:
That's great. I can start.
As mentioned, my name is Elena Bennett. I am an associate professor at McGill University, based here in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
I have been studying agriculture, especially soil and water quality with respect to fertilizer use, for 20 years. For the last 10 years my research has increasingly focused on land management in agricultural areas and understanding the multiple benefits that communities receive from agricultural lands, which include not only food production and its concomitant economic benefits, but other benefits as well: places to recreate, flood control, water quality, climate regulation through carbon storage, and more.
We call those benefits “ecosystem services”, a term that has become of great interest to the research and management communities for the past 10 years. I'll be talking about that today.
I want to start by thanking you very much for the invitation to speak. I'm really pleased to see that the government is taking climate change seriously and is considering how that's going to affect important Canadian sectors.
I want to share one overarching idea today that leads to two recommendations you might consider. The overarching idea is this: that we have to think beyond food production when we think about agricultural landscapes. While it's undoubtedly true that Canada's agricultural landscapes are important for food production and for Canada's economy, it's also true that these landscapes provide many other benefits to Canadians that are undervalued, if they're even considered at all.
If you think about your favourite Canadian agricultural landscape, it might be potato fields of P.E.I. or canola in the Prairies; it might be corn soy here in Quebec, or maybe fruit orchards in British Columbia. If you picture that landscape in your mind and try to list the benefits we get from those landscapes, the ecosystem services, probably the first ones you think about are things like food and water, or maybe fuel wood and maple syrup around here. If I push you to think about it a little longer, you might also consider aesthetic beauty, opportunities for hiking and recreation, or maybe the inspiration they deliver for people to make art or other things of cultural significance.
If I really push you further than that, then you might finally recognize that these landscapes are providing flood control, that they're regulating climate, that they're storing carbon in their trees and soil, and that they're providing high-quality water for drinking and fishing and swimming.
The problem is that thus far our fairly single-minded focus on increasing efficiency of food production in these landscapes creates dramatic declines in these other ecosystem services that are provided in agricultural landscapes. To explain that a little bit, there are trade-offs between ecosystem services. For example, if I want to produce more food or produce more food more efficiently, I might increase the rate of fertilizer use, but that's probably going to lead to declines in water quality, and those sorts of trade-off interactions are the case across a great many agricultural landscapes.
A few years ago the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was a UN-sponsored, five-year, 1,000-plus-person effort to assess the state of the planet in terms of its ecosystem services, found that services of food and fibre production are increasing, but other services, especially those that have trade-offs with agriculture, such as flood control or water quality or recreation, are declining. At the same time, this Millennium Ecosystem Assessment found that demand for all types of services is increasing.
We're facing a very intense pressure right now to expand agriculture, to intensify agriculture, to increase production for economic reasons, for reasons of food security. Because we can very easily quantify the economic value of food production, I think we sometimes get caught up in policies and decision-making that focus only on that food aspect of agricultural landscapes, but it's incredibly important to Canadians that we remember all of these other things of value, all of these other ecosystem services that are provided in these landscapes, before it's too late.
How can we do this? This question leads to my first recommendation to you, which is to think about enacting policies and creating funding for and generally taking steps that encourage the following four things: measuring the biophysical production of these other non-food delivery services; measuring demand for those, measuring how much are people wanting from their landscapes; estimating the benefits that are delivered to people in agricultural landscapes from more than just food; and then finally, ensuring that farmers and farm communities have a way to benefit from the fact that they are providing these services to other Canadians.
Any efforts to measure this or to ensure that farmers are benefiting will help to make sure that we remember that those benefits also come from agricultural landscapes and that these agricultural communities continue to take the kinds of actions they're taking now that ensure we can keep benefiting from these things that our agricultural landscapes do.
Let me move on to my second recommendation, which touches on the issue of resilience more directly, and it's in many ways related.
A lot of our efforts go toward sustainably optimizing crop production while taking sustainability into account. However, that's not enough. When I talk about this, it's strategies like more crop per drop, which aims to get more crop growth per water irrigation, or increased yield per unit input of fertilizers, or reduced greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product produced. Those are important and necessary, but it's not going to be sufficient, and it is probably going to reduce the resilience of these communities to climate change in the long run.
In other words, we've been very good at increasing agricultural productivity in areas with access to fertilizers and with access to technology, but there's a lot of evidence that these steps we're taking, which increase this narrow-sense efficiency of agricultural production without thinking about resilience, are leading to highly damaging fluctuations in food production and food costs and environmental outcomes.
For example, native pollinators of crops are declining around the world, including in Canada, because of land-use change, because of pesticide use and other changes that are happening, but managed honey bees aren't adequately compensating for that loss.
What I would encourage instead is that we think about aiming for resilient agriculture. How can we meet demand for agricultural products and economic growth over the short and long term without undermining—
Good afternoon.
First, I would like to thank the members for their invitation, and I would like to thank them for their interest in the research activities of our institute. My name is Aubert Michaud. I have been a soil and water conservation researcher at the Research and Development Institute for the Agri-environment, the IRDA, since the institute was founded in 1998.
The IRDA is a research institute that has about a hundred regular employees. Eighteen research teams work on various issues relating to soil and water conservation, air quality, and biodiversity in the agricultural sector.
My team and I work mainly to support concerted actions of rural communities focused on water quality management issues.
Our first finding follows from climate projections, and it is obviously the longer growing season. Of course, this has many opportunities and benefits for the farming community.
Climate change is also an issue, particularly in terms of the distribution of water surpluses and deficits.
I will now present four major issues that deserve our attention and, most certainly, adjustment measures.
Our first issue is related to increased winter rains. Clearly, the season will be longer and the spring will be earlier, but large amounts of runoff will be managed because of the effect of precipitation on frozen and snow-covered soils. We need only think, for example, of the 2011 floods in the Richelieu Valley and, more recently, those of spring 2017, which occurred in several regions of Quebec. Unfortunately, this has shown the devastating effects of rains on abundant snow cover. Ground frozen or saturated with water is then vulnerable to surface runoff.
For 20 years, our hydrometric monitoring with small watersheds, tested in Quebec, show that, every other year, the largest runoff volumes are actually observed in winter and early spring. As a result, there is a real need to adapt our hydrological criteria for the design of agricultural structures to this situation.
It should be noted that the current criteria are mainly focused on peak flows generated by intense precipitation in the summer. In addition, many investments are made each year in Quebec to maintain 30,000 kilometres of watercourses. In some regions, particularly in Montérégie, the recurrence of work is worrying.
Several municipalities are expressing concerns about increasing peak flows or increased sedimentation. This is an opportunity to do things differently and to act in a concerted manner, not only in terms of watercourse development, but also in shoreline and farmland development. The techniques are known. The challenge arises especially on a human scale, in the co-operation of stakeholders and in the technical, financial and regulatory support of these interventions.
Long-term conservation of soil quality is another major issue for climate change. It is particularly a question here of preserving the physical condition of our soils and ensuring the conservation of its principal fertility capital, its organic matter.
Soil compaction and drainage problems are high on the list of concerns of Quebec field crop producers. Currently, several agricultural companies are doubling agricultural drains in their fields. In fact, this concern is not new. Already in the late 1980s, a large inventory of soil degradation resulted in a degradation of the soil structure on more than 400,000 hectares.
More recently, the portrait of the grain industry in Quebec shows an average decline of 15% in the organic matter content over just 10 years, between 1998 and 2009. In central Quebec, the average decrease for the same period reached 30%. And this problem has motivated the funding by the Quebec ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food, or MAPAQ, of a province-wide soil health study. The study began this year and is coordinated by IRDA.
A longer growing season offers a great opportunity to restore the physical condition of our soil and to ensure the preservation of organic matter. The introduction of cover crops is certainly one of the most effective ways. Cover crop is a crop that is grown with or after the main crop. It has the advantage of improving the soil structure, bringing organic matter, storing nutrients and protecting the soil against erosion. These benefits are particularly important when cover crops are planted with a small grain, such as wheat, for instance.
This crop allows the cover crop to have more time to grow, compared to corn or soybeans, which accounts for the central interest in bringing small grains back into the corn-soy rotation in Quebec, which currently dominates the landscape of major crops.
As for water quality, one of the main issues facing the agricultural sector is the eutrophication of water bodies and the proliferation of cyanobacteria. Several bodies of water in rural areas are affected by swimming bans or by contamination of intakes. So it's an important public health issue. Phosphorus intake is considered the main factor behind these phenomena. In agricultural areas, runoff and land drainage generally contribute the largest share of diffuse phosphorus inputs to water bodies.
In concrete terms, the first line of defence for retaining phosphorus on our farmland is the control of soil enrichment. As such, let's remember that the issue is first of all in terms of farm manure. In fact, farm manure constitutes 65% of the phosphorus used in agriculture in Quebec, which is about 95,000 tonnes, compared to 35% for mineral fertilizer. Overall, phosphorus intake is about 30% higher than crop removal. So the soil is enriched.
For example, in livestock concentration zones in Montérégie, the critical soil fertility rate, namely, 7.7% phosphorus saturation, is reached for 40% of crop acreage. Disposing of farm manure becomes problematic. An effective solution to the problem is to reduce phosphorus slurry content at the source by separating solid and liquid fractions in livestock buildings. The techniques, which are known and effective, are widely used in Europe. They have been evaluated in Quebec by some of my colleagues at IRDA. The nitrogen-rich liquid fraction can then be used on phosphorus-rich soils.
The fact that the majority of farm fertilizer applications occur during periods when runoff may occur, in the spring and fall, is another aspect of the problem. Because of wet soils, these run-offs contribute to soil compaction. Here again, the cultivation of small grain makes it possible to use our farm manures, to reduce soil compaction and, as a bonus, to store nutrients.
Finally, the anticipated climate changes will result in larger water deficits during the growing season. Two factors are at play: warmer seasons and more intense rainfall. This will ensure that a lower proportion of the rains are stored in soils.
With regard to the water supply for agricultural production, a long-term vision needs to be developed and should take into account the availability of surface and ground water, as well as the consumption of all users—
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the time of the witnesses today and their great information. I look forward to hearing some more details from you.
I'm going to start with Mr. Michaud, please.
A witness in a previous meeting talked about some of the concerns with our water use in Canada. I'm from Alberta, and I have to apologize for not being familiar with every other provincial jurisdiction. I know that in Alberta and some of the other western provinces, we have a real problem with what's called “first in time, first in use”, which means that whoever had the original water licence can hold on to that water licence in perpetuity, whether they use it or not, while there are farms, ranches, or other users that are really struggling.
Is this a missed opportunity for us or something that we as a federal government have to start taking a look at in terms of who has the water licences and who has access? Do we have to take a stronger look at best use and best practice for those finite water resources?
:
Thank you very much for your testimony.
I represent a very agricultural riding. In fact, 85% of the land of the Shefford riding is considered an agricultural sector. Obviously, I speak regularly with producers, and they are concerned about climate change. It undoubtedly creates some insecurity.
However, many also talk to me about possibilities. As you said, the agricultural sector is extremely resilient, but it is always ready to come up with solutions and adapt to the different constraints it faces.
Could you talk to me about these possibilities? Dr. Michaud, since you briefly discussed this at the start of your presentation, perhaps Dr. Bennett could answer my question first.
What do you think about the possibility that our agricultural producers could increase their production? Clearly, they still want to feed the people of Canada, and there are a lot of possibilities on the world stage right now. How do you see the opportunities that the agricultural sector has for increasing its production?
I'll hear from you first, Dr. Bennett, and Dr. Michaud could respond afterwards.
:
Your question is very pertinent.
The majority of the issues involve a number of players, as is also often the case for the solutions. One of the things I talked about was land development. There are a lot of concerns about this in the municipal world. It is also a concern shared by farmers. Subsoil drainage is perhaps their main asset in terms of the productivity of their crops. Clearly, the management of waterways and agricultural land is a concern for municipalities and regions, for provincial authorities, and even for federal regulations.
The techniques are often known, but it is becoming difficult to really coordinate the measures and even to make sure that the technical, financial and regulatory frameworks are consistent.
It is not for me, as a scientist, to comment on the federal government's positions. However, I can say that there are certainly major factors of infrastructure and sustainable investments with land and waterway management, for example.
In addition, federal environmental regulations are affected in these projects. It is important that the regulations put limits on problematic situations, but also that they do not prevent us from innovating and trying new approaches, for waterway management, for example.
:
That is indeed the case. Your question is very pertinent.
I would quickly like to recall the report on soil conservation published by the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in 1984. It is called “Soil at Risk: Canada's Eroding Future”, or the Sparrow Report. Perhaps you have seen the document, which certainly had an effect on the development of zero tillage in the 1980s.
We are aware that, in the west, the practice is now almost the norm. Even in Quebec, it involves a little more than 50% of the land. Specifically, the dominant rotation is corn-soybeans. In general, soybeans lend themselves to no-till better, but, unfortunately, they leave very little crop residue on the surface of the soil. Moreover, if farm fertilizers are not added, we see an increased loss of phosphorous in the surface run-off.
Direct seeding really is an interesting approach but you have to consider diversifying or improving the rotation. Earlier, I talked about introducing small grains, for example. Unfortunately, they have been in a significant decline, particularly wheat and barley. Certainly, a very interesting market can be developed, with benefits for soil conservation. That is so for winter grain in Quebec, for example, where the climate will be better. As a result, other cover crops can be introduced, because the practice is much less effective with soybeans and corn.
:
Thank you for your question.
There are actually two types of issues. First, there are issues in quantitative water management. Earlier, I expressed some concern about excess water, the winter flooding that results from precipitation onto frozen ground and from melting snow. Clearly, that issue concerns rural areas, but it can also concern urban communities that are next to the outflows of rural watersheds. So it is a major issue for everyone.
Water deficits are also an issue. We talked about that earlier. The issue arises a lot more in western Canada than in Quebec, perhaps. Concerns are being raised, for example, about the quality of the water used for irrigation. In some areas, it is a problem because they no longer have access to surface water for irrigation, which creates additional pressure on the water under the ground. In addition, there are other users, of course. So the issue really is in reconciling water use.
The other issue, clearly, is water quality. Hotter seasons may well increase the number of cyanobacteria and the processes of eutrophication in bodies of water. A number of bodies of water are already affected in eastern Canada and in Quebec.
I feel that we have to be even more vigilant in terms of controlling the increase of phosphorus in our soil. We have to work on structures for livestock that contain phosphorus in its solid form, manure. Above all, we have to work on cultivation systems to develop manure spreading windows that are less problematic in terms of compacting the soil, and we have to recycle nutrients better. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, but everything can be turned into win-win propositions for farmers and for the downstream communities.
:
Currently we're working on eight different projects with researchers from AAFC on Prince Edward Island and in Fredericton, and also a couple of different Prince Edward Island agriculture department officers and a professor from NSAC.
With regard to climate change and its impact on P.E.I.'s agriculture industry, some of the things we're seeing are more heat units available to the crops. We're seeing somewhat of a lengthened growing season, a change in our precipitation patterns, and a bit of an increase in our frost-free period.
What does this mean for our industry?
We see a possible opportunity to grow different crops that we may not have otherwise been able to grow in P.E.I. If we can keep research funding going to AAFC and other affiliates, we could use it to research these other crops that might be available to us.
Climate change could potentially result in a higher yield for some of our crops, based on longer growing days, especially for potatoes.
As agriculture producers, we would benefit greatly from increased research into the new varieties of existing crops and new crops that could prosper on P.E.I.
Also on climate change, we're seeing extended dry periods. These extended dry periods are certainly putting our potato crops at risk of low yields and low quality.
We're also seeing less frost during the winter months, which is not totally a bad thing in some respects. On the other hand, frost helps with our pest management system. Without the deep frosts, we're seeing an increase in insect pest populations, we're seeing an increase in some soil diseases, and we're also seeing increases now in weed populations.
We're looking to continue working with AAFC and others on partnerships on new water management strategies that are required and on some new things we can use to help the crops against new or greater pest populations. We also want to deal with the new pests and we want to work on improving storage management strategies.
We need information and data to improve our decision-making on when to irrigate, how much water to apply, and where to apply it, etc. Gordon and I are two of the 80% of growers in our group who do irrigate currently. There's definitely a need for research in proper irrigation on Prince Edward Island. There are different soil types. There are different areas of P.E.I. where irrigation has worked better than in others. There are different types of irrigation that can be used. We see this as a real opportunity on P.E.I. to work with AAFC to move forward on the irrigation file.
One thing we had in our presentation, although I don't have it to put in front of you, is that in the past several years in P.E.I. we have seen basically a flatline in potato yield increases, while other regions of the U.S. and parts of Canada are seeing a steady increase in their yields. That's one of the reasons we have formed this group, and we're trying to work closely with the AAFC researchers and get their boots on the ground with us in the fields so that we can build a good relationship with them, build the trust, and hopefully, when we get to the end of projects together, find the positives and negatives and pass them on to our fellow growers. Hopefully, with that trust built, those research initiatives will be used for the industry.
Go ahead, Gordie.
:
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you all.
As mentioned, I'm an assistant professor. I'm the junior chair of agriculture and environment at UBC's faculty of land and food systems. I'm an agricultural ecologist. My role here is to help farmers reduce their impact on the environment but also to help reduce the environment's impact on agriculture. Specifically, my role is to help farmers with climate change adaptation.
I'm also the chair of the B.C. agricultural climate adaptation research network, ACARN. This is a network that comprises five universities in the province, industry, NGOs, and government organizations. The objective of this research network is to enhance B.C. agriculture's capacity to adapt to climate change.
My knowledge and experience are focused mainly on B.C., but I think some of what I'll say applies broadly to farmers across the country.
Here in B.C. we expect to see temperatures and precipitation increase. Increased temperatures could present a great opportunity for our growers here, as we would see increased numbers of growing degree days. The challenge, however, with increased precipitation is that we're expecting to see this on the important shoulder seasons: in the spring, when farmers are trying to get their fields ready for planting, and in the fall, when the farmers are trying to harvest. In case you don't know, when you put heavy equipment on saturated soils, you can potentially cause irreparable damage to that soil, impacting the productivity of the system and the long-term sustainability of the farm.
In terms of the projections for B.C., the models suggest that we could see increases of up to 12% to 15%, even by 2030, in terms of precipitation. If we were to capitalize on the increased growing degree days, we'd for sure need to do something about drainage.
The other important thing to note is that increased precipitation in the shoulder seasons is not necessarily good for our water dynamics in terms of the production season. With increased precipitation, we're actually expecting a reduced snowpack. The snowpack is where we store our water for use in irrigation in the summertime. As that resource is reduced, we may be turning to groundwater resources more frequently for irrigation. The problem is that we don't have a good handle on the status of our groundwater here in B.C., or on the changes to it. We also haven't planned well in terms of forward thinking in terms of other water resources.
I think you're also interested in hearing about soil, and that's what a lot of my research is focused on. It's clear that if we change our management of soil, we could help address some of these problems. We could also help to mitigate the impacts of climate change broadly. By increasing soil organic matter through a number of different management practices, we can potentially increase the water-holding capacity in the soil, improve soil structure, improve infiltration rates, and overall improve the resilience of our crops and our farming systems.
There are a number of well-known management practices that can increase soil organic matter. The challenge is in getting farmers to adopt these practices in the face of labour or other economic constraints. Some of these practices need to be incentivized in some way. Broadly across Canada, it's possible that we could substantially increase our soil organic matter on the 20% of our agricultural lands that are currently considered moderately to severely degraded and are not currently sequestering carbon.
Climate change is a huge challenge for agriculture, as it is for other sectors, but farmers are going to be some of the first and hardest hit. As we heard earlier, farmers are already recognizing that problem. They are recognizing the problem here in B.C. The major challenge is that this is a big, slow-moving beast, and it's hard to differentiate the challenges of fluctuations in weather patterns we have seen in the past with the ongoing and quite dramatic changes we're expecting to see.
We just held a workshop last week with a number of industry groups, and it's clear that they have a whole set of research priorities that are related to pest management, nutrient management, disease control, and managing for irrigation, but many of their research priorities are not consistent with what some of the long-term research priorities should be.
For us as researchers who are thinking about the long game, the challenge then becomes some of the more dramatic impacts that are going to happen with climate change. How do we get funding when we need industry to match it? Industry is clearly looking at the near term, and that's important, it's critical, but we also need to be playing the long game. How is it that we're going to do that research for projecting industry needs 10 or 30 years down the road if we need that industry match and they are focused on today?
What I ask of you all is to help think outside of the box. How do we get the funding into research so that we are ready for the big changes that are coming?
We also need to be thinking in ways that are going to address the complexity of this situation. Climate change is incredibly complex. We need to be thinking about the economics, the environmental problems, as well as the social issues that are involved, and we need to be thinking about some of the opportunities for our local farmers but at the same time consider the agricultural situation across the nation.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Oonce again I appreciate our witnesses' great information. It's always great to see young producers get together and come up with initiatives and projects like this one that you guys have taken on. It's really good to see that you're thinking outside the box, tackling some of the issues you face, and doing it together as a group, which is fantastic to see in the watershed that all of you share.
My riding is southwest Alberta, so I'm in the heart of cattle country, with a little bit of potatoes on the south end. Cavendish has just opened up there.
The one thing I'm glad you brought up is the issues with PMRA and imidacloprid, which I'm assuming is the one you were talking about when you were talking about wireworm. I know this has a huge impact on potatoes, but canola and pulse growers also use it in Alberta. I know the horticulture industry in Ontario relies on it a great deal.
I understand you guys as a group have about 20,000 acres. Can you talk about the impact that losing some of those tools would have on your industry? I think that's the message we need to get to PMRA. We're seeing, as I think a lot of my colleagues would agree, a discussion going on in silos. Health Canada and PMRA are not talking to the agriculture sector. They don't understand how the decisions they are going to make will impact our producers and our agriculture economy.
Can you talk about it, just so we can have it on the record? Do you have an idea of what the economic impact would be if you lost some of those tools that are in your tool box?
We received just a little under a million dollars to do a greenhouse gas mitigation project. We're planting willow trees not in but near the buffer zones on our farms. That's to do two things.
One is to sequester the carbon in the soil. We're working with a professor from Dalhousie University and we'll be hiring two master's students who will look at the greenhouse gas emissions from the trees and do measurements on the sequestration of the carbons in the soil.
We're also using this as an agroforestry best management practice. It's fairly easy. The willow trees are easy to plant, and they grow fast. With that fast growth, they're cut every three years. After they're cut, they grow back even more rapidly. They create more habitat within the fields for wildlife species.
We were pushing this project because we see a lot of environmental benefits, and it's also a very easy and cheap practice that can be adopted by the farmers. With this project, we're working on 12 different sites across the province. We have 12 sites planted. The testing and the research will be going on over five years for this particular project.
What we're hoping for at the end of this project is that we will have demonstrated to farmers that this is a very easy thing for them to do within their grassland areas. These are areas that have already been taken out of production, so they're not taking anything away from their existing crop production areas. Also, willow trees are easy to plant and easy to manage.
One of our researchers who we work really closely with on two other projects has just made a proposal to extend that project to look at the biomass. You're cutting the trees every three years, and he's looking at applying that biomass back to the potato fields to combat disease and build organic matter in the soils. Right now, he has proposed that research for five to 10 years as an extension of this project.
We're hoping that at the end of the day there's an agroforestry best management practice that will be easily adopted by most of our potato producers across the island and elsewhere.
An hon. member: How long is this...?
Mrs. Andrea McKenna: It's a five-year project right now.
:
Our vision of precision farming is going to start with mastering the soil sampling side of things first.
As Jason alluded to, I invested in a very expensive machine from southern Illinois, and it covers 100 acres in less than an hour. I can pull 4,200 soil plugs. The problem with grid sampling is it's so labour-intensive and it totally relies on the human, and there could be human error. If you're talking about soil science, you're talking about depth inconsistencies and so on and so forth, so that's why I looked for this machine.
We're going to start with soil sampling and move into nutrient management.
I just got back from a trip to a fertilizer company in Great Britain three days ago, and they were emphasizing different kinds of nitrogens. Some work differently under different temperatures. There's no better fit with what we're talking about now: we have to pay attention to our soil temperatures more.
We're starting to apply fertilizers throughout the season, not just giving one bang in the row in May or June and hoping for the best. I think we have to look at that more. I think we have to learn our nutrients and the characteristics of them with climate change and temperatures and so on.
Then we're going to take this grid sampling and nutrient management and introduce drone imagery to potato production in Prince Edward Island. To take it a step further, we are investing in yield maps on our harvesters. Basically, you can imagine taking all the guesswork out of your yield and where it came from. You can zero in on the exact location in that field and why it overproduced or underproduced.