Good afternoon.
Clean and green—my background is agriculture and agronomy. I built a very large consulting business and one of the first carbon credit trading companies in North America.
In Canada, as of last year, we had about 27 million acres of wheat, and we had 22 million acres of canola. When you look at canola, being about 40% oil with a 90% extraction rate, we could convert each tonne of canola oil into 360 litres of biodiesel. For every tonne of CPS wheat that we grow, which is a specific kind of wheat that is generated or grown for the ethanol industry, we could extract about 425 litres of ethanol. When you put this in the context of the opportunity for Canada to grow additional crops—and I know there's always a trade-off between growing crops for food and growing crops as fuel—Canada has a great potential to increase our production of crops to meet this new biofuel market.
Our average wheat yield last year was 51 bushels per acre, and our average canola yield was about 40 bushels per acre, which is about one tonne per acre.
There is a lot of opportunity for us as Canadians to grow more crops that can feed into the biofuel industry. However, we must temper the countervailing policies, such as a perceived reduction of nitrous oxide emissions. That is fine to achieve, but if you achieved it through the absolute reduction of fertilizer, you would catastrophically hamstring our ability as farmers to meet biofuel. Also, the difference in an absolute 30% reduction in fertilizer to meet the nitrous oxide target would mean 0.000028 of 1% to the global greenhouse gas economy
The opportunity that we have in agriculture is to increase that production and increase those yields, carving off part of our production into the biofuel economy. The excess could also be used in biomass—for example, oat hulls. The hulls that remain from oats can be used to burn very cleanly in biomass digester furnaces.
The idea that Canada could be clean and green is really important. We have some of the lowest environmental impact quotients when it comes to how much input we're using to produce our crops, and we have some of the highest no-till or zero-till farming on planet Earth, which makes us some of the best conservation farmers on the planet.
To be clean and green, let's use agriculture as part of the solution to meet this new challenge we're facing.