THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, February 6, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 6:30 p.m. [ET] to examine and report on the status of soil health in Canada.
Senator Robert Black (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our winter sitting. I’d like to begin by welcoming members of the committee and our witnesses, as well as those watching this meeting on the web. My name is Rob Black. I’m a senator from Ontario, and I chair this committee.
Today, the committee is meeting on its study to examine and report on the status of soil health in Canada.
Before we hear from our witnesses, I’d like to start by asking the senators around the table to introduce themselves, starting with our deputy chair.
Senator Simons: Hello. I am Senator Paula Simons from Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Jean-Guy Dagenais, from Quebec.
Senator Petitclerc: Chantal Petitclerc, from Quebec.
Senator Dalphond: Pierre J. Dalphond, from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Cotter: Good evening. I am Brent Cotter, a senator from Saskatchewan.
The Chair: Before we begin, I’d just like to share with you a gift I got at Christmas from my cousin Morley Trask, from Alma, Ontario. It’s a quote by Paul Harvey, who was an American radio broadcaster for ABC News, born in 1918 and passed away in 2009. He’s the guy that said, “And now, the rest of the story.” It says:
Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
I thought that was appropriate to share with you folks tonight, and thanks to cousin Morley Trask.
Today, we have witnesses on our first panel who are based in Australia. Tonight, we welcome Hugh Harley, Professor of Practice, Global Economy, University of Sydney; and Ravi Naidu, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of crcCARE, who is joining us today from Fiji.
I invite the witnesses to make their presentation. We’ll begin with Dr. Naidu, to be followed by Dr. Harley. When I put my hand up, that will mean you have one minute left, and when both hands are up, it’s about time to wrap it up. The floor is yours, Dr. Naidu.
Ravi Naidu, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, crcCARE: Honourable senators, thank you very much for the invitation to address you on the critical topic of soil health. I’m an Australian, but right now I’m in Fiji.
I recognize the Senate’s commitment to addressing pressing global challenges; hence, I am eager to contribute to the discourse on an issue that transcends borders and affects the well-being of our planet.
One Health, promoted by the World Health Organization, stresses the interconnectedness of environmental, animal and human health. When examining the three pillars, it becomes apparent that environmental health, especially the well-being of the soil, is of utmost importance.
As we all know, soil is a living entity. It hosts millions of micro-organisms. It’s fundamental to sustaining life and biodiversity. The adverse impact of land degradation and pollutants on the microbial community of soil is profound. This disruption has far-reaching implications for climate change, as it affects the biogeochemical cycling, including carbon and nutrient cycling, something we often fail to see.
Soil is the critical part of Earth’s Critical Zone, and the Critical Zone is what extends from the top of the trees all the way to groundwater. Therefore, such consequences not only jeopardize animal and human health but also threaten food security and trade, not forgetting that the Critical Zone also includes the air that we breathe.
Healthy soil must be seen as the cornerstone of One Health, an interconnected web linking the health of ecosystems, plants, animals and humans. The soil, which is teeming with a myriad of micro-organisms, micro-, meso- and macrofauna, is a silent architect of life’s sustenance. It provides the substrate, nutrients and connections between organisms necessary for the growth of the crops that nourish us, and sustains diverse ecosystems and supports countless species.
In the One Health arena, the importance of healthy soils cannot be overemphasized. Nutrient-rich soils produce nutrient-rich crops, which form the basis of a balanced diet essential for human well-being and for the healthy growth of livestock, poultry and other animals. Conversely, degraded soils compromise the nutrient content of our food quality, aggravating health problems.
In addition, healthy soil acts as a natural buffer against the spread of pollutants and the spread of disease. Biodiverse soils form a resilient barrier against pathogens, preventing their transmission to plants, animals and ultimately humans. Healthy soils are also more resilient and able to retain and immobilize chemical pollutants entering the ecosystem. Soil acts as a sponge, holding and filtering water, directly influencing the quality of water resources, protecting communities from waterborne diseases and pollution. Indeed, any pollutants entering the soil system impact soil health.
Soils are home to 60% of terrestrial biodiversity, or even more since we still know a very small part of the organisms that live under our feet. The protection of above- and belowground biodiversity must therefore start with the protection of the larger ecosystem that supports them.
There needs to be debate on how to anchor the monitoring, protection and sustainable management of soil into the mechanisms and initiatives focused on One Health.
Turning to Canada, Canadian soils are generally well maintained even with minimal tilling, but challenges remain, including low cadmium levels and diffuse pesticide contamination. Vigilance and collaborative efforts are essential to address these concerns and safeguard our soil health system.
Recognizing that the responsibility for optimal health lies with us all, Canada, as a developed nation, has a unique role to play. As we prioritize One Health, soil management strategies, including a risk-based approach, become essential.
I do see us, particularly Canada and others, sharing our expertise with developing countries, particularly in South America, Africa and island nations, which is imperative. This outreach can enhance global efforts to address soil health issues and promote sustainable practices.
The main barriers to mainstream soils within the One Health approach are as follows: Many humans are disconnected from land and soil; in many countries, soils are seen as an economic asset versus indigenous peoples and rural populations that see the land and soil as the “mother”; lack of awareness of the importance of healthy soils; actions are mainly driven by accidents and impacts, for example, pollution accidents and disease outbreaks, and not by a precautionary and prevention approach. Healthier, more nutritious and diverse diets are not well established as a solution to achieve One Health.
The main gaps to overcome these barriers are the lack of evidence that we have on the impact of soil degradation on soil health, environmental and animal and human health; lack of information on the economic impact of soil degradation; and lack of attention to soils at all educational stages, particularly in health-related university degrees.
Some suggestions are as follows: We have to make soil spicy and promote activities that allow populations to reconnect to the world; the importance of World Soil Day should be recognized, and soil health and One Health should be part of it; awareness creation is needed, including health and environmental benefits, appealing to feelings and creating parallels between human, animal and soil health; we do need existing tools for managing soils, and we need to look at metadata analysis and also adopt a machine learning approach.
With that, I’ll conclude that we should focus on connecting the dots of the One Health approach using a wide range of information, surveillance and monitoring systems for animal, human, plant and soil health. In closing, I humbly request the Senate’s support in exploring avenues for collaborative action. By leveraging Canadian expertise and engaging in partnership, we can contribute to a sustainable future for Canadians and others as well.
Thank you for your attention to this critical matter. I look forward to the opportunity to contribute to the dialogue on soil health. Thank you very much for having me.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Naidu. It’s good to see you again. We ran into each other last July. Five minutes is very quick, isn’t it? I will say that.
Dr. Harley, the floor is yours.
Hugh Harley, Professor of Practice, University of Sydney, as an individual: Thanks very much, senator, and thank you all for listening to me.
I want to speak briefly about the Global Soil Health Programme, a joint initiative of the universities of Sydney and Glasgow. I lead it as a former banker, but the real powerhouse is Professor John Crawford, who is at the University of Glasgow. Our stated objective is to try to improve 60%of the world’s soil over the next 10 years.
I want to reinforce Dr. Naidu’s points on the importance of soil but then to make the point that, of the three biospheres — oceans, atmosphere and soil — the thing about soil is that humanity now knows enough to be able to improve soil. If we look out a decade, hopefully we might slow down the damage to the atmosphere and the oceans, but with soil, we know enough, if humanity were to take a concerted view, that we could actually quite substantially improve the quality of soil. That’s absolutely what motivates this program.
I want to stress, though, that we have concluded that the main impediment is not science and policy but actually economics, and that’s for two key reasons. The first is, if we want to achieve substantial improvement in the soil, it’s going to require a widespread transition among farmers from what we might call turnkey chemical solutions to soil fertility, biology and ecology-based solutions. The challenge is that almost always these nature-based solutions require more expense, more effort and great complexity flexibility of farmers in their communities, and they’re much more sensitive to local conditions. One of the most striking messages we hear from our research is that farmers tell us, “We can see the benefit for the environment. We just can’t see the benefit for us from these different practices.” It’s a classic externality problem. Farmers typically bear the costs while the wider community shares the benefits, and I suspect we’re seeing some of that on the streets of Paris at the moment. This, of course, is notwithstanding the fact that soil has the lowest cost per ton for atmospheric carbon removal, followed a little bit farther by forestry and then well ahead of other options.
The second reason this is an economics challenge is that we need to be able to figure out how to scale up the required changes quickly enough to meet the science community’s exhortation that this is the current decade for critical improvement in the environment. We’ve got to figure out as part of this how we can get the right feedback loops to learn as we go.
The fact that this is primarily an economics problem and not just a science problem is exactly why this program has been led out of the School of Economics at the University of Sydney and out of the Adam Smith Business School in Glasgow, and why we’ve put such effort into working with global corporates such as Microsoft, Shell, Bayer, BASF, Rabobank and Swiss Re, as well as the big global public institutions such as the FAO, the United Nations, the OECD, the World Economic Forum and so on.
In terms of the four critical tasks we’ve identified, first, we must provide farmers and other soil custodians with key information enablers to help them solve many of the problems they’re seeing. Second, we’ve got to have cost-effective measurement reporting and verification at scale so we can have actions and measure actions to restore soil health. Third, we’ve got to be able to influence incentives in the food chain to encourage the level of investment in farming that is required to raise farmer incomes to enable the necessary on-farm investment. Finally, we have to continue to work on resolving the scientific uncertainties about how the soil system works.
In short, our cornerstone is to find ways to assist farmers to take actions which have a positive impact on the soil while at the same time working to improve the science of soil and creating a learning loop.
2023 was a frustrating year for us. We thought we had very substantial philanthropic support in excess of $1 billion for this program out of the North Americas. Unfortunately, at the end of last year, that evaporated. That’s been a substantial impediment for us. In my notes, I list some of the activities we were going to do, but given the time, I’ll take those as given.
I see the senator has his hands up, so I will finish shortly.
I do want to make the point that we now understand that if we’re going to make progress on this, we’re going to have to move into the mainstream of for-profit activity. Particularly, we are very keen to build on the work we’re doing to provide two‑way information sharing between farmers with each other and farmers and scientists. We think that if we can get enough connection, we could generate a hockey stick of innovation.
I would make the point too that it’s clear that the world is now much more cautious about private investment in these matters.
I do want to conclude with two points. First, I would like to emphasize the fact that there is a glass-half-full element of this. At least with soil, there is private ownership, unlike with the oceans and atmospheres. Well-designed government programs can leverage those private incentives for good soil stewardship in a way that we can’t with the oceans and the atmosphere. I think this is a critical reason why this is such a large opportunity for mankind.
The final point I’ll make is that there are still big gaps in cost‑effective measurement reporting and verification. There are still big gaps in soil carbon codes. We need a country to be a national champion of this. It’s not going to come through private investment. Respectfully, I hope you understand why I think Canada could be such a wonderful champion of this, given the potential for you to be one country that could, in aggregate, notwithstanding micro-disruption, benefit from climate change, as long as we keep it within manageable grounds.
On that note, senators, thank you for listening to me, and I also look forward to the dialogue.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Harley.
Dr. Naidu and Dr. Harley, your testimony has been tremendous. We’ll open the floor to questions.
Senator Simons: Thank you very much to our guests for speaking to us from the future because it’s already tomorrow where you are. Maybe that’s an apt metaphor.
Dr. Naidu, I had the chance to listen to your inspiring speech at the Global Soil Plenary in Rome this summer. I wonder if you can talk to us tonight a little bit more about the connection between healthy soil, pollution and infection. We’ve heard from many soil experts in our study, but I don’t think anybody has told us before that soils can protect us from disease, whether that’s plant disease or human disease. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about that. What are the dangers of pollution getting in the way of that soil service?
Mr. Naidu: Thank you very much for your question, senator, and I’m delighted to see you again.
crcCARE is a cooperative research centre on contamination assessment and remediation of the environment, supported by Australian defence, mining companies, regulatory jurisdictions and water industries, so we do work on pollutants. The focus of my presentation was largely not just what we’re doing in developed countries but also developing countries.
Now, from a pollution perspective, we are confronted with nearly 10 million potentially contaminated sites globally, and every farmland has a certain dose of toxic metals. Of course, you can eat that soil and it won’t kill you because the concentrations are so low, but these pollutants can bioaccumulate in plants. Therefore, the [Technical difficulties] expose a pathway through food into human systems. Equally, when you pasture, for example and you’re supplying nutrients through fertilizer, for instance, we often also use secondary treated effluent. These pollutants can then pass from the soil into pasture and through that into humans as well.
There’s now sufficient evidence, and we were in a meeting of the World Health Organization in Bil’in, Israel, where you could see a link between pollutants and many different human diseases, not forgetting that 75% of babies in the mother’s womb are already linked to pollutants in their serum. There’s evidence for that as well. Cancer is one example. Diabetes is another example, and there are numerous other diseases that have been linked. More often, we forget that it really starts from the base, which is the soil.
The pollutants in the soil do two things: First, as I mentioned, they can bioaccumulate into plants and pasture. Second — and this is what we have been lacking — the tiniest levels of pollutants can adversely impact biogeochemical cycling, in this case carbon cycling. If they do, then carbon sequestration is impacted as well. What we see is the impact, but what we don’t see is the cause of that impact, which in our case, as I said, is pollutants as well. So unless we prevent and clean up our environment, humanity is at risk, taking into consideration that male fertility is also impacted by the presence of pollutants.
With that, I’ll step back and be happy to expand on this if required.
Senator Simons: I’m going to ask a question of Dr. Harley, and then I’m hoping to go on second round.
When I said Australia is speaking to us from the future, I meant it as a compliment and not entirely as a joke because Australia has been an international leader in soil health. I wanted to understand why you’re so much better at this than we are. In Canada, we have a problem of joint jurisdiction. Soil is under both federal and provincial jurisdiction. Australia is very much like Canada in terms of being a federation of states. In Australia, what is federal jurisdiction and what is state jurisdiction? Is that part of the reason that you are ahead of us?
Mr. Harley: No. As in Canada, there’s also a shared jurisdiction here as well. Australia has always had a heavy emphasis on agriculture right from our origins, obviously. That has been one of the factors that has underpinned the focus that Australia has made on soil. Sitting here, we, of course, wish we were much further ahead.
There’s a more general reason than a soil-specific reason for Australia in that, having been born as a White-settled country in the late 1700s, we were absolutely a child of the Enlightenment. That focus on soil science has really resonated all the way down through our history. It’s one of the reasons Australia pushes above its weight in medical research, for instance, and we’ve been lucky to be able to maintain that as well on soil.
I think it’s a combination of a bias toward science historically in Australia plus an emphasis on the agricultural sector that has underpinned it. I think many of us would hope we’d made as much progress over the last 30 years as we had in the previous 30. However, I think, overall, there’s a lot to be positive about.
The Chair: Dr. Naidu, do you have just a quick comment?
Mr. Naidu: Yes, I have a very quick comment.
I think Australia is also fortunate to have a National Soils Advocate that was supported by the federal government. His drive toward soil health has been incredible. That also led to national soil guidelines plus ways we need to invest, and soil health has been very central to that.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Cotter: Thank you for whatever time it is tomorrow morning for you that you’ve joined us. It’s much appreciated by all of us here.
Dr. Naidu answered, in part, my second question regarding the National Soils Advocate. I wanted to drill down, though, on what was essentially the first aspect of Senator Simons’s second question. It relates to what seems to me to be, from a Canadian perspective, almost a magical approach by the various governments in Australia, which we probably have some difficulty in Canada struggling to achieve.
I have had a look at the National Soil Strategy. It’s a strategy that appears to engage both the national government and state governments in Australia and, I think, to a significant degree, the agriculture industry. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how it is that particularly the national and state governments have come together to develop a strategy that is as all encompassing and as promising as it looks, at least from my point of view. We don’t necessarily live in a world of what I would call cooperative federalism these days in Canada, so I’d be interested in how this magic occurred in Australia.
Mr. Harley: I might actually suggest that Dr. Naidu kick off on this, because he’s much closer to the mechanics of Australia. My focus has been much more on the global level. If you’re okay to do that, Dr. Naidu, I’ll add.
Mr. Naidu: Dr. Harley, thank you very much. Yes, I’d be very pleased to respond to this.
First, yes, we have state and territorial governments. Just on the pollution perspective in the first instance on soils, even from a pollution perspective, states and territories have their own legislation for assessing and remediating contaminated sites. When the national centre of excellence, crcCARE, was established — I can brief you on what cooperative research centres are, if you want — the one task we had was to harmonize states and territories into developing a national remediation framework. That task was not easy, but ultimately it did happen, and we do have a national remediation framework. From the soils perspective, the soil advocate played a very significant role getting the states and territories together.
Also, I led a new initiative on what we call a Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils. That cooperative research centre brought different states together under one umbrella — researchers and also state government departments. What that meant was that, jointly, they were able to work with the soil advocate and get the national government to recognize that the maintenance of soil health is crucial from not just the perspective of the quality of food but from the perspective of productivity as well.
I always revert to the soil advocate because I had worked closely with the former soil advocate — who, unfortunately, is not with us today — and also the new soil advocate, who is playing a fairly significant role as well. Having the soil advocate and getting together the national centre of excellence and the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils has brought together farmers, state governments and the Commonwealth as well.
The Chair: Dr. Harley, do you have anything to add?
Mr. Harley: Only to say that, so far, Australia has been able to preserve a reasonably cooperative federal approach generally. I think it comes from the fact that the events of Second World War knocked Australia around very badly and were a wake-up call about the importance of the fact that Australia was a small country in a big world dependent upon a relatively narrow range of exports. It was important, notwithstanding political differences, to continue to focus on these cooperative matters.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Oh: I have a question for both witnesses. What specific aspect of Australia’s National Soil Strategy do you believe could be effectively adapted and implemented for Canada considering our differences in geography, climate and agricultural practices? Would you be able to comment on this?
Mr. Harley: Dr. Naidu, I expect that you are more of an expert on that question than I am.
Mr. Naidu: Thank you very much, Dr. Harley.
First and foremost, the national strategies that we have for soils bring together both the state and territorial governments, as well as researchers, under one umbrella. Therefore, the objective has always been not to focus on one particular farm but to be national. The focus was also to bring together researchers from different states and territories under one umbrella so that they could work jointly to create a database that others can also access. Metadata analysis was crucial. Climate change came into the picture as well and, with that, One Health.
Initially, the Australian government investing resources was another factor because, as we all know, any research that is conducted by universities never moves forward unless there is what they call a bucket with money. That bucket of money from the Commonwealth brought the researchers together, recognizing as well the gaps we had from the soil health perspective and gaps we had from science and impending climate change. That is what led to what we have today.
Senator Oh: Any comment from you, Dr. Harley?
Mr. Harley: Only to emphasize the point I made in my address about the fact that the different practices are going to require fundamentally different economics and incentives for farmers. Unless any government is prepared to direct that head‑on, it is hard to see that there is going to be a smooth adoption path.
The research we do with farmers is always about them trusting, more than anything else, advice from other farmers. That is why, in the program, we’re encouraging the Australian government to focus very hard on using new technology to connect farmers, with the proviso that the farmers remain in ownership of their own data and be able to share that data collectively with each other but also on a systematic basis to the scientists so that the scientists can also contribute in a practical way in the ways that Dr. Naidu suggested.
Mr. Naidu: I entirely agree with Dr. Harley.
I wanted to bring to the attention of senators that I also chair the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ International Network on Soil Pollution. Within that, we have what we call the Soil Doctors Programme. The Soil Doctors Programme is scientists reaching out to farmers, connecting with the farmers, and also providing them tools that farmers can also use to monitor their soil health. It is something we need to do not just in developing countries that we are targeting right now but in developed countries as well. What it needs is resources. Resources are something that are not easy to finance and not easy to obtain.
Senator Petitclerc: My question is for Dr. Harley, but if Dr. Naidu wants to comment on it, that would be appreciated as well.
We live in such a big territory here in Canada, a big country, and so do you, and we have similar jurisdictions, as we spoke about. One of the challenges that we heard about was how to do better in collecting data, measuring the quality of soil and in measuring improvements. Measuring, mostly. Is that a challenge that you face as well? If so, do you have solutions for us?
Mr. Harley: I think the short story is that the whole world faces that challenge. The scientists know how to measure the carbon content of soil very accurately, but we don’t know how to do it cheaply, reliably and at a price point that makes sense both in terms of the economic value produced by the soil and also relative to the various carbon price incentives that are around the world. We’re particularly excited by some work that is happening at the moment in Kenya using spool spectroscopy, and with progress here at the University of Sydney too. In an optimistic view, the costs might come down by 90%. It has to be solved. It is clear that people have been working on this for a long time without progress. We do think that this, as I said at the end, falls into the moonshot program. Someone with deep pockets, if we’re serious about this, is going to have to pick it up. This is our view because it is fundamental to solving the problem.
Senator Petitclerc: I understand the solution, from your perspective, will have to come from corporate involvement and not the government. Or is it both?
Mr. Harley: No. Ideally, there would be a corporation that has deep enough pockets to solve it. I think the experience to date has probably been that this is not the case. At the start of this program, we were very optimistic about working with corporations on these solutions, and we have made some great progress, but it is clear that the challenge for them of moving from a chemical-based world to a biology-based world is very challenging. That creates its own preoccupations and challenges for them, and it perhaps means that collective progress on some of these issues is struggling. Again, it comes back to do we or don’t we believe the scientists when they say we’ve got ten years to solve this problem?
Mr. Naidu: I entirely agree with Dr. Harley that the approach that is practised will very much depend upon the availability of resources and whether we are in highly developed countries or less developed countries.
It is also a challenge even in Australia, for example, where every team conducting research will have their own approach to doing things; therefore, when you have data generated, you cannot just dump the data in a database and try to do metanalysis because different approaches will deliver different numbers as well. Hence, I have been pushing hard for people to make certain that the approach that they use is one where, with the data that is generated, we can easily conduct metadata analysis. From crcCARE’s perspective, we do that, and I’m also trying to approach the government to make certain that any funding available makes certain that different groups all use the same approach, which is something that we need to focus on. Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My first question is for Mr. Naidu. Mr. Naidu, the risks or consequences of actions are often unknown. Based on your knowledge of Canada and its habits, have you identified any known farming habits that it could adopt to ensure a better future for its soils?
[English]
Mr. Naidu: Thank you very much, senator, for that question.
First and foremost, for example, farmers are all focused on productivity, the yield, because that is what gives them the return from the economic perspective. For that, they use the fertilizer for nutrients and they also use pesticides. The challenge that I have seen is that the pesticide companies, for example, when they come up with the pesticides, in the tests that they do, they do that with limited numbers of soils and they forget that soil types can vary considerably depending upon where we are located but also, frankly, exposure to humans.
The first thing that I think we need to make certain is that the nature of tests that they do, the policies that we put in place, forces the pesticide companies to do a lot more investigations before they release the pesticides.
The second thing is they must do some work from a toxicity perspective, from human health as well as ecotoxicological, because ecotoxicological is soil health and human health is something that is needed as well.
The third one from a fertilizer perspective is that we do need to have a policy on cadmium content of the fertilizers that we used because every time we load soils with triple superphosphate, we are loading cadmium into soils.
The final one is that we also end up using alternate sources of nutrients. Here it could be, for example, biosolids. Here we are also using water, for instance, that can be treated, and that means that we forget about emerging pollutants, and many farms, for example, now are polluted because of the presence of certain emerging pollutants as well, so policy is imperative here.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Since we’re in a northern country, there are surely consequences or advantages when our soils freeze. What can freezing soils do for us? If anything, how can we take advantage of the frozen soil situation in Canada? Our soils are frozen for part of the year.
[English]
Mr. Naidu: Indeed, there is a lot written, and Dr. Harley might like to comment as well. There is a lot written that freezing of soils does benefit sustainability of soils as well. But from the pollutants perspective, for example, freezing doesn’t help because freezing can also slow down the natural attenuation of pollutants. Of course, deep freezes can help, but not inorganic pollutants. Indeed, when you go from freezing to a state where your soils are at a higher temperature, you do have microbial activities that do help soil.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Mr. Harley, from what I just heard, the transition of Canadian soils is an economic challenge for the country. What urgent action needs to be taken, and how can we assess the cost of those actions to farmers and governments?
[English]
Mr. Harley: Well, there are many parts of that question. Ultimately, it comes down to what price we place on climate change running away from us.
As I have tried to argue, the critical importance of soil is that it is a lever that everyone can participate and buy into. It is a fundamental change in the economics, and governments will have to have a different attitude. Ultimately, the question of the economics is, what is the cost of doing nothing? I will perhaps leave my comments at that level, seeing as the hand is up.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you.
[English]
The Chair: I have a quick question for Dr. Naidu. You said there was a new soil advocate. When we look at the website, it says that the position is not continuing in its current form and no name is provided for a new soil advocate. Do you know something we don’t know?
Mr. Naidu: Senator, you are right. We did have a new soil advocate, the Honourable Penny Wensley, but the minister has now stopped that position. Therefore, we are hoping that the government will still invest money. Sorry about that, I should have clarified.
The Chair: Thank you.
My second question is to both of you. Very quickly, what land management policies are in place in Australia — or maybe you think should be in place at the local, regional or national levels — to mitigate the impact of soil pollution? I will start with Dr. Naidu. Just in general, where I am going here is, what can we learn from you folks to maybe move to Canada? Thank you.
Mr. Naidu: Thank you very much, senator.
First and foremost, we have two types of environmental pollution. One is what we call point source, which is highly contaminated sites, and the other is what we call diffused pollution. This is largely linked to products of farming systems.
For the highly contaminated sites, Australia does have the National Environmental Protection Measures, but the states and territories are active as well from an emerging pollutants perspective. I do connect with Environment Canada, and I know that Environment Canada is very active as well from a managing pollutants perspective.
In Australia, as well as in Canada, what we are lacking is that we do not have any policies on diffused pollution, particularly of soils. I think New Zealand is working towards that, if my memory is correct. I think Belgium is working towards that. We in Australia do not have anything on diffused pollution. It is something that was initiated in the 1990s, but it just died down, and we are trying to see what we can do about that. Canada could also focus on that perspective.
Mr. Harley: I have nothing to add to that. That is an excellent answer.
The Chair: We will move on to a second round.
Senator Simons: Dr. Naidu, I think I was the person who pushed hardest on this committee for us to look at the question of soil pollution. I’m from Alberta, which is a petrochemical producer, and I was thinking of soil pollution in a much more literal sense of oil and gas exploration that poisons the soil. You’re talking about diffused pollution and cadmium levels. Can you explain a little bit more for us about what you mean by diffused pollution as opposed to the kind of localized, grand-scale pollution that I was thinking of?
Mr. Naidu: Senator, thank you for your question.
Pollutants present in the air, for example, are diffuse, and you cannot identify what the source is. There could be many different sources. There is one example of diffused pollution.
Diffuses pollution where farm soils are concerned is low levels of pollutants that are diffused in the soil, and very large areas as well. Where you have large areas, you cannot extract or remove pollutants from the soil. Sometimes we say phytoremediation could be the way to do this, but more often we manage by making certain that we have appropriate environmental practices that ensure that pollutants do not transfer from soil into crops, because that is the pathway to humans as well.
Farming soils globally will have a certain level of pollutants present in the soil. There have been low doses of pollutants, and bioaccumulation is a challenge. They are not just metal pollutants, like cadmium, for example. Equally, we could have other toxic metals as well, particularly where we have, for example, mining operations. Air can transport some of the pollutants from the mining operations and distribute and lodge it into farm soils as well. It is a different thing from pesticides.
Senator Simons: Dr. Harley mentioned how hard it is to test its scale for carbon concentration and sequestration. If you are talking about pollution that is this subtle, how does a farmer know how compromised their field might be? If you are saying that there is no remediation technique for that, what do we do about it? Is the cadmium mostly coming from car exhaust or …?
Mr. Naidu: Cadmium is mostly coming from triple superphosphate fertilizers; hence, we need to have a policy that ensures that the triple superphosphate fertilizers that we purchase and supply to farmers are of the quality where you do not have ultra-low doses of cadmium. The rock phosphate that people used to manufacture — [Technical difficulties] New Zealand — would have a certain dose of cadmium associated with that.
Of course, pesticide is the other one. More often, when we purchase pesticides, we are told that the pesticides’ half-life would be two to three days, but then there are certain pesticides that we have used in the past that are still present in our soils because they do not easily degrade. The degradation of pesticides could also vary depending upon the nature of soils and where you are globally. Your geographical location plays a significant role as well.
We, from the major food and agricultural organizations, are inviting countries to invest resources such that farmers can provide their soil, and we could do work within Canada to look at the cadmium content of soils so that you have a map that you keep internally that shows which farms have elevated levels of cadmium. Then we come up with management strategies that do not extract cadmium from the soil but convert it into a form that is not taken up by plants. That is the only approach that we use for toxic metals. Pesticides are different; we can get them to naturally attenuate.
Senator Simons: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: I have one last question for Mr. Harley. How aware and capable do you think farmers are of taking action if the government — unfortunately — doesn’t support them?
[English]
Mr. Harley: The starting point is probably to say that it is clearly difficult to talk about all farmers collectively. However, there can’t be any doubt that, particularly over the last 10 years, the awareness of both the more difficult climate and the challenge of feeding a still rapidly growing global population has become increasingly at the front of farmers’ attention. Certainly, in Australia, we’re seeing that quite a lot of the pressure on government for change, generally, is coming from farmers. There are differing opinions, but overall, this is a very strong voice for change, and in Australia, by and large, the government is listening to that.
The final point for me to empathize is that the policies need to be practical and actually have an impact and result in change at the farm gate. As Dr. Naidu has also emphasized, it is this practicality that is particularly important.
The Chair: We have no more questions for this panel.
Dr. Naidu, it was so good to see you again. Thank you for joining us. Dr. Harley, it was great to have you as a witness tonight. I want to thank you both very much for your participation. Your assistance with our study is very much appreciated. We look forward to getting you our final report when it is tabled later this year, we will ensure that a copy is sent electronically to each of you. Thank you.
For our second panel, I’m delighted to welcome Mel Poulton, an owner/operator of a sheep and beef farm business in New Zealand. Mel has travelled extensively around the world and visited a wide range of different types of farming systems in many nations. In a personal capacity as a Nuffield scholar and when she was posted here in Ottawa as New Zealand’s Special Agricultural Trade Envoy, we enjoyed a dinner together and chatted at length. I’m absolutely delighted that we were able to connect with you, Ms. Poulton. It’s great to have you here. From AgResearch, we have Alec Mackay, Principal Scientist, Digital Agriculture.
I invite you both to make presentations. We will begin with Ms. Poulton, to be followed by Dr. Mackay. You each have five minutes. I will put my hand up at four minutes, and when you see two hands, it means it’s time to wrap up. With that, the floor is your, Ms. Poulton.
Mel Poulton, Owner/operator of a sheep and beef farm business, New Zealand, as an individual: Good evening. Senator Black, it is indeed lovely to see you again. As I said before, I thought I was off the hook and was a bit surprised to get the email.
Thank you for the invite, and thank you also to Ferda and others for the preparation and for making it possible today. Thanks also in advance to the interpreters. Let me know if I need to slow down, please.
The caveat of this presentation is that I’m not a soil scientist and I’m not an expert on Canadian soils or Canadian farming systems. I’m speaking to you only as a sheep and beef farmer from New Zealand, and I hope that my experience can offer some insights that may help you with your study on soils.
I will touch on four points with you: a bit of background context of me and my farm, soils and soil management, soil and technologies, and soil carbon and greenhouse gases.
For the background context, I’ve been farming here for 20 years, most of that time with my husband, Mike. I’ve now been running the business on my own for the last three years since his passing. I have one full-time staff member who focuses on livestock and a couple of others who work with us on a part-time casual basis.
The farm in total is 1,000 hectares, including the set-aside land. The main home block is 814 hectares of pasture platform and operates as a breeding sheep and beef farm on extensive hill country, wintering about 5,000 head of sheep and 400 head of cattle. The small finishing block is where we finish all of our young stock as prime animals, which often go to export. All livestock are fed on pasture in situ their entire lives. There is no grain-fed system and no stock housing in our business.
Average annual rainfall in recent years has been about 1,300 mm. Last year was 1,700. The altitude of the farm ranges from about 600 feet to 2,100 feet above sea level. Our climate is temperate with strong marine drivers, being an island nation. Our geographic latitude is located in what is known as the Roaring Forties, where the equinox winds are quite the challenge, especially in the spring. Every year our farm will get about five dustings of snow, and the air temperature can range from -2 to 32 degrees Celsius, although with windchill it can often feel a lot worse than that.
Number two, soils and soil management. There’s a significant variation of soils on both of our blocks of land, with 19 different soil types. Soil classification on this farm ranges from Class 2 to Class 7, and that’s on a scale of 1 to 8. Over two thirds of this farm would be Class 5, 6 and 7, which is steep terrain or hill country, hence why it is an extensive pastoral grazing system. We are also acutely aware of the varying production capacities of the different areas of the farm, driven by soils, climate, topography and aspect, which all influence pasture production and stock-carrying capacity. For simplification, we’ve put the farm into six different management blocks.
Every year I do a visual soil assessment across the farm, thanks to Alec Mackay, which assesses the soil profile and soil condition. Is it nutty, friable, free draining versus compacted and with pans? I also look at plant root depth, bugs in the soil and the colour and the smell and any other noticeable changes, which was referred to in the previous panel, and all of which is important to soil health, which I think, by the way, is probably helpful for a cheap solution to what you were asking for earlier, senator. Each block has multiple soil transect lines for soil testing, which we do on an annual basis. In these we test and monitor pH, Olsen Ps, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulphur, which are analyzed in an independent science lab.
Three, soil and nutrient technologies. We have electromagnetic imaging on the finishing block to understand soils and water. We use an integrated sustainable land use management tool. We use Overseer and nutrient management software with our fertilizer company. At a farm level, I use Google Earth a lot. Our contractors apply fertilizer using mapping tools for more precision application. As technology improves, if it is cost-effective, efficient and more accurate and better for our types of land and farm systems, we will adopt it.
On soil, carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, the focus of the New Zealand government and New Zealand agriculture has been more on enteric methane emissions from ruminant livestock rather than gains in soil carbon per se. In this business, there’s not a lot of cropping. When we undertake pasture renewal, it’s normally without tillage using direct drills. That protects the carbon we’ve got. We’re bracing for a greenhouse gas levy on all farmers, which puts a price on enteric methane as well as nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide.
I hope this gives you a background for some introduction. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Dr. Mackay.
Alec Mackay, Principal Scientist, AgResearch: Good morning, senators. I am Alec Mackay, principal scientist with AgResearch, a Crown research institute based in Palmerston North.
One of our research sites or research stations is on the Saddle Road, which is about half an hour drive from where Mel farms. One of my long-term research programs is a site where we’ve been following and tracking the impacts of pastoral agriculture on our soils dating back to the early 1970s. I think it’s probably the relationship with Mel over the years that got me invited to this session today. I’m really here just to provide some support around the questions around soil health and around soils as opposed to having a specific agenda to push. I suppose just to help the conversation today, very briefly, the three broad research areas that I have can be summarized around soil health.
Nutrient fertility is one component of soil health, along with organic matter, the second component of soil health, along with biology, not just micro but also that macro/meso community, and also the physical properties of the soil. Those are the four components that make up the health of the soil. In the past, the emphasis has been around nutrient fertility, driving production. There’s an increase in awareness of those other three elements. Clearly, with carbon beyond the importance of organic matter for soil function becoming a currency, obviously there’s heightened interest in carbon.
The second area I’ve spent a lot of time working in over the last 15 or 20 years is looking at the benefits of using an ecosystem service approach to capture all the benefits we obtain from our soils and our landscapes. We tend to value land based on its ability to produce food and fibre, but we often fail to recognize all those other benefits and services we obtain from our landscapes. When it rains, the fact that the soil absorbs water is really important to reducing the risk of flooding and drainage. The fact that you can walk across a field without sinking into it means it’s providing a service called support. It’s a refugium for a whole lot of beneficial organisms. It is recognizing those other benefits and services, which we generally put a value on when we lose them or they come in short supply rather than valuing them up front.
The third area of research, and I suppose this is where probably most of my development extension goes, is building soils information into land evaluation and farm planning processes, so getting that information to the decision maker. Mel put it really nicely. Recognizing that most farms are an amalgam of a range of different soil types and very rarely have one soil type, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of soils is really critical, and that’s based on their characteristics. Aligning both the enterprise and the practice of those, recognizing those strengths and weaknesses, is a fundamental principle that most smart farmers adhere to. If the soil has a weakness, recognize that in the way you design the farm system. The concept of matching use to inherent properties is pretty critical. Clearly, if you’re going to put a monitoring program in place, it’s critical to recognize the differences in the soil if that monitoring is going to be meaningful. If you’re going to monitor without recognizing there are differences, then that, obviously, increases the difficulty of interpretation.
After people, soils and lands are the most important natural resource New Zealand has. We’re a bit of an oddity. We’re a developed country, but we are essentially a primary industry-based economy. We essentially trade on national capital, which is, essentially, our soils.
Those are my opening comments. I’m quite happy to take questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
I’m taking the chair’s prerogative and asking the first question. Ms. Poulton, you talked about the greenhouse gas levy that you said was coming or is in place. You talked about enteric levy. Is that just a per-animal levy of some sort? Is that where you’re headed, or is it there now?
Ms. Poulton: It’s complicated. We’ve just had a change of government, so we’re not exactly sure where everything’s going to land per se. The idea was that it was going to be based on the animals that you’re carrying.
There has been an enormous amount of work between government and industry, agricultural sector groups such as Beef + Lamb New Zealand, Federated Farmers, DairyNZ and some of our companies as well, including Frontier and various others, who have worked hard to come up with a proposition or a proposed approach to New Zealand agriculture addressing greenhouse gas emissions.
Because we already have quite a high content of carbon in our soils, the science was basically suggesting that we couldn’t really get very far by doing things about soil carbon because we already had a relatively full bucket there, so there was this idea of how about we try and look at enteric methane. Again, there has probably been at least 20 years worth of research done into enteric methane. Probably the last three years there has been a huge effort to try and understand how you actually measure it and then how you charge for it. The likes of Beef + Lamb New Zealand, with their economic service for the beef and sheep sector, had done quite a bit of work to develop greenhouse gas calculators for farms. That was the case for all the other different agricultural and horticulture sectors in New Zealand, trying to identify what exactly our numbers were.
I actually have that for my farm, and I know how many tons of emissions my farm is generating from nitrous oxide, enteric methane and carbon dioxide based on how they calculated it.
The Chair: On a per-animal basis is how they have calculated it?
Ms. Poulton: Generally speaking, we can’t get down to the nitty-gritty detail of a per-animal basis. That said, I did get the chambers out to my farm, and I have had a number of my rams tested for enteric methane. I have actually measured that on a small group of my breeding rams. The results have just come back yesterday, in fact, and I am very much scratching my head and pushing back on the scientists and saying, “You have to do a far better job than this.” In the results that I had from my animals, the ones that were most efficient from an enteric methane perspective were certainly not the ones that have the breeding objectives and values that we’re looking for for the rest of our production system. This is where the rubber hits the road and where farmers are on the leading edge of these new technologies. We’re desperate for the science to come up with some solutions, but this is a very challenging space for New Zealand and for farmers globally.
Because of the extent of our pastoral systems and because we don’t house animals, it’s not as if we can just give them a teaspoon of this or that to mitigate their enteric methane emissions. We have some really difficult challenges to try and overcome. I know that New Zealand scientists have been working in collaboration with Irish scientists in trying to come up with some solutions. Some good work has happened, but I don’t have the confidence that we’re entirely there yet for commercial farming.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Simons: In Alberta, we have a different word for enteric methane emissions. I shall not put it on the parliamentary record.
I’m curious, Ms. Poulton. You mentioned that it’s difficult for you to leverage carbon sequestration as a countervail because your soils are already so carbon rich. Is that specifically your farm, because you are grazing animals and they are cycling carbon back into the soil, or are New Zealand’s soils naturally carbon rich?
Ms. Poulton: Broadly speaking, New Zealand is relatively young and recently developed into agricultural systems, so we haven’t spent all of the carbon through hundreds and hundreds of years of cultivation and what have you. However, I really do think Dr. Mackay would be better to answer those questions than me.
Senator Simons: Thank you. I have to say that you win the prize for the best poster. I love that, the underground economy.
Where I’m from on the Prairies, those are dry grasslands that were evolved to be grazed by bison. White settlement destroyed the bison population, and beef farmers argue very passionately and effectively that we need to put cattle back on that land to graze it. Otherwise, it’s ecologically out of balance. New Zealand didn’t have a large grazing species like a bison, so tell me about the carbon in your soil and what happens when it’s intensively grazed.
Mr. Mackay: I’ll pick up that question, Mel, if you like.
New Zealand soil essentially developed under a forest ecosystem, by and large, and then, effectively, that forest was removed and replaced with, essentially, pastures or species from the Northern hemisphere. Those soils are rich in organic matter. Our soils are also very young. There’s a lot of organic matter developed in the forest. We cleared the forest and put a pasture on it, and then it’s a permanent pasture. That pasture is there for most of the country. The pastures you’ll see in the hill country, the high country, those pastures can be over 100 years old, so you have, essentially, local ecotypes evolving. Pasture renewal is limited to lowlands and intensive systems. Under that, the organic matter is pretty well protected and sustained.
On one of our long-term sites, we’ve been comparing different fertilizer and grazing strategies now going back to 1970, with a difference in animal productivity that is more than threefold in terms of very low to very high fertility. There’s no difference in the amount of organic matter in those soils over that period of time. Under a permanent pasture and that particular soil type and that climate, we’re essentially quite stable.
Now, if you cultivate that, turn it over and aerate it, then an enormous amount of that organic matter will very quickly get oxidized and lost. I did a postdoctoral in the Midwest, at Purdue University, back in the 1908s where they talked about having 1% organic matter in their topsoil was rich. They’ve been cultivating those for probably over 100 years, so very little organic matter in those annual cropping systems. They get very depleted.
As Mel said, probably our biggest challenge here is holding on to that organic matter into the future in those pastoral systems. There are some debates about what future climates might hold.
Senator Simons: Are there any natural grasslands, or are all those grasslands man-made?
Mr. Mackay: There are some minor natural grasslands, but largely it was forest-covered, no mammalian pests, essentially just birds. I think the moa was probably one of the few that grazed, or browsed, grassland.
Senator Simons: Thank you very much. That’s really interesting.
Senator Oh: Thank you, witnesses, for joining us.
In what way has New Zealand addressed soil health concerns? Are there specific initiatives or regulations that have proven particularly effective? Could you comment on how similar approaches might be considered for adoption in Canada?
Mr. Mackay: I’ll make a comment first and then Mel might want to back me up.
Regional councils have responsibility for looking after the natural resources in the regions across New Zealand. We have a sort of city district, regional and then national government. Those regional councils, as part of one of their statutory requirements, report on the state of their resources. For state of environment reporting, they report on soil quality from the regions, and then that’s aggregated up into a report. That is then provided about every five years by the ministry for the environment.
When it comes to soil quality, there is a program that involves seven indicators of soil health. Those are monitored within the regions across the major land uses. For New Zealand, the major land uses are deering, sheep and beef, forestry — exotic forestry in this case — cropping or arable and then the perennial horticultural areas, like apples and kiwi fruit. In addition to those major land uses, the monitoring is done across the major soil orders in the country. New Zealand has a wide diversity of soils due to the fact that we have active landscapes that change on a regular basis.
That information is collected by the regions and is aggregated up to provide a national perspective on the state of soil quality. I apologize, but I’m not aware if there’s an equivalent in Canada or not.
Ms. Poulton: I think Alec answered that question brilliantly. I don’t have anything more to add.
Senator Oh: Thank you.
Senator Cotter: I have mainly two questions for Ms. Poulton.
I attended the presentation you made in your capacity as envoy when you visited here and was riveted by it. You can correct me if I drew the wrong conclusion, but one of the things I took from it was a fairly interventionist approach by the national government in New Zealand to address a number of questions related to agriculture, greenhouse gases and those kinds of issues. I think you said it diplomatically, but this was not universally welcomed by agricultural producers in New Zealand. I’m interested in knowing, with the change in government, will there be kind of a drawback from that bolder approach in New Zealand when it comes to management of the relationship between soils and climate?
Ms. Poulton: Thank you. It is good to see you again. I did recognize your face earlier and thought I was sure you were at that meeting.
The previous government certainly had a bold approach. I think due to the nature of our economic construct in that we are a trading nation and our economy depends on our food exports, we are highly motivated to take responsibility and chase integrity around what we’re doing for greenhouse gas emissions, our environment and biodiversity. We want to be good stewards of our land. That’s irrespective of whether we are farmers or whether we are based in an urban population. Everybody in New Zealand is feeling deeply connected to looking after our natural environment, but we also have that economic incentive and economic pressure as a nation to ensure that we’re delivering our responsibilities on the global stage, specifically with the commitments we’ve made with the likes of the Paris accord and various other international forums on environment and greenhouse gases. Irrespective of what colour government we may have, there is no doubt in my mind that we are on the train tracks looking for solutions to address these issues. As a nation, we’re also becoming more mindful of how complex and difficult it is and that there is actually no silver bullet.
When it comes to farming, there might be a problem definition around soil or around greenhouse gases, but often they’re not really well-defined problems and they chase a specific solution. The same can be said of policy. We want a policy on this. They might define the scope of the policy, but when it comes time for implementation, it’s got to work in the real word. Farmers have to make it work in integrated farm systems. Often, those one‑scope, narrow-scope issues and the solutions to them don’t work at a practical level because we’re trying to balance it within ecosystems, be it the soil, the water, the stock, the land, the biodiversity, the environment and climate, the markets, economics and all these other things. It makes it really difficult.
In answer to the question about what happens with the next government, yes, there has been a temporary pause for everyone to catch their breath, but I don’t think it will go away. I have absolute confidence that there will be a continued pursuit around greenhouse gas emissions, but we just don’t know what it looks like. At the moment, there’s a lot of uncertainty.
Senator Cotter: Thank you for that.
Given particularly not only your role as an agricultural producer in New Zealand but also the work you did as envoy, do you have a sense that these principled approaches to the development of agriculture production in New Zealand is a selling feature not just in New Zealand but beyond the borders of New Zealand and whether that’s easily replicated around the world for other agriculture-producing countries?
Ms. Poulton: Nothing is easily replicated because every country is working within its own ecosystem, political construct, environment and natural essence. The only replication would be at the principles level. That’s all that can be said, really. What is our approach at a principles level?
Yes, we see that there is definitely a selling point for the high‑end market to be delivering on this kind of thing. One of the last few trips that I did as agricultural envoy was to realize how difficult that is because markets are highly sensitive to what might be going on in their country. Consumers might say that they want something, but when the economic pressure comes on them, their purchasing decisions change. For example, they might say that they want high-end, high-value scotch fillet beefsteak to be carbon neutral, but they’re not prepared to pay the extra money that it costs for us to produce that. When the pressure comes on them, instead of buying that high-end carbon-neutral scotch fillet steak, they’ll actually just go and buy mince. They’re still buying that meat protein, but they’re not necessarily able to buy that high-end product. That also creates a real challenge and tension around government policy and commercial reality.
Senator Cotter: I appreciate that.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My first question is for Ms. Poulton. I’d like you to share with us the concessions you probably had to make to get involved in the soil improvement process. How much has your business suffered economically as a result of these decisions?
[English]
Ms. Poulton: Can you ask the question again? Or could the interpreter repeat it, please, just so I caught it?
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: I’d like you to share with us the concessions that you probably had to make to get involved in the soil improvement process, because to improve the soil you have to make concessions. To what extent did those concessions hurt your business economically, if at all?
[English]
Ms. Poulton: Thank you.
First, you have to measure and then monitor before you can manage. The cost really was one of time, getting out there and actually doing the work to actually measure and then monitor. There were costs as far as sending my soil tests off to the lab. My budget for that is about $150 New Zealand dollars. Then there are the costs of identifying what you will put on to improve soil health.
One of the things that I have most recently done is put on 300 tonnes of lime. That is to increase the soil pH. In our systems, it takes a lot of lime to be able to lift it 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 of a pH unit. That comes with economic costs. However, the economic benefit is that your system is able to hold on. Your pastures are able to hold on longer in the shoulders of the season so you are able to graze longer or not face so much grazing pasture protection pressure because you have got the lime on there. It is enabling it to last a little bit longer on the shoulders of the season. It is also about enhancing that microbial activity in the soil, making sure that your plants are really vibrant and thriving. That is one thing that has happened. That cost me. Lime itself is not that expensive. The biggest cost was actually getting it on, the application. Because of the nature of the topography of my land on the home block raising from 600 to 2,100 feet, I have to apply it by plane. That costs an enormous amount of money. There is an economic cost to that. The benefit of it is longer term.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Mr. Mackay, can you tell us whether farmers and producers have easy access to digital data that can ensure soil improvement? How much do they use numerical data? How are change efforts going?
[English]
Mr. Mackay: If I do not answer this, please come back with a refined question.
New Zealand has national databases in terms of a soil database, land use capability database, a large number of databases which are at a resolution of 1:50,000 in terms of scale. Farmers can access those to get some indication of what soils or land-use capability units they would have on their farm, but those inventories weren’t designed for use at farm scale and decision-making by farmers to get really detailed, resource information at farm scales about your soil and what you see. You really need to get someone to actually come in and physically map those, a pedologist or a land manager, to actually physically measure those. Then they will put that in a GIS, using a wide range of spacial tools. Once that information is in a spacial tool, that allows you to manipulate that in terms of information and how you might break up your farm into land management units, which Mel talked about, and put your monitoring in place. There are a few other technologies that you could bring to bear when you have that base information. One of the challenges we have at the moment is ensuring that all farmers have that good, underlying resource information to underpin decision-making.
As a bit of an aside, we actually had a program running for about a decade called SUBS, which was an acronym for Soils Underpinning Business Success, to help teach farmers to map their own soils on their own farms. They have a lot of general knowledge of their properties, where it is wet, dryer, what grows more or less, and by actually teaching them some basic skills around how to do a texture, a colour, topsoil depth, they could go about producing a map, not necessarily give it a pedological description, but map it to a degree where that information was very useful and helpful for decision-making.
The Chair: We will move on to round two.
Senator Simons: While we’re on the subject of emissions, Ms. Poulton, you are raising cattle and sheep. I imagine they have different profiles. You have just had your rams tested.
Ms. Poulton: Yes.
Senator Simons: Is this something that now, as a farmer, you have to calculate based upon what kind of livestock emit more? You mentioned that the kind of rams who have lower emission are less valuable to you as stock. Are you and your peers in New Zealand having to think about what breeds you raise and what species you raise in a different way?
Ms. Poulton: Yes is the answer.
Senator Simons: Would you like to elaborate? That is a very concise answer.
Mr. Mackay: It is.
Ms. Poulton: I’m scared of that hand going up.
Look, when agricultural subsidies were removed in New Zealand, farmers from that point on had to be just brutally honest about their farming systems and ruthless on decision-making around how they change things, so ruthless in regard to what granddad and dad used to do. We actually just have to change in order to survive. We’re 100% reliant on ourselves for the success of our businesses because we do not have a whole lot of government subsidies or any fallbacks to lean on. You will find in New Zealand that the farmers generally have a fairly open, innovative type of culture where we’re constantly looking for solutions to chase efficiencies and to chase ways that we can do things better. This whole greenhouse gas stuff is just another layer and challenge for us to embrace. Some are doing that leaning in quite quickly and others are hoping that it will go away. That’s the honest truth.
In fact, I had a discussion group come to my farm recently, and they gave me quite a hard time about me getting the chambers in and testing my rams, saying, “What are you doing this for?” My answer was that, in farming, we have all kinds of threats and externalities that we have to manage. Some we cannot control, so let them go. But included in that is regulatory externalities that actually have quite an impact on our business. We have to do what we can to lean in on that and get ourselves on the front foot.
I didn’t want to buy in rams from somebody else who has had totally different breeding objectives for a different farming system in a different climate and topography to my farm and buy his ram because he has selected just on methane efficiencies, because that means all of the work done over the years is just going to be wasted. I did not want to do that. I wanted to test within my own flock to see if I had efficient rams from within my own flock that I could breed from. Having the results that we have has really put a spanner in the works. I’m not sure what to do. I’m properly scratching my head about it.
We are definitely trying to lean in and find solutions, because this is not going away. At a global level, it’s not going away. At a national level, it’s not going away. Even within my farming system, I need to stand in front of the mirror and have integrity that the product that is going out of my gate is meeting the market and is something that I can be proud of and it stands with integrity.
Senator Simons: Thank you very much. That was lovely, inspiring.
The Chair: That brings to a close our questions for this evening.
Ms. Poulton, you can go halfway around the world and we will still find you. Thank you for joining us tonight. Dr. Mackay, thank you for joining us. Your assistance with our study is very much appreciated. We will ensure that you get a link to our report when it is tabled later this year, with your names included as witnesses. Thank you very much.
I also want to thank the committee members around the table for your active participation and very thoughtful questions. I also want to take a moment to thank the staff who support us, our own office staff, the folks behind me, the interpreters, the debates team who transcribe the meeting, the committee room attendant, the multimedia service technician, the broadcasting team, the recording centre, ISD and our page. Thank you very much for all that you do.
Our next meeting will be held Thursday, February 8. The meeting will be in camera, and it will be on the committee’s report. We will discuss the committee’s soil study report as well as future business going forward. Senators, you have received a number of relevant documents already. I would ask that you review those ahead of our meeting.
(The committee adjourned.)