and the fall economic statement around supporting the types of efforts that you're undertaking as an organization, but how do we get that expertise such that, if I am a farmer, I can turn to someone if there is no ALUS in my backyard?

[Bryan Gilvesy]

My answer is twofold. First, we'd love to bring ALUS to your community.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Sure.

[Bryan Gilvesy]

There's that.

In my history as a farmer, the biggest missing thing for us has been the loss of extension for farmers. The role of extension has been taken over largely by the suppliers who sell the inputs for farms. This is a bit of a missing link, because that knowledge about what we're embarking on here today has to come from somewhere credible. It has become the backbone of our program and I cannot stress enough the importance of it. The government does have a role to play to provide this extension that we've lost over time.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Okay.

Mr. Barnes, I want to go back to you with one more question. I have about 45 seconds as per my clock.

You talked about BRM, and of course, you mentioned the United States using their crop insurance program to incentivize that digitization. I heard from your comments more that this is not only good for the environment, but it can include reduced risks by shoring up margins and protecting the overall viability of farms.

Is that what you were getting at in your comments?

[Wade Barnes]

Yes, absolutely, the ability of digitalization, using data.

Right now, we have reinsurers who are looking to go to work directly with growers, because they can actually do a better job of risk management at a lower cost for the grower than the grower utilizing subsidized insurance. I think governments can utilize that data the same way to provide better products to their farmers and put less risk on the taxpayer.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Thank you very much.

I think that's my time, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Yes, that's your time. Thank you so much.

We'll go to our next questioner.

Mr. Perron, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

My thanks to both witnesses for your testimony. How passionate you were!

Mr. Barnes, I would like to continue talking about how the business risk management (BRM) programs can support the digitization of data. You mentioned the U.S. example, if I'm not mistaken, that is being used as an incentive. Can you tell us more about that? What tangible steps could the government take?

[Wade Barnes]

If I can look back to my history, when our company was first founded, the government came out with what they called environmental farm plans. As part of that, there was an incentive for farmers to utilize GPS equipment, variable rate application equipment and private consultants to help them with their 4R program. Farmers were very concerned at the beginning about providing this type of information to government, but once they got over those fears, they overwhelmingly used that program.

That is the foundation of technology on the farm, specifically in western Canada. I see the digitalization no differently. As farmers move from precision agriculture to digital—and digital is the use of data to help make decisions—I think that the government could use a similar playbook to what they had with the environmental farm plans years ago.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

My second question is for Mr. Gilvesy.

You mentioned that it's not just about carbon capture, and that it's important to encourage producers to invest more and to move forward, while keeping this process as voluntary as possible. Here's my question: in setting up an incentive program, how do we recognize the achievements of producers who have already been working hard? We have talked about establishing offsets. Last time, officials told us that it would be done starting in 2018, but there are producers like you who have been making those efforts for a long time. How could the government take that into account?

[Wade Barnes]

I think the reality of it is that there might be a short window to look back. You're not going to be able to, most likely, provide value to the time that the grower started these processes, but I think we should at least look forward and incentivize on an ongoing basis.

Again, some of this can be done through a reduction in the cost of crop insurance or lending to implement some of the technology that's required to create the sustainability processes on the farm. Again, I think the government has done this in the past and it's been successful.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Gilvesy, along the same lines, how could we recognize work that has already been done?

[Bryan Gilvesy]

This is a very challenging question and, fortunately, we have 31 farmer-led PACs across the country that have addressed it. What they feel is that it's important to recognize a farmer's contributions dating all the way back to the Kyoto protocol. We recognize, within our programming, something we call “by your own hand”. For farmers who have gone before and provided stewardship activities for which they have some evidence that they've provided, we work hard to enrol those in the program. That's a classic farmer solution by the leaders in the landscape analysis. We need to recognize those who have gone forward first. Otherwise, we'll be setting very bad precedents where people will tear down trees in order to get carbon credits to plant new ones.

That's where we landed on that.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you.

I really liked your statement earlier. You talked about creating value on the farm, about rewarding growers. You also talked about the fact that ecosystem services should have a market value, and that there are other uses for the tax. It's not just about agricultural production. If you make a contribution to environmental protection, it has to be calculated, it has to be considered. But it's very complex for a government to come up with numbers like that. Would you like to make some concrete recommendations perhaps?

[Bryan Gilvesy]

We do. Our partnership advisory committees have landed a way of pricing projects across the country, but it's through research that we will determine their true value.

We work with Dr. Wanhong Yang at the University of Guelph, who has provided some very impressive IMWEBs models on some of the watersheds where we operate. This model will generate quite specific quantities of how much water those farm sites will filter, how much more biodiversity will come, how much more resilience there is for the downstream communities and how much carbon gets sequestered.

There are ways to get at these numbers and understand the true value. We've learned over the years that some of the early adopters in our program are municipalities, because they know when they invest in farmers upstream they can save a tremendous amount of money on roads not washing out, because we've done wetland programming, for instance.

There's a marketplace for all this work. We can figure that out by comparing the work that farmers do through nature-based solutions to built infrastructure, and then the mathematics become easy.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Gilvesy.

When you say that you have recommendations and such, if you have documents that you have not already provided to the committee, I would encourage you to do so and I will come back to you during the next round of questions before the chair scolds me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

There's no scolding here, Mr. Perron.

Thank you very much.

We'll move on to Mr. MacGregor.

Go ahead for six minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for helping with our study today.

I'll start with Mr. Gilvesy with ALUS. I was struck by your comment in your opening remarks that “programming must create value at the farm gate”.

My wife and I have a small farming property, and it was pretty much a bee desert when we first had it. We had some apple trees, and we took some time to plant a lot of flowering plants all over the place and slowly brought the bees back. We had the benefit of a huge apple crop in subsequent years.

Can you expand on that comment and maybe put it in the context of some specific recommendations you would like to see in our eventual report to the government?

[Bryan Gilvesy]

We are farmer-led. Our whole program is developed from the farmer's perspective. I'm trained as a business person, and I think first and foremost what ALUS attempts to do is to make sure that a significant amount of the value that that farmer creates stays with the farmer. As we've seen in the past, with carbon in particular around the world, so much of the money has disappeared into verification and trading, and all those sorts of things. The money went to Bay Street rather than downtown main street in Tillsonburg, for instance. I would hate to see that.

I think it is important to recognize that this is a unique role—the one I'm talking about—that only farmers can play. When farmers participate in this marketplace it can be much more rewarding than a single-dimension solution, like just paying for one dimension of their work.

Again, I stand for finding value for the farmer. Our new acre project provides a transactional vehicle so that corporations can see their outcomes performed by farmers on the landscape in a way that provides for shared value for the farmer and for the corporation. Ultimately, we hope they all have an epiphany like you had, that by doing activities like this they'll have more pollinators on their land and they'll have bigger crop yields and better fruit.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

You should have seen the collective light bulbs that went off for my wife and me. We've been learning every single year on our property.

Thank you for that.

Mr. Barnes, I'll turn to you. I was also looking, as Mr. Blois was, at the Farmers Edge website. I was looking at the soil sampling services that your company provides. I know a lot of it is looking at the proper mix of nutrients, making sure they're applied at the right time and using that new and emerging technology so that farmers are really not paying more than they need to and are applying the right amount.

Do your soil sampling services also look at soil ecology? Plants have an amazing and very complex relationship with the bacteria in the soil as well, and there's a very interesting interplay between the two. Are you doing anything on soil ecology services?