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Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, my name is Naresh Thevathasan. I'm an associate professor and leader of the agroforestry research and development and woody biomass research initiative at the University of Guelph.
I would like the thank the standing committee honourable members for the invitation extended to me to make this presentation today. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, , for his vision and leadership in the agricultural sector, especially with respect to the implementation of the agricultural greenhouse gases program.
Agroforestry is a globally recommended land use system where trees are deliberately integrated into agricultural ecosystems in order to derive environmental, economic, ecological, and social benefits. However, its impact on climate change mitigation and adaptation in Canadian agriculture systems has not yet been fully realized. This is irrespective of the Canadian government's commitment to research in temperate agroforestry through the agricultural greenhouse gases program.
If you exclude classes 1 and 2 agriculture lands, and if you integrate trees into classes 3 to 6 agriculture lands, we are blessed with about 46 million hectares in Canada. Integrating trees in those lands could significantly increase the terrestrial carbon sequestration potential for Canada.
In this context of introducing trees into the agriculture landscape, I would like to recommend three temperate agroforestry land use systems to this committee. I will quickly present some visual representations of these land use systems in order to enhance understanding of what types of land use systems I'm talking about. I will not describe the photographs, but when I mention the names of the land use systems, I will quickly flip through the photos that I brought.
The first land use system is a tree-based intercropping system. The second one is a riparian buffer system. This shot was taken in P.E.I. The third land use system is the windbreak system, commonly seen in the Prairies. The fourth land use system is the silvopastoral system, and I can assure the committee that these cows are not tied to the trees. They are resting. In peak summer months, they get heat stress, and therefore they look for shade. The fifth system is a biomass production system, or bio-energy. The sixth land use system is the forest farming system, where you integrate economic crops into the woodlots.
Here are some of the overall research findings. Irrespective of the type of agroforestry land use system, all can contribute toward climate change mitigation and adaptation while providing ecosystem services. Agroforestry land use systems are not a choice between environment and economics, as they enhance both. Agroforestry systems are not a choice between food versus fibre. If properly integrated into agricultural systems, they provide both. Therefore, I have listed some of the major outcomes, both economic and environmental, that can be derived by adopting these land use systems in Canadian agricultural landscapes.
First, the photographs that I showed, irrespective of the type, all enhance system-level carbon sequestration. If you compare with a conventional agricultural system, they can sequester between 200% and 300% more carbon.
Second, they provide better utilization of the soil nutrients via nutrient cycling mechanisms that result in less residual inorganic soil nitrogen, which is a precursor for nitrous oxide emissions from the agricultural landscape.
Third, they help with nutrient leaching reduction, which contributes towards maintaining water quality.
Fourth, they all enhance biodiversity.
Fifth, they can create climate-smart and resilient land use systems, thereby increasing economic returns to farming communities across Canada.
Globally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recent COP22 conference, held in Morocco in November 2016, highly recommended agroforestry land use systems to be adopted in developing countries in order to promote climate-smart agricultural systems, while contributing to climate mitigation efforts by sequestering carbon both in trees and in soils. The same sentiment has also been echoed by the Food and Agriculture Organization in its policy paper released in 2013.
With regard to the challenges and opportunities for Canada, it has no specific and targeted policy in place for agroforestry land use systems. As such, agroforestry adoption rates in Canada, irrespective of the government’s commitment to research in temperate agroforestry, are low. In the United States, there is a targeted policy put in place by the United States Department of Agriculture. The policy is an agroforestry strategic framework, and is called “Enriching our Lives With Trees That Work”.
As I speak, field shelterbelts or windbreaks are being removed in the Prairies. Field windbreaks have become a farm operational issue, and, in some cases, trees in the windbreaks are also dying. This trend needs to be addressed with urgency. There is a lack of riparian plantings along the agricultural streams across Canada, especially in eastern Canada, where heavy non-point sources of pollutants and soils are entering the water bodies.
Tree-based farming systems are historically familiar to many first nations communities. Therefore, a concerted effort should be taken to initiate dialogue with them in order to reintroduce agroforestry land use systems on first nations lands to bring about food and income security for them.
Introduction of silvopastoral systems in the developing agricultural lands of the clay belt regions of Ontario and Quebec should be given urgency to enhance terrestrial carbon sequestration.
I would like to leave some recommendations with the standing committee.
Number one is that a Canadian agroforestry strategic framework policy is required. This should be led by the federal government in consultation with researchers across Canada, federal and provincial government officials, first nations communities, conservation authorities, and landowners. This document is required to provide the strategic guidance for science, adoption, and integration of agroforestry practice into agricultural landscapes.
Federal leadership in agroforestry is required, such as that provided by the former Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's agroforestry development centre at Indian Head, Saskatchewan.
Programs that promote the integration of trees into agricultural landscapes are needed if Canadians wish to economically and environmentally benefit.
Finally, appropriate agroforestry education, research, training, and knowledge transfer protocols should be developed to promote sustainable agroforestry systems in Canada.
Thank you once again for the invitation and for the opportunity to make this presentation.
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Thank you very much for the invitation. Again, my name is Pierre Desrochers. I'm an associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. The remarks I prepared for you were co-produced with my colleague Joanna Szurmak, who is an electrical engineer and information specialist by training. I did send you images but I cannot unfortunately display them on the screens today, so I hope you have the images with you. With apologies to the translators, I will describe my talk around the images rather than follow the script that I sent you.
Obviously there are three points that I want to address. The first is climate change, considered in broad, historic terms, and then soil and water conservation.
If you look at the third image, you see that the point I want to make should be an obvious one. It is that climate has always changed. Whenever we go back in the geological record, we see that climate has changed in the recent past. Obviously, if we had tried to schedule this meeting here 20,000 years ago, which is really a blip in terms of geological time, we would have had a minor problem as we would have had to deal with a glacier that was nearly two kilometres thick. Again, that's only 20,000 years ago; that's nothing.
Because climate changes all the time, the next image shows you that climate change is a consideration for every generation. I have some quotes from The New York Times. In 1895, people thought that another glacial period was about to begin. In 1952, it was a “Next Great Deluge” because the ice cap was going to melt. Then in 1959, we have “Rising World Heat”. In 1974, the “Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea”. Again, climate changes all the time and every generation rediscovers the problem.
If you go back to the past, you used to throw virgins into volcanoes or else you would burn more witches as the climate was changing. People have always blamed themselves for climate change, but a few things to keep in mind in the context of this committee is that if you look at the majority of models that have been made in the recent past, they all tend to predict favourable outcomes for Canada. That's because obviously more heat and more CO2 will benefit most growing regions in the country. In terms of formulating policy, I believe this is a general consideration that we should keep in mind.
The next image is about the increase of corn yields historically. The point I want to make is that it doesn't matter what the climactic change trend is. As long as you have economic development, agriculture tends to prosper. You can see that you got very few bushels per acre when Europeans showed up in North America, but then, whether you had cooling or warming trends, yield tended to increase. You can see the big spike, the sort of hockey stick. The blade begins really with the development of hybrid corn in the 1920s, and it goes up whether the climate is warming or cooling.
One thing that people tend to forget today is that there was actually a cooling trend between 1945 and 1975, roughly, which is why people used to worry about global cooling in the 1970s. If we were to stretch that line today, we're at roughly, these last few years, about 160 bushels per acre in terms of corn, so again warming or cooling, agriculture tends to become more productive.
What we observe also for agricultural production is that we produce more and more food on less and less land. These are American data, but you could see similar results, perhaps not as spectacular but the same trend, in most countries. You can see that corn production has been going through the roof these last few years, but the amount of land used to produce it has decreased overall. Again, warming or cooling, we produce a lot more food on a lot less land.
Just so that you don't believe that I'm making up data, I have again this cute little graph from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that shows that in agriculture, as in every business, it always makes sense to do more with less. Whatever line of agricultural work you look at, you produce more outputs using less inputs. You don't need any government policy to do that. You just need old-fashioned competition where people have an incentive, again, to use their inputs as efficiently as possible.
The key point I want to make in the committee is that many people have declared a war on carbon fuel and petroleum products today and we view only their negative effect. But none of these advances would have been possible without a heavy diet of carbon fuels to power the engines that make this progress possible or else petroleum products, everything from plastics to seed coating to irrigation systems. Petroleum products were absolutely essential in achieving those results.
The longer document deals with this issue in more detail than the little summary that you might have, but historically, climate change has not really been a problem for farmers. The problem is singular weather events. Again, you have pictures of drought, frost, and floods. This is historically what really has been problematic for agricultural production, and this is why, throughout human history, you've had famine and malnutrition everywhere, either in the tropics or in temperate regions. It was only long-distance transportation, meaning at first steamships and railroads, that put an end to famine, at least for the advanced parts of our planet, as the surplus of regions that had good years could be shipped economically and in large enough quantities to regions that had bad years.
Again, we take our agricultural system for granted. Today, we don't worry about famine and malnutrition, but again, this would not have been achieved without carbon fuels, and trying to go cold turkey without modern technologies would obviously be a problem.
Another thing that we should keep in mind is that farmers have to adapt all the time, climate change or not, and I would argue that, in the grander scheme of things, climate change is a minor consideration compared with economic considerations. For example, there has been a lot of adaptation in the tobacco belt in Ontario, because people smoke less tobacco than in the past, but you might have diseases or you might have competitors emerging in other regions.
I know that some of you are from out west, so pulse production in this country is a nice success story. It's an opportunity that emerged and proved better than other alternatives. Again, just for economic reasons, or perhaps because you're dealing with pests or better competitors, as a farmer, you have to adapt all the time, and climate change in that context, in terms of adaptation, I believe, is a minor consideration.
The next image is about ethanol. Before creating new policies, I would suggest that we consider repealing bad ones, and I believe that a lot of things that have been put forward in the name of fighting climate change—
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Fair enough. I'll be quick.
Soil degradation has been a concern since the beginning of farming. This was the climate change issue of the 1920s, with everybody bothered about that. What has happened in the last few decades is that forests have made a huge comeback in advanced economies, and the key issue here is that people have replaced resources produced from the surface of the land with resources that came from underneath. Because of petroleum products, we've seen the abandonment of marginal agricultural lands and the reforestation of most advanced economies. If you care about soil conservation, this is really the way to go.
In terms of water, water is like everything else. For economic reasons, farmers have used less and less of it over time, and if we want to adapt to climate change, again, we should have more trade liberalization so that regions like Canada that have a lot of water are able to ship products that use a lot of water to regions of the world that have less of it. Again, by building resiliency with more long-distance trade and more petroleum products, we should be able, overall, to better adapt to climate change.
I apologize for that. It didn't take that much time when I was rehearsing.
Thank you both for coming here.
Naresh, it's really good to see you again. I had a chance to visit your research centre this summer. You've attracted researchers from around the world to work in Canada, and in turn, you're taking your research around the world, which is a very good use of Canadian investment in technology.
I want to focus on our study where we're looking at carbon management within the soil system. We're looking at the economic opportunities that policy around carbon management brings. Yes, there's a cost to farmers on carbon inputs, but I'm thinking that the trees that you're showing are an economic opportunity for farmers. They also sequester carbon up to a certain point, but some trees that you showed me this summer are no good after a certain age. They stop sequestering carbon, and they need to be harvested in order to continue the sequestration cycle.
Could you speak to that, the economic opportunity as well as the sequestration that trees bring to the soil?
Each tree species has the capacity to sequester carbon to some extent. The tree species that I showed you at the research site are hybrid poplar. They have a tendency to sequester carbon rapidly, but only after 15 years, so there should be a continuous planting of hybrid poplars. Those trees can be harvested for energy. As long as they are replanted, you can get a continuous sequestration of carbon in trees.
We should also understand that there's carbon sequestration below ground, in soils. In the study we are currently conducting, we are assessing woodlot carbon and soil carbon in the adjacent fields. That woodlot has not been disturbed for many years, so we can fairly assume that in terms of the maximum level of soil-carboning of woodlots, it is the capacity that the particular soil type can carry forward. For the agriculture systems or abandoned land adjacent to a woodlot, if the soil carbon is less than the carbon that is seen in a woodlot, then those soils have an enormous amount of capacity to sequester carbon.
In terms of economic returns, the landowners can integrate nut trees. They can integrate sugar maples, whereby they can get additional revenue from selling maple syrup. Christmas trees are another economic return for the landowners.
We also have to understand that when you put trees into the agricultural landscape, there's a certain percentage of land that is taken out of production, but if you look at the agriculture revenue that came from the land that is lost, it is insignificant. When you get a profit of 20¢ to 40¢ on a bushel of corn, even if you get 100 bushels less on the land where you have integrated trees, we are looking at $30 or $40 in revenue loss. That revenue loss can be easily obtained by the selling of nuts and by syrup production and other economic returns.
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I'll speak in very general terms. When we talk about climate policy in this country, and frankly pretty much anywhere, the problem is that we tend to forget about the big picture. We just look at the impact that a tax would have on reducing carbon production, or at least carbon emissions. We tend to forget that there is a real price to taxes, especially in a context with....
Whatever you might say of the head politician south of the border, if they are creating an economic environment in which people are not submitted to the same constraints we have here, we are going to put our farmers out of business and penalize consumers. I don't see the point of establishing policies that have not, frankly, delivered much in terms of concrete results in other parts of the world and penalizing our farmers in the process, especially in a very competitive environment.
Again, what I try to point out in the little memo I sent you is that our main policy should always be win-win or “no regret” things that deliver benefits to producers and consumers, but also to the environment. The more we allow our farmers to compete, the more efficient they will become over time, the more jobs they will create, the lower the food prices will be for our consumers, and the more our environment will benefit in the process.
Virtually every day, again, in terms of water retrieval, reforestation of the land.... I understand that marginal agricultural land might be a concern to some of you, but at the same time, if you take a bird's-eye view of these things, I have no problem with the rewilding of the earth.
I'm sorry if this is a rambling answer. I think our farmers have enough problems. We don't need to shoot them in the foot with policies that make them uncompetitive.
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They have progressed in leaps and bounds compared with Canada. There's an agroforestry centre of excellence in Nebraska. The University of Missouri has the national agroforestry research leadership. The Association for Temperate Agroforestry is situated in the States, even though Canada is a member.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the amount of land area that has been brought under agroforestry systems significantly increased from 2011 to 2016, especially forest farming systems, which have seen a humongous amount of adoption. A lot of landowners are producing mushrooms, ginseng, and speciality medicinal plants. They have also crated niche markets for them, such as supplying specialty products to restaurants. That has also enhanced income for the landowners in the United States.
What made that happen was that the agroforestry strategic network policy provided incentives and guidelines for them to initiate such changes in the agricultural sector. That took off, and adoption went significantly higher. For example, in 1998, we brought 40 landowners to the University of Guelph, and we showed the land use systems and ecosystem services, plus the economic benefits these land use systems can contribute. All of them answered a questionnaire and said, “These land use systems contribute to the public good, but who is going to bear the cost? We are happy to adopt them, but why should I put in riparian buffers for somebody downstream to benefit? Will I get a tax credit on my property? What incentive will I get in order for me to invest in public-good land use systems?”
All of them contributed that answer. They did not dispute any of the economic, environmental, or ecosystem services these land use systems could bring about. They didn't dispute them at all, but the question was “who is going to bear the cost?” As the Canadian government has committed to the Paris accord, and we are spending $2.65 billion in developing countries to bring about the climate commitment of developing countries, I think we should also contribute to coming up with a policy measure similar to the United States agroforestry strategic network.
We started that. We had an agroforestry development centre situated in Indian Head, in Saskatchewan. They were trying to formulate the policy, but then it was closed. I think we need such initiatives in Canada.
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Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here.
Your presentation was very informative. Forestry is an issue for me back home in Glengarry—Prescott—Russell. As you know, the Ontario government has set, I think, 30% of land mass for forestry. I'm not sure how other regions are doing, but we're at 23%. Obviously, we do need more land mass for agriculture, but what I'm seeing here is that you're promoting the combination of forestry and agriculture.
You have probably had some interaction with the conservation authorities. Back home, the conservation authority seems to be acquiring land and mass planting in one area as opposed to planting a little bit here and planting a little bit there.
In Ontario, what's been your experience in terms of educating farmers that they can combine, that their lack of revenue won't be that significant, and that they can combine both without having a major impact on the bottom line?
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I'm talking about 50 trees per hectare or 75 trees per hectare, so it is not per se forestry.
What we are trying to do here is to capture the nutrient-cycling aspects, the carbon sequestration aspects, the biodiversity aspects, and the ecosystem services aspects that could be derived, even at a low density of trees in the agricultural systems, in order to reduce runoff, nutrient loading, and enhance bird diversity and microfaunal and macrofaunal diversity. This is what we are trying to achieve.
When it comes to the landowners, they were paid to remove trees in order to allow big machinery. Now we are trying to ask them to put the trees back, so there's a lot of education that is needed.
I should say that these trees, when they are integrated into the agricultural landscape, need a certain degree of management, like pruning of branches. If you look at these trees, the branches have been pruned. Why? We need to allow more solar radiation in order to continue productivity. The tree row orientation is also important. You can't plant east-west in Canada, because you will get less productivity. You have to plant either north-south or northwest-southeast, because we are in the northern hemisphere.
A lot of education is needed. There's a management aspect that's needed. Landowners are willing to do that, provided there's a policy to support it. The issue, as I said, is that they're asking why they should invest for the public good and what they get as a result of that.
The science is not disputed. Actually, the science has been proven globally. I just mentioned that in the COP22 conference in Morocco, agroforestry was given a session, and it's being promoted to be integrated into the agriculture policy of the sub-Saharan African countries, because that is the only way they can increase resilience to climate change in the agricultural sector.
Trees can modify microclimate. The evapotranspiration losses can go down, and there's more moisture. We have shown through research that 3% more moisture can be retained as a result of having trees. In a dry year, when agricultural crop productivity declines, the reduction in yield in a tree-based farming system is comparatively less because of the microclimate modification. It can increase diversity of soil micro and macrofauna, which enhances the organic carbon input as well, from the leaves, and in turn, the soil's organic carbon.
The science is there and landowner acceptance is there. They are not disputing anything that you say. They can see that their animals will benefit, because the silvopastoral system not only contributes to the heat stress reduction, but it also contributes to the cold stress reduction in the winter months. If you have coniferous trees, that contributes to windbreak and cold stress reduction, which enhances productivity in the livestock because of less stress.
Some have adopted such land use systems, but the issue is that there is no policy or incentives to back the adoption of them.
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There are two things. As you probably know, some countries have actually gotten rid of systems that were fairly similar, like New Zealand and Australia, and New Zealand has taken over the dairy products. They have better conditions to produce dairy products.
I've travelled in Wisconsin and parts of the upper Midwest where, honestly, conditions are not so different from those in Quebec. I've never understood the argument that Quebec couldn't compete with regions that had similar climates and similar soil conditions. What makes Quebec producers less effective is that they're smaller and they don't generate the kinds of economies of scale that you've seen in liberalized markets.
I'm with you in that I don't like the U.S. farm bill, but at the same time, if I'm looking at that as a taxpayer, I don't see how having dairy products that are more expensive and penalizing our food processors is actually good for us.
As you probably know, the cost of sugar in Canada has historically been lower than in the U.S., because we don't protect our corn and sugar beet producers. A lot of candy manufacturers a few years ago relocated to Canada, because with the cost of sugar being lower they could produce candy here and ship it back to the U.S. The same was true for chocolate.
Canada's dairy products ended up in Canadian chocolate that was being reshipped to the U.S. It's Canadian dairy products, and if our dairy products had been even more competitive, I believe that we would have shipped even more chocolate to the U.S.
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Again, I'll speak only in general terms.
If the past is any indication of future trends, we need more innovation and more economies of scale. Let the best and more creative farmers take over, grow the scale of their operations, and become more efficient over time. We've reached a point now—it's funny that we're discussing these agroforestry issues—where a number of experts these days talk about “peak farmland”, meaning that despite the fact that the world population keeps increasing, we've probably reached the maximum amount of farmland that we will ever need if past trends and increased yields keep on improving.
Many parts of the world obviously have other disadvantages as compared with Canada in terms of infrastructure and a less corrupt political system. Competition will come from many places, and it will come hard. Historically, we've mostly had only to worry about competition within Canadian provinces, or perhaps from the U.S. I'm sure you're all knowledgeable about what has been happening in Argentina and Brazil and New Zealand and other places. These people, as far as I know, will not be burdened with those other taxes and will be able to drive our producers out of the market if we keep asking the impossible of them, which is to become ever more efficient while burdening them with regulations and taxes that their competitors don't have to face.
Again, look at past trends. Look at how much progress has been made in the past. Let's lay the foundation to make sure they can do more of that in the future. Let the most creative and the most entrepreneurial agricultural producers grow. It's nice to want to save the family farm and to want to keep supply management, but that's just not the way to go, in my opinion.
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First of all, I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to speak to you about an important issue. My remarks are based on 30 years of research on the climate and soil landscapes of the prairie provinces, including a recent five-year study of the vulnerability of agricultural communities to climate change. This project was funded by three federal government agencies: NSERC, SSHRC, and IDRC.
The Prairies are a good case study of soil and water conservation when you consider that they have more than 80% of Canada's agricultural land and that commercial agriculture has succeeded here in one of the least favourable agroclimates on earth. It has succeeded through technological innovation, but also through the sustainable management and conservation of soil, water, and rangeland.
Major changes in farming practices and agricultural policy have occurred primarily in response to periods of accelerated soil and water degradation, notably during the droughts of the 1930s and 1980s. Considerable progress has been made in conserving soil and water, especially in the past several decades. However, this progress could be undone by a changing climate.
Canada's climate is clearly getting less cold. The warming of a cold country is good news for agriculture. Unfortunately, this climate is also more hospitable for pests, pathogens, and invasive species, and there's a second major constraint on the opportunity to capitalize on warmer climate: the increasing severity of both storms and drought.
In the past few years, flooding along the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario and some hot, dry summers have been described as “unprecedented”, implying that they defy prediction and preparedness. A scientific interpretation of the severity of these events is that they are probably amplified by a warmer and moister climate, although events of a similar magnitude can be found in weather records that extend well beyond the limited experience of our lifespans. In our laboratory at the University of Regina, we've constructed a 900-year history of prairie climate using trees. It clearly shows that every century has had at least one drought of 10 years or more in duration. Therefore, the most challenging future scenario for prairie agriculture is the inevitable reoccurrence of a long drought, but in a warmer climate. The sponsors of our research have been preparing for this plausible worst-case scenario.
The most consistent climate change scenario is wetter and warmer winters and amplified drought and flooding. A resilient agro-ecosystem must have the capacity to store the excess water to withstand dry conditions that could last a growing season or longer. Healthy soils store water and carbon and support a continuous vegetation cover that is more likely to out-compete the undesirable species. Therefore, conserving soil and water is the most effective adaptation to projected climate changes.
The entire population of Canada derives benefits from healthy soil, quality fresh water, and a domestic food supply. Researchers from the University of Alberta have documented how farmers in Canada absorb much of the additional cost of conservation practices. Financial incentives from our government are almost 10 times less than the compensation given to farmers in Europe and the U.S.
At our research centre, the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, we do climate change research by working with the people who manage our soil and water. This producers' perspective is invaluable. It's the social context that enables us to translate our technical data to information and knowledge; otherwise, our scientific data is just a bunch of numbers.
I keep a catalogue of quotes from producers. For example, a rancher near Shaunavon, Saskatchewan explained that raising cattle takes water, grass, and shelter. He added that he can replace only shelter. Similarly, we've been told that people construct buildings and fences, but only God makes land. An old-timer from southwestern Alberta, when accepting an award from a conservation group, offered these words of wisdom. He said that when the oil fields run dry, we'll still have the real source of our wealth: soil and water.
In addition to these anecdotes, we have a large database of producer observations that we've collected using social survey methods and focus group meetings. Of the comments and recommendations we've received from producers, the most policy-relevant are regarding the limits of their adaptive capacity.
Producers told us that new technologies on the farm are expensive and that a single farm business can withstand only so much extreme weather. Without help from their neighbours, the local community, and higher levels of government, they are challenged to deal with the extreme weather that we expect in a changing climate.
Participants in one of our focus group meetings recommended that government establish some type of coordinating agency or boundary organization, with technical expertise to link scientific knowledge to adaptation options and agricultural practices targeted to regional stakeholder groups and rural communities. In fact, a federal government agency with exactly that mandate existed for more than 80 years. It was phased out in 2010 to 2013. The prairie farm rehabilitation administration, or PFRA, implemented government programming related to soil and water conservation and rural development in western Canada, and for a few years late in its mandate, right across the country. With the demise of PFRA, the federal government also has abandoned most of its responsibility for irrigation infrastructure, for soil and water conservation, and for the management of native prairie on crown rangeland.
It's somewhat ironic that our federally funded research has concluded that a major impediment to climate change adaptation in rural Canada is the demise of federal programming and federal services that helped to maintain the resilience, viability, and adaptive capacity of rural agricultural communities. Coincident with this recent loss of capacity is a disconcerting but almost predictable retreat from traditional soil and water conservation practices in favour of capitalizing on above-average precipitation over the past decade.
The University of Saskatchewan surveyed 61 producers recently, and 40% had removed shelterbelts from their operations. Mostly it was to accommodate large equipment. On prairie farms, air seeders are typically 85 feet to 100 feet wide. Some are up to 160 feet wide, which is about the width of a football field in Canada, and this is a single seeder.
Shelterbelts were first planted more than a century ago to prevent the loss of snow and soil. By capturing snowmelt water and storing carbon, today shelterbelts represent both adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change. Agriculture Canada's shelterbelt centre, which predated the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, distributed more then 600 million tree seedlings.
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That's even better. That's great.
Thank you very much for the invitation. It's interesting. I also listened to the first two presenters as well as David, so I'm pleased to follow them.
In the first slide, I have a picture that represents a landscape very familiar to John Barlow, whom I would particularly like to thank for the invitation. This is the iconic Foothills region near the Rocky Mountains in southern Alberta. This is the landscape that generates the primary water source for the rivers that flow across the Prairies.
In the next slide I have a summary, and this is the only data slide I will show you. This is called a hydrograph or a water graph. It represents the amount of water that's been flowing, in this case in the Waterton River, but it's pretty typical of the rivers that drain the Rocky Mountains. The darker plot, which is black if you have a coloured version, represents the conditions over the last century. The red plot represents the anticipated conditions into the next century.
You will see there is likely to be a gradual decline. Even though we're getting more rain, we're getting more drying from evaporation, but most critically, we have reduced flows late in the summer, in July but especially in August and September. Also on this plot I have the green dash line, which represents crop water use, in this case for potatoes. We have a temporal problem in that we have abundant water in the spring, but demand for water for irrigation and other uses happens later in the summer.
The obvious strategy to deal with this situation is to impose dams to create reservoirs to store and subsequently release the water. This has been done, and it involves pretty much all the streams in the South Saskatchewan River basin, with the water from southern Alberta as well as northern Montana that flows to Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
The problem with this approach is shown in the next slide. This is a photograph of the river valley in Lethbridge in July, when typically there would be high flows. You can literally walk across and not get your gumboots wet. As indicated in the plot in the lower left corner, we have a damming and diversion of the vast majority of the flow.
A challenge we face relative to climate change is that we've already pretty well fully allocated our river systems in the western prairies, but unfortunately things are becoming drier because things are becoming warmer.
The first problem relative to this in terms of irrigation is that agriculture relates to water quantity, and in particular to sufficient water quantity to allow for the existing commitments, and this will limit further expansion.
The other problem follows, because as we lose the water in the river, any contaminants, whether from agricultural, industrial, or municipal sources, become more concentrated. We have this interaction between declining water quantity and degrading water quality. Both are likely to increase with climate change.
Over the past month or so I have asked people who know more than I do about policies and practices what they think might be done to prepare Canada for this future. I will briefly describe five points relative to what the federal government might do.
The first point was raised by an individual from Alberta Innovates. His suggestion relates to a number of federal government programs referred to as clean technology programs. These are primarily aimed at oil and gas and energy, but many of the principles would also apply to agriculture. Thus, there should be a widening of the eligibility for this group of programs.
This next opportunity is perhaps the one that was most commonly suggested. It suggests that for agricultural research, as we try to cope with the compound problems of increasing population globally and climate change, we match the research program that is common in biomedicine.
In the medical field, we have a cluster of research programs that support basic research, cell biology, and genetics, but there's a long way from that to the hospital. In the biomedical field there is this intermediate category of research called translational research, and the view is that this should be increased relative to agriculture.
I'm sure people in the room and others will have better examples than mine, but mine dealt with the prospect of effective timing and scheduling relative to irrigation.
The next suggestion invites a paradigm shift, a change in the way we're thinking about things. In the past century, the view was that we should maximize crop production, and the way this was done with the green revolution was to maximize inputs: more water and fertilizer equals more yield. The problem is that this might not be the optimal use relative to efficiency. Let's imagine that we could cut back on the inputs, but not as strongly cut back on the yield. If we provide lower levels of water and fertilizer and still retain reasonable productivity, this might be a more optimal way to manage our resource. It would also reduce the environmental consequences.
Following from that, I chatted with a number of scientists in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and some of them have expressed concern about the increasing requirement that they have formal funded links with industry for their research programs. I think this is great in moderation, but these same very sharp scientists should also have some independent programs, programs that are not hindered by the constraints that industrial partners might bring. In fact, some of those constraints might provide a bias that could in fact challenge some of the environmental objectives and might also limit what we could refer to as “visionary” research, research that doesn't have any near-future benefit but might help in the long run. This could be especially relevant for climate change as we think about broadening the germplasm for drought response of our crops.
Finally, as my own area of focus, in southern Alberta and elsewhere in the Prairies we've invested a lot of money on infrastructure related to agriculture, but we've generally done it primarily for agriculture. In terms of thinking about the impacts on the landscapes in western Canada, the next slide shows an aerial photograph taken while flying into Lethbridge. The circles are irrigation pivot crop circles. You'd have a similar view in Regina, Calgary, or Winnipeg. As you fly over this landscape, you can see that it has been cultivated. This is a much bigger impact than oil sands, pipelines, and many other things that are in the public media.
I would argue that we should think more broadly about agriculture, not only as providing a challenge for our environment but also as providing opportunities. There's one example in the slide. While we convey water for irrigation, let's use stream channels instead of canals, thus allowing for the secondary benefits. In fact, this relates to the prospect of riparian buffers and agroforestry that was talked about earlier.
I want to sincerely thank both witnesses for being here with us today.
The more witnesses we hear tell us about climate change, about the quality of soil and water, the more we realize that there are as many problems as there are solutions. You both work on some very specific elements.
I'll begin with you, Mr. Sauchyn. You said that according to your analyses, people expect farmers and producers to absorb the majority of costs due to climate change.
Do you have any specific examples that show that things have been different over the past few years, as compared to normal adaptation? In other words, what are the additional costs? Farmers have always had to adapt to all sorts of things. How has this been accelerated, in your opinion, Mr. Sauchyn?
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So this is what I understand: because Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada is less present and there are fewer programs to help farmers, farmers themselves have to pay for the costs of adapting and preserving their soil. In addition, there is now a carbon tax. So farmers have to pay twice to try to preserve their soil for the long term. That is my perception, in short.
Thank you very much, Mr. Sauchyn.
I will now address Mr. Rood.
I think that Mr. Barlow was very happy to see the images you showed at the beginning of your presentation.
I'd like to go back to a point you made in your presentation. You said that “cultivation, not pipelines or oil sands, has the biggest impact on the environment [...]”. However, you also said that the situation presents opportunities. I did not understand, unfortunately, what those opportunities are for agriculture. Could you expand on that? I think this could be interesting.
I know that the environment and the preservation of soils has always been at the heart of farmers' concerns. I'd like to know what the opportunities are for them, specifically.
The Green Revolution was regarded as a huge success, and I think there were elements of it that indeed were; there was a Nobel Prize for Borlaug. What that did is develop types of wheat and rice that were able to cope with high levels of water and fertilizer without toppling over, without lodging.
That was great if your objective was yield, but if you start to think about the use of that water as opposed to alternate uses, and also if you start to think about the costs, including the energy cost, the carbon cost, of producing that nitrogen fertilizer, you may rethink that business.
As David mentioned briefly, I think, the function of yield versus input is not linear, so you get a big return for your first application of water and your first application of fertilizer, but the response tapers off. I suggested as a hypothetical example that you might end up with 75% with only 50% input.
There's a problem with this. There are a number of complexities, but one is that the farmer invests in the infrastructure of the pumps, the sprinklers, etc., so they're going to want to use them to the utmost.
Anyway, that's the nature of that perspective paradigm shift. I think people worldwide are moving in this direction.
I'd like to thank both witnesses for their participation at committee. Their experience and knowledge is really impressive.
I represent a riding that straddles the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. In the springtime, we had a lot of flooding. Usually the people who live close to the water get it for a few weeks. They're used to it. They get out their boots, and they just deal with the flooding. However, a lot of people were stuck in flooding for months. A lot of farmers weren't able to get out and work the fields. Usually they start a few weeks later, but it was months. A lot of people in Saint-Barthélemy and Maskinongé have lost significant amounts of money. One dairy farmer wasn't able to produce enough grain for his cows, and he had to buy it. It was $100,000 to $150,000 to feed his cows this year. One year it's drought; the next year it's flooding.
I know that in the federal government we negotiate business risk management programs with the provinces. They're supposed to be there. These are tools we have to help farmers when there are issues like this.
Mr. Sauchyn, could you comment on the importance of the government's taking a leadership role in elaborating a strategy, an agroforestry shelter belt?
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Prevention is better than cure, as we say.
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This is an opportunity for the government to show a lot of leadership, work with education, and, if need be, incentivize producers to adopt different practices.
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Right. The perception of Canada from places like the U.K. and Washington is that Canada is going to boom under a warming climate because we're a cold country. If you look in more detail....
In fact, we've collaborated with agricultural researchers at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Guelph. They have these models that simulate the production of various crops. We give them data from climate models. We give them a climate scenario, and they apply it to their crop model. The results are much higher yields in the future—in some cases, yields that are two to three times higher—just based on an increase in temperature and a longer growing season.
However, what they don't factor in is, as you said, the impacts of the pests, the pathogens, the disease vectors, and they don't necessarily factor in the impact of extremes. When they factor in the variability of the future climate, they discover that yes, on average, yields are higher, but they can be very high or very low from year to year. The message we give to agricultural producers is that in the future you could have very high yields, but you could also have no yield at all. If you want to capitalize on a warmer climate, be prepared to have wildly fluctuating yields from year to year.
I wanted to touch on PFRA a little. My colleague Mr. Longfield brought it up.
If I recall, 90% of the PFRA land that was federally owned was in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. There was very little in Alberta, and what was in Alberta was given over to the provinces. It was up to them to decide what to do. I know that a few farmers and ranchers in our constituency got together and bought land as a grazing co-op, so there were opportunities there for them to save it.
In terms of research, we've also heard in our study that there is a void in research in commercialization, in getting it on the farm. Perhaps we can get some recommendations from this study that will help us address some of these shortfalls.
Last, before I run out of time, Mr. Rood, in the WISE program, the University of Lethbridge has become quite renowned for some of the water, agriculture, and soil studies you've done there. We've talked a little in this committee about some of the opportunities for new crops that are being grown around Lethbridge, the pulses, lentils, and sugar beets that would never have been grown there even a decade ago. Can you talk about the importance of the ongoing study in crop rotations that are allowing us to conserve our soil, as well as educating our producers and taking advantage of some of those new opportunities?