Proceeding of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue No. 35 - Evidence - Meeting of October 19, 2017
OTTAWA, Thursday, October 19, 2017
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 8:01 a.m. to study the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors.
Senator Ghislain Maltais (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning. I am Ghislain Maltais from Quebec, chair of this committee. I would like to start by asking the senators introduce themselves.
Senator Mercer: I am Senator Terry Mercer from Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Gagné: Raymonde Gagné from Manitoba.
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Senator Woo: Yuen Pau Woo from British Columbia.
Senator Bernard: Wanda Thomas Bernard from Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
Senator Pratte: André Pratte from Quebec.
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Senator Doyle: Norman Doyle, Newfoundland and Labrador.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Jean-Guy Dagenais from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Ogilvie: Kelvin Ogilvie, Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
The Chair: Today, the committee is continuing its study on the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors.
[English]
Today, we welcome Mr. Barry Smit, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, University of Guelph.
[Translation]
We also have Neal Scott, Associate Professor, Associate Head, Geography Graduate Programs, Queen’s University.
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Thank you very much for accepting the invitation to appear.
[Translation]
I would now invite the witnesses to make their presentations. We will start with Mr. Scott. The floor is yours.
[English]
Neal Scott, Associate Professor, Associate Head, Geography Graduate Programs, Queen’s University, as an individual: Good morning, honourable senators, guests and staff. Thank you very much for the invitation to come and speak to the Agriculture and Forestry Committee today.
My name is Neil Scott. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University. My research focuses on understanding the carbon and nitrogen cycles, how carbon and nitrogen move between the land and the atmosphere and how human activity influences the movement of those elements. I am also very interested in how humans can better manage the land surface to try and enhance, in one case for carbon, the storage of carbon on a land surface, but also still letting forests provide some of the materials that society needs.
Part of my past I spent in New Zealand, where I helped them develop a national carbon monitoring system for the entire country. So that’s been part of my background as well.
Today what I want to talk to you about is the carbon cycle, primarily the carbon cycle in forests, and looking at how it’s likely to change in response to changes in climate. I also want to talk about some possible opportunities for what we can do to try and reduce the risks to forests but also enhance their ability to still provide some of the materials that we need.
I provided you with a series of PowerPoint slides. I am going to be skipping a few of those. I found out it would take me way too long to cover all of those. So I will be skipping, especially at the beginning, a few of those. Hopefully you can follow along with me as I go.
We know atmospheric CO2 has been increasing since measurements started in the 1960s, but when you look at the curve of increase, it’s not a straight line. It has a very jagged, saw-toothed shape to it. That primarily is because of the land surface. My point here is that the land plays a huge role in terms of influencing the amount of carbon that ends up in the atmosphere. We all know that carbon dioxide is one of the most major greenhouse gases.
In terms of changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, though, what is the most pressing problem now is that the rate of change is so much higher than it’s ever been. If you look at the last 600,000 years of data, the rate of change is unprecedented. For systems to adapt to these changes is going to be a real challenge because of this rapid rate of change.
At present, human activity introduces roughly about 35 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere from both fossil fuel combustion and also land use change and forestry activities. Fortunately, a lot of that CO2 doesn’t end up in the atmosphere. A little less than half of it ends up in the atmosphere. About a quarter of it ends up in the oceans, and another quarter or a little bit more ends up in vegetation and soils all over the earth’s surface. We don’t really know exactly where. That is part of the problem. So that number is calculated by difference when we look at the global budget.
My point is that the land surface plays a huge role. If it doesn’t keep fulfilling this role, the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere increases even faster than it is right now. So land surface, vegetation and soils are quite important.
I’m not going to talk too much about soils and soil management opportunities. I think my colleague might be talking about that in the context of agricultural systems, but we will see.
Climate change has several impacts. We know about the chronic slow increase in temperature that the data show since records started being collected in the late 1800s, but there is more to it than that. There are also changes in patterns of precipitation. We have seen increases in drought frequency leading, in some cases, to more fires. We have also seen a lot more extreme weather events. This is perhaps one of the more pressing and interesting problems, the amount of variability that forests will be exposed to in the future. So it’s not just the chronic change in temperature, but it’s also these extreme weather events — extreme precipitation or extreme temperature events — which can have a huge impact.
There are a whole range of impacts of climate change. I am sure you have heard about a lot of these. I will be focusing today primarily on forests.
Canada is a special country. It has about 10 per cent of the total forest area globally in its land area, about 330 million hectares of land area, of which about 220 million hectares actually fall into what is called the “managed forest.” There is a map that is part of my presentation here that shows the distribution of the managed and unmanaged forests.
Carbon moves back and forth from the forest to the atmosphere through two major processes. Photosynthesis brings it in; respiration is the main way it leaves. Once it gets into a forest, it’s redistributed in several different ways. There is a little diagram here that shows some of the pathways of carbon movement. My main point, though, is that all of these carbon-cycle processes are influenced by changes in temperature and precipitation.
We know that with changes in climate, all of these processes are going to be changing. We don’t yet know exactly in what direction and how quickly they will change, but we do know that they will change.
If you look at Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, the projections for 2020, around 735 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, only about 4 per cent of that can be directly related to human activity, the land use, land use change and the forestry sector. That’s a pretty tiny amount, but what I’m going to show you in the next couple of slides that I have is that the actual movement of carbon back and forth between forests and the atmosphere is much greater than that tiny 4 per cent that is actually counted as part of the national emissions inventory.
The first thing I want to look at is the opportunities. This is the top slide. It has several bar graphs and then a line graph going through it. It is number 11 in my group. You can see a couple of things.
The line shows that the net storage of carbon in managed forests has ranged between 110 million tonnes of CO2 up to about 26 million tonnes of CO2. Keep that in mind. Canada’s total emissions are 735 million tonnes. Opportunities in the past, if you go back to the 1990s, Canadian forests were storing over 100 million tonnes of carbon into their vegetation and their soils. But that number is changing. It does point to the fact that if we actively manage forests, we can make them remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it on the land surface.
Disturbance, though, is another problem. The next slide looks at the potential contributions of insect outbreaks and fire, and how those can release huge amounts of carbon. That number has varied anywhere from zero up to about 230 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent released into the atmosphere as a result of insect outbreaks and fire activities.
The key points here are that management can play a key role, a positive role, and disturbance can be incredibly important in terms of negating a lot of those positive impacts that management might have. When we are thinking about management strategies, we have to think about how we can design those strategies, building in all this variability in the weather that is going to be occurring and this increased frequency of disturbance.
What are some of the risks, then? I have a couple of slides here with some bullet points on them.
Some of the increased risks are increased risk of fire and increased risk of pathogens. These are all in response to changes in temperature and precipitation. These are going to be more frequent.
We have seen the impact of the mountain pine beetle on Canada’s forests in the western part of the country. There are likely to be changes in species composition. Whole communities, whole ecosystems, will reorganize themselves in response to these changes in climate that we’re going to observe.
Tree species, and trees in general, are moving north as temperatures get warmer. They are moving into areas dominated by permafrost, and with that comes the potential for huge carbon stores, which are stored in these northern soils, to be released into the atmosphere. This is a huge problem. It’s not really part of the managed forests, but, in terms of thinking about how forests contribute to the global carbon picture, that is a major issue to be thinking ahead to.
We know that these changes in precipitation and temperature are going to influence the overall carbon balance of a forest because we know that all of those processes are sensitive to changes in temperature and precipitation. We may have to actually think about better management strategies just to maintain the role that forests play in the current carbon budget, removing that roughly 25 to 30 per cent. We may have to actively manage to do that.
How can we manage? What sort of things can we do to forests? We can change harvesting regimes. There is a whole range of different harvesting systems that are being experimented with to change the structure of forests. We could change species composition, introduce more fast-growing species, for example, species that are important for bioenergy systems. We can actually manipulate the structure of forests to make them more efficient in terms of how they use resources. That can then actually make them grow faster under a wider range of conditions.
We can change the distribution of carbon in forests. Where it ends up determines how long it might stay there. If it ends up in the woody part of the plant or in the soils, it’s going to stay there a whole lot longer than if it ends up in the foliage, for example. We should keep in mind that soils are important. We can increase the amount of carbon stored in soils. That’s a good place to store carbon because it tends to stay there for a long time once it gets into the soil.
Finally, we can increase the use of wood products as another way of storing carbon on the land surface. I have actually been involved in an experiment up in Maine, in the United States, where we experimented, at a whole-stand level, with harvesting systems to try to enhance carbon storage, and we found that we could actually manipulate growth efficiency of these forests just by changing the harvesting system that has been used. There are ways of monitoring the carbon balance of entire forests. That’s part of what I do as my research activities.
Just to conclude, what are some of the take-home messages? Climate is changing. We’re going to see changes in temperature and precipitation. Some are gradual; some are more episodic. In some cases, the episodic ones, these extreme events, are perhaps more problematic than some of the chronic, slower changes in temperature that we’re seeing.
We know that these climate change factors are going to influence the carbon balance of forests. We don’t necessarily know how in all different forest types. There is research ongoing in that area.
Climate change is going to have a major impact on disturbance frequency, and I think it’s important that any management strategies that we develop take into account that this frequency of disturbance and the types of disturbance will change and that frequency will likely increase going forward into the future.
But there are opportunities to increase the area of managed forests and also to enhance our management strategies to try and enhance the role that forests can play, both in Canada’s carbon balance and also in the global carbon balance.
There is a need for, I think, increased education and research. We need to train the next generation of foresters not only to think about how we manage forests to provide products but also to manage the carbon cycle of those forests. So I think there is an opportunity. A lot of forestry programs have been declining in terms of student numbers. I think there is a real need to try to boost that and train these students, in a more diverse way, though, so that they understand these multiple benefits that forests can provide to society.
I think carbon pricing mechanisms are one tool that can be used to create incentives. There need to be incentives to change management. Carbon pricing is one of the tools that can be used.
Finally, I think there is a need for a comprehensive monitoring program. If we don’t know what is happening in these forests, it’s really hard to think about designing new management strategies that can be used to help to both enhance the ability of these forests to provide products and also to potentially mitigate some of the effects of climate change. That’s all I have to say; thank you very much.
Barry Smit, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, University of Guelph, as an individual: Good morning. There is a handout that I will use to guide my presentation. Climate change affects agriculture in two main ways. The first is through a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, what the climate change people call “mitigation of climate change.” That represents some challenges for agriculture. So here, if we have attempts to reduce the use of fossil fuels, perhaps carbon tax, these things will increase the costs for some farmers and encourage them to be more efficient with their use of energy.
There may actually be some regulations or controls on other emissions from agriculture, such as nitrous oxide or methane. So attempts to mitigate climate change can have some challenges for agriculturalists. On the other hand, there are opportunities for farmers as well, opportunities in such areas as carbon credits, capturing carbon in agriculture, biofuels and alternative energy. Other witnesses will speak to this issue.
The other way in which climate change affects agriculture is through the changing climate itself, and agriculture is going to need to adapt to these changing climatic conditions. In effect, that represents a type of risk management or management in agriculture to deal with conditions that are changing. It’s this area that I’ll focus on today.
I was involved in some of the first studies of the impact of climate change on agriculture in the 1980s. There has been a long history of this. Across Canada and in the world, there are hundreds and hundreds of studies of how climate change affects agriculture in Canada and how adaptation might work to deal with those, to benefit from the opportunities and to reduce the risks. I have left a summary document with your secretariat that gives you an indication of the type of work that has been undertaken across Canada.
Now, if you ask the question, “What is it that agriculture needs to adapt to,” initially, we thought, “Well, it’s the gradual change in temperature.” The early studies worldwide thought that Canada would benefit; Canada’s agriculture would benefit. We have longer growing seasons. We have more heat. We can have high-yielding varieties, and it would generally be a benefit. To some degree, there is truth in that. There are opportunities from a longer growing season in many parts of the country and for many crops. But, as you’ll see, that’s probably not the key impact of climate change on agriculture. In fact, even warmer temperatures can be a problem for some producers. If you are in the ice-wine business, for example, which is the major wine export of Canada, you can only harvest the ice wine when you get -8 degrees Celsius for harvesting the crop. The time of the year where -8 degrees arrives is becoming later and later. It used to be in mid-December, now later December, now mid-January. So the producers are getting less and less crop, and some of them will find they won’t be able to produce ice wine in those areas. So it can be a problem as well.
But the key thing, probably, from climate change for agriculture is moisture. If you ask farmers what do they think about climate change, they will say, “It probably doesn’t matter much, but if we keep getting these droughts and more serious droughts, that’s a big challenge for us.”
The frequency and severity of droughts is part of climate change. If you look at the handout, there is a diagram showing how drought severity varies from year to year. Some years, it’s quite dry. Other years, it’s wetter. Farmers have arranged their operations so that they can handle slightly dryer, slightly wetter. But with climate change, we find that the frequency and severity of extreme droughts is increasing. In fact, the droughts in the 1990s and 2000s were more severe meteorologically than the ones in the 1930s, the Dust Bowl and those areas. But we have adapted to those to some degree.
So, if you look at the claims through crop insurance and disaster relief, drought is the serious issue, causing hardship for farmers and costing Canadian taxpayers lots through assistance in crop insurance and drought relief, the safety-net programs. We need to adapt to increasing droughts.
Timing of conditions: In 2012, the apple trees in Ontario blossomed quite early because there was a warm period, and then they got a frost, not an untimely frost, regular time of frost. It killed 80 per cent of the apple crop, a huge loss for Ontario apple producers, because of change in the timing of conditions, which happens with climate change.
Then there are extreme events. I have already talked about droughts, but there are also extreme rainfall events. Climate change can increase the intensity of storms.
Agriculture has always dealt with droughts, storms and intense rainfall, but with climate change, the frequency and severity of these conditions is increasing. So they are going to have to deal with this. In Ontario, excessive precipitation accounts for 25 per cent of the claims in the crop insurance.
There are other effects. Snow cover will affect agriculture. And there are indirect things — pests, diseases, fires — that are indirectly from climate. In the forestry sector, there is a classic example. The early studies of the impact of climate change on forestry concluded that there would be an improvement in the productivity of Canada’s forests.
You look at B.C., what happened? The mountain pine beetle, which always existed in southern British Columbia, spread. Because of the warmer conditions, it was able to spread northward. It has devastated the British Columbia pine forest and pine forest industry. Eighty per cent of the pine forest has been lost. They had to harvest the trees before they became mush, which has resulted in boom and bust — a huge impact on the forest industry not because of climate directly but because of its impact on a particular pest. That can happen in agriculture.
Asian soybean rust is able to spread because of milder winters. Agriculture is going to have to deal with these indirect effects as well.
Now, I’m talking about adaptation in agriculture. What does that look like? What does that mean? Well, you can have various forms. You can react to an impact after it has occurred, or you can adapt proactively in anticipation of it. Obviously, it makes sense to adapt proactively. You can do tactical or strategic adaptation. If you’re a Prairie farmer and you are hit by a drought, you can deal with it that year tactically by buying more feed or selling some of your livestock. Neither of those is good because the price of feed will be very high, and there won’t be much money for your livestock. Or you can do it strategically. You say, “Okay, given there is a chance of this happening next in the coming years, I’m going to moderate my mix of livestock or my crop feeding.”
I have given you a table which gives you a summary of various kinds of adaptations in agriculture.
Now, the ones we often hear about are technological ones. We say, “We’ll develop new crops to better match the new conditions.” There is some opportunity there, but right now we have dozens and dozens of different crop varieties and hybrids, and farmers still have to choose which ones to use. They will still have to do that. So the key thing will be farmers’ decision making on what crops to use.
We say, “Well, we’ll do a better job of predicting the weather or the climate.” Well, yes, we will make progress there, but our ability to predict seasons in advance is still very limited. We don’t have a lot of confidence in that. Farmers have to make decisions for seasons ahead one year, two years. The investment is large. They are still going to have to manage these risks.
People say, “Well, we’ll irrigate to deal with these droughts.” You look at the Prairies currently. Most of the water available is already taken up. In fact, it’s over-allocated. When we have less water coming down the rivers from the Rockies because the glaciers deplete, there will be less water and there will be problems already meeting the commitments for current irrigation. That’s not a viable option.
So it means that we will have to look at farm production practices to enhance opportunities, to increase resilience, and they can be done in crop choices, in land use choices and in timing of operations.
Then there is the farm financial management. This is a key. Farmers manage their risks through financial mechanisms. They buy crop insurance. They might take crop shares in futures. They become part of the income stabilization programs. All of these will be affected by climate change. As claims on crop insurance increase, premiums will go up. In fact, insurance companies will have to moderate their programs because there will be increased claims. It’s already happening.
The last category is what about government programs? What is the role of government in this? Well, adaptation is something done mainly by farmers and agribusiness, but governments do have a role. For instance, governments are major players in crop insurance. Taxpayers support 50 per cent, roughly, of the cost of crop insurance. There is a public interest in having these systems work efficiently. The same with income stabilization programs. These will be affected by a changing climate.
There are opportunities for government there, not some massive adaptation program, necessarily, but tweaking the things that will be affected by climate change.
My next question is, who does adaptation? I have already addressed that. Adaptation in agriculture is mainly done by farmers, but also by agribusiness and insurance companies, and there is the role of government that I already mentioned.
I have identified three challenges to effective adaptation in the agricultural sector and solutions to deal with those.
The first one is denial of climate change. Many producers haven’t accepted the reality of climate change. They say that it’s just part of a natural variation. There is an unwillingness to do anything about it, and that’s fine.
Some of them say, “Well, there is climate change, but it’s not relevant to me; so I don’t need to do anything.” One of the reasons that statement is heard is because they have heard that climate change is this long-term global warming, that 50 years from now the average temperature will be 1 or 2 degrees warmer. Well, a farmer will say, “I deal with variations of greater than 2 degrees in a day, in a season, in a year, so it’s irrelevant.”
What we need is agriculture-relevant climate information. The average temperature is really not the key thing for producers. It’s what about the probability of changes in the frequency of droughts or the frequency and severity of dry periods or extreme hot spells or rainstorms that can have an effect? These are pertinent to agriculture, and these are the things that the climate science community needs to be providing to agriculture for that sector to be better positioned to adapt.
The second factor that is a challenge is the influence of other conditions. Farmers don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Climate change, how am I going to deal with this?” They wake up in the morning saying, “What are the costs of production? What are the prices of my product? What are the markets doing? What technology can I use?” Climate change is not the top issue on their agenda, quite rightly so.
What that means for adaptation is if you are looking at ways of incorporating adaptation into decision making, you do it in the context of all those other decisions. You treat it like you would any other risk management. You don’t have a separate program for adaptation. You incorporate it.
And the last one —
[Translation]
The Chair: Since there are only 30 minutes left for senators’ questions, we will ask you to wrap up your presentation, if you don’t mind. Senators will be able to extrapolate, since we all have the document in front of us. I apologize, but we have a limited amount of time. Senators have a lot of questions for you. We will start with Senator Mercer, deputy chair of the committee.
[English]
Senator Mercer: I want to thank both of you for your excellent presentations today. You have covered a lot of ground in a short period of time.
Dr. Scott, you talked about changing what is in the forests. Are you suggesting that as we do reforestation, we change the species that we’re using to do that to help better with the management of CO2?
Mr. Scott: It’s an opportunity. When I worked in New Zealand, most of their forestry is plantation forestry. They don’t use their native forests much in terms of wood products. I’m not saying that we should plant plantation forests all over Canada, but there are opportunities. Species composition will change anyway, most likely, in response to changes in climate. There might be ways to think about taking advantage of that and encouraging some species that are more tolerant to drought, for example.
Senator Mercer: Are you familiar with the way the Irving people in New Brunswick manage their forest? I don’t think you would call it plantations, but it is managing the forest by removing the underbrush from the species that are in the way of productive trees — productive trees from an economic point of view, not necessarily from a CO2 point of view. Is that of some help because they are creating larger trees faster?
Mr. Scott: Definitely so. The system we worked with in Maine is a shelterwood harvest. They go in and take out portions of the trees at different points during the harvesting regime. You never clear the land surface completely; it allows for natural regeneration.
You also have to be cognizant of the risks of fire. It sounds like the strategy you are describing, though I’m not familiar with how it is applied in that region, could potentially have an impact in terms of reducing the risks of fire or the magnitude of fires when they do occur. That has been a real issue in the United States and Canada, thinking about how to manage forests so that when there are fires, because we are not going to get rid of fires, they are not these huge, massive fires like we are seeing this year in the western part of the United States.
Senator Mercer: I would encourage you to have a look at the model we are using in New Brunswick. Some members of this committee have visited several of their forests that are being managed, and it is an impressive operation — not necessarily the answer, but it is impressive.
You suggested that we might use faster-growing species. If we had people from our Aboriginal community here, they would probably be asking, what does that do to the other natural activities that happen in the forest, to the other species, the animals that live in the forest? Should we not be concerned about that as we talk about reforestation?
Mr. Scott: I am not proposing monospecific plantations over the entire forest area; that is not what I am talking about. There may be opportunities, for example, for things like bioenergy applications. Maybe there are opportunities in that area.
Species composition will likely change. We don’t want to totally get rid of biodiversity, but there are ways of encouraging forests to develop with certain species perhaps becoming more common. Those are species that might already be there, but they are not necessarily a dominant species in that forest.
I am not necessarily advocating a wide change in terms of planting plantations all over, but it is using the species that are there and thinking about the forest structure and ways that we can effectively use characteristics of these species to enhance the ability of forests to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere.
Senator Mercer: Mr. Smit, you talked about the three challenges that you have proposed. I am surprised that denial would be one of those challenges in the agriculture sector because these people live and breathe the climate every day — more so than those of us who don’t work the land.
The changes that are happening, you are right, it is 50 years, and you can measure it by a couple of degrees. Is no one looking at the opportunities that this presents to the agricultural sector of slightly changing what we are doing to maximize our output?
I continue to talk about the fact that we will have 9.5 billion people on this planet fairly soon. If we can’t feed them, there will be some unhappy people, and unhappy people respond to hunger by fighting and causing world conflict.
Mr. Smit: Yes, indeed, there are lots of people looking at ways of improving the productivity and the profitability of the agricultural sector in Canada, including in the light of a changing climate. There is vast literature that outlines some of those opportunities. So, yes, there are people looking at that.
My comment wasn’t about the entire agricultural sector. There are people, just as in the general population, who are yet to be convinced that climate change is real and will impact the lives of us and our children.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My question is for Mr. Scott and has to do with the uncertainty or challenges of the experts with respect to the future, which you mentioned. We know something is going to happen, but we do not know what exactly.
In light of that, is the basis on which politicians develop programs to fight greenhouse gases appropriate? Could they better target the actions that need to be taken? If so, what can we say or recommend to help them better fight climate change?
[English]
Mr. Scott: I like to think of the word “resilience.” It is hard to know what the target is. You have heard both of us talk about the problem of variability and extreme events. If we are designing, say, policy related to forest management, that needs to be kept in mind. We need to think of strategies that can deal with that variability.
There is a lot that is not known, and there is a lot of scope for research. That is what keeps me going and what interests me. We need to be mindful that we will be living in a much more variable world, and if we are going to design strategies, we have to design them with that in mind.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My second question is for Mr. Smit. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada foresees warmer temperatures in most regions of Canada for the next 60 years. Does this mean that some agricultural crops will have to be abandoned because they will no longer be viable? Should we start developing new crops right away?
[English]
Mr. Smit: Exactly. Both. Yes, there will be some areas where the crops currently grown won’t be viable 60 years from now — probably 20 years from now. I will use the example of wine producers in Canada. Some are already finding that they may want to change the varieties they plant.
There will be new opportunities. In Atlantic Canada, over the last decade, they are now growing corn for grain where previously they weren’t able to do so. There are opportunities and there are risks.
You could wait until you find that your crop is failing year after year, or, as you suggest, you could look ahead and say, “It is likely that the viability of this crop is not going to continue, so I am going to change in advance of that and benefit from the conditions that are occurring.”
Senator Pratte: Mr. Smit, concerning this issue of denial of climate change, we heard from many witnesses representing producers and farmers. They talked to us much more about their concerns about carbon pricing or a carbon tax than about their fear of climate change. I wouldn’t say they were denying climate change. I felt they were very confident that they could adapt to climate change rather than denying it. Would that be a proper characterization?
Mr. Smit: Yes. I am not painting with a broad brush here, but there exist, in all communities — not only in agriculture, but in forestry and in coastal settlements — some people who aren’t convinced that it is real. It may be a small portion of the population. Certainly the ones that come to this meeting would probably be more attuned to the issue of climate change than others.
Indeed, yes, farmers are probably more concerned about things like carbon pricing or controls on emissions of nitrous oxide or methane than they are about changes in the weather. But oftentimes there is not a connection between recurring droughts and climate change, as I indicated, for a lot of people; they think climate change is largely change in temperature long term. Of course, they can adapt to that. That is not a problem at all; in fact, it’s a benefit. But, if we get the variations and extremes, that may be. Yes, most producers are on the ball, and they manage those risks well. That is what adaptation is. That is how it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen largely by producers perceiving the risks and opportunities and adjusting to them. Where that doesn’t work, we will have claims on insurance and claims on safety-net programs and some people going out of business, but most of them will probably do very well.
Senator Pratte: Dr. Scott, one of your graphs shows that, presently, land use in forests absorbs something like 25 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. In the 1990s, it was over 100 megatonnes. So what happened?
Mr. Scott: That is a good question, actually. I was looking at that data. I think it may partly —
Senator Pratte: Because the area of forest hasn’t changed at all.
Mr. Scott: Hardly, yes. It may have to do with increasing disturbance frequency having some role, because some of that land area is also having disturbance associated with it. That is one possible explanation. But I remember that when I was looking at this and pulling this together, I was actually wondering the same thing myself.
Senator Pratte: It is a huge difference.
Mr. Scott: I know, but it also outlines the potential, I think, that there is an opportunity. Managing the risks from disturbance is really critical. You can see, in the other graph, disturbance frequency, fire frequency, insect outbreaks. It shows the importance of the mountain pine beetle. It is interesting; even the outbreak of the mountain pine beetle, which is that big hump in the middle of the graph, still didn’t actually increase the emissions from disturbance as much as you might have thought. They are actually higher now than they were during that time. A lot of it is intensity, too, and how intense the disturbances are, which isn’t necessarily captured when you just do total land area.
Again, it points to some of the opportunities for management. Clearly, we have been at a place where we have been able to store more carbon, remove more carbon from the atmosphere than we are right now in that managed area.
Senator Woo: Thank you, Professor Scott and Professor Smit, for your very informative presentations.
We are doing this study, of course, in the context of a stated government intention to try to meet our very ambitious GHG-reduction targets under the climate change accord and a proposal, a government intention, to put in place a carbon tax as a tool to help us to achieve those targets.
The more I listen to you and to other colleagues from the sector, the more I wonder if the carbon tax in itself is able to create the market-based incentives to achieve the kinds of carbon reductions in your sector that would be needed to help us to meet that target.
I raise this question because there are some special circumstances in forestry, and agriculture more broadly, that may not be responsive to a carbon tax in its purest form. I want your comments on that. What I am thinking about here is, number one, the need for some collective actions that a carbon tax potentially would not touch because the collective actions would not be incentivized. And the second one, the bigger thing, I guess, is the issue of sinks. If sinks are not given recognition in some way, not priced, and the people who can produce things do not get financial benefit from them, then why would they do it?
Can you talk a bit about the types of government policies and incentives and, I guess, regulations, ultimately, maybe subsidies as well, the mix needed in order to bring about the sorts of GHG reduction in the agriculture and forestry sector to help us meet our global targets? It is a big question.
Mr. Smit: I understand the question, including the issue of sinks, carbon capture. Unfortunately, it is not my area of expertise. I would be making stuff up. There are people who examine these questions with a lot more substantive basis than me, so I’m not going to answer that.
Mr. Scott: I am not an economist either, unfortunately.
I think there are opportunities to analyze the question, though, using econometric types of models. That is not the kind of work that I do, but I think that counting sinks does create an incentive. I think that comes back to having a monitoring program and designing programs that let you at least quantify them and attribute them. It is one thing to say, “Well, in Canada, we’re storing 26 million tonnes of CO2.” We’re going to have to know who is doing it. Where is it happening? The only way that that’s going to happen is to have some kind of a program that can actually quantify those sinks, with some degree of uncertainty, because that’s going to affect the pricing in a big way.
Senator Gagné: Thank you for your presentation. Most ecosystems are dynamic. When the resiliency of systems is assessed, are you able to determine where tipping points occur or when systems are subjects to episodic resetting? It is the doom question.
Mr. Scott: Are you asking that in the context of any ecosystems or just forests or agriculture?
Senator Gagné: I will ask the question as pertaining to forestry and then pertaining to agriculture.
Mr. Scott: Okay. We always talk about tipping points, but I don’t think we actually really know where they are in most cases. Unfortunately, our models that we use to predict what happens to ecosystems are all kind of based on this concept of steady state. Well, steady state you can sort of throw out the window when we look ahead to climate because the variability, I think, anyway, is going to be so great. It is kind of like flood frequency. We base our estimates of a 100-year flood on the past data, how frequently a 100-year flood occurs. Well, maybe those are going to occur now every 10 years. So the concept of these intensities of disturbances is going to change how we have to think about producing models and forecasts in the system. I think those tipping points are there, but I don’t think we really know what they are. I think that, again, having monitoring programs in place might actually help to forewarn us when we are getting close to those points. Maybe it is a season length or something like that. Maybe it’s what happens the year after some particular event occurs. Unless we have some way of monitoring carefully what is happening, on a broad scale, for the whole country, though, we are going to miss those warning signals.
Senator Gagné: As a supplementary, what do we need to be able to monitor? Any recommendations?
Mr. Scott: Right now, there is a national forest monitoring program. The way I understand that it works is that it’s sort of a five-year recurrence of sampling plots that are scattered around the country. But I think there needs to be a more spatially comprehensive assessment that is done as well and done more frequently. That can be done with combinations of satellite tools and other things that we can use to monitor the land surface almost on a weekly basis if we want to. There are ways of doing that. The tools are there; they are up in space. There are ways of doing that if we can just get it all organized and coordinated. That is the key. I know from when I developed these systems in New Zealand, bringing together all of the different stakeholders is important, because there is the forestry sector and the agricultural sector and the remote sensing group in Canada, and everybody needs to come together and actually design an effective system that will provide the data that is needed.
Mr. Smit: The tipping point idea is a bit of a problem often. One of the reasons it is so prominent in the climate change field is because of the international Framework Convention on Climate Change. All countries are still committed to this. It says that countries will make efforts to prevent “dangerous climate change.” So all of the people are now asking, what is “dangerous?” Most recently, they have come up with a 2-degree change. What that suggests is that, up to 2 degrees, everything is fine and dandy, and then, after 2 degrees, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.That is not the case.
Already there are countries and people around the world that are being affected problematically by climate change, losing their livelihoods and lives. Some people aren’t affected at all. As time goes by, more people will be affected. So the tipping point is somewhat arbitrary.
We are required under this framework convention globally to have it. In our operations in Canada, I don’t think it matters that much. We will have issues that arise and become more problematic as we get more extreme conditions, more frequent droughts or whatever. To some degree, many people will be able to handle those without any difficulty at all. For them it won’t be a tipping point, but for others it is already.
I don’t think it is that helpful. I think it is a gradual thing and will become more problematic, but there will be some opportunities as well. I don’t think there is one point at which everything changes.
Senator Oh: Thank you very much for the information that you provided to us this morning. I have a question that is a little bit science fiction.
Has climate change happened before on Earth where we are living? A million years ago we had dinosaurs, but they are now gone. What about mankind living in the future? Will we disappear like the dinosaurs?
Senator Gagné: Another doom question.
Mr. Smit: Over the geologic time scale, climate has always changed through all sorts of forces: the rotation of the Earth around the sun, et cetera. From our perspective, that is very slow. We would hardly notice it.
In the last several centuries, we have had human effects, things that we didn’t know we were doing. Our ancestors cutting forests and burning fossil fuels has changed the composition of the atmosphere and the climate at a pace that, as far as we know, is unprecedented. We are changing it faster than natural forces do.
Some people say we have cooling. In fact, the climate scientists have demonstrated that were it not for our emissions of greenhouse gases, the earth would be gradually cooling. It is in one of these interglacial periods. So it’s gradually cooling, but with our emissions of greenhouse gases, we have just overwhelmed that and are causing the changes we observe.
Climate change itself is a natural thing. Human-induced climate change that we have over the last several centuries is quite distinct.
Mr. Scott: I would add to that. The fourth figure in the deck of slides that I provided shows the CO2 concentration and how it has tracked temperature going back 640,000 years.
It is pretty clear from that that the current rate of change is unprecedented in terms of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is what is really different when we look at the past. Sure climate has changed over geological time scales, but we are looking at changes occurring over 100 years, perhaps, that are quite different than what we have seen in the past.
[Translation]
The Chair: You mentioned hybrids in your brief. Where in Canada did you study the quality of hybrid plants and their growth, and in what type of soil did you do that research?
[English]
Mr. Scott: I am not sure what you mean by “hybrids.” I didn’t talk specifically about hybrid plants. I talked about possibly changing species composition. I am not necessarily thinking about a hybridization program or something like that.
[Translation]
The Chair: Are you aware that this has been going on for 40 years, particularly in New Brunswick and the north shore of Quebec. Around 1986, the Irving company in New Brunswick produced a hybrid tree between fir and spruce, varieties that came from British Columbia. This tree takes 22 to 23 years to mature instead of 30 years. On the north shore of Quebec, where the land is more arid, it can take up to 30 years for a tree to reach maturity. As a result, you can skip a cut of hardwood. After cutting the conifers, the hardwoods automatically come up. You have to wait another 60 years for the conifers to come back. Irving and the Government of Quebec did that work. I do not know whether this approach is being used elsewhere in Canada. I do not know whether you have done any research on that. This saves a lot of carbon. In the future, should hybrid conifers be better developed than some hardwood trees that are considered more or less useful?
[English]
Mr. Scott: I am not personally familiar with that program, but it sounds fantastic. It sounds like there is a need for that type of program.
I am more familiar with what is happening in Ontario. I have only lived in Canada for about 12 years now, and I am not actually conducting experiments, myself, on species competition, but what you described is the kind of thing we need to do a lot more of.
My sense is that in forestry, at least in Ontario, the industry itself is not as vibrant as it used to be, and I am not sure there is as much incentive to carry out those kinds experiments as you described being done out in some of the Eastern provinces.
To me, that is the kind of thing that needs to be done. We need more of those types of experiences. In Ontario we have this Model Forest framework. There are opportunities to use some of those frameworks to do these experiments in a coordinated way. That is critical, and I think they need to start sooner rather than later. If we wait until we start to see impacts and then want to start to implement some of these changes, it takes a long time to create these hybrid trees or to get them established.
[Translation]
The Chair: I think it would be good for the University of Guelph to contact the Irving company and Dalhousie University; they did that research about 30 years ago. It’s an interesting approach that could be used across Canada.
As for Senator Oh’s question, whether we are going to disappear someday, we do not need climate change for that; we just have to look at the history of wars since the creation. Look at what’s happening in the world; I think Kalashnikovs make more noise and kill more people than climate change.
Thank you very much for your very interesting testimony. I urge you to continue your research. If you have any other information that might be helpful for our report, please forward it to the clerk of the committee. Thank you very much, and have a safe trip back.
We will now move on to our next panel of witnesses. Joining us this morning are Claudia Wagner-Riddle, Professor, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, and Alfons Weersink, Professor, Ontario Agriculture College, University of Guelph. Welcome to you both.
We have a total of 45 minutes for your presentation and senators’ questions. Perhaps we will ask you to speed things up a bit to give senators the opportunity to ask you questions.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle, you’ll go first. We are all ears.
[English]
Claudia Wagner-Riddle, Professor, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, as an individual: Thank you very much for the introduction. I am going to read from a prepared statement to stay within the allotted time.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for giving me the opportunity to provide input to your deliberations. I will focus my statement on emission mitigation strategies for the agricultural sector, and the role governments can play in meeting reduction targets.
In collaboration with colleagues across the country and with the input of many students, I have studied mitigation practices for the farming sector over many years. It’s exciting for me to bring my experience to this committee.
I have structured my statement to address two questions: What can farmers do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and how can governments play a role?
My assessment is that, indeed, there are many farm-level practices that can be used to meet emission reduction targets, but unless mechanisms are put in place to promote and help to implement them, they will likely not be adopted.
I would like to start with a bit of background by describing how it is that agriculture produces greenhouse gas emissions. After that, I will move on to the policy implications of my research.
Farms in Canada harness components of the carbon and nitrogen cycle to produce food for people, feed for animals, fibre and fuel for national and global consumption, as we all know. But farmers are essentially carbon and nitrogen managers in this process.
Biochemical processes mediated by microorganisms within these cycles result in the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from the sector. These emissions occur naturally, but their rate increases due to farming activities such as nitrogen fertilizer addition or rearing of livestock.
The growing of crops accumulates carbon in fields, but not all carbon stays there. A large fraction is returned to the atmosphere when the harvested product is consumed by people or animals and when the leftover biomass is consumed by soil microorganisms. Indeed, farmland can be a source or sink of carbon, depending on the difference in uptake and loss.
Although greenhouse gas emissions can be considered a side effect of farming, how farmers manage a carbon and nitrogen cycle on their lands has a significant impact. Indeed, it’s possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, store more carbon and still deliver farm products for society’s consumption.
The metric to evaluate this performance is emissions scaled by unit of products such as milk, meat or grain, also known as carbon footprint. This means increased on-farm efficiencies can reduce the carbon footprint.
In the last decades, increased productivity has resulted in carbon footprint reductions in Canada. However, this improved productivity has been accompanied by some negative trends, such as increased reliance on external farm inputs such as fertilizers, reduction in crop rotation diversity, soil degradation and decreased soil health. These trends will have consequences in the long term and need to be reversed so that we can have agri-ecosystems that are resilient to climate change while also mitigating emissions.
Within this context, I will return to the question, what can farmers do? I will elaborate on this, but simply put, as I said, farmers can make a difference. Investment by Agriculture Canada in the Agricultural Greenhouse Gases Program, in the Canadian 4R Research Network in partnership with Fertilizer Canada, as well as other government and producer-funded programs, for example, have quantified the reduction potential of promising mitigation practices.
Improving feed conversion efficiency in ruminants is a practice that reduces emissions and costs for farmers. A recent analysis we did for the Ontario dairy sector has shown that the carbon footprint could be reduced by 12 per cent with increased profits. Better nutrient efficiency in crops, such as through the fertilizer industry’s 4R program, also results in reduced emissions. This program promotes the right rate, right time, right place and source of fertilizer, ensuring more nutrients end up in the crop and less in the environment with potential cost savings.
Again, some work we have done for the North American corn belt has shown that the use of enhanced efficiency fertilizer, which is the right source in that program, can reduce emissions from corn by 30 per cent on average without yield penalty.
Other promising practices that producers can use are related to manure management. On livestock farms, manure typically is kept in storage for part of the year before being recycled by application to soil. This storage period results in significant emissions for which many mitigation practices and technologies exist. A good example is complete emptying of the storage tank, which has been shown to reduce emissions close to 50 per cent for dairy manure through removal of the microorganisms or inoculum that leads to methane reduction. For those of you familiar with winemaking, they keep some of the old wine to inoculate and produce better wine, applied in a slightly different context. Anaerobic digestion promotes methane production from manure and captures biogas; so that also avoids emission and offsets fossil fuel.
As carbon managers, farmers need to move from a mindset of feeding only the crop to also feeding the soil. This can be accomplished by diversifying crop rotations and including cover crops which are grown not for removal through harvest but for the purpose of feeding soil microorganisms. These long-term soil care practices improve soil health and bring other benefits such as increased soil carbon storage and crop resilience to extreme events such as droughts.
Innovative farmers are leading the way in testing these soil care approaches, but there is lack of awareness of the importance of soil health, and that’s still very widespread.
These examples illustrate what can be done. I would like to move to the question of how governments can help. Firstly, in partnership with industry, there is a need for continued investment in education, training and research. An excellent example is the Ontario Soil Network by the Rural Ontario Institute and funded by several organizations, which aims to train farm innovators to become effective soil health influencers in their communities. Farmers learn best from other farmers, and this type of training is essential to move results into practice.
Continued investment in research and training of personnel on mitigation of emissions is also needed to ensure these new proposed practices and technologies are evaluated.
Secondly, how can we move from the research results we do have to implementation at the farm level? I’m not a policy expert, and I would leave comments on policy mechanisms to my colleague here. However, I will offer my thoughts on the need for support that I hope you find useful.
Some practices decrease greenhouse gas emissions while also increasing productivity or profits. These win-win situations only require support for education and increase of awareness. For example, our study in Ontario with the 12 per cent reduction in dairy is really a matter of moving some of the producers still on the lower side to the more productive farmers.
Many other practices are not win-win situations. They require investment by farmers. A good example is the complete emptying of the manure storage tank. There is no reason for a producer to do this except for the specific purpose of reducing emissions. Unless it is rewarded or mandated, it’s likely not going to take place.
Yet other practices provide benefits only in the long term but require investments in the short term. The investment in soil care practices, for example, results in benefits that accrue only after five years or more. Many producers can’t afford, and they are really not thinking about the long term, and this is particularly true for people working on rented land, which has increased as a proportion of farmlands.
From these observations, it’s clear that governments have an extremely important role. Alfons will comment on advantages and disadvantages of possible implementation mechanisms. My only observation on this is that cooperation with producer organizations is essential. It’s very difficult to get people to do things they do not buy into.
In conclusion, there are several reduction measures that are effective for reduction of farm emissions. Governments have a crucial role to support implementation of these measures through education, training and research and development of policy mechanisms that take the on-farm reality into account. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Alfons Weersink, Professor, Ontario Agriculture College, University of Guelph, as an individual: I very much appreciate the opportunity to testify to the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
My name is Alfons Weersink. I’m a professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph. My research focuses on the effects of new technology and government policy on what farmers do at the individual operation level, and the effects of those decisions on the environment, on markets and on the structure of the sector.
In terms of your study on the potential impacts on the effects of climate change and the actions undertaken to increase adaptation in emission reduction strategies, I will focus my comments specifically on the role that government can play in meeting the target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and, more specifically, within the agricultural sector and not at the forestry level.
Before discussing the alternative roles that governments can take, let me talk briefly about the complications of the production processes that generate emissions from agriculture. It really complicates the design of environmental policy for this sector.
First, there are many potential contributors to the problem. These are small farmers, making it costly to measure emissions from each individual farm.
Second, there is an indirect linkage between the actions the farmers take and the environmental impact. Claudia’s work measures the greenhouse gas emissions from alternative practices. What you find is that it varies by location. It varies by a number of factors such as the practices, soil quality, type, slope, and many practices that are unobservable, such as the timing of application, and others that are outside the control of the farmer, such as weather.
Mr. Smit talked about a time lag between actions taken now and emissions. It makes it difficult for farmers to understand why they should bear the costs now when the benefits are not received well into the future?
The other complication with greenhouse gas emissions is that it is unobservable — Claudia’s fancy equipment measures the actual amount of emissions from different farming practices. Farmers are willing to change their practices if they can directly observe the impact of their actions on environmental quality. I’ll give you an example.
Farmers no longer apply manure in the wintertime. It used to be a relatively standard practice, but they saw the runoff that would result in the creeks. They saw the runoff of soil erosion, so they’ve adapted soil conservation techniques. They will do that if they see the impact of their actions on environmental quality. It’s more difficult to do with a gas that you cannot observe.
Finally, another complication is that these are families operating these pollution-generating operations. It’s not a faceless corporation. So that has an impact on how we deal with them, and this is a group that has garnered political support in the past.
The net result of these complications is that there is not a single silver bullet policy that government can use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions cost-effectively. So they must decide upon several alternatives. In deciding amongst those alternatives, they have three questions to ask: One, who should be targeted with the policy? Two, what should be targeted with the policy? And, three, what mechanism can be used?
In terms of who should be targeted with the policy, given that greenhouse gas emissions are deposited in the atmosphere, all farms would be appropriately targeted. This is in contrast to a nutrient-reduction problem, such as phosphates in the Great Lakes, where you want to target those producers that are either very close to the Great Lakes or contributing most to the problem.
In terms of what should be targeted with a policy, we can have performance-based policies that target actual emissions, but, given the cost of measuring emissions from farms, most agri-environmental policies are design-based. They are focused on practices. The choice depends on whether these practices can be easily monitored and their correlation with the environmental target.
In terms of what policy should be used, there are two broad ways to incentivize farmers to alter their management practices. First, we can provide payments to farmers who adopt environmentally beneficial actions. Second, we can introduce direct controls or regulations that require farmers to undertake certain actions, backed up by penalties for non-compliance. So a carrot or a stick approach.
The first approach is the most commonly used agri-environmental policy across developed countries as many governments pay farmers completely or through a cost-share arrangement to adopt best management practices. These range from planting tree shelters to installing manure-storage facilities to setting aside lands.
Examples of direct regulation, the second approach, include the banning of certain pesticides, the requirement that buildings be so far away from water courses, and the limiting of nutrient loading. Both the provision of payments for environmentally beneficial management practices and a regulatory requirement for use of a BMP can be further characterized based on who is targeted. Is it everybody, or is it targeted to certain individuals? What is targeted? Is it GHG emissions or is it practices?
In addition to the carrot or stick approach, the government could provide advisory measures that inform farmers on the extent of the greenhouse gas problem and on the means to address the situation. Such extension efforts are effective if farmers are unaware of win-win management practices that can increase both farm profitability and environmental health. This is what Claudia talked about and the important role of government to be involved with producer organizations to encourage these extension efforts.
If the BMPs are unprofitable, a fourth option is the development of a profitable farming system through funding strategic research and development or the provision of infrastructure to support new farming systems. Agriculture Canada’s Agricultural Greenhouse Gases Program is an example of both extension and technological development options for government. It supports projects that will create technologies, practices and processes that can be adopted by farmers to mitigate GHGs.
Note that a fifth option is for government to do nothing. Forbearance — government does nothing — is appropriate if the costs of the policy in terms of reduced farmer profits and increased administrative costs are higher than the resulting benefits or if the benefits are expected to occur even without government intervention.
The choice among the five policy roles for government is influenced by a number of political and administrative considerations. One is who should pay for the policy. The “beneficiary pays” principle requires that, since society benefits from lower greenhouse gas emissions, government should provide positive incentives for farmers to cover their costs in changing practices. This has been the de facto means so far.
The “polluter pays” principle moves the financial burden on to those who are creating the environmental problem. That is the use of negative incentives, such as carbon pricing.
The role of deciding who should bear the cost appropriately falls to government. In practice, governments often seem to prefer the “beneficiary pays” mechanisms when they seek to alter farmers’ existing practices, and they prefer the “polluter pays” mechanism or stick when they seek to prevent farmers from changing their current practices to something worse for the environment.
The choice of the carrot or the stick has direct implications for government expenditures. Payments require governments to pay out, and the degree of political support for the subsidization of best management practices will decline, depending on how tight budgets are. The pressures can result in a reduced-scale program that reduces either the extent of the cost share or the length of time for which funds are available and, subsequently, the effectiveness of the incentive.
For example, a common program is to pay farmers to plant a perennial crop. They provide an initial phase of payments of three to five years, but not for ongoing payments. This will likely result in a conversion back to annual crop production unless the actions being promoted have positive private benefits.
Direct controls are less costly to government than payment schemes, although they do incur transaction costs. Other polluter-pay mechanisms can even generate public revenue, which increases the attractiveness of such options for governments facing budgetary pressures. Taxes on emissions are a direct source of revenue, and permit schemes can also bring in money, provided the initial tradeable rights are auctioned rather than allocated through a grandfathering clause.
In addition to whether the beneficiary or polluter pays, there are several distributional considerations for each incentive mechanism. The benefits and costs can differ across farm types. For example, the pricing of carbon is more likely to affect the greenhouse sector than other regions of the country, members of society and generations. The physical management characteristics vary across farm operations, a heterogeneity that has implications for the effectiveness of uniform measures and for who bears the cost of addressing the externality. The choice of mechanism in other jurisdictions can influence the distributional implications as well. Interest in cap-and-trade markets for carbon among states in the United States and within Ontario, Quebec and B.C. has increased with the implementation of a permit market in California. However, governments are reluctant to impose carbon pricing on export-oriented sectors, fearing it will negatively impact the competitive advantage of that sector.
The public assessment of what is fair and equitable has justified the use of government funds for farm-support programs and for payment schemes to incentivize the alteration of current management practices. The joint objectives of enhancing both farm income and environmental performance may not necessarily coincide. Agriculture-support programs may have contributed to the externality issue associated with modern farming by enhancing the average and reducing the variability of returns for more erosive and chemically intensive row crops. Practices meant to reduce the targeted environmental externality of a given policy could also positively or negatively address another externality. For example, programs to enhance soil health, which Claudia mentioned, can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions in addition to providing benefits to the producer.
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, and I look forward to discussing the issues further with you.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you very much for your testimony. We will now have the questions from senators.
Senator Dagenais: My thanks to our two guests.
Mr. Weersink, risk management programs have been made available to farmers, but we see that many of them do not use them. So why would we develop other programs before farmers start participating in programs that already exist?
[English]
Mr. Weersink: We have two main programs to support, let’s say, crop production.Livestock production is different because we have crop insurance and AgriStability, which would be the main program. It is a revenue net margin base program.
There are no linkages to any environmental performance measures now. One of the things that could be looked at is perhaps cross-compliance, where you tie the benefits to be received from a program such as AgriStability to the adoption of certain environmental management programs.
We have something like that in case you want to build a new barn. In order to get a building permit, you have to have a nutrient management plan in place in terms of how you will store the manure, apply the manure, what rate and when. There are no consequences afterwards, but it is a condition in order to get the building permit. There could be some things like that tying environmental performance to the receipt of the AgriStability.
Your other question was about the declining enrolment in AgriStability. That is partially due to the extent of specialization in the sector and whether the benefits will be received over time.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: That brings me to my second question. Some farmers refuse, perhaps indirectly, the methods suggested to reduce greenhouse gases. Is there some resistance related to the costs of setting up those programs or to the lack of information? We know that farmers work seven days a week. They have busy schedules. Is that why they would delay implementing measures to reduce greenhouse gases?
[English]
Mr. Weersink: The adoption of any of these beneficial management practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are categorized to one where it works like there could be additional profits to be earned for the farm. Claudia referred to those as win-win. There are others where there could be direct costs.
Those that have direct costs, there are losses associated with them and there are financial reasons. For the other ones, there are other reasons for non-adoption: How difficult is it to change their existing practices to the new ones? If there are large adjustment costs, they are reluctant to do so. You mentioned that farmers are busy, so learning about the new practices will play a role.
One of the beneficial best management practices is reducing fertilizer rates. Often the question is, why do farmers apply more than the recommended rate? That seems like it would be an easy one to do. We have done some work to show there is an insurance premium with applying more fertilizer. There is the reduction in uncertainty. There is a risk reduction with applying more.
What it means is that in the good years, you get a significant boost in yield by applying more fertilizer. In the other years, you have a relatively small cost of applying the extra fertilizer. You balance it out; the greater return in that one year pays for the over-fertilization in the other year.
It is important to understand the reasons farmers are adopting the practices they are. They are doing it in their best interest. Part of it might be a lack of information, but there are other valid reasons such as risk and large adjustment costs in switching.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: I could add to that. It is because it is a business model that doesn’t consider environmental losses or the impact. If farmers apply extra fertilizer in the years where it is not used, there is a higher risk of loss and pollution, but they are not penalized for that. When we look at that business model, that is what the effect is.
Senator Oh: Thank you, witnesses. My question is about biodiesel fuel. Carinata is an oil crop that has been used to produce biodiesel fuels to power rail and surface transportation. This crop can be grown in relatively low fertile soil. Do you think this type of crop could be widely adopted by farmers? Should we go ahead with this type of project?
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: Are you talking about soy beans?
Senator Oh: It is called carinata.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: Where is that grown?
Senator Oh: In Ontario.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: Do you understand where?
Mr. Weersink: No, I am not aware of that crop either.
Senator Oh: If you could talk about biodiesel fuel, then.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: Is it canola?
Senator Oh: It is an oilseed crop.
Mr. Weersink: In general, biodiesel is relatively limited right now. The decision of making it feasible depends, for an individual producer, on whether they want to grow it. So is it feasible relative to their alternatives? Maybe it is more profitable for them to grow corn, soybean crops or wheat — the traditional crops — and to convert that crop into biodiesel and then the market for it.
Biofuels, initially, were not profitable, but because of the mandate requiring so much, it has become a feasible alternative fuel. Biodiesel is not quite there yet because of a number of factors. But I don’t know that particular crop.
Senator Oh: Is that the way to go in the future?
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: Potentially. What I would do is look at what kind of organic matter this crop brings back.
We shouldn’t focus on one crop. Research has shown that diversifying crop rotations is better for several reasons. It is better for the soil, and it is better for yields in comparison to a continuous crop.
It is good to look into alternative crops and to try to place those within the traditional crops and make it so that we have crop systems that are adapted to climate change. If you focus too much on just one thing, it is not good, but I think there is potential.
Senator Pratte: Forgive my ignorance, but I would like to ask a few questions about carbon pricing in agriculture.
Am I mistaken that in the Quebec, Ontario and California cap-and-trade system, agriculture is not included?
Mr. Weersink: That is right.
Senator Pratte: It’s not. It’s only major industrial producers.
Mr. Weersink: Yes.
Senator Pratte: In B.C., where they have a carbon tax, I think agriculture has been exempted from that.
Mr. Weersink: That’s true.
Senator Pratte: In the federal system it has just been announced, but we don’t know what the status of agriculture will be in that. In your view, is it one possibility, one way of convincing farmers to adopt GHG emissions reductions? Should agriculture be part of a national carbon pricing system?
We have had producers as witnesses, of course, and many of them are reluctant to be part of such a system, especially export-oriented producers.
Mr. Weersink: Going back to my initial statements, the difficulty of implementing any policy in agriculture is that it’s harder to measure emissions. You have so many small producers, which tend to be family-based operations that have garnered political support, and it is difficult to measure the emissions from them. It’s costly, and maybe it is just not worthwhile to deal with them. Each one individually, it’s not worthwhile.
What we’ve seen instead is that in the case of a carbon market, you have aggregators that will assemble credits for farmers adopting certain practices that sink carbon. They will pull them all together and then sell those credits within a market. Farmers are paid for that.
What we have seen in agriculture — and likely will continue to see, for a number of reasons — is that support will be provided for farmers to change their practices, either in terms of the market providing that support through a carbon market and aggregators, or governments continuing to provide cost-share programs for that.
Senator Pratte: Simply because it is more practical?
Mr. Weersink: Yes.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: If I could comment on that. Even though it is not mandated, there is a move for a volunteer system. I am involved in several committees that are looking at the protocols that could be followed on a volunteer carbon system, targeted specifically at enteric fermentation, manure management and soils within the 4R programs. I think that producer organizations are on board for that; they just don’t want to be mandated to do it.
Senator Pratte: How does the volunteer program work?
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: I don’t know the details of the policy. Both the Quebec and Ontario governments have hired a company out of California to oversee the development of all the protocols that would have to be followed for producers to be able to earn credits.
Senator Petitclerc: My question is a bit more ideological, perhaps. I get the impression from both of you, and from the witnesses before you, that when it comes to motivation for farmers to implement change and work on reducing their impact, it is largely motivated by — and I am not imposing judgment on that; I am just trying to understand — either being efficient or because they have to. I am trying to get a sense of how environmental motivation plays a role. How much of this motivation comes from wanting to do good for the planet? I know they are a business and have to make a living, but I am trying to get a sense of that.
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: I can only talk about the experience I have had with the farmers that I meet. They are mostly those who go to things like a summit on soil health that we had in Guelph organized by the Soil Conservation Council of Canada. There were many producers there. They are the ones we see at all the meetings. They are the active ones. They are the innovators, and they really care. They are doing things on their land to improve the soil and so on.
As a percentage of the total, however, I am not sure what percentage that is. They are aware of that. Our task here is how to get the other 80 or 90 per cent — whatever the fraction is — to have that on their radar screen.
Mr. Weersink: Each individual operator has their own objectives, and ultimately they have to stay in business. That is one of them. They are environmental stewards. They are concerned about certain practices where there are direct benefits to the operation. I would agree about soil health. The better the soil health is, the higher the yields and the higher the profits, so they will be motivated to do that. Soil health measures, such as the adoption of cover crops, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so there are benefits in that way. Generally, there is an environmental stewardship component, and the more it is linked to their bottom line, the stronger it is.
On an aside, though, I think this further complicates the design of policies in the agriculture sector. We have this growing separation between ownership and management. About 40 per cent of the crop land is rented; it is owned by somebody else. The management decisions are made by the tenant farmer. So sometimes the policies are targeted to the landowner and sometimes to the tenant. If they are one and the same — and they are for 60 per cent of the cases — then it doesn’t matter. However, when you have this growing separation, then maybe soil health isn’t as important to the tenant because he doesn’t know if he will have that farm in two years’ time, when the lease is up. That is an issue in terms of environmental stewardship and motivation that is changing relatively quickly in this sector.
Senator Bernard: My question was very similar, actually, but maybe I will ask a supplemental question.
You talked earlier about the carrot or the stick. I’m thinking in particular about small-scale farmers. What do you know is most effective? Has there been research that’s looked at that? Do we have any indication of what might be most helpful, particularly for those smaller farmers?
Mr. Weersink: In the farm sector, in general, it has been the carrot approach to get them to move their existing practices: We want you to adopt the 4R nutrient management system; we want you to plant cover crops. It has been a carrot.
If they are currently using a practice such as a certain tillage system, there are sticks to prevent them from going there. That is traditionally the way that environmental policy has worked in this sector. Sticks have been used, for example, in terms of, “This is the bad side. We don’t want you to go there, and we will hit you to prevent you from going there. We want you to go here,” and the carrot is there to pull them there.
The effectiveness of any program depends on whether it does actually change the behaviour of the intended target. Is that correlated with the environmental performance that you are looking for? What are the costs to the government of implementing that policy as well?
[Translation]
The Chair: Ms. Wagner-Riddle, I would like to go back to the topic of mustard that Senator Oh mentioned. You know, Alberta is a very big producer of mustard; it has 60,000 hectares on which three kinds of mustard are grown: white, brown and Chinese. Senator Oh spoke about the latter. Canada is a major exporter of mustard. Even Dijon mustard, which is imported from France, is made from mustard seeds from Canada.
My question is not necessarily about mustard. We heard from a number of farm groups at committee meetings. They all work very hard, but they lack the technology. They tell us so.
In research universities such as Guelph, I do not know whether the technologies you develop can be made available to farmers. The carbon tax should be used first for research to help farmers have the resources they need to remove as much carbon as possible. It’s sort of like the song says, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” There is a bill to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Who will pick up the tab? Farmers, consumers or society as a whole? It’s a question we have to ask. Research becomes the driving force, but the results of research must be made available to those who work the land. That is where the disconnect is. Over the next few years, I think the connection needs to be made between research and processors, those who farm the land. Who will have to pay the bill? Researchers, universities, farmers, consumers? That is another question to which we certainly have no answer this morning.
I have a quick question for you before I give the floor to Senator Gagné. Will farmers have access to the results of your research in any form once they are published?
[English]
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: Thank you for your question and for clarifying. Yes, I do know about mustard and rapeseed. There was an issue in the understanding here.
Yes, we work closely with producer organizations. I led a large agricultural greenhouse gas project that had support from the Dairy Farmers of Canada. They recently launched, on their dairy network webpage, some pamphlets, simplified information, on greenhouse gas emission reduction measures that were geared to farmers that came directly out of our research.
Fertilizer Canada organizes webinars. They recently filmed our research site, and there is an active component of transferring that information to farmers.
I am aware of the reality on the farm. Again, I won’t comment on the policy mechanisms, but we need to have a buy-in. It would not work to say that now you have to do this, and if you don’t do it, you need to pay more. We have all the producer organizations on board, but they are asking how much it will cost them. We would get further ahead with a program that is shared and that provides incentives, maybe with some metrics associated with it because the programs that have happened till now were great. They relied on volunteers, like the environmental farm plan and so on, but there are not a lot of the metrics associated so that we can see how the environment has increased. That, in my view, is a good thing. Also for the sector, because there have been great improvements, but it is hard to announce those if we don’t have metrics.
[Translation]
Senator Gagné: That was the question I wanted to ask.
[English]
Professor Wagner-Riddle, I know you have published a study showing that worldwide emissions of nitrous oxide from agriculture are underestimated by as much as 28 per cent. You have a lab that is equipped to measure the emissions. Are there many labs like yours across Canada and around the world? Are you networked to share knowledge and research pertaining to the emissions?
Ms. Wagner-Riddle: The study you are referring to was based on data from our long-term site, combined with the University of Manitoba’s long-term site. We were able to arrive at a relationship and extrapolate to the globe and show this underestimation.
In Canada there are three of these measurements — the one in Manitoba and another at Agriculture Canada in Ottawa. It is highly specialized equipment. But we have a network across the country — for example, the 4R network — this was a three-year program that we hope will be renewed. That was through Growing Forward.
There is a network, but it is a bit of a patchwork in terms of three years of funding and then we network and then the funding is over, and then the way we network is more informally. Definitely that is one thing that could raise the profile of the greenhouse gas reduction measures if we have something more formally that involves Agriculture Canada researchers as well as university researchers across the country.
[Translation]
The Chair: Ms. Wagner-Riddle and Mr. Weersink, thank you for appearing before our committee this morning. Your testimony will be very useful to us in the issue we are dealing with at the moment. We will probably be contacting you again in the near future — either you or your colleagues in the field of research and agriculture — because the University of Guelph is renowned for its agricultural research. You have seen how interested senators are in this matter. It is very important for us to have your input and to find out about the progress of the scientific work you do for agriculture. Thank you very much, and have a safe trip back!
(The committee adjourned.)