Agriculture committee  I've no idea.

Agriculture committee  What's the biggest threat to our soil? I might say it's loss of organic matter, but that's driven largely by my personal experience. What did he say?

Agriculture committee  Sure. I've had less experience with shelterbelting, but one thing that has turned out to be quite beneficial, not only for wind erosion and rain erosion but also in just providing more services in general, has been to plant strips with native habitat—for example, native prairie.

Agriculture committee  I imagine it would be similar here with shelterbelts.

Agriculture committee  In the trade-off between agriculture and water quality, there are great trade-offs there, because a lot of the way we increase agricultural productivity is to increase fertilizer, and that has obvious implications for water quality. That's something we face every day, and certain

Agriculture committee  Yes, whether to use zero till or to incorporate crop parts back in depends on what you're trying to manage for. Zero till is great for managing for phosphorus and some aspects of water quality, but it turns out to be less useful or sometimes even detrimental in managing nitrogen.

Agriculture committee  That's actually not a part of agriculture that I know that much about, so I don't want to categorically say there's a place or not a place in Canadian agriculture.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Tiling, basically, is a system for delivering phosphorus straight to our waterways.

Agriculture committee  That's right, it's in the absence of retention ponds. Most of the soils work that I've done is in Quebec, and what I've seen there is that most of it's going pretty straight into drainage ditches. We need to do it in many areas when we have compacted soil and we have relatively w

Agriculture committee  Well, there are a lot of differences in livestock fertilizer, depending on how we're applying that, when we're applying it, and what sorts of quantities we are talking about. Is it from grass-fed pasture beef, or are we talking about a feedlot system? In the area around here, a

Agriculture committee  I think Mr. Michaud has mainly covered this aspect. I'll just say that understanding where we're at with respect to the natural capital that's driving these agricultural systems is quite important for soil, water, and all of the other mechanisms that are driving agriculture.

Agriculture committee  Are there policies that are having a detrimental effect on water management? There are certainly policies in place that I think are probably keeping farmers from doing what they know or believe is best for water quality—even, for example, some of our regulations about how we mana

Agriculture committee  I haven't done studies on precision agriculture, but I am familiar with that literature. It does reduce the amount of fertilizer we use, but with great inputs of capital and great dependence on technology. There is a trade-off there between resilience and our ability to be flexib

Agriculture committee  It strikes me that this would be a very large increase to be able to make without a lot of other changes. You were asking earlier about how we can organize across levels of government to achieve the sorts of things we want to achieve in farming, including these sorts of increas