I'm Don McCabe and I'm a farmer from Ontario.
The reality is, as Nevin has pointed out, Canada has a problem and there are solutions on that landscape. That landscape can be used to a maximum efficiency, but it's also animal production. I know that cattle, in terms of greenhouse gases, have been nailed for being terrible and we shouldn't be eating beef and all the rest of it, but I'm here to offer a different story.
We feel there is 1.5 million tonnes that can be brought to marketplace if it existed to address that. The reality with those ruminants is that their first stomach does enteric fermentation. They are able to take cellulosic material, as in grass. They have four-wheel drive and they can go up the sides of hills that I can't go up with a tractor and bring that cellulose back. By the time it's back it's been turned into protein and milk that I want to use. We can reduce that enteric fermentation with technology that's now emerging in the marketplace.
At the same time, there is some stuff that comes out the back. The bottom line is it's sometimes labelled as waste. I'm here to tell you agriculture doesn't have waste. We only have underutilized, underpriced opportunity, because waste usually means it's useless. Those are nutrients and an energy source which again, we can harness to go to the future.
In the process of moving through all these different processes that Nevin has touched on and I've highlighted on the livestock side, we need to extend further into the issues of the yield of our crops, which are expanding rapidly. I will give you Ontario stats, because they are what I'm most familiar with, but they are also a symptom within the country.
Between 2011 and 2016, we were losing in Ontario 350 acres a day, according to the census—and before that there were higher rates of land loss—due to urbanization. If it had not been for the yield increases that we are now seeing, whether it's canola or corn, wheat or soybeans, or all the plethora of crops, we would not be able to do what we do in Canada.
With those yield increases, it has brought us more residue. From the issue that we've harvested, first, the crop, now we have the leftovers, and there's too much residue there. That means it's a problem for the farmer. Society doesn't know and doesn't care. It's our problem to solve and we wish to offer you a solution.
That solution will be using those residues in the forms of bioproducts. We can cascade down through from composites, to chemicals, to fuels, to methane, and finally, if we make an electron, we've blown the energy system and we've got to return to it all.
You, with the power that you have, can give us an opportunity to get a framework and bring a greater 30% contribution to our intended nationally determined contribution that will be discussed in Poland next week.
Canada is embarrassing itself by not harnessing biological systems that we have in place. We're here to offer you this opportunity with a bit of ingenuity.
Thank you for your time.