Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for holding this hearing.
My name is Gillian Flies. Alongside my husband, we own and operate The New Farm, near Creemore, Ontario, where we produce certified regenerative organic vegetables, salad greens and livestock.
We are seeing the impacts of climate change first-hand on our farm. Last August alone, we had three rain events of more than two inches in under an hour, including one of three inches in under 30 minutes. It completely flooded our fields. However, thanks to our soil health and structure, the water soaked in within 30 minutes, allowing us to harvest our whole crop, while our neighbours' crops were severely damaged.
Our soil health is key to our climate resistance. Through our practices, we've increased our soil organic matter from 3% to about 5% to 6% across the whole farm. For every 1% increase in organic matter, soils can hold an extra 25,000 gallons of water per acre. Compared with a farm with about 3% organic matter or less, which is the average, we can absorb an extra 75,000 gallons per acre on our farm and survive these storms when they come.
We've achieved this through practices such as no-till and using tarps on our vegetables and salad greens. The untilled soil stays 6° to 9° cooler under the tarp than the tilled soil since it holds more moisture, allowing for better germination and less irrigation. We have successfully integrated livestock, including cattle, pigs and chickens, to rotationally graze our cover crops annually, further reducing our reliance on external inputs and input costs while naturally fertilizing our soils. Research shows that healthy soil also increases the nutrient density of our crops. For example, the Bionutrient Food Association found that regeneratively grown vegetables had 21% more nutrients than U.S. averages for eight crops.
A resilient domestic food supply is critical for food security. Canada imports three-quarters of our fruits and vegetables, including much from California. This leaves us vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and supply chain disruption. In 2018, when the drought in California and the simultaneous hurricane Michael in Florida brought shortages, our cooler soils allowed us to continue producing when others couldn't. We sold out so fast that we had to close our farm two weeks early that year. At the peak of the COVID pandemic, farmers' markets and small-scale producers, many organic, were able to continue supplying Canadians with fresh produce.
This underscores the need to increase not only domestic production but also on-farm resilience. To do this, we must be able to compete with cheap imports, including from the United States. Like many horticulture farms, we participate in the seasonal agricultural worker program, paying fair wages and complying with the higher standards of this program. The committee should consider solutions, such as wage subsidies, to address this imbalance.
We also need better support through the business risk management programs. As a small, diversified operation, these programs are not accessible to us. We need affordable emergency and whole-farm coverage. The BRM programs should also account for and encourage the risk mitigation impacts of soil health practices.
The new climate programs need to be adapted to support innovation on farms like ours. We have not been able to access programs like the on-farm climate action fund despite demonstrating practices that are adopted widely across the agricultural sector.