Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the invitation to appear today on behalf of the Agriculture Carbon Alliance or ACA. My name is Dave Carey. I serve as co-chair along with my colleague, Scott Ross, who I will be splitting my time with. ACA is a first-of-its-kind coalition

Agriculture committee  I would quickly add that I think there is the acknowledgement that the rebate does not make farmers and ranchers whole from the cost of carbon, which will go up on April 1. I also want to point out there's a growing amount of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, that re

Agriculture committee  Just briefly to your point, Mr. Drouin, I think that is a progression in the technology, being able to use pelletization of wood. There is a carbon intensity that comes with that, too. Previously, most biodigesters required farmers to take additional passes on their fields, take

Agriculture committee  Thanks for the question. I'll see if Scott has anything to add at the end. A big driving force behind the ACA coming to fruition was that, after December 2020, “A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy” had around 65 bullet points, many of which had an agri-environmental focu

Agriculture committee  I think he's right. We don't know exactly where the baseline is—the measurement—so, if anything, we need to take a step back. Some of the soil health testing methods we're using are almost a century old. Again, are we looking at carbon saturation, or how much soil can be pulled i

Agriculture committee  Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec have hydro electrification. In Saskatchewan and Alberta, it is not possible. The grid does not allow it, or it's not hydro-based; it's actually coal-based in some regards. Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the invitation to appear today on Bill C-234. My name is Dave Carey. I have the pleasure of serving as co-chair of the Agriculture Carbon Alliance, or ACA. I'm joined today by my fellow co-chair, Scott Ross. I will be sharing my time with him. ACA is a first-of-it

Agriculture committee  Yes. Our 15 national organizations collectively represent 190,000 farm businesses.

Agriculture committee  I don't agree that it would be a fair statement. I think it's important to note that when it comes to innovation, the actual farmers who are purchasing natural gas and propane are not the innovators in that sector. They are customers, just like we would be as a household. I thi

Agriculture committee  There's nothing that's scalable or viable at a macro level or an action level. There are niche things that we could certainly do, such as pelletization in small instances, but I think what we saw in the first panel was a lot of theory. What Scott and I represent as the ACA is the

Agriculture committee  Yes. There's certainly validity to some biomass digesters on-farm, but you would be increasing your diesel use by taking your tractor on-farm, and your labour costs. You then need to dry that feedstock and store it in some manner, which creates a lot of fire hazards, particularly

Agriculture committee  I can start. Currently for oilseed and grain drying and for the heating and cooling of livestock barns, there just isn't another technology commercially available at any sort of scalable, economically viable level. As for a rebate versus an exemption, farmers during the season

Agriculture committee  I think it's very hard to create a taxation policy like this that actually applies to sensitivities on-farm, and farmers, as has been alluded to by my colleague at the CFIB, are getting pennies on the dollar back. As well, the turnaround time is 18 to 24 months down the road, as

Agriculture committee  I can start. I think that when we look at heating or cooling buildings, we need to be very clear that those would be livestock buildings and greenhouses. There's no intention, I think, in this legislation to consider housing costs or the heating and cooling of homes. Infrastru

Agriculture committee  I don't want to speculate as to what the government's thinking was, but I think they wanted to be sufficiently broad while appropriately narrow. I think the biggest confusion that we had at that time—or now—is that only gasoline and diesel were included, as opposed to natural gas