That's not the case for all members, but thank you for your honesty, Mr. Chair.
My name is Richard Phillips. I am with the Grain Growers of Canada.
In the first photo you'll see the smiling family with the children. This is Franck Groeneweg. Franck farms just outside of Regina, Saskatchewan, about three hours south of where my farm is.
Franck is originally from France. He comes from south of Paris, actually. Franck is a farmer with 7,500 acres to put in, in the spring, and 7,500 acres to take off in the fall.
Franck is a very modern farmer. He uses the most modern technologies and crops and machinery available to farm in as environmentally friendly and sustainable a way as possible.
The next photo there is a picture of a field. I just want to touch on some things there and point out some stuff to you. This is a half section, which is 120 acres, so it's one mile long and half a mile wide. And 283 acres are zero till. Zero till means that Franck just goes in and seeds directly and doesn't move the soil around, cultivating or working it up to control weeds.
That 283 acres you see is carbon sequestration. He has 37 acres, or about 11% of the land, set aside for wildlife conservation.
This is what a lot of farmers will do. I think you'll find most farmers, where there is a chance to preserve some habitat and farm efficiently, will do so.
There are some small lines indicated. This is where the water has been running across the field, and he's seeded some grass in there. When you seed the grass in there, you just go through with your machinery. You just lift your machinery up as you go over top of it and then you drop it down again. That allows you to go almost a full mile with your machinery.
Today's machines are much larger than the farm machinery we used to have. You simply can't be turning around the way we did when we used to farm, in and around all the potholes and all the slough. So most farmers have cleaned up their land to have these long runs, because they make efficient use of their machinery and their time.
In total, of Franck's 7,500 acres, he has just over 900 acres set aside for environmental purposes. Zero tillage, with less soil disturbance, provides for wildlife habitat conservation.
On the next page there is some stuff on Ducks Unlimited I want to go through with you. There is a partnership that we, as farmers, work with very carefully across Canada. It's not just on the prairies.
There is a photo here of what winter wheat stubble looks like. If you plant winter wheat in the winter, wheat stubble will trap snow through the winter, and in the spring you don't have to work the soil at all because the wheat just regenerates and comes up. That allows the wildlife to nest in there. There is a photo of an egg in a plant providing nesting cover for ducks there.
On the next page you'll see the eggs again. If you look closely, you can actually see a duck sitting in the wheat field there, in the photo on page 8.
That's the sort of stuff you get if you can avoid working your fields at all in the spring, but that's not reality for a lot of farmers because we don't have winter canola that we can plant in the fall, and we don't have a lot of winter crops, and even for winter wheat there is a limit to how many acres you can grow in there, because of winter hardiness, as you go further north.
There are also other things we do with Ducks Unlimited, such as delayed hay cuts, for example. If you have a forage crop and you leave it a little bit longer, there is a chance for the ducks to hatch out of their eggs and get back to the water before the hay is cut.
Those are the sorts of things we do. Again, it's an economic partnership with Ducks Unlimited.
The last photo is just of the ducks. I just want to say that farmers do like being good stewards of our land; we do like habitat, and we do like having water fowl and wildlife around.
As Mr. Bonnett mentioned, though, we need partnerships with society, because there are some areas in which society can play a role in helping us protect that land. He mentioned the ALUS program. You'll hear more about that on Thursday from Doug Chorney, from Keystone Agricultural Producers, with which society has partnered to preserve land and set it aside.
I also want to bring back a reality. I want to go back to this picture of the field and tell you a true story about some land I bought three years ago. Looking at how we can drive the tractor almost a mile up and down, I bought some land, and it had a lot of bigger trees and potholes. I could not find a single farmer to farm that land for me, because there was no place he could even drive a half a mile without turning the big machinery around.
All the farmers said, “I'm sorry, but even if you give it to me for free, I'm not going to farm it, because I don't like that much overlap in my chemicals and my fertilizers and my seed. It's just not worth the trouble, time, and hassle.”
We cleared off a bunch of the bush on the land so that people could make a half-mile run. Now, we did leave places for wildlife at the sides, but the reality today is that I see a lot of tree rows being knocked down so that people can make those longer runs. Just for the reality and the economics of farming, that's what's happening. I see this a lot in Ontario.
We did leave some bush, and I have some bees on my land, but at the end of the day, in order to allow farming to continue commercially, I couldn't find anybody to do it unless I did some clearing of land. That's the reality of what we face as farmers.
We want to be good stewards. If we can work with society in general to set aside more land for preservation, that's great.
Thank you very much. I look forward to the questions and some open discussion.