THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 2, 2023
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 9 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on the status of soil health in Canada.
Senator Robert Black (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. Good morning, everyone, it is good to see you here this morning.
I would like to begin by welcoming members of the committee, our witnesses who are online and those watching this meeting on the web.
My name is Rob Black, a senator from Ontario, and I chair this committee. Today, the committee is continuing its study to examine and report on the status of soil health in Canada.
Before we hear from our witnesses, I would like to start by asking senators in the room to introduce themselves, starting with our deputy chair.
Senator Simons: I’m Paula Simons, senator from Alberta, and I live in Treaty 6 territory.
Senator Burey: Sharon Burey, senator for Ontario.
Senator Oh: Senator Oh from Ontario.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Before we begin, I would like to point out to our witnesses today and to those around the room that if you should experience technical challenges, particularly in relation to interpretation, please signal to the chair and the clerk, and we will work to resolve the issue, which may require us to suspend.
This morning we have two panels. On the first panel, we welcome, via video conference, Ted Taylor, Soil Resource Specialist, Soil Resource Group; Paul Renaud, Chief Executive Officer, The Lanigan Group; and Paul Arp, Professor, Forest Soils, Forestry and Environmental Management, University of New Brunswick.
I invite you to make your presentations. We will begin with Mr. Taylor, followed by Mr. Renaud and Dr. Arp. Each of you will have five minutes for your presentations. I will signal when one minute is left; I will hold up my hand. When two hands are held up, it is about time to wrap things up. With that, the floor is yours, Mr. Taylor.
E.P. (Ted) Taylor, Soil Resource Specialist, Soil Resource Group: Honourable members of the Senate committee and fellow witnesses, it is a privilege to participate today. My name is Ted Taylor, and I’m a soil resource specialist with the Soil Resource Group. Primarily, we’re working on an on-farm R&D program looking at soil health and soil degradation right now in Ontario.
Prior to that, I recently retired from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and for 30 years I’ve worked in agri-environmental program planning and education focusing on soil, water, environmental issues, soil health and conservation. I also worked in agroforestry, primarily working on training and development of educational materials. Prior to that, in the 1980s, I was a forest soil specialist on contract through the University of Guelph with the Ministry of Natural Resources looking at tree species productivity in relation to soils and training staff accordingly.
I would now like to talk briefly to you about agroforestry in Ontario. I want to look at definitions, the types of agroforestry practices or ecosystems that we have in southern Ontario and also some of the linkages with soil health and conservation. Quite simply, agroforestry is anything to do with trees and agriculture. There are more robust definitions, but that pretty well summarizes it.
We deal with four general types in southern Ontario. You have farm woodlots or woodlands — essentially, what you see at the back of the property, usually deciduous. You have plantations; driving by county or concession roads, you have uniform looking evergreen or conifer plantations in equidistant rows and they are forested areas on previous farmland. You also have linear plantings, expressed as either shelterbelts or windbreaks or buffer strips along water courses. You also have special agroforestry plantings, like nut orchards and alley cropping and intercropping and silvopasture. These are the types that people often refer to when they think of agroforestry.
In a little bit more detail, woodlands include anything from upland to lowland woodlots. They are anything from deciduous to straight conifers or a mixture thereof. They are managed usually for on-farm timber use or for sales as well as for fuel wood and fence posts as well.
In terms of plantations, these are areas that have gone through what we call afforestation. It’s land that was previously in agriculture generations ago. And before that, it was under forest cover in most cases. We plant trees by afforestation on two types of lands. These are either marginal lands that are too wet, too stony, too steep for agriculture production, or what we call fragile lands. These are lands that have experienced soil degradation or are at a very high risk of soil degradation due to erosion and compaction. These are most often pure conifer plantations or a mixture of conifer species, in some cases conifer and hardwoods.
There are also the linear plantings, and as I said before, these are things like windbreaks, shelterbelts and riparian-type plantings that we call buffer strips. These are intended to protect either cropland, pasture or farmsteads, but also to protect surface waters, such as ponds and wetlands and, for the most part, water courses.
The fourth type of agroforestry we see in southern Ontario is the specialty plantings. They can be anything from Christmas trees to sugar maple orchards to nut orchards to alley cropping, where they put rows of trees either along the contours or in areas where they are separating fields with the long-term intent to have these afforested to a forest condition.
In terms of linkages with soil health, there are three main ones. There’s simply long-term cover. If we keep it under forest cover, the land will be protected. It will remain in very good soil health and will perform all the ecological and economic functions that you are looking for from woodlands.
If you do plant trees with the process of afforestation, that land will be ultimately rehabilitated, primarily through continuous and substantive additions of organic matter, but also through the root development that reduces soil density and improves soil structure.
There’s absolutely no question that one of the final improvements correlated with soil health is carbon sequestration. Not only are you adding wood, and that wood grows for a long time — and it depends on the quality of the wood product coming out of it. Arguably, if you are growing something like veneer and something that will be part of furniture, you get several hundred years of sunk carbon in wood tissue. Needless to say, there is no question that you are getting a fair bit of organic matter and organic carbon rehabilitated or added to the soil, and that improves soil health in the long run.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Taylor. Mr. Renaud?
Paul Renaud, Chief Executive Officer, The Lanigan Group: Thank you. I’m also a maple syrup producer. In fact, I was the first climate-neutral maple syrup producer. I have been applying my learnings from that to bring agroforestry into other branches of agriculture. What I have discovered is that everyone talks about emissions caused by agriculture, but nobody talks about sequestration. Why is that?
It is an established fact, as Mr. Taylor just presented, that trees improve soil quality by replenishing the minerals and carbon in the soil. Are there enough trees on farms to help mitigate climate change? Unfortunately, there are no official answers to this question. This perpetuates a myth that trees on farms do not matter and that Canadian agriculture is not sustainable. I’m here to debunk those myths.
The first myth is that loss of trees due to agriculture is a major factor driving climate change in Canada. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, this is a true statement globally but does not apply in North America. In fact, 90% of deforestation in Canada is due to forestry, not agriculture, and changes in land use in Canadian agriculture have not contributed to climate change for over 20 years.
The second myth is that there aren’t enough trees on farms to matter. StatCan surveys land use in agriculture but does not identify treed acreage, so we had to figure this out on our own. We did this via farm case studies and some top-down modelling. For example, a 200-acre farm near Stratford in south-central Ontario, an area widely believed to have few trees on farms, was 35% treed — enough to offset all their emissions. Most of those trees were found in ravines, steep slopes, fence lines, et cetera, basically the areas that you cannot farm.
A 1,300-acre farm near Perth in eastern Ontario was 39% treed, enough to offset emissions from 200 dairy cows. In fact, if that farmer were paid fair value for his sequestration services using the same value of carbon as in the carbon tax, that farmer would make an extra $100,000 a year after deducting their emissions.
Across Canada, there are 30 million acres on farms covered by perennial vegetation — trees in the East and in B.C., and woody shrubs and grasses on the Prairies. This is an area 30% larger than Nova Scotia and New Brunswick combined, so clearly there are enough trees.
Why isn’t this farmer selling sequestration services via carbon credits? It’s because carbon credits don’t work on farms. There is not enough value, too much overhead in running the system, and most farms are too small. Less than 2% of all carbon credits issued worldwide are in agriculture for that reason. It is falsely believed that trees release all their stored carbon when they die. This is true only in forest fires, and according to the national wildfire database, there are no forest fires on farms.
When the trees are alive, as Mr. Taylor identified, they sequester carbon both in their biomass and into the soil, and when they die, one quarter of the biomass in the roots stays in the soil, and the majority of the above-ground biomass decomposes into the soil with only some of it released into the atmosphere.
What about enteric emissions? Are they bad for the environment? Methane emissions comprise half of all agriculture emissions, but, again, no one is talking about sequestration. Cows are not nuclear reactors. They do not manufacture carbon from subatomic particles. The carbon in methane can only come from the carbon in the food they eat, which in turn comes from the carbon dioxide photosynthesized from the atmosphere. Chemically, it is impossible for the carbon volume of these emissions to exceed the amount sequestered annually. When we account for sequestration, and even accounting for the fact that methane is 25 times worse than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it actually turns out that cows are carbon-neutral. Agriculture methane emissions have not increased for the past 15 years, according to the National Inventory Report.
While any opportunity to reduce methane emissions is helpful in combatting climate change, it is more of an opportunity than a problem.
The impression created by the National Inventory Report is that agriculture contributes 10% of Canada’s emissions, but these are gross emissions, not offset by sequestration services provided by farms and not accounting for the biogenic cycle of livestock emissions. Since there is no official footprint, we took a stab at figuring that out, and it turns out that Canadian agriculture is already sustainable. If you value their excess sequestration using the carbon tax, the same amount as in the carbon tax, farms should be paid $3 billion a year, so why isn’t carbon a cash crop in Canada? Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Renaud. Dr. Arp, please.
Paul Arp, Professor, Forest Soils, Forestry and Environmental Management, University of New Brunswick, as an individual: Thank you for the invitation. I have been considering whether I should or shouldn’t contribute because agroforestry is something that I grew up with, but my professional life has been in forestry here at the University of New Brunswick for almost 50 years.
As such, we have been working with the forest industry and lately with agriculture and a variety of NGOs dealing with where we find things on the ground. We are focused on mapping the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., parts of Ontario, a huge part of Alberta and smatterings across the world in terms of understanding how we can portray exactly where we find what across the province here, and other provinces, in terms of soils and water and forests and open fields.
Lately, we have been working on matters of crop suitability, and with that we’re going into the level of one-metre resolution across provinces.
The products that came out of the research that we are doing here at the university are now available on several governmental websites, like the crop suitability mapping for New Brunswick at the Agriculture Ministry website for this province, and this has also been done in communication with the Agriculture Department and with the growers who are dealing with crop rotations and potato production, in particular.
We found out that, based on the topography alone, which is at one-metre resolution — lighter coverage, which is expanding across the world because of practical utility in terms of planning and conducting operations, which will reduce damage to roads and damage to off-road trafficability — basically, it is a win-win situation for industry, forestry, agriculture and also fisheries, particularly on-land fisheries. We have not gotten into that to any extent as of yet, but there are great possibilities in taking better advantage of how the land is presenting itself to us.
Remarkably, when we looked at the crop suitability mapping and overlaid this on where we actually find the fields in New Brunswick, the people who established the farms across the province already knew where to place the fields, based on the rating that we do after the fact. As we have said before, you will find the fields are reasonably shallow in slope and are not poorly drained. We can map this water flow across the province in a seamless way, across the fields, across the roads, and all the way to the Bay of Fundy and to the Northumberland Strait. This is great progress.
The forest industry that we are running here is using the maps that we are producing for online navigation as they are cutting down the trees. Most of forest practices here in New Brunswick are letting the forests grow again.
I sent you a summary, and you will see all kinds of details in there. I think that will be sufficient for my testimony at this time.
The Chair: Thank you very much, witnesses.
We will proceed to questions from senators. Before asking and answering questions, I would like to remind both members and witnesses in the room to please refrain from leaning in too close to the microphone. We don’t want to effect feedback and negatively impact our committee staff who are translating and taking notes.
As has been our previous practice, I will remind each senator that you have five minutes for questions and answers, and we will do subsequent rounds as required.
We will start with our deputy chair, Senator Simons.
Senator Simons: I am from Alberta, Mr. Taylor, so what you are describing in terms of growing trees for hardwood and trees for nuts is all new to me. Can you explain this to us, in terms of soil health: If you plant an orchard of nut trees or fruit trees, does that put healthy soil organic carbon back into the soil, or are those trees depleting the soil of its nutrients, or are they in balance?
Mr. Taylor: Thank you, senator. Coming from a soil background and working over the last 10 to 15 years in soil health and conservation, I have worked with some soil health specialists. What we’ve noticed over time, which is why we are advocates of conservation tillage systems and no-till systems, is that the biggest source of carbon loss — this is probably a contradiction — is mostly from tillage and not putting any form of organic carbon, whether it is from crop residues or manure, back into the soil.
Anything you do with an agriculture system, if you change from row-crop agriculture through to pasture or forage production, you are going to not only stop or completely reduce carbon loss — because you are not disturbing the soil, breaking up the soil structure so that it is further exposed to microbial breakdown and carbon loss or converting any kind of organic carbon to carbon dioxide — but also add organic material from both the top growth and the rooting systems, because the roots grow and die, and they are always adding carbon as well as what they call exudates from the crops themselves.
In a woody crop system, it is even further that way. There is less disturbance, and therefore you have kind of eliminated carbon loss unless there’s some methane loss because you have poor drainage conditions. In most cases, you are reducing the loss and you are adding organic material, mostly from leaf fall, which adds to the top, especially if there are earth worms and other soil macrobiotic creatures doing that job for you. It is also simply from tree roots growing and dying that you are adding carbon.
If you create a forest, just as both witnesses said, you are adding a fair bit of organic carbon to that soil. Anything that becomes, in a broad term, permaculture or some kind of permanent crop is much more carbon-positive than anything we can do. Even with incredible cereal production in Western Canada or the 10-foot corn that you get in some places in southern Ontario, you are adding carbon for a while. But if you are working up the soil, there is a loss as well. Hopefully, you are carbon-neutral, but in any kind of woody plant, it is a carbon-positive addition.
Senator Simons: I assume there are only certain parts of Canada where that is a viable form of agriculture — the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, parts of Ontario and Quebec and, I’m guessing, maybe parts of New Brunswick. Where do we have our biggest production? I’m not talking about growing conifers, but I’m talking about growing fruit trees, nut trees, trees for veneer and that kind of thing.
Mr. Taylor: You have nailed it: any of the places that have a positive kind of woody plant or orchard-based horticulture going on right now. There is no question, Fraser Valley and Eastern Canada where you have protected microclimates, southern Ontario where you have protection from the Great Lakes — any of those mesoclimates are more suited to any type of orchard-type production. You are absolutely correct.
Senator Simons: I have a hazelnut farm in my backyard.
Senator Oh: My question is for all of the witnesses. Thank you for being here.
According to a 2017 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 1.2 billion people around the world practise agroforestry on around 1 billion hectares of land. What are the potential economic benefits of agroforestry for agricultural producers in Canada? Also what are the potential environmental benefits of agroforestry for agricultural producers?
Mr. Taylor: In terms of environmental and economic benefits of agroforestry, you can develop high-quality wood products — veneer, sawlog timber, firewood, utility hardwoods for things like pallets, conifers for posts, and recreational use woods for decks or fences; they can pressure-treat that type of wood or chemically treat it so it has environmental resistance. You have that going on in terms of economic benefits. For on-farm use, there is a lot used in fences, corals and wagon building. There are a whole lot of things that can be used in agriculture.
From an environmental point of view, carbon sequestration is number one. Soil rehabilitation is very high, but trees play a very large role also in protecting surface water from runoff from agricultural sources, whether it is intensive livestock operations or simply cropland runoff. Those are some of the main ones. They also protect habitat for fish and other aquatic ecosystems as well.
Mr. Renaud: In terms of economic benefits, I have pointed out the economic benefit from sequestration. If we look at other sources of income, it has already been mentioned that you can use trees for nuts, maple syrup and those types of products.
What was interesting is when the University of Guelph did their alley row cropping demonstration over a 30-year period, they were able to take away 15% of the farmland to allocate to trees, yet they saw no net loss in crop yield because the trees were acting as nitrogen pumps, collecting excess nitrogen from the soil and redepositing it in the form of leaves on the soil to be decomposed and reintegrated. This reduces fertilizer costs and ensures a healthier soil environment over time. So you don’t lose agricultural production due to degrading soils; you maintain it while at the same time cutting your costs. There is a significant advantage in the long term.
The problem is everybody is looking for a quick fix. Trees take a while to grow and be established. We need to move out of this mentality of a quick fix and look at agroforestry’s long-term value. Agriculture Canada has not been funding agroforestry nearly to the extent that it should be.
Mr. Arp: The comments I have for this question relate to operational win-win situations. For example, if you don’t know what your machines are doing to the ground but you are having all kinds of problems with the soil — you lose the soil; you have more erosion, more sedimentation; you have poorer quality, and the entire operation becomes economically inefficient — basically, mapping the land at the one-metre resolution allows you to see where to place what parts of the agroforestry component that you wish. You would know beforehand if you have land that is suitable for this and suitable for that.
To give you an example, forest operations have changed over the last 50 years — I kind of contributed to it — from being rectangular patches regardless of the topography to being lands which have cutblocks that are designed to keep the hydrological integrity in mind, also relating to the amount of water that flows off the fields and the forests so that we are better prepared to accommodate storms. All of these involve great financial costs if you don’t do it properly.
That’s right; we are having good support for the work that we have done over the years.
Senator Burey: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I always learn so much at these committee meetings.
The Government of Canada’s Fall Economic Statement in December 2020 announced $4 billion for the Natural Climate Solutions Fund, which included the Natural Resources Canada 2 Billion Trees Program, Nature Smart Climate Solutions Fund and Agricultural Climate Solutions Program.
However — and I’m talking about the 2 Billion Trees Program now — a recent report showed that Canada was not on track to meet its tree-planting goals. What is the situation in Ontario, Mr. Taylor?
Mr. Taylor: I’m not up to speed on the percentage of land covered. The last I saw — someone else can probably tell me; one of the Pauls would know better than I do — it was very low. I’ll defer. I know it’s much lower. I can talk about why that might be, but I can’t give you stats, my apologies.
Senator Burey: Okay. Maybe Professor Arp, with his tree mapping, could answer that question, and then I could get back to Mr. Taylor regarding why that might be.
Mr. Arp: We don’t have an answer to that either. However, we have started an exercise by which we are looking at all the forested and non-forested land of New Brunswick to see how the parcels that we get in this way relate to crop suitability. We will have a good inventory of what is being used for what in terms of forest tree growth and fields across New Brunswick. We can come up with a statistic, but we don’t have it at the moment, not yet.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much. Mr. Renaud, could you comment then on these programs? You noted that Agriculture Canada was not funding these programs sufficiently. Could you comment on that further?
Mr. Renaud: The tree planting initiative is in forestry, not in agriculture. Right now, nothing is happening in agriculture. Ontario has the most farms in Canada. They are smaller farms than out in the West, but if you look at the total number of farms, it’s the province with the most farms.
I participated in a proposal from the Ontario Woodlot Association to Agriculture Canada to create an agroforestry initiative in Canada. We asked for $10 million in funding and got zero. In fact, none of the funding being provided via the Living Laboratories program was going into agroforestry. That program was simply seeking short-term solutions from cover cropping, which is nowhere near as reliable for sequestration as trees. We demonstrated the long-term value of tree sequestration in a 2030-50 horizon was far superior, yet Agriculture Canada was focused on a 2030 horizon only. That is the short-term thinking that is robbing our future.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much for that. What should this committee do on our soil health study? How can we move this file along? Can you give us some recommendations?
Mr. Taylor: I can try and answer, but I think Paul Renaud knows more than I do. In the past, we have tried to encourage people to plant trees on agricultural land — what we call fragile land — by providing financial incentives to offset not only the cost of establishment but also the opportunity cost of not being able to grow row crops or forage or pasture on those sites to make it a little more lucrative for someone who would not normally consider planting trees in a certain part of their farm. So if they had land that was quite fragile or marginal, they could consider it when the compensation was worth it. Meeting the cost and offsetting the income lost by producers are one way of doing it.
The second thing that we had going for us were much more concerted efforts in terms of outreach. In Ontario, we had the Ministry of Agriculture, the conservation authorities and the Ministry of Natural Resources’ forest technical staff out there informing people and providing services that enhanced afforestation programs in Ontario. Right now, we have Forests Ontario and the conservation authorities, but there is really not as much going on except for technical guidance from the Ministry of Natural Resources. There are not enough technical people out there promoting and guiding interested land owners, let alone promoting the idea of planting trees on less than desirable cropland. I would like to hear from Mr. Paul Arp or Mr. Renaud.
Mr. Renaud: To pick up on what Mr. Taylor said, the initiative we had proposed was to supply the said experts. This was declined.
There are two ways this committee can deal with this. The first one is to hold Agriculture Canada and Environment Canada accountable for answering this question: Why is it that we do not know the net carbon footprint of agriculture in Canada? That would require them to understand the amount of land covered by trees, possibly to expand the wonderful program that Dr. Arp is doing in terms of mapping land use across Canada, not just in New Brunswick, so that we can get facts that we can put on the table to understand and make informed decisions.
The second area I think this committee can explore is why it is that we are not redirecting the carbon tax revenue that we collect from carbon emitters and use it to incentivize those who sequester carbon. The minute you start incentivizing a farm for sequestering carbon, guess what? They will start planting trees. They will start cutting their emissions. Can you imagine if we started paying that dairy farmer in Perth $100,000, how his neighbours and other dairy farmers in Canada would react? They would jump on board. They would want more trees; they would look at ways to cut their emissions. This would generate such an amazing transformative effect that it would be astounding.
Mr. Taylor: Beautiful.
The Chair: Thank you. I have a question of my own. You’re talking to someone who has planted thousands of trees on my property and on neighbouring properties over the last number of years. I’m planting them for my kids and my grandchildren. That’s what we all do.
In Wellington County, we have the Green Legacy Programme, which is providing free trees to anyone with property over two acres. Are you aware of any other types of programs like that across Canada?
Mr. Renaud: Free trees are also available generally across Ontario. It was a tree program that was originally axed, but farmland owners asked for it to be restored in the provincial budget, and it was. It is certainly popular. It’s a myth that farmers don’t like trees.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Arp: For New Brunswick — you might find this interesting — we have a problem now in our hammock-like landscape where we grow potatoes where the soil loss has been going on for decades. The mission there is to find out how to switch from lands that are currently used for potato production and put them back into forests and find new lands that are productive again for potato production. This is a problem that needs to be resolved that I would like you to be aware of.
The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Renaud talked about the University of Guelph and their alley cropping. Mr. Taylor, it has been about two years since the university has cut down all those trees. As someone who drives by that area somewhat regularly, it was nice to see because you knew, as a consumer, that there was something happening there, and they were growing crops and trees.
With all those trees being cut down now, what message does that send? At first, I wondered whether there was value in what they had done in the last 30 years. I’m glad to hear that there has been, which I knew. What message is that sending to everybody who drives down Victoria Road and sees that field now, Mr. Taylor?
Mr. Taylor: I knew the people who established that. In fact, I helped plant some of the trees there. Dr. Andrew Gordon was a colleague of mine. He is retired and living near Algonquin Park right now. I didn’t get to ask him why it was taken down. Mr. Renaud is clearly more informed about the recent research.
I do know that they did an awful lot of studies on it with master’s and PhD theses on it. I think they accomplished their goals. They used a certified random block design. I was trying to encourage them to do it linear in more of a purposive style because it would then serve as a better extension tool if you had the same tree species growing along the particular contours, but that didn’t meet design needs for experimentation. It would have made a much better showcase and a better argument to show people that if red oak was grown on the knolls, and if silver maple was grown in the low wet areas, and if black walnut was grown where it was slightly moist — just ideal site conditions for it — you would have seen better productivity and perhaps a better argument for keeping it.
There must be something more to this that involves real estate expectations. I can only surmise and speculate, and I hope Paul Renaud knows more than I do. I don’t know.
Mr. Renaud: The land was actually owned by the province and not by the university. With the change in government, the province wanted the land back so that they could use it for development. The university was required to cut down the trees and restore the land to its original state, and so they did that.
In doing so, they maximized the research value. They did a comprehensive biomass analysis. The papers from that research are just being published now. They indicate fantastic gains because, guess what, trees on farms grow better because they are on farms. They are not in forested environments; they are in good growing conditions, and there is a synergistic relationship between the crops and the trees. It’s a win-win situation all around.
However, they were forced to pull down that forest. They didn’t want to; they wanted to keep that study going. There is much more, as Mr. Taylor points out, that we could have learned from it.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Renaud. You have answered my question.
I want to ask one short question of Dr. Arp because he didn’t get the opportunity to answer the question. What recommendation would you like to see in our final report?
Mr. Arp: The recommendation, which has been very successful, is that better maps allow people to plan better. If you know where to grow which trees and where to establish which crops for agriculture production, and not only that but also how to deal with the wetland issue — not so much the protection of the wetland but more generally the protection of biodiversity or the expansion into biodiversity goals — it would be fundamental to keep us sustainable and self-sufficient.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We have noted all three of your suggestions.
Senator Simons: Dr. Arp, I wanted to ask you this because you mentioned you did extensive mapping in my home province of Alberta. A lot of people, when they think of Alberta, they think of the prairies and the mountains. They don’t think of the boreal forest or the extensive wetlands — we call them muskeg, which is actually perfectly descriptive. It’s a perfect word to describe that kind of area.
In your mapping of Alberta, what did you learn about where forests are thriving, and where there are wetlands that need to be protected? What is Alberta best situated to do in terms of silviculture and tree cropping going forward?
Mr. Arp: That’s an interesting question. Our initiative for Alberta was related to mapping the green zone, which comprises about 40 million hectares at one-metre resolution. This was supported by the provincial government. We did this for a number of years, so that information is available. We did not expand into the agricultural zone, which I thought would have been very interesting from agricultural and agroforestry perspective, but that still needs to be done.
For your information, we charged about 10 cents per hectare to do this work. In the meantime, we learned to do so much more with our mapping that we could address the questions that you just raised. We did look at the particular distribution of wetlands versus forests versus agriculture. We made some inroads on the dinosaur park that I found particularly interesting to map, but it’s basically hanging in the air.
Senator Simons: Is that the one in Grande Prairie as opposed to the one in southern Alberta?
Mr. Arp: Yes.
Senator Simons: Can you provide me with a link? I don’t know that everybody on the committee is as keenly interested as I am, but I would love to know more about your findings.
Mr. Arp: There is a website. I have to get in touch with my contact in the Alberta government to make you aware. If you can send me an email, then we can connect you.
Senator Simons: Terrific.
I have a question for Mr. Taylor and maybe Mr. Renaud as well. When we were exploring Alberta and Saskatchewan, we heard over and over from witnesses and people who have testified before our committee that there is a problem with the insurance system in that it incentivizes people to plant crops on marginal land. There isn’t that kind of insurance backstop for people who are turning their land back to forage or to grazing.
What could you tell me about woodlots and tree farming? Do you find that there are better insurances for people who are planting wheat, canola and corn than there are for people who want to switch or expand into growing more tree-type products?
Mr. Taylor: I’ll defer. I don’t know if there is any kind of insurance for growing trees. I’ll have to admit my ignorance on that. I’m sorry; I don’t know if there is anything.
Mr. Renaud: As a maple syrup producer, I’m well aware of the fact that crop insurance doesn’t work. When you lose a corn field, crop insurance will pay for you to replant your corn field or whatever it is you were growing.
The problem with trees is that they produce over the life of the tree. In many cases, for example, it takes 50 years to establish production of maple syrup from a tree. You may lose a tree due to a windstorm; for example, the derecho that hit Ontario last year took out 3% of all Ontario maples. I calculated the economic loss to be something like $300 billion, none of which was insured because they don’t insure over the lifetime value. They insure only over the annual value.
Maple syrup producers had their infrastructure covered by insurance, for example, the pipelines they could replace in a year, but if you lost 22,000 maple trees, as some did, half their livelihood was gone for 50 years, and none of that was insured.
Senator Simons: You might have sold that year, but not for the —
Mr. Renaud: Not even.
Senator Simons: Not even for that, wow.
Mr. Renaud: Not even for that. In fact, that’s the biggest risk to maple syrup and climate change — the fact that this can happen every year. If you lose 2% of your trees a year for 50 years, that’s 100% of your trees before they even begin to produce again. In other words, you’re out of business.
Senator Simons: Wow, that’s really interesting. You are certainly not the first person who has raised the issue of why we don’t have a viable carbon market. We have met with people across the country — from British Columbia, from Alberta, from Ontario — who are wrestling with this question of how we can set up a carbon market that is real and doesn’t just sort of give out brownie points but is actually something that you can literally take to the bank.
If you were going to advise people on how to set up a carbon market that actually worked, what would your ideal carbon market look like?
Mr. Renaud: I have thought a lot about this. I would tell them to stop using a hammer to pound in a screw. Carbon credits don’t work. What we need is an incentive-based scheme that recognizes sequestration services and pays out annually. That provides cash flow to make improvements. It reduces the overhead because it can be administered with the support of the various agriculture product associations to ensure that best practices are being followed and sidestep all the extra costs that come with verification.
There is a far simpler way of doing it if we just stop thinking of carbon markets as the only tool.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Oh: I would like to move the question over to Indigenous peoples. According to Natural Resources Canada, almost 5% of the population identify as an Indigenous person, and almost 70% of Indigenous people live on or near forestlands. In addition, the cultures and economies of more than 200 Indigenous language groups are strongly interconnected with the land.
What role does Indigenous traditional knowledge play in the health and stewardship of the forest soils? Can anyone go into this?
Mr. Renaud: As a person of Métis descent, part of the agroforestry initiative proposal we had was significantly Indigenous-led for that very reason. For example, the Algonquin of the Ottawa Valley were using trees to raise horses from the time that they were gifted horses from the French colonialists. There is a lot to be learned on how to practise agroforestry and how to exploit the value of forest ecosystems that we’re just beginning to understand now, and there is a ton of knowledge that we could have tapped had Agriculture Canada actually funded a real agroforestry program in Ontario.
Senator Oh: Would anyone else like to comment on this?
Mr. Arp: I could comment. At one particular point, we got interested because of some contacts we had with the mining operations in Northern Canada, particularly the Ring of Fire I think it was called. We were trying to work with the Lakehead NGO dealing with the First Nations in that area, so it looked promising, but nothing came of it. We would have dearly loved to have mapped this Ring of Fire situation so that we can perhaps better organize the operations that lead to the exploitation of the mining resources that are up there and are an ongoing process, but it didn’t go anywhere.
Our communications and interest in helping First Nations haven’t really gone anywhere so far, but maybe this can.
Senator Oh: Do you think that the Indigenous traditional knowledge can be expanded upon and better integrated into the decision-making process?
Mr. Arp: Absolutely.
Senator Oh: Thank you.
Senator Burey: I’m getting back to frameworks. The United States Department of Agriculture Agroforestry Strategic Framework for fiscal years 2019-24 provides an updated strategic framework for farmers, ranchers and forest owners and alludes to what many of you have said before about needing to reach out, investigate and integrate as the pillars.
I’m particularly taken by Mr. Renaud’s myth busters. I would like to get a cheat sheet on the myth busters, if you don’t mind.
I have two questions for everyone. First, should Canada have such a policy? Second, how could developing such a framework facilitate food security?
Mr. Renaud: Thank you. Absolutely we should have such a policy. My entire testimony is about the need for both Environment Canada and Agriculture Canada to come clean on the true sustainable posture of agriculture and why we don’t know about it. That’s because they haven’t done enough. By doing more, we will discover more.
The U.S. government is actually pulling ahead of us now. What is really sad is that, meanwhile, Canadian agricultural products are being painted as unsustainable when the opposite should be true. We could be promoting Canadian products internationally as sustainable, improving our exports and having an entirely different narrative around the whole subject. It’s because of the lack of a strategic framework and the lack of funding for agroforestry and for the research that needs to occur to fill in all these gaps that this is happening. It’s the short-term thinking that has to end.
Senator Burey: The second part was about facilitating food security.
Mr. Arp: I could respond to that. The government here in New Brunswick has approached me with a crop suitability mapping for exactly the purpose of increasing food sustainability for this province. I don’t know whether similar programs exist elsewhere, but I would say that we are blessed here because we have a tremendous amount of information on the government website showing exactly what we should do where. Nova Scotia is pulling up, and we have also worked with P.E.I. It could be expanded to the other provinces as well, particularly those that have this high-resolution elevation mapping done.
I gather that most of southern Quebec is now available also free of charge, which helps tremendously with the inventorying of the land and the water into the operations we need to do to make things better.
Senator Burey: Mr. Taylor, did you have anything to add?
Mr. Taylor: Anecdotally, having worked with the forest staff and expertise and consultants in Ontario for years, I can say having a framework in place, as Mr. Renaud and Mr. Arp have said, would address what we’re all seeing. We have woodlands that are completely undermanaged. In many cases, they are being excessively harvested, but in most cases they are being ignored and neglected. If they were harvested, and if people could see the economic value of these, if they were educated — that is, if we had staff out there or other educational vehicles to help people learn about how environmentally sustainable and complementary to agricultural practices forestlands are — if we looked to the riparian areas, fields where tree fence rows were taken out and trees were removed because of expanded cropland drainage operations and so on, we have almost unlimited areas in southern Ontario, let alone other ecosystems in Canada, where some form of agroforestry could complement and enhance food security, diversify income and improve the environment. With such a framework in place, a lot of that could be realized. It is something we should address soon.
Senator Burey: Thank you.
The Chair: Mr. Taylor, Mr. Renaud and Dr. Arp, I thank you for your participation today. Your passion came out in your testimony and in your answers. Thank you for speaking with us today.You are welcome to continue to stay on the call, but I would ask that you turn your cameras off.
For our second panel, we welcome via video conference Ken Van Rees, Professor Emeritus, Forest Soils, University of Saskatchewan — it’s good to see you again, Dr. Van Rees; Raju Soolanayakanahally, Research Scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and Kevin Boon, General Manager, British Columbia Cattlemen’s Association.
I invite you to make your presentations. We will speak in the same order that I introduced you. Dr. Van Rees, the floor is yours.
Ken Van Rees, Professor Emeritus, Forest Soils, University of Saskatchewan, as an individual: Thank you very much.
The Chair: You will have five minutes, and I will signal when you have a minute left. Thank you.
Mr. Van Rees: Thank you, again, to the committee for allowing me to present my ideas. I’m a retired professor from the University of Saskatchewan and former director of the Centre for Northern Agroforestry and Afforestation in the College of Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan.
Over the last 20 years, I have been working with agroforestry systems. Mr. Taylor mentioned a number of different systems, but the ones I’m most familiar with are the windbreak systems such as shelterbelts, whether they’re in fields or in farmyards, biomass production systems such as willow and hybrid poplar. I’ve also done a lot of work with forest farming and production systems such as growing hybrid poplar in large plantations.
I would like to talk a bit about the impact on soil health and some of the work that we have been doing with my graduate students. As has been said previously, increase in soil organic matter pools is a huge thing that trees add to agricultural systems. One of my students looking at 60 different shelterbelt trees with adjacent agriculture fields found anywhere from 6 to 38 megagrams of carbon per hectare additions from growing trees on agricultural land. When you think about how many shelterbelts there are in the province of Saskatchewan, we measured about 61,000 kilometres of shelterbelts that have been planted over the last 100 years. When you think about the scale of that, a lot of carbon has been added to the soil. In addition, there has been a lot of carbon grown above ground.
When we think of some of our hybrid poplar plantations that we’ve grown — and I know one senator is from Alberta — Al-Pac had a large program growing hybrid poplar for their mill, but in the 16 years that we were measuring our plantations, we were finding growth rates three to four times more than what the boreal forest was able to put on in the province of Saskatchewan. There is a lot of potential for growing carbon above ground but also impacting soil organic matter below ground.
The other thing that we were able to find is that shelterbelt trees also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One of my students — I will highlight his work — working with the Holos model developed by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada was looking at farms over a 60-year period where 5% of the farm was planted to trees and found a reduction in greenhouse gases of anywhere from 8% to 23%, depending on the species of trees used on the farm.
If you want more information about how much carbon is being sequestered, we have two websites that I have highlighted in our material that I sent to the committee. One is more scientific, and the other more general, but you can plug in numbers for how many kilometres of shelterbelts you have and come up with the amount of carbon being accrued by those shelterbelts.
The other thing in terms of soil health is that we think of salt-affected soils in Saskatchewan. We have about 4 million hectares, and we did research looking at what tree species could grow in these conditions. We had a student looking at willow trees who found varieties able to survive in highly salt-affected soil. There is another way of trying to rehabilitate these soil systems.
People have talked about economic and environmental benefits. I will not go there. I wanted to talk more about the barriers for agricultural producers to adopting agroforestry practices. We all know that it costs a lot of money to install these systems, especially in Western Canada. We found that for planting hybrid poplar as a tree plantation, you are talking about $1,000 a hectare. Again, that was 15 years ago. And if you are doing a biomass energy system with willow, you are talking anywhere from $1,500 per hectare to establish those things, and the main cost of that is the material. Finding plant material to put in the ground is the most expensive part.
The closure of the PFRA Shelterbelt Centre in Indian Head was a huge blow to agroforestry in Western Canada and all of Canada. When that happened in 2012, it was a huge blow to trying to encourage agroforestry practices across Canada.
Accessing tree species, the cost of planting and weed management are a huge issue, as well as trying to get this thing going.
I will close with this: In dealing with farmers in Western Canada, a lot of them had a traditional mindset that we’ve been getting rid of trees all our lives, and now trying to convince them to grow trees again is a huge thing. Helping them to understand the ecological services and benefits and better education of agroforestry practices is a big part of that.
My last point is this: During my 20 years of doing this research, no one at Agriculture Canada and Natural Resources Canada wanted to take responsibility for growing trees on agricultural land. We need to sort this out. That is why the PFRA Shelterbelt Centre was a key piece to doing that.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Van Rees.
We will now hear from Mr. Boon.
Kevin Boon, General Manager, BC Cattlemen’s Association: Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to present to you here today. I’m presenting on behalf of the BC Cattlemen’s Association, which represents approximately 1,100 cattle producers in British Columbia who manage about 85% of the cattle in the province.
Personally, I was a third-generation rancher in Alberta until 2009, when I moved to B.C. to take on the job of General Manager of the BC Cattlemen’s Association. My entire life has been spent farming and ranching, where I depend upon the health of that soil to supply my living.
I want to speak to you about the importance of water and land management and how it affects the health of the soil from a production perspective. I will glance into the realities that we are facing today as a result of some of the catastrophic fire events that we have experienced since 2017.
In B.C., about 85% of the province’s land is Crown land. About 22 million hectares of that Crown land we utilize for ranging our cattle on for summer forage requirements. Most of that land also supports forestry. In essence, we utilize it and need to manage it as agroforestry. But the responsibility for that, because it is Crown land, falls on the provincial government, and much of it is managed by regulation and not necessarily by science. We see some problems with that.
The challenge of how that land is managed sometimes puts into question initiatives such as the 2 Billion Trees Program that has been implemented without a thought about how that will affect the biodiversity on the landscape in areas such as British Columbia, where it is managed mainly through regulation. In essence, it really makes us question what they are looking at for the goal between the trees and is there a goal between the trees.
On the mountainsides in B.C., trees are an integral part of that healthy landscape, but only if they are in balance. We have created a mindset that the tree will be the ultimate answer to climate change because of its capacity to store carbon. This is a very good way to store carbon. We know that if the tree is harvested at maturity and turned into lumber, that will store that carbon for the life of the product, but when the tree is consumed by fire, that carbon is quickly released and becomes a contributor to our climate problems.
In 2017 and 2018, it is estimated that wildfires alone contributed more than three times the average annual amount of greenhouse gases in B.C. It is only good for storing carbon and increasing soil and atmospheric health if it remains stored. One of the most secure forms of storage is in the ground.
The forage between the trees and on the grasslands are a valuable contributor to carbon sequestration. There is a correlation between the stem-to-root ratio of a plant in general. The more root we can establish, the more carbon we can sequester. If we do not have enough stem, the root will be small. If we have too much stem, the root will shrink. Through the management of the stem growth, we can manage the root and its ability to sequester carbon.
Let’s now take a look at the other aspect of fire that has a much more profound effect on soil health that needs to be examined for how we manage that land post-fire. Currently, the focus after a fire is to get as many trees planted as possible, as quickly as possible. We can agree that getting that vegetation re-established on the landscape is imperative, and trees have to be part of the long-term strategy, but for immediate benefit, they are not going to benefit as much post-fire for what we need to achieve.
However, a post-fire forage seeding program will be of much more benefit in restoring the health of that soil for a number reasons. Two things happen almost immediately after a fire: One, there is a flush of nutrients that become available, and, two, the soil becomes hydrophobic. When these two things happen without the presence of seeds to take advantage of the nutrients, the repelling nature of the burned soil allows water to carry nutrients away, leaving soil that is dry, unstable and unhealthy.
Getting seed in the ground and established early allows the soil to become more absorbent with natural aeration for plant growth, allowing forage to benefit from the nutrient flush and establish a vegetation, which will retard weed infestation and give stability to the soil to prevent erosion and utilize forages.
I will quickly wrap up and say that a focus on soil and water health must be one of the highest priorities, and we have to look at ways to consider the adaptation of retaining both soil and water post-fire that is maybe a little different than what we are looking at right now. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Boon.
It appears that we have had troubles connecting with our third witness, so we will hear from him another time, either in person, on video conference or through a written brief.
We are moving on to questions, Senator Simons.
Senator Simons: Dr. Van Rees, I asked the previous panel about insurance disincentivizing farmers from planting commercial crop trees. When you talk about Saskatchewan and planting not just windbreaks but trees that might have some other kind of commercial value, do you see the same problem with insurance programs, the incentivization of planting canola on marginal land and not experimenting with either forage or the kinds of commercial tree crops that you are talking about?
Mr. Van Rees: I am not an expert on insurance stuff, but the big claim by farmers is, “If I am going to do this it costs a lot of money up front to establish these plantations and these trees.” It is a five-year commitment to get crown closure in terms of looking after and controlling weeds. Once the trees have crown closure, then you do not have to worry about it, but I do not know of any program that would incentivize farmers to do this. As we know, there is a huge cost to planting, and now without a supply of trees, it makes it even more difficult to be able to do that.
Senator Simons: Even though I am an Albertan and from a Prairie province, I was shocked when our committee travelled to Saskatchewan this summer and saw the degree of salination in some of the fields. Can you explain to us how willow trees might have the capacity to reclaim and maybe desalinate some of that soil or at least reduce the stresses of salination?
Mr. Van Rees: I know that Raju Soolanayakanahally was part of a project in Indian Head. It is more about finding species that are able to tolerate the high levels of salt in the soil. I do not want to get into the physiology, but there are species that are able to tolerate higher amounts of salt and survive and grow.
If you are able to do this, then you have some kind of cover on there. Maybe over a long period of time, in terms of the amount of rainfall and stuff, you can start washing some of these salts away. Again, it depends on how the salts got there in the first place, depending on the hydrological processes in the different places, but salt is a big problem.
If we’re thinking about biomass energy, and willow is a well-suited crop for that, you also need an industry to take this material and do something with it. That was the beauty of the thing at Indian Head. The PFRA Shelterbelt Centre had a wood-burner heating greenhouses and other buildings, and it was a really nice opportunity to demonstrate what can be done with situations like that.
Senator Simons: Mr. Boon, if one is grazing one’s cattle on Crown reserve forestlands, what impact do the cattle have on the health of the forest itself? We heard a lot of evidence from people who told us that good grazing of grasslands helps those grasslands to stay healthy and helps them to sequester carbon. Can you talk a little bit about the role of cows in the forests? If they are eating up all the little trees on the ground, is that good for the forest floor?
Mr. Boon: Thank you for that question. Actually, cattle are not and do not really enjoy eating the trees, so consuming them is not the issue. When they are seedlings, they can trample them at some point if they are not protected. It is one of the reasons we manage our woodlots. We have a woodlot system here in British Columbia, and the ranchers are the main managers of that. They do things that we call “obstacle planting” where they utilize obstacles to plant the trees.
There’s a difference between being managed for agroforestry versus when it is logged by the forest companies. They are doing it strictly for forestry. Their objective is to meet a regulation, and it is to get as many living stems as required coming out of it at the end. We can have more issues there.
For the most part, they have no problem establishing to get their 1,200 stems per hectare that they are required to have on that landscape with cattle out there.
Senator Simons: When you say you put up barriers in some cases, is it so that cattle cannot go here or cannot go there?
Mr. Boon: No, we use natural barriers. We will use rocks, roots and stumps. We will use the topography that is there.
Cattle are basically not the most ambitious animals. They are looking to find the easiest source of food they can. If we can make it a little more challenging for them to get at those trees, survivability of the trees comes up as well.
Senator Simons: I am guessing that managing the health of those forests is really important to managing water supply?
Mr. Boon: Absolutely. One of the things that we have seen with the fires out here is we lose the canopy or the growth, and it takes 20-30 years to get the growth of the conifers out there, the fir and the spruce, to a point where they are retaining the snowpack so the freshet does not move off so quickly. That is a major part of it.
If we get too many trees, and the growth is too thick — this is where we run into problems when we do not manage properly — the snow never makes it to the ground. It gets hung up in the boughs, and evaporation occurs before the snow gets to the ground. It is about creating the balance we need in the system moving forward.
Senator Simons: Thank you.
Senator Burey: Good morning. Thank you for being here. We were able to visit Saskatchewan and Alberta this year for our committee’s study, and it was wonderful.
My question is one I asked the previous panel. As you know, the United States Department of Agriculture Agroforestry Strategic Framework for fiscal years 2019-24 provides an updated strategic framework for farmers, ranchers and forest owners, including policies such as reaching out to all landowners and communities, investigating advanced science and technology, integrating information and research, et cetera.
Should Canada have such a policy framework? Second, would this framework facilitate food sustainability and food security?
Mr. Van Rees: Absolutely. I think it’s very important to have a policy like this within Canada. I tried for 20 years to develop an agroforestry industry in Saskatchewan and was unsuccessful because I didn’t have provincial government backing. I think something from the federal government doing something like this, incorporating trees into agricultural landscapes, is a wonderful thing. Back in the 1880s, the government decided to plant a third of the Prairies with trees. It never happened because there weren’t enough trees, but I think the government has to do something in terms of enacting policy to get this going.
It’s not the answer to everything, but I think it’s an important part to your question about food security. If we are at the stage now where we’re losing shelterbelts for one reason or another, it has an impact on wind erosion and soil erosion, water quality, and all of those things impact food sustainability. It’s a very important part that could be a benefit to farmers and producers.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much. I also enjoyed your paintings.
Mr. Boon: I agree wholeheartedly. We do need a strategy. One of the biggest problems we have is that we don’t create strategies for the whole landscape or for the whole plan. We create mono-strategies which will take one thing or another. The beautiful part about agroforestry is that we’re able to look at more than one aspect of it.
If I look at B.C., where we have very little arable land for agriculture, we can’t take those mountainsides and plant canola. We have to depend on the forage and the trees on those mountainsides for them, and they are very good producers of both. If we manage that correctly, and that management includes doing a full watershed plan — and this is one of the things with fires — we have the opportunity. Let’s not waste a good crisis.
Speaking of the painting, I like to look at it as the fires creating a blank canvas. How we paint that canvas is going to determine what this looks like for 50 to 80 years down the road. It’s our responsibility to do that. We have lost millions of hectares of land here in the last five to six years with the top growth on it. We have an ability now to seriously look at how we do that and utilize the science and knowledge that we have to paint that canvas correctly.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much.
The Chair: Thank you. I have a couple of questions. First, for both of you, we will write a report when this study is done and it will contain a number of recommendations. If you had the pen in your hand, what recommendations would you like to see us include?
Mr. Van Rees: The first thing is who is going to be responsible for this. Is it Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada? Is it Natural Resources Canada? No one knew whose jurisdiction was what. I think there needs to be a clear outline of who is responsible for agroforestry on agricultural land. I think that will help tremendously with the government agencies knowing what they can do and what they can’t do. There needs to be cooperation between the two. Not to say there hasn’t been, but I think it needs to be clearly outlined who is responsible and where the program is coming from. I think that would be really helpful.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Boon: I agree with that. We have to look at what we need in the future. We have to create balance. There is no way that we can carry forward without creating a biodiverse environment, and agroforestry allows both. We have to look at the other parts of the composition. Where are the bugs, the grubs, the squirrels, everything, and where do they contribute? When I look at this, it has to be that when you have the pen, it’s a matter of looking at the broad spectrum. I feel you’re doing that right here today and in your past presentations.
Look at the experience on the land, those guys on the ground. I’m speaking as a farmer and I feel we have a lot to offer, the same as First Nations having that ability in the past, but there is also a reason our rear-view mirror is so small and our windshield is so big. We have to utilize what we see in the rear-view mirror to move us forward, but we have to plan for that future. That’s where the knowledge that you’re gaining right now will allow you to pen what we do in the future.
The Chair: Thank you very much for those wise words.
Mr. Van Rees: The important thing is that in the last 100 years there have been a lot of trees planted across Canada. I don’t think we have truly recognized or appreciated all the work that has been done in the last 100 years by various agencies to see that happen and the benefit it has been to Canadians.
Going forward, whether there are some agencies such as the PFRA Shelterbelt Centre, whatever form that takes down the road, I think it’s important that we not only recognize the benefits that we have had in the past but think about how we move this forward in the future.
The Chair: More wise words. Thank you, Mr. Van Rees.
Specifically, let’s think about incentives. How should the federal government incentivize foresters and agroforesters into adopting sustainable practices going forward into the future, thinking about soil carbon management, et cetera? Specific incentives. Any thoughts?
Mr. Boon: I found it very interesting to listen to Mr. Renaud in the previous presentation. I agree with him. The current carbon credit program that is out there does very little to incent us to be able to utilize, and it makes it very difficult to do.
One of the things in there is that it makes it so we have to make a practice change in order to qualify for it, without recognizing the benefit that we’re contributing right now. Of course, my interest has always been in forage. I have to feed the critters out there. There is a huge value in the sequestration value of that forage, but we must have the trees, we must have that balance to get it there, as we pointed out. How do we incentivize having the forest and the trees? It comes down to what the goal between those trees is and how we do it.
It’s hard to say that we need that incentive on one side when we look at what is happening on the other side, where people are buying the credits and utilizing them to do wrong. We have to find ways to create that balance throughout.
That’s a question for people who are a heck of a lot smarter than me to figure out the system that is there. I just don’t necessarily feel that the credit system is working, and we need to really look at how we pay for what is already being done when what is being done may be the most beneficial thing out there.
Mr. Van Rees: I agree. I have talked to a few ag economists in our college about what is happening today. There are some small programs for best management practices by incorporating trees, livestock or water quality, but what it comes down to is supply of trees. Not having a free supply of trees has altered farmers’ opinions on what they want to do with trees. The shelterbelt program providing free trees to farmers was a huge benefit. Without that, I don’t know how you move forward, because trees are going to be the key thing in terms of supply, and having enough trees provided of the different species. And thinking about 60 years from now, what trees will be best if we’re thinking about carbon sequestration, what trees will grow best, and with changing climate.
Tree selection will be huge down the road. Having a supply of those trees will be key to getting any kind of agroforestry program going across Canada.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Simons: It’s interesting that one of the themes we have heard again and again in our study is that there is not enough sharing of information and sharing of data about soil health and soil mapping.
But this whole conversation has made me think of a new challenge. When you think about canola growers or corn growers or dairy farmers, yes, conditions are different in different provinces of the country, but I don’t know if they are as radically different as they are in agroforestry.
If you’re doing agroforestry in northern Alberta, it’s completely different than if you’re doing it in central Saskatchewan. It’s completely different again if you’re doing it in British Columbia growing fruit trees or in Ontario growing walnut trees or maple trees for tapping for syrup.
I’m wondering, for people in agroforestry, do you have a committee, a lobby group, a way of sharing information, or are you all doing such different things that you don’t have a common gathering point?
Mr. Boon: I’ll go first on that. I would say that, no, we don’t have a common gathering point other than some of our researchers. Researchers are great individuals to gather around because they tend to be very much looking at the different angles and looking for the solutions outside of the box of what the normality would be. We tend to go there.
When we look at some of the things here, especially in British Columbia — because you’re so correct; agroforestry is totally different wherever you’re at. Ranching on the Prairies, if we had a stand of willow trees, we looked after them with reverence because it was the only tree we could get to grow out there, whereas here in B.C. in some places it’s almost like a weed because it gets in the way.
That’s where things like the woodlot associations come in, where they are individuals managing that wood. Often it is ranchers doing it because they might have the tenure on that Crown land. So they are managing for more than one purpose. It comes back to that monoculture idea. If we manage for only one purpose, we don’t associate with the others well. Coming together to do just agroforestry is a little more difficult in that we each do it differently and it’s not quite as refined as some of the other associations we might represent.
Senator Simons: Great.
Mr. Van Rees: I would agree that we had proposed at one time to have an agroforestry committee group across Canada, but it never got funded when we made the proposal to the federal government. At the time of the AGG Program, the Agricultural Greenhouse Gases Program, the Indian Head Shelterbelt Centre was the centre for all the information that was happening across Canada, whether it was in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, whatever. That was kind of the hub where a lot of information went. They also had a wonderful extension program, too, in terms of getting the information out.
Clearly, there isn’t a cohesive group across the country that talks about agri-forestry. Honestly, many of us who have been working in agri-forestry have retired, so it’s an uphill battle. But it would be nice to have some kind of national centre, whatever, as they do in the United States out of Lincoln, Nebraska, to do this kind of work.
Senator Simons: We’re going to have a rather long to-do list. Thank you. I was very lucky last December to be able to attend a big conference in Edmonton that was two conferences together, one on soil health and one on grazing. It brought together such fascinating people from across the West, from all four Western provinces and some of the Western states, to talk about soil health and grazing. I don’t know if there is ever anything like that for agroforestry, or are you each alone in your forests?
Mr. Van Rees: Actually, with the AGG Program, the first round of it, we actually got together as researchers in a meeting to talk about our results, which was helpful. In the second AGGP program, there wasn’t money for that kind of opportunity, so it really hampered the program. As researchers, as Mr. Boon has said, we always conversed. I knew the guys at the University of Guelph, in Quebec, Alberta, whatever. So as researchers we always talked to one another, but there wasn’t some kind of national program that was a repository for all the information on agri-forestry.
Senator Simons: Thank you very much for being here today.
The Chair: We have no more questions. Since we have a little bit of time, I’m going to give the last word to each of our witnesses. Is there anything you would like to leave us with, witnesses? You have the last word before we wrap up.
Mr. Van Rees: Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about agri-forestry. I think it’s a very important practice in agriculture. It just hasn’t taken root as it has in other countries around the world, unfortunately. But I still think of it as an important practice that could be managed here in Canada; it’s just we need some kind of central agency to oversee and kick-start this thing, but there is a lot of interest in it. There are a lot of farmers who want to incorporate trees into their systems. We just need something to get it going. I think it’s an important part of Canada and our history in Canada.
Just as a side note here, Bill Schroeder, who used to work at the PFRA Shelterbelt Centre in Indian Head, just wrote and released a book called Trees Against the Wind. It’s a history of shelterbelts in Western Canada and a very interesting book that was just released by Nature Saskatchewan. If you’re interested in having a read about trees, this is a great book.
Mr. Boon: First, I really appreciate this opportunity. Second, I really in some ways envy you of your job because you get the opportunity to learn different aspects from across the country of what we’re talking about here today, mainly agroforestry.
One of the things I would add into this is we sometimes forget that the most important part of agriculture and forestry is water. Ken Van Rees has been saying quite a bit about the PFRA, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. I would love to see the PFRA come back. Growing up in a time when it was very active on the Prairies, they had a lot of great programs, not just for forestry and trees but also for water and water storage. If we can create those riparian lands, and the storage allows us to do things like growing willows on the Prairies, but out here in British Columbia we have allocated all the water we have. We have to now store it and manage that accordingly because we can’t grow the trees, the forage or the crops if we don’t have that water and that management.
We need to consider water in everything we do, no matter what kind of agriculture, no matter what we look at. If we want food security, we have to look at that. Management of the ground, we have to map it, plan it, balance it and make sure that water is inclusive in all of that.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Van Rees and Mr. Boon, for your participation today. Your assistance with our study is greatly appreciated. Mr. Boon, enjoy your steak at lunch.
I would also like to thank committee members for your active participation and thoughtful questions. I want to take a moment, as I always do, to thank the staff who support us: the interpreters, the Debates team, transcription folks, the committee room attendant, multimedia service technicians, the broadcasting team and the recording centre, ISD and, of course, our pages.
Our next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, November 7, at 6:30 p.m., where we will continue to hear from witnesses with respect to the committee’s study on soil health.
If there is no other business, honourable senators, I’ll declare the meeting adjourned.
(The committee adjourned.)