Evidence of meeting #16 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was soil.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Susie Miller  Executive Director, Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Crops
Erin Gowriluk  Executive Director, Grain Growers of Canada
Duane Thompson  Chair, Environment Committee, Canadian Cattlemen's Association
Fawn Jackson  Director, Policy and International Relations, Canadian Cattlemen's Association
Eric Toensmeier  Director, Perennial Agriculture Institute
Rod MacRae  Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, As an Individual
Ryan Cullen  Small-Scale and Urban Agricultural Entrepreneur, City of Greens Farm, As an Individual

11:55 a.m.

Director, Policy and International Relations, Canadian Cattlemen's Association

Fawn Jackson

Yes, I really think that we can keep it at a higher level because I think that's where we're going to be able to really drive the amount of change we need, and then, as we get into the finer details—perhaps you want to supply a habitat for a specific species or perhaps you want to increase wetland retention in one specific area—I think that's when you can get down to those smaller details. Perhaps it's working on the infrastructure that can support that, such as having the certified sustainable beef program, which 17% of our beef producers are under now.

Those are the types of tools that would be able to really home in on some of the very specific details, but to go back to that sort of land loss, keeping it at a high level is going to be very important for the short-term solutions that we need. As the Nature United paper said, by 2030 we need to stop land conversion.

11:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Thank you, Ms. Jackson.

Thank you very much, Mr. Perron.

Go ahead, Mr. MacGregor. You have the floor now.

11:55 a.m.

NDP

Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Gowriluk, on Bill C-234 the discussions are going to be very similar to what we had in the previous Parliament with Bill C-206. I remember that when that bill was before committee we had witnesses, people who were involved in the technology, and they said that anything to replace propane and natural gas was probably at least 10 years off to be commercially viable.

We also had a witness who appeared for this current study who warned our committee against systems that may take leftover plant residue, crop residue, off the fields to use that as a fuel source, because it is very important, she said, for increasing the carbon in the soil.

No matter which way you look at it, there's a trade-off.

From your members' perspective, have any of your members started using alternative systems? Do they want to see the federal government put more research into this? I know that even with natural gas prices, with or without the carbon tax, that can still be a very volatile fuel source on international markets, so that stability won't always be there as much as farmers would like.

Please give us what comments you have on that.

May 2nd, 2022 / noon

Executive Director, Grain Growers of Canada

Erin Gowriluk

Absolutely. Thank you very much for the question.

As outlined in my initial comments, when we had an opportunity to survey our members in preparation for today's appearance, it was really all about efficiency and about cost savings. Many of the practices they've adopted make good environmental sense, but they just make good business sense. If you have an alternative to natural gas and propane, which is increasingly expensive, farmers would look to adopt that, but it has to offer cost savings and it has to be efficient.

To your question with respect to whether many of our farmers, or any of our farmers, who dry grain are currently using an alternative to natural gas and propane, the answer would be no. It simply doesn't exist yet.

I think that's why you see sector-wide support, even beyond grain growers, for Bill C-234, because we recognize that it's not going to achieve its policy intent, which is to encourage a practice change and for Canadian farmers to use alternative fuel sources, which are simply not available right now for the purposes of grain drying.

Noon

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Thank you, Ms. Gowriluk.

Thank you, Mr. MacGregor. Unfortunately, that's time. That concludes our first panel.

Colleagues, I don't do it often, but I'm going to ask a quick question of Mr. Thompson.

I recognize you're from Saskatchewan and I had the privilege of being there a couple of weeks ago. I visited one of your colleagues, Scott Greiner, near Indian Head.

It was eye-opening, of course, when talking about land management and some of the pressures that are on farmers in terms of what crops to bring forward. Some farms are mixed, but we know that commodities are through the roof right now. He talked about some of the sloughs and some of the wetlands that exist and how's there's an inherent pressure to make them even more maximized from a crop perspective.

The government had announced some programs around wetland preservation. We know there have been partnerships with Ducks Unlimited. Can you speak to whether those programs are landing for farmers, whether it be cattle farmers like yourself or perhaps crop farmers?

Are those programs working and how can we expedite them, particularly with some of the pressures that are being faced to preserve those wetlands and grasslands?

Noon

Chair, Environment Committee, Canadian Cattlemen's Association

Duane Thompson

There's a significant pressure on conversion of any possible acre that can grow the high-value annual crops that are being produced right now. As a couple of previous speakers have mentioned, farming is such a high-stakes game now. The amount of money in and out is immense, so when producers see lands that could potentially turn a few more dollars into their net return, they are really motivated to make the most of it.

It really is important that we encourage some of that land, because a good bit of it is better left in wetlands and left in habitat, if policy can be drafted and a lot of consideration made to say, okay, you could make it a couple of acres, but it's worth this to stay in wetlands or to stay in grasslands. You drive around western Canada and there are a tremendous number of acres that should not be farmed. It should be converted back to a perennial cover program as Fawn mentioned.

It's really important that we think about that. I would suggest it could be in the millions of acres that could be promoted to be that kind of cover.

Noon

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

Colleagues, thank you for the brief indulgence.

Thank you to our witnesses. Ms. Miller, Ms. Gowriluk, Mr. Thompson and Ms. Jackson, thank you for your time today.

Colleagues, we're going to take a very brief moment to get our new witnesses in, and then we're going to get right to it so that we can try to get some time for questions.

12:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Colleagues, welcome back.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, for the quick changeover with our witnesses.

We're going to get right to opening statements so that we can get to questions, particularly with the impending vote.

Today I'm pleased to be able to welcome Eric Toensmeier, who is the director of the Perennial Agriculture Institute, which I believe is connected with Yale University, although it's not in my notes; Dr. Rod MacRae, who serves at the faculty of environmental and urban change at York University; and Mr. Ryan Cullen, who is a small-scale and urban agriculture entrepreneur at City of Greens farm.

Each of you will have five minutes for opening remarks and we will get right to that.

Mr. Toensmeier, I'll start with you, for five minutes.

12:05 p.m.

Eric Toensmeier Director, Perennial Agriculture Institute

Thank you, honourable members.

I hope today to share my experience as a former senior fellow for Project Drawdown and researcher on agricultural climate change mitigation. My knowledge relates to science and practices rather than policy. That part I will leave to you.

Climate change is kind of like an overflowing kitchen sink. Emissions are the water flowing from the faucet, which is now pouring onto the floor. The first thing to do is to turn off the faucet. That's reducing emissions, turning off the faucet. The next thing is to mop up the wet floor. This is carbon sequestration. Both are necessary, and neither is enough alone.

In the area of agriculture, we have several approaches to mitigation.

The first is to demand reduction, for example, reducing food waste and shifting diets to foods with low emissions and low land demand, although food can have positive or negative effects depending on how it is produced.

Next is reducing emissions from agricultural production itself.

Third is to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in soils and biomass, a process called carbon sequestration. Increasing productivity on the farmland we have can help to reduce deforestation pressure elsewhere, a process called sustainable intensification.

Finally, the supply chain is a significant source of emissions, including transport, processing, retail and more.

Each approach is important, and together they can have a powerful impact.

According to FAO, Canada's top five sources of agricultural emissions are land conversion, farming on peat soils, on-farm energy use, enteric fermentation from the digestion of cattle and other ruminant livestock, and synthetic fertilizers.

Canada has a powerful tool kit of mitigation practices to draw on. I love seeing the agricultural climate solutions grants program that targets cover crops, nutrient management, shelterbelts and rotational grazing. These are all excellent priorities.

A number of additional tools are available to address your key emission sources like limiting land conversion, re-wetting peatland soils, on-farm energy conservation and using forages with high tannin levels to reduce methane. Returning sovereignty of forest land to indigenous people is also a powerful tool for protecting forest carbon.

When it comes to carbon sequestration, it's important to note that some practices have a much higher per acre impact than others. They're not all equal. Generally speaking, the more trees, the more carbon. This is why agroforestry practices that integrate trees with crops and/or livestock are especially powerful.

Carbon sequestration has other limits as well. It does slow down dramatically after several decades, and the carbon that is held can be re-released by climate disasters or a return to the previous farming practices.

To come back to the notion of the overflowing sink, the bucket for the mop is only so large, and it can be knocked over. Carbon sequestration is essential, but isn't the only approach we should take.

While many emission reduction practices are new and were created just for mitigation, this is not true for carbon sequestration. These practices were developed because they're good for the farm and/or the surrounding environment. They offer many co-benefits like climate change adaptation, which is critical because, while no farm on its own can mitigate all of climate change, every farm must be resilient to the new conditions in which they're farming.

Canadian farmers are facing increased rainfall intensity, which exacerbates erosion. Many of these carbon sequestration practices reduce erosion, and all of them improve soil organic matter, which greatly enhances soil water-holding capacity for drought resilience, among other benefits.

The proposed private member's bill, Bill C-203, an act respecting soil conservation and soil health, would create a national strategy to greatly accelerate the adoption of practices that sequester soil carbon and assist farmers to adapt to our changing climate.

Thank you once again, and I welcome the opportunity to answer any questions.

12:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Mr. MacRae for up to five minutes.

12:10 p.m.

Dr. Rod MacRae Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, As an Individual

Thanks very much for the opportunity to appear before you today.

I urge the committee to examine how to improve our policy execution. We have an implementation problem in the Canadian food and agriculture system as it relates to environmental improvement. It's a decades-old problem. It cuts across all levels of government, all governing parties, elected and unelected officials, and their systems. Nobody seems to want to address it and I'm hoping you will. Given what's in play and the potential of Canadian agriculture to contribute to environmental sustainability, this seems to be a moment for change.

We do have many good aspirations and policy statements, and in some cases we have very good targets, but the instruments that we're using will not permit us to meet the sustainability goals we've set out for the food and agriculture sector. All the main programs for environmental sustainability and agriculture suffer from the same kinds of deficiencies. This includes the Canadian agricultural partnership, the on-farm climate change fund and climate change solutions. These problems are essentially that they're largely voluntary, focus on grants or contribution agreements and are not targeted. They focus on best management practices and not systems change. They focus on the supply side without demand-side elements, and they have limited transition planning associated with them.

These instruments are not adequate for the scale of our challenges. We have to improve our instrument choices, our designs, application and integration. I elaborate on more suitable designs on my research website. The clerk has the link to that site.

Thanks for inviting me, again, and I look forward to the discussion.

12:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Thank you, Mr. MacRae.

We'll now move to Mr. Cullen for up to five minutes of opening remarks.

12:10 p.m.

Ryan Cullen Small-Scale and Urban Agricultural Entrepreneur, City of Greens Farm, As an Individual

Good day, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

My name's Ryan Cullen. I manage a small-scale—in our case, 10 acres—diversified farm. We predominately grow market garden vegetables intensively, but are integrating small-scale livestock systems and small fruit and nut tree systems in a rural and peri-urban context. I've also designed and managed a small-scale, high-tech and high-yield urban farm in an academic setting at our local college, while also learning and getting training from some of the leading small-scale and regenerative farmers around the world. I'm focused on demonstrating the viability of small-scale, regenerative agriculture farms, teaching and training a new generation of farmers and growers and redefining the paradigms in horticulture, food and farming and how they connect to our everyday life.

Regardless of the context of any of these farms, I want to stress the importance of how some of them are being managed.

On our farm, we plan and manage our farm holistically following regenerative farming principles, meaning we consider how our resource base, our decisions, our production systems and outcomes not only affect our bottom line but also positively affect our environment and the people in our community. Regenerative agriculture is all about managing holistically, so we make decisions that are not just based on economics but include the social and environmental impacts and outcomes as well.

Building soil, as we've heard through many of the speakers today, is an important part as well. It has the power to sequester carbon, cycle nutrients and produce life. We focus on systems that improve soil health, not destroy it, whether it be no-till cover crop systems, not spraying herbicides and pesticides, or using organic inputs.

We try to mimic ecosystem processes, understanding how nature functions in wholes, recognizing natural laws and patterns in nature and how we can use nature to create a niche for our production systems and our economies, and integrating these laws, patterns and systems into our production systems and our everyday farm business. We strive to use local inputs for local outputs, capitalizing on circular economies using wastes, particularly our own, as resources, and integrating our systems so the inputs for the farm come from the farm.

We focus on mobile, scalable infrastructure that's low tech, innovative, energy efficient and useful technology applied with low capital costs and minimal fossil fuel use. We're investing in management and information, not expensive infrastructure with high capital costs.

Our model's direct-to-consumer sales and certified by our customers. We very much meet and exceed organic standards, but don't believe we should have to pay for certification to demonstrate we have safe and high-quality products. We maintain transparency about what we do and how we do it by inviting the public and our customers to be part of the experience, to see how their food's grown, to understand how we do it and educate people on where their food is coming from, trying to put the farm at the centre of the community and making it an integral part of the social fabric.

We're ecologically, socially and economically regenerative. We're attempting to build up multiple forms of capital, not just economic forms. We're trying to create a resource base in harmony with nature, society and ourselves that's sustainable, viable and resilient. If farms are going to be regenerative, we need to work to a triple bottom line that works to keep our business, the regeneration of the land and our customer satisfaction in equal consideration.

What we need in agriculture are production systems at various scales fit to their context. Whether it's 1,000 acres in Saskatchewan or a quarter-acre in the city, we need integrated systems that permeate the social fabric of our lives, produce high-quality food for people and grow it locally with local labour accessible and convenient to the local population. We need systems that regenerate our landscape, cities and countryside and are integrated into the communities, economies and environments we're living in today.

Production systems that are viable agricultural models and use useful technologies already exist and are being practised. We need to promote these systems and models and promote local inputs and outputs, create local jobs from a skilled local workforce and integrate these systems into our local communities and economies. We need to take a holistic approach that is regenerative, and that's what we're trying to do.

Thank you.

12:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Kody Blois

Thank you, Mr. Cullen.

For the benefit of our witnesses, we are expecting a procedural vote in the House, where bells may start at about 12:30 eastern. We have permission to go for about another 15 minutes after the bells happen, so we should be able to get one full round of questions in. For the benefit of our colleagues, if folks want to share time, that is your prerogative.

We're going to start with the Conservatives. I believe it's Mr. Falk who's up first.

It's over to you.

12:15 p.m.

Conservative

Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to our witnesses for your presentations this morning, they were very interesting. We'll try to glean a little bit more information.

I'd like to start with Mr. Toensmeier.

You talked about increasing productivity. Do you have any specific examples of how a person could do that?

12:15 p.m.

Director, Perennial Agriculture Institute

Eric Toensmeier

One interesting thing about that category is that there are perhaps hundreds of different ways of doing it, from a very conventional approach of increasing fertilizer use and integrated pest management and so on, to the integration of trees with crops so that you can produce timber and crops on the same land. On 100 acres you could produce what would take 130 or 140 acres to produce separately.

There are lots of different ways to do that.

12:20 p.m.

Conservative

Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB

Okay. I want to get back to a comment you just made about increasing fertilizer.

When it comes to agriculture, part of this government's objective is to reduce fertilizer input by 30%, yet they've also indicated in this last budget that they want to increase our agriculture exports from $55 billion to $85 billion annually.

Is that a doable aspiration?

12:20 p.m.

Director, Perennial Agriculture Institute

Eric Toensmeier

I would suspect that would bring some challenges with it.

In terms of increasing fertilizer use, that refers more to areas where it is underutilized, which is not the case in most of North America. I do work globally, so I may have implied something incorrectly there.

12:20 p.m.

Conservative

Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB

You also talked about shifting food demand. Can you extrapolate a little bit more on what you mean by that?

12:20 p.m.

Director, Perennial Agriculture Institute

Eric Toensmeier

Certainly. It's clear that some foods tend to have much higher emissions than others, both directly from their production and by using more land than other crops. If you can shift diets to some degree to some of those lower-emission foods, that can reduce emissions from agriculture.

That's sort of a demand-side approach, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is getting more excited about, for example. It does seem like a really important component of the whole thing.

One possible approach to doing that would be through just changing what kind of food is served in schools.

12:20 p.m.

Conservative

Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB

Thank you.

Mr. Cullen, I would like to ask you a few questions too.

You farm 10 acres. You say you supply the local market. What do you mean by “local”?

12:20 p.m.

Small-Scale and Urban Agricultural Entrepreneur, City of Greens Farm, As an Individual

Ryan Cullen

We're very much concentrated just outside of an urban centre. If you're familiar with the Durham region—Oshawa, Whitby, Ajax, Pickering.... We have a 10-acre farm with almost an acre of market garden and we're able to feed 150 to 200 families a week.

We sell our products at local farmers' markets within the city. We have partnerships with local businesses that allow us to go direct to our consumer. We invite people to the farm in our local community to see what we're doing, to learn how we're growing and to buy products from us right off the farm. We're very much connected in a direct-to-consumer relationship.

12:20 p.m.

Conservative

Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB

You're saying your farm would entirely supply 150 to 200 families' food requirements for a week.

12:20 p.m.

Small-Scale and Urban Agricultural Entrepreneur, City of Greens Farm, As an Individual

Ryan Cullen

It wouldn't entirely.

Currently, we're growing vegetables. We specialize in salad greens and market garden vegetables. We have eggs as well. We currently don't grow any livestock, so there's no meat, dairy or anything like that coming off our farm. We supply vegetables, farm-fresh eggs, honey and things like that on a weekly basis.

12:20 p.m.

Conservative

Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB

Okay.

Do you have a way of sustaining these products through winter?