Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue No. 46 - Evidence - Meeting of March 22, 2018 (morning meeting)
CALGARY, Thursday, March 22, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 9:01 a.m. to study the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors.
Senator Diane F. Griffin (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: I see we have a quorum, so I’m going to call the meeting to order.
For those of you who are not familiar with us, we have two senators here, the chair and deputy chair. I am Diane Griffin from Prince Edward Island, and I’m chair of the committee. Senator Maltais will introduce himself.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Good morning to all three of you. I’m Ghislain Maltais. I’m a senator from Quebec, and I’ve been a member of the Agriculture Committee for seven years.
[English]
The Chair: As you know, we’re on a fact-finding tour and also conducting hearings, of which this is one session, here in Western Canada. We had done a similar tour in Eastern Canada a few months ago, and we’re looking into the impacts of climate change on agriculture, agri-food, and the forestry sectors. We were in Vancouver for two days, had some tremendous presentations, and had an excellent tour of some of the forestry labs at the University of British Columbia.
We’re spending three days here in Alberta and covering all three Prairie Provinces. We’ve had some good presentations, both related to forestry and to agriculture. Yesterday was a fantastic day. So we’re looking for more of the same today. I’m not trying to put any pressure on you, and I’m sure you will live up to our expectations.
I want to thank you for being here today, we greatly appreciate it, Cherie Copithorne-Barnes, Reynold Bergen, and Graham Gilchrist. Graham was with us yesterday. He’s wearing a different hat today, one of those very capable people. It’s almost like being in the Maritimes where we wear a lot of hats. The same person has to fill a lot of roles. It’s a small place there.
The clerk has given you instructions about the length of time to present, and has also indicated that there is some flexibility because there are fewer senators to ask questions. Feel free to take whatever time you need. At the end of the day, we still had the full hour, but you can have more of it is what I’m saying.
We’ll start on this end first with Cherie Copithorne-Barnes.
Cherie Copithorne-Barnes, Chair, Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef: Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss climate change in the Canadian beef industry. My name is Cherie Copithorne-Barnes, and I am a fourth generation rancher from west of Calgary. I am also Chair of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. I’ll use CRSB for short. I’m today joined by Dr. Reynold Bergen. Dr. Bergen is the science director with the Beef Cattle Research Council.
The CRSB is a multi-stakeholder organization focused on advancing sustainability efforts within the Canadian beef industry. We currently have over 100 members and observers representing producers, processors, NGOs or nongovernmental organizations, agribusiness, academia, plus many others. Our mission is to facilitate the framework for the Canadian beef industry to be a global leader in continuous improvement and sustainability of the beef value chain through science, multi-stakeholder engagement, communication, and collaboration. The CRSB defines sustainable beef as a socially responsible, economically viable, and environmentally sound product that prioritizes planet, people, animal and progress.
The Canadian beef industry is committed to sustainability and continuous improvement, evidenced in part by the formation of the CRSB in 2014. The industry has conducted historical research, benchmarked its social, economic, and environmental performance and developed a strategy to continually improve upon this performance. A peer-reviewed study by Legesse and others published in 2015 funded by the beef science cluster found that greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of beef produced declined by 15 per cent between 1981 and 2011 due to the development and adoption of technologies that improve production efficiency. The CRSB’s benchmarking study released in 2016 found that the Canadian beef industry’s greenhouse gas footprint is among the lowest in the world, at 11.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalence per kilogram of live weight. The study also assessed carbon storage and found that beef cattle production helps preserve approximately 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon.
The benchmarking study provided the foundation for our sustainability strategy, which was developed by our multi-stakeholder membership through a very collaborative process. The strategy includes a goal to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of the Canadian beef per unit of product produced, accompanied by the following action items: We are to optimize cattle diets, improve manure management, increase carbon sequestration, improve feed and forage production, support the identification and selection of cattle genetics that reduce greenhouse gas footprint of beef production, and increase stakeholder knowledge. These action items are guiding our efforts to reduce the industry’s greenhouse gas footprint.
In addition to the benchmarking study and as a result of the strategy, the CRSB also just has launched the Certified Sustainable Beef Framework, the first of its kind in the world. The framework is an outcome-based assurance scheme that provides producers and processors with the opportunity to demonstrate the sustainability of their operations through a certification audit. It enables retail and food service companies to fulfill sustainable source and commitments and provides on-product labelling and off-product marketing claims to support clear, consistent, and transparent communications with consumers about the sustainability of beef.
Climate change is a complex problem with different risks and opportunities for different segments of the beef value chain. It is important to better understand the unintended consequences of a carbon pricing mechanism from farm to fork and the potential negative impacts that this could have on the competitiveness of the Canadian beef industry as a whole as we are already a global leader in sustainable beef production and have among the lowest greenhouse gas footprints in the world. One way to accomplish this from our experience is to engage with all stakeholders that can be impacted across the value chain and obtain their perspective.
In 2016, cattle accounted for 3 per cent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and Canada accounted for 1.6 per cent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. The Canadian beef industry contributes more than $41 billion to the Canadian economy and generates 228,000 jobs. However, the average long-term margin for a 200-head cow herd provides an annual income of only $17,559, and up to 85 percent of the cow-calf sector relies on off-farm income.
From a different perspective, we know that approximately 19 per cent of edible bone-free meat is wasted from secondary processing through to consumption. It was estimated that reducing meat waste by 50 per cent could save up to three kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalence per kilogram of packed boneless beef delivered and consumed.
The Canadian beef industry reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent over a 30-year period, and we have among the lowest green gas footprints in the world. We also have a strategy to improve upon this performance.
Governments can play a role in helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More specifically, we recommend that governments adopt a multi-stakeholder collaborative process when developing policy options to ensure those impacted are engaged and all perspectives are considered. Fund and support staff participation in precompetitive platforms and initiatives such as the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef that facilitate collaboration and enhance coordination within the industry, invest in research to achieve the six action items mentioned earlier, invest in research to better understand food waste causes in Canada, and enhance communication efforts to reduce food waste at the consumer level, and continue specific or scientific measuring and monitoring of the greenhouse gas footprint of Canadian beef production to ensure robust datasets that enable greenhouse gas monitoring.
Thank you for this opportunity to appear, and Reynold and I would be very pleased to take any questions.
The Chair: We’ll go now to Mr. Gilchrist.
Graham Gilchrist, Chief Executive Officer, Biological Carbon Canada: Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to be here.
Today I make my presentation on behalf of Biological Carbon Canada. We’re a nonprofit registered here in the province of Alberta, and my name is Graham Gilchrist. I’m a professional agrologist and the CEO of the society.
We’re a multisector membership striving to make sure that we’re a conduit and facilitator between business and research, turning on Alberta’s innovation and skill that we’ve learned in the Alberta market and exporting that across Canada. Our members work in the greenhouse gas reduction industry, and we’ve been around since Alberta brought in the first North American compliance carbon pricing system and offset system since 2007, starting in 2002.
We’d like to refresh the Senate on a few numbers. They come out of the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change report to the United Nations in December 2007. Canada sits at 722 million metric tonnes of emissions that come out of everything from planes, trains, and automobiles, if I can borrow that movie title, plus the oil and gas sector. Fugitive emissions account for about 85 per cent of that or 587 million metric tonnes, mainly from the oil and gas and transportation sectors, moving people and freight around Canada.
The rest of the emissions come from a smaller set: agriculture sits at ten, industrial processes sit at seven, and the waste sector sits at three. In Alberta, because what we have here for an economy, certainly continues to be one of the higher emitters across Canada, mainly because we have an expanding oil and gas infrastructure here in Western Canada.
Agriculture, though, is very proud and we would say, to participate in the programs that are here. Here in Alberta, we have two systems: We have a final emitter program, and lately we have a consumer levy.
Since 2007, the offset system has been working — 46 million tonnes of carbon offsets have been transacted and sold. That’s 46 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that have been reduced from the atmosphere. Another 24 million tonnes have come from performance credits, and to remind the Senate, these are credits when the final emitter surpasses their benchmark, get into a surplus of reductions, and then they also were sold to other finally emitters.
Within that, agriculture has put together 14.3 million tonnes of measurable real carbon dioxide equivalent reductions. Based on that revenue between the farmer and the final emitter, our best estimate is that cheques of $182 million before commissions have been written between the final emitter and the farm and ranch doing the protocols.
Then in 2018, just here not that long ago, the old rules were changed to the final emitters, and we now have an output-based allowance system with which the final emitters now have to comply. Within that still there is an offset mechanism for those final emitters to purchase offsets to meet their compliance obligations.
Also, Alberta has a consumer levy coming in in 2017. That is a tax on fuel, and farms and ranches here in the province are exempt in their marked gas and fuel but continue to pay on other energy products that they use on their farm, like propane and natural gas. There are programs to try to offset that, but the levy is paid up front.
We went to our members and asked some questions about your questions about resilience. We’d like to remind the Senate of a few things. One is, Canada has a very large natural green infrastructure that’s different than green infrastructure that’s man-made. We’re talking about our wetlands, our perennial upland grasslands, and our boreal forests that do provide an important ecosystem service that Canada enjoys; anywhere from flood attenuation, flood reduction, water quality as our wetlands provide those strainers and filters, plus there is carbon sequestration in those natural areas. Different than a tradable offset, but there is carbon being sequestered in those areas. That is critical in our climate adaptation and resilience.
One of the things that we would certainly like the Senate to point out is that having a wetlands policy within your climate strategy would benefit both agriculture and Canada.
Certainly climate, and there are coming before you people who will speak more on this than us, does change, access to water does change. We made note on various things one of which is that the South Saskatchewan River Basin, for which we are here today, is out of water. There are no more licences because the amount of water being issued is at its maximum. We have to give a little to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and as a result, it makes industry development critical.
The last thing in this is that we do have adaptive business systems. What that means for the biological space, is that we have to have a systemic collection of the relevant data to make decisions. We’ve learned over time that if Alberta’s farms and ranches have those systems in place, two things happen: One is the cost of creating an offset lowers, the cost of verification lowers, and all things being equal, there’s a price net to the farm and ranch increases because we don’t have to build that stuff after the fact.
The challenge in data collection is not so much in the carbon pricing alone, but it’s the financial viability of why you’re making that data and the fact that the data has to make sense for a business purpose, in addition to collecting it to verify a carbon offset.
The natural second challenge is accuracy. I said yesterday and in my presentation that Alberta requires a five per cent error rate or two and a half per cent either side of zero. With most meters that you can stick on a cow, which don’t exist, it’s very difficult to get that accuracy, whereas you can get that at the top of a smokestack. We have to look for different pathways to ensure that we meet the accuracy requirements to show that the offset is real, but at the same time, if we don’t have those pathways, the ability for the biological systems in Canada will either be missed or they will not monetize because we can’t meet those accuracy requirements.
Our comments on the carbon pricing system will be very specific to the offset. To refresh your memory, an offset is when you have a practice change that results in a reduction or a permanent removal of a greenhouse gas. It’s not a case of a status quo that already exists in a biological system, and it comes from a part of the economy that is not currently subject to a tariff or a levy or a compliance certificate. So in the case of agriculture, it’s one of the natural sources that’s currently outside that compliance regulatory system, at least in Alberta.
How do you create it? Offsets are created when a project management takes on an activity that shows a reduction in greenhouse gases or sequesters it in a sink. There is an approved protocol that essentially gives you the math, and the emission reductions can then be qualified and verified, and then they are sold into that carbon trading market. It’s important to remember that an offset brings a reduction from a sector that’s not already currently under regulation.
We would also remind the Senate that it’s equally important that Alberta currently has created some 46 million tonnes of offsets here in this province, some from agriculture, certainly some from our wind sectors, and some from our performance credits. Those are real reductions coming out of the atmosphere.
We want to stress that carbon markets work. They’re messy in their start-up, as you saw in the CBC article here this week, but right now they function in a fairly straightforward way. We as Biological Carbon Canada, and this is coming out of the work we did for the Innovation Supercluster Initiative program, believe there’s another 60 million tonnes that agriculture can provide Canada. We think there’s 12.5 million tonnes further dealing with green infrastructure, putting the protocols around wetlands and uplands, another 7 million tonnes dealing with direct carbon reductions, essentially the smokestacks on our farms and ranches, another 32 million tonnes with advance protocols around Mace management and waste processing, and finally another 10 million coming from biosystems and building materials.
The advice we would give is that the language here in Canada is world class, and certainly here in the province, where the new OBA system is being touted as world class. We are leading, both in that policy and in the development of building credits. We want to enforce that the reductions of greenhouse gases is the target of the day, not building more revenue into the federal coffers.
However, we’ve learned a few critical things since we’ve been trading since 2007: Number 1, markets work. The second thing we’d pass on is that the protocols creating the credits must be economically viable first, and then there has to be offset created that is measurable. The third thing we’d pass on is that the market, the $180 million that has been traded between our final emitters and our farmers, creates jobs, creates emission reductions, and builds new technologies to do the work that’s required for verification and other requirements and technologies.
How are you going to spend that levy? We would ask a few things: One is you do further work to build a national carbon market framework. In other words, we want standards, the tools and trades and all the trappings that other commodity markets have here in Canada. We do need the protocols. They have to be built, and somebody has to fund them in order to measure that real reduction.
The third thing would be the purchasing the carbon credits by the federal government from Canada first, rather than overseas, to meet Canada’s obligations. So you’re buying Canada offsets versus European offsets as an example.
Finally, we need the research supports in both the green infrastructure and agriculture communities to answer the questions that are still outstanding. What’s at risk if the funding and investments are not made is that the biological sector would be excluded from the offset market. Without the protocols, we can’t participate. From a federal point of view, you’re buying somebody else’s offsets rather than Canada’s offsets. Without a carbon market, the jobs that you expect from this policy won’t be created.
Alberta was the first jurisdiction in North and South America to have that compliance-based market back in 2007. It’s the first jurisdiction that recognized soil carbon and created an offset around it, and it’s the first jurisdiction in the world that actually aggregates small tonnes, like a farm and ranch, into large packages of tonnes that can be bought and sold by the market. We can lead with that knowledge both through our advice and then our expertise around the world from our members.
Last, a little bit of advertising:Our website is biologicalcarbon.ca. Thank you for your time.
The Chair: I call upon Senator Maltais to lead off with the questions.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you for those very interesting presentations.
Ms. Copithorne, when you say that sustainable beef production produces 15 per cent less carbon, that’s 15 per cent of what?
[English]
Reynold Bergen, Research Director, Beef Cattle Research Council, Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef: The statistic that Cherie mentioned was the result of a research project that was funded through the Canadian Beef Science Cluster. It was research that was led by Agriculture Canada and the University of Manitoba. They looked at the greenhouse gas emissions of beef production in Canada per kilogram of beef in 1981, which was a census year, and compared that to greenhouse gas emissions from beef production in Canada in 2011, which was another census year, and looked at how those emissions per kilogram of beef had changed over that 30-year period. The result was that in 2011, each kilogram of beef that was produced in Canada had a 15 per cent lower greenhouse gas emission associated with it than it did in 1981. A lot of that reduction in emissions was simply due to improved efficiencies on the production side, whether it was improved feed efficiency on the animal side, improved forage or crop productivity on the agriculture side, improved animal health, improved animal reproduction and that sort of thing.
The take-home message from that research for me was really two things. One was that incremental improvements in productivity and efficiency lead to environmental benefits. The other one was that — well, I guess it’s really the same point — they’re not mutually exclusive, that when we can improve our efficiency and productivity on the farm, that does lead to environmental benefits as well.
Does that answer the question?
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Yes.
What does sustainable beef sell for compared to non-sustainable beef?
[English]
Mr. Bergen: You’re asking me, but I’m going to throw that one to Cherie.
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: The reality is that at this stage of the game, we cannot answer that accurately. We recognize that the Canadian beef industry as a whole has demonstrated through the formation of the beef sustainability assessment that was done in 2016 that we are sustainable, and that is taking a look at the entire industry as a whole.
We basically use that now as our starting point, our benchmark. Now we’re able to create metrics that producers can focus on. One of the issues up until this point is that we as producers did not know where to focus on what it is that we are defining as sustainable or not sustainable, so that would be the first part of your answer. We didn’t know how; what was being called sustainable versus not being sustainable. We’ve now created a standard that allows producers on a more uniform basis to provide answers on how they’re going to arrive at our definition of what sustainable beef is. As this framework was just released in December, it’s too early to answer that question, but it has been a real challenge for this industry because we have not had the uniformity and understanding of what metrics to collect.
As we do this, not only here in Canada but also globally, we are creating a system and a means to measure beef’s impact on greenhouse gas, for example. Now hopefully we’re going to be able to compare country to country, as well. We can proudly say that we’re one of the lowest emitters, but that’s based on our metrics, and we need to ensure that each country is following the same set of metrics. All we can confirm to date is that we know where our starting point is. We’ve set a goal for our industry to improve upon because continuous improvement is a big component of sustainability. Now we have the tools or are starting to develop the tools that will allow our industry to arrive at that.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Speaking as a consumer, I’m a Quebecer, and we buy a lot of Angus beef, most of it from Alberta. When I’m at a steakhouse, how do I know if the meat on my plate is sustainable or not? I think your marketing strategy should include a way to let consumers know that the beef they’re buying was raised sustainably according to specific standards. That would make consumers buy it. Raising cattle in accordance with the rigorous criteria you talked about is nice and all, but you have to sell that beef. And you have to make a profit on it. The profits you mentioned — $17,000 for 200 head — is not enough to support a family. I think consumers are ready to pay more for a quality product raised according to certain standards.
I would also like to raise a third little point. Is your organization connected to Canada Beef?
[English]
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: Yes, Canada Beef is a member within the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Canada Beef exports a lot to China. I’m sure you know that. We have a little problem with China and Central Asia right now because of traceability. The Prairies will comply with the traceability program. Do you have a sense of how that will play out?
[English]
Mr. Bergen: I can take a shot at it. I’m the research guy, so I may not be able to fully answer all your implementation questions. What I can say is that every beef producer in Canada is currently subject to Canada’s traceability requirements regarding individual animal identification. In order for an animal to leave the farm, it’s got to have a permanent individual identification ear tag attached with it that follows it all the way through the production system up until slaughter. So all of Canada’s beef, whether we export it or consume it domestically, can certainly be traced back to the farm of origin.
Now, in terms of the specifics around China, I’m not familiar with those.
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: We’re finding that one of the most difficult or misunderstood concepts from the point of traceability to the retailer to the consumer is that from a producer’s perspective, the value in what it costs to maintain the integrity of that information that’s travelling from owner to owner stage to stage hasn’t been made very obvious. Therefore, there has been a lack of incentive for producers to input their data, their information into a database that can be used to market in the way that you’re asking about.
That’s very much a part of what the sustainability framework has been focusing on because it needs to be auditable. Therefore, allowing Canada beef the leverage that it needs to determine how that traceability can be worked, as well as providing the ability to communicate back to our producers is necessary to make sure that that information transfers.
Mr. Gilchrist: When you’re trying to put an offset together and you want that traceability from let’s say a feeding offset at a feedlot back to a cow-calf producer, that chain of custody of the individual bar code or RDF has to be secure. When a ranch sends off a trailer load of mixed heifers to the feedlot, if the beef manifest doesn’t have the individual ear tags, you lose that chain of custody.
In other words, I can create an offset, but because that system doesn’t allow for the auditable trace, there are no market attributes to come back. However, we’re talking two different systems, we’re talking about a business system versus the ear tag which is currently a disease system.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I brought that up because I did a lot of work on the Canada-Europe free trade agreement. I went to the European Parliament numerous times. I visited Council of Europe member countries. The former eastern countries that now make up the Council of Europe — Hungary, Czechoslovakia — all those countries that used to be part of the USSR, they obviously have a very hard time complying with those standards. You probably heard last year or the year before when horsemeat was masquerading as beef in the lasagna in France. We need traceability so we can avoid problems like that.
Another way the agreement benefits Europe is that our meat is better than what’s available in the European market. Those most strongly opposed to the free trade agreement are restaurants. If you go to a restaurant and you see “Canadian Angus beef”, it’s going to cost $6 or $7 more than beef from the country of origin. Customers can see that there’s a $6 difference whether it’s Angus beef or not. That’s why restaurants are so reluctant to put that meat on their menus, but consumers are eager to buy it at the butcher shop because it’s new. It’s a challenge for them, and they like quality.
Anyway, the point is that Canada plays a major role and the Prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, play a major role in meat production.
Mr. Gilchrist, that brings me to a little question for you. How does carbon capturing work?
[English]
Mr. Gilchrist: That takes me back 30 years to my soils courses.
In the case of the biological systems, at the end of the day, it’s the amount of organic material that is retained within the soil. That organic material is the building blocks. You have your sand, your silt, your clay, you know, and the water, but then you have all the organics, worms, down to the micro-fungi that move the material from the soil particles into the root zone.
That is the soil organic matter. The offset is the change that raises that, so that comes from practices that leaves and supports that organic material building. So as you build the amount of fungi all the way up to the worms as an example, that raises the soil carbon. Then over time, if you can measure it, that change in organic matter means you are building a sink. If you have practices that don’t change the soil organic matter, then you have a status quo, and if we have building practices or farming practices, ranching practices that decrease that and hurt your organic matter, then you have a loss of soil carbon.
In the case of the regulator market, and I’m trying to answer your question here, there’s a practice change that with the math shows that we’ve moved up that number. We’ve gone from 3 per cent organic matter to 3.25 per cent. That is a measurable tonne, and that tonne is then translated into the market.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Mr. Bergen in British Columbia, we heard from people from the agricultural sector, researchers, and even farmers who are doing that kind of research. Since the climate is changing and is likely to keep changing in the coming years, they are trying to figure out how to come up with a new kind of hybrid animal that is more heat-resistant, needs less water, and can tolerate drought. We’re talking about climate change, not what we’re seeing today. Is that something you’re concerned about? Fifteen or 20 years from now, what kind of animals will you have to raise?
[English]
Mr. Bergen: That’s an easy one; no, it’s a difficult question. The climate is changing. It has always been changing. We have climate models that predict how it’s going to change how it’s going to impact temperature, how it’s going to impact rainfall, how it’s going to get drier in some places and wetter in some places, and that will impact what kind of crops we can grow in areas where perhaps crops are currently grown. If it gets drier, then maybe there are more opportunities for rangeland and beef production.
I will get to the question around the cattle, but as to the issues around climate change, it may impact what types of cattle we need in the future. What is potentially more immediate is how that will impact things like disease and parasites and crop plant productivity. Some diseases that we perhaps assumed or were confident that a long cold winter could destroy may be able to increase in prevalence, and the same with parasites, if our winters aren’t as long or aren’t as cold. In order to anticipate or measure or cope with those changes, we need surveillance to see what’s actually happening and what may be increasing as a risk before it comes out of the blue and hits us.
Investment, whether it’s research or simple investment in animal health and disease surveillance, I think is really important. We’re supporting some of that. We’ve got plant breeding as well, developing forage varieties, as well as feed crop varieties that are more disease resistant. If we have changes in temperature and rainfall, that’ll change the risk of different rates of smuts and blights and things that can impact plant health, as well as parasites that impact plants. So there is disease resistance and also trying to improve water use efficiency so that in conditions of low rainfall plants can still extract the water from the soil and use it as efficiently as possible. It’s not just the types of animals that we need to be concerned with, it’s the whole milieu.
In terms of the types of animals, time will tell whether we need to change the types of beef cattle we raise. The ultimate extreme would be something like the cattle in India that can cope with these things now, or if our climate starts to resemble what we’re seeing in the Southern States where it’s much more tropical, then those are the sorts of genetics that we could certainly bring up here.
The Chair: I have questions for each of you. I’m going to start with the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, but obviously there is going to be overlap, and that’s fine.
In your brief, I was really pleased to see, in particular, a number of specific recommendations for governments. As you know, all governments have basically two toolkits that they work from. One is a regulatory toolkit in which they pass legislation and regulations that say “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” on penalty, and there’s the other toolkit which is what I call “economic instruments,” incentives or money for research or other things. It seems that most of your recommendations have fallen into that toolkit, that you’re interested in further research for the six action items that are listed in your brief. You’re interested in research to better understand the food waste causes in Canada and to continue scientific measuring and monitoring of greenhouse gas footprint.
Recently, I think it was February 28, there was an announcement by the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, about the CAP, the Canadian Agricultural Partnership program that pledges a significant amount of money over a five-year period toward research related to carbon reduction. Will this fund be useful to your organization? Do you see some practical applications that will help you achieve your goals?
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: During our benchmarking study, we recognized that when it came to greenhouse gas monitoring at the cow-calf level, the tools simply don’t exist today to help truly understand how we’re impacting close to 42 million acres of rangeland, for example. As an organization, we function under three main pillars: one is the benchmarking, one is standard setting within the beef industry, and the third is our projects pillar, same concept as you were just describing. We are going to be striving to find those projects, those tools for our industry that will help us obtain these goals in the same way.
The CAP funding will definitely move us towards finding those tools because right now the extra funding is just not available in agriculture for this research. I applaud the minister for that. Where I struggle is that in order to truly understand the impact of carbon sequestration, it’s has to be bigger than five-year projects, unfortunately. The environment does not allow us five-year time increments. Even with our own beef production system, you’re looking at a minimum of two years before you recognize whether it’s the genetics, your own grazing management, or a number of different things. These require long-term perspectives. The cow-calf industry has basically been overlooked in that capacity. We look at things in 10-year increments because by two cycles of our genetics, we’re going to know more or less if we’re on the right path.
The same must hold true – and, Graham, I would consider you the expert on this one so please correct me if I’m wrong here – in that it takes a significant amount of time to recognize if the changes you make, especially from a grazing perspective, on natural ecosystems, is having an impact. When you’re farming, you see more immediate results in a one- to two-year cycle but not in grazing.
The Chair: I understand your point exactly. One of my brothers is a beef producer.
Mr. Gilchrist: To answer your question, from our perspective the short answer is no.
The Chair: It’s not going to help you?
Mr. Gilchrist: It’s not going to help. From the conference call we had three weeks ago with the two managers for both of those programs for research, in order for us to benefit, we’re going to have to solve a business problem first with a co-benefit of being an offset. We asked very directly, “Could we use your research funds to fund the next offset, say dairy as an example?” They told us no, that that’s a regulatory product and as a result, outside the scope of those funds. We, as good researchers, will have to figure out other language. Perhaps we’ll solve a business problem with the research and use the data to build a protocol, but not the other way around.
The Chair: I understand where you’re coming from. It will be useful in some circumstances; in others, you need to do a stretch or go to the next program.
Mr. Gilchrist: Next ministry.
The Chair: You’ve mentioned that it’s important to understand the unintended consequences of carbon pricing mechanisms from farm to fork and the impact this could have on the competitiveness of the industry. At the end of the day, I think much of it comes down to the individual producer as to how they’re going to cope with that.
So as an organization, is there anything that you can do specifically to help producers reach the goals of reducing carbon, in spite of the fact that they’re not going to get paid much more for that pound of beef as compared to somebody who is in another country and is competing and hasn’t had to have the same cost inputs?
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: By creating that set of metrics, that standard, we’ve allowed them to focus on what it is they need to be focusing on, to try and create efficiency and where they should be focusing. The unintended consequence from a group perspective is that we’ve been very fortunate to have a large and well-rounded membership, in that we have hopefully approached the standard setting from all corners and prepared ourselves for any of these unintended consequences.
I can only answer your question on a personal level as a producer. We can set parameters for our operations, we can set goals that we want to reach, but I’m going to give you a direct example of what’s happening to my ranch right now with our natural gas and the carbon levy that goes with it. My fiscal year is December 1 through to November 30, so I’ve got three months coming into 2018. Even with the kind of winter that we’ve had, I’ve been able to reduce my gas usage by 8 per cent, but the amount of carbon levy that I have now paid in the first three months of this fiscal year has increased 88 per cent. So as a producer, I can’t even begin to budget how I’m going to approach this — what I can do beyond reducing, turning down my furnaces, turning down my heaters. We’re in this situation because this carbon levy, carbon credits and carbon systems fluctuate from company to company and province to province and we are the ones paying for this inconsistency. We’re not really sure how we can improve. We’re doing everything in our power to hopefully reduce our imprint on the world, but we’re still paying more at the end of the day. That unintended consequence is an example of the result of that levy. We’ve done everything according to the standard, according to what all the literature says we need to do, and yet we’re still paying more. At the end of the day, that cuts into my bottom line, and that’s what makes it difficult to function.
The Chair: An excellent answer, and it’s great to get it on the record.
Nineteen per cent of edible bone-free meat is wasted. I assume some of that’s at home, in my home and other homes, but that’s probably not all of it. What accounts for the 19 per cent?
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: Basically that’s from the deboning floor of the processor onward, so the value added side. That has a lot to do with trim and efficiency of trim, spoilage within the refrigerators, on the meat counters; there is a number of things. A large percentage is at the consumers’ home that gets thrown away — oversizing and not eating and not getting to it fresh or expecting that the best-before date is past so they throw it out rather than assume that it’s still good.
The Chair: What’s a precompetitive platform? I’ve never heard that term.
Ms. Copithorne-Barnes: That is a term that has basically been coined at the sustainability, at the global level. It’s one that we have taken from industry, from the McDonalds and the Cargills of the world. Food safety would be another example of precompetitive.
These are issues for these companies, and no matter where you sit along a value chain, they impact you directly. They are non-competitive issues that these groups are prepared to come and sit around a table, work under a code of ethics and say “We need to solve this for the greater good, the benefit of the greater good. This is not about our bottom line any longer.” They view food safety as such a thing, they view sustainability as such a component. It has allowed for open and transparent conversations to happen at a table that will allow the entire industry to benefit, not just certain components along the chain.
The Chair: You mentioned “value added” a while ago. The next study for our Agriculture and Forestry Committee is related to value added for agricultural and forestry products.
One of our first witnesses appearing next week is the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, and I’m looking forward to that presentation. Just to let you know, we’re looking ahead to that important next step.
No one mentioned methane to any extent here; it was alluded to. In your presentation, one of the action items was to optimize cattle diets, another to support the identification and selection of cattle genetics to reduce GHG footprint, I’m assuming that both of these would relate to trying to decrease the amount of methane; am I correct?
Mr. Gilchrist: Yes.
The Chair: Anything else you want to say about that?
Mr. Bergen: There are a lot of different greenhouse gases, and methane is one of them. When it comes to beef cattle that’s probably the biggest one. When they talk about greenhouse gases, they’re looking at methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and one or two others. Then they balance them according to how impactful they are and add them together and call it “greenhouse gas.” Methane is a part of greenhouse gas.
Mr. Gilchrist: In two of our protocols currently licensed in the province — long story short — we put an additive into the feed that changes the microbiology in the rumen. Given this research, you could say they are literally putting a meter on the cow. By adding that additive, you change and reduce the amount of methane when the animal chews its cud, and as a result we can measure that change.
The offset in the lifestyle protocols is by changing the additive, you change the amount of methane coming out the front end of the animal, and that can be measured and then sold.
The Chair: Mr. Gilchrist, you mentioned fugitive emissions. That’s a real issue with the oil and gas industry. I’m assuming it’s things like pipeline leakage, the joints, flaring. What other examples can you give me that would be specifically related perhaps to the work you’re doing regarding Biological Carbon Canada?
Mr. Gilchrist: Those numbers came from the Ministry of Environment. The total number was 722 for the oil and gas sector, and that ranges anywhere from the gas coming out of the pickup trucks doing the work to the flare stacks. They are running about 190 million metric tonnes.
The other fugitive emissions really come from our transportation sector. As I said, that’s our planes, trains, and automobiles. If you dig down into the data that they published, we’re talking about the emissions from our tailpipes, from our personal vehicles, our trucks, airplanes, our transportation vehicles. Those numbers, if I can read my graph, are just around that 180 million again this year.
The Chair: We heard that it’s not very feasible for your average farmer to be able to do all the documentation that’s required to be able to claim the carbon credits and therefore get reimbursed for those carbon credits. I think you said “carbon markets work, but they may be messy in the start-up.” I assume that inability or disincentive for smaller operators will get less messy in the future.
Mr. Gilchrist: We’re now into 2018. The application of the conservation offset is essentially four pieces of paper. You’ve got a three-pager inventory of how you farmed today, which takes about 15 minutes to fill out with a client. We use crop insurance as a verification piece — was there an annual crop, what were the acres involved. If they don’t have crop insurance, we do crop plans. The best way to do that is to run around and take a picture every year to verify and pass the audit. Last, we verify the machinery. We show inventory by taking pictures of the serial number, the size of the boot, the width of the boot, and the distance between the shanks. That’s prescribed in the protocol and it’s about an hour a year in time.
The Chair: That’s interesting because we were given to understand it was much more onerous than that.
Mr. Gilchrist: There are a couple policy challenges, though. The first panel talked yesterday about not liking some of the paperwork. By law, carbon is private here in Alberta. Along with the peat, the clay, the marl and the gravel, carbon is owned by the farms and ranches. When we’re dealing with the reductions, the conservation protocol has about 80 percent in real reductions. Those are the smokestacks, those are coming from our diesel tractors, and about 12 per cent is the sink right or the amount that’s going into the soil. You have two owners transacting on one tonne of carbon and both have to transact.
Alberta Environment also uses landowner signoff as one of their verification pieces to ensure that the tonne is created in Alberta. You can’t sell a Saskatchewan carbon in Alberta.
As a result, 55 percent of our clients in my particular firm, when I buy carbon, have handshake agreements to farm, and as a result, there’s no carbon clause in there that says who gets what. The landlords have to, on a yearly basis, have that discussion, and we’re fighting over $1.50, $1.80 an acre, because of the price. They trade as a discount to the $30. The last price today was $23. You’re having that uncomfortable discussion with your landlord of who gets what. Am I going to upset a long-standing relationship with my landlord fighting over $1.53 an acre?
Those are some of the practical challenges in putting an offset onto the market. A lot of it is driven by the verification requirements, and there’s a large penalty at the end if they aren’t real. If an energy company buys an offset from a farm and that offset is presented to the Alberta government as real and they get caught in an audit and are deemed not real, it’s a $200-a-tonne penalty for presenting an incomplete certificate to the Crown. The mess that we’ve created is we have to comply with real audit standards.
We started in 2007 with a notice-to-reader audit standard, and when we became incremental in 2012, we moved it all the way up to a reasonable test. We are at the highest audit standard. In the case of agriculture, if it’s not written down, it doesn’t count. As a result, we’re having to get the paperwork, we’re having to get both the farmer and his wife, if they’re joint owners because both have a share in that tonne. In some respects, I suppose that hasn’t been well paid and well explained, that you are selling something that you own as your tonne.
That’s a long winded answer to the question.
The Chair: It’s a great amount of pertinent information. I really appreciate it. Thank you for putting it on the record.
Senator Maltais, do you have any further questions?
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I do have a little question, but the answer could be a bit more complex. We’ve heard a lot about a carbon tax and a carbon exchange. Mr. Gilchrist, you said the federal government should create a carbon exchange and that carbon credits shouldn’t be purchased elsewhere, and you’re absolutely right. Here in Canada, we’re all responsible for our carbon emissions. That means you and me, Ms. Copithorne-Barnes with her ranch, me with my car and the little motorboat I use to go fishing. We’re all responsible, but there’s carbon in the atmosphere that we are not responsible for.
Here’s an example. Our clerk is from Newfoundland. The vast majority of airplanes that cross the Atlantic take off from Montreal or Toronto. They fly over Gander, Newfoundland. Have you ever thought about how much carbon is emitted over Newfoundland, a province that produces hardly any carbon? Then there’s the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the seaway. All the ships that come from the Atlantic go through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Quebec and Ontario. They emit tonnes of carbon. Those are all diesel ships. How is the Canadian government planning to tax that carbon?
[English]
Mr. Gilchrist: My first answer is, if that boat never fills up with bunker fuel anywhere within Canada’s jurisdiction, it would be an avoidance of that system. Once that freighter pulls into Baie-Comeau and unloads and has to refuel, then you have that point of interaction where the tax can be applied. In the case of the aircraft flying from Ireland to Washington and it doesn’t land at Gander, you’ve missed that aircraft. Once that aircraft lands and refuels, you have the point of interaction to apply the tax.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I have to stop you there. They don’t land planes in Gander. That’s where they get on track. You know how the globe works. They fly over Gander, Newfoundland, and set their course. They fly over Prince Edward Island. Our chair hears them 24 hour a day. That’s where they set their course. When they come in from Europe, that’s where they set their course for the United States or Canada. The same goes for passenger trains that go through where you live without stopping. You’re not responsible for the trains’ carbon emissions, but they go through where you live. In marine environmental law, they calculate that a vessel of a certain size with a certain motor emits however much carbon. That could be one way to measure carbon emissions. However, international agreements mean that Canada will always have to buy credits from carbon exchanges other than its own, of course.
I should point out that Canada pollutes less than most other countries. Our country is as big as Russia. We have 36 million people here, whereas Russia has close to 250 million, and their antipollution system is not as good as ours right now. I’m not saying “in the future”; I’m saying “right now.” Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We have to keep our feet on the ground. You need to keep doing the good work you’re doing.
I really admire what you are doing in the livestock sector. I have to admit this is the first time I’ve heard of sustainable beef. I can see why you’re interested in a carbon exchange. And I completely agree with you that it’s unpredictable for farmers and ranchers.
You talked about your finances, but all of your members have the same problem. It’s unpredictable. I think that, in the future, once the law and regulations are in place, the Canadian government should clarify all this so it’s very easy for farmers, ranchers and the forestry sector to implement. I was very impressed by your remarks this morning. I think you gave us a sense of how things will be in the future. You’re very practical-minded. You have both feet on the ground, and I am extremely grateful for your testimony. Thank you.
[English]
The Chair: I agree with the senator.
Mr. Bergen: I’m sorry to interrupt, but the senator’s last comment reminded me of something that I think is pretty relevant to this conversation. One of the points that he was making is that carbon doesn’t respect borders, neither does free trade. I think Cherie made the point of how current carbon levies are impacting her bottom line. I think we all made the point about the low carbon footprint of Canadian beef. I t’s one of the lowest carbon footprints of beef anywhere in the world.
Beef contributes to 3 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas footprint; Canada accounts for 1.6 per cent of the world’s. You multiply those together, that means that Canadian beef accounts for 0.05 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. So the concern that we all have is that the carbon policy in Canada means that our industry is less competitive. If we aren’t able to continue producing environmentally responsible beef, it may be displaced by imports from another country that has a much greater greenhouse gas footprint. That’s a concern. Thank you.
The Chair: Not only does agricultural products, but cement and other products face that same issue.
Mr. Gilchrist: Senator, let’s pick on airplanes. Ultimately, those airplanes are licensed to operate here in Canada. I’m trying to adapt how the OBA system for the oil and gas here operates in Alberta. You have an aircraft that essentially operates in Canada, even though that plane may not land but flies over. At the end of the day, you have a reporting system for that licence. Depending on how many air miles of fly-over, you can attach a fee for those emissions on a Canada basis. However, you require that aircraft or that company to report all the emissions for where it flies and then take a percentage depending on how many times they fly over Canada and don’t land. Then you attach it to the licence and the reporting requirements.
The Chair: Thank you for that clarification.
We now have two more panelists. I’m Senator Diane Griffin from Prince Edward Island, chair of this committee. With me is the deputy chair, Senator Maltais from Quebec. The other members of the committee who were here yesterday were called back to Ottawa on Senate business, but you’ve got the chair and the deputy chair. Everything you say goes into the record, so I want to assure you that you are being heard.
I invite the witnesses to introduce themselves.
Anna De Paoli, Consultant to the Alberta Greenhouse Growers Association, Alberta Greenhouse Growers Association: My name is Anna De Paoli, and I’m a consultant to the Alberta Greenhouse Growers Association.
Douglas J. Cattani, Department of Plant Science, University of Manitoba, as an individual: My name is Doug Cattani. I’m a perennial crop breeder from the University of Manitoba.
The Chair: First we’ll hear your presentations and then have questions.
Ms. De Paoli: On behalf of Albert Cramer, the president, the board of directors, and our membership, we thank you very much for the opportunity to present to you, this important standing committee.
The Alberta Greenhouse Growers Association, the AGGA, was founded in 1980 to work together to bring knowledge and research information to our members, to share ideas, and work with government to help grow our industry in the most progressive and sustainable way possible. Today, the AGGA has 179 members, of whom 143 are greenhouse growers. We represent all aspects of the greenhouse industry, including vegetable, floriculture, and forest nurseries.
The total Alberta greenhouse sales was $132.9 million in 2016, and this excludes the data of the forest nurseries. There was a change in the way Statistics Canada measures the numbers in 2016, and forest nurseries is now not included in the greenhouse statistics. Our industry employed 3,397 employees in 2016. Of those, 67 percent are seasonal, and 33 per cent full-time.
We’ve prepared a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, of our industry with respect to climate change in order to answer the questions we were asked to prepare.
When we look at the strengths, I think these are important measures for adaptability and resilience in the greenhouse industry. The first strength is family businesses. The majority of greenhouse growers are multigenerational family businesses. This brings a depth of knowledge, resiliency, and experience that is not possible without family succession. It also allows long-term decision making on investments and loan guarantees for more financially secure family members. This provision allows access to capital that’s not possible for smaller and nonfamily-owned enterprises.
In Alberta, there’s also a strong cooperative component to the greenhouse industry. The RedHat Co-op was founded in 1966 and has 150 acres in vegetable production, and 35 members. Pik-N-Pak Produce, founded in 1987, currently has 15 acres in production. By forming cooperatives, economies of scale in packaging, marketing, and distribution are possible. This makes the industry more efficient and able to service a growing market that demands consistency of supply.
The second strength is productivity. Greenhouses are highly productive users of land. For example, 200 cucumbers per square metre was achieved in 2016 in Alberta, a world-class yield. Water use is very low. Approximately 90 per cent of water and nutrients are recycled in the vegetable greenhouse industry. Pesticide usage is reducing with a conversion to biological controls by introducing natural predators into the greenhouse environment.
There have also been a number of expansions and additions in the greenhouse industry in recent years. Economies of scale are very important differentiators in all sectors of our industry.
Efficiency: The Netherlands is a leader in greenhouse technology and production efficiency. Many of the Alberta greenhouse growers have direct family and business relationships with the Netherlands, meaning that the Alberta industry closely follows and adapts the latest technologies to become more efficient. LED lighting is one example of a change that is starting to be implemented. This low energy medium allows year-round production with a much smaller carbon footprint than high-pressure sodium lighting.
A third advantage and strength that we have is carbon dioxide recovery. It’s very important to note that greenhouses often recover carbon dioxide from boiler flues and co-generators. Enhancing CO2 from ambient levels of around 400 PPM up to 1,000 PPM increases plant growth and productivity significantly. This important sink for CO2 makes the greenhouse industry unique from other agricultural operations.
When we look at the weaknesses of the industry, there are two mains weaknesses that we’ve identified. The first is the building envelope. Energy efficiency is an important method to reduce energy consumption; however, greenhouse structures are unique in that the balance of light penetration is counter to standing building insulation technologies. Whilst measures such as energy curtains, high efficiency boilers, and fans are increasing in Alberta, greenhouses will continue to use significant amounts of natural gas for heating.
When we look at the risks associated with climate change, there are two major areas that we see. The first is severe weather events. The key risk posed by climate change for the Alberta greenhouse industry is the increased occurrence of severe weather-related events, such as flooding, hail, tornadoes, and windstorms. In a climate-controlled environment, sudden changes are devastating to crops.
Severe weather also causes structural damage and lost production; as a result, insurance cost increases. Additionally, the frequency of weather-related claims drives insurance premiums higher, and this is a threat to the viability of the industry. In Alberta, insurance premiums have been rising significantly in recent years, in some cases, over 20 per cent per annum. Such cost increases cannot be passed down to consumers in a highly competitive commodity market and are absorbed by producers, reducing their margins.
There are further threats to our industry with respect to the policy changes implemented as a result of climate change. The first is around carbon pricing. As I mentioned, Alberta greenhouses are significant users of natural gas for heating and electricity for lighting. Demand for vegetables is year-round, and increasingly, to be competitive, the larger operators are moving to year-round operations. Energy costs account for approximately 25 per cent of operating costs; hence, the Alberta Climate Leadership Plan and the Government of Canada’s carbon pricing backstop present a significant challenge to the competitiveness of the industry.
As a result of the consultation with the AGGA, the Government of Alberta granted the greenhouse industry an 80 percent rebate of the carbon levy for eligible heating via a program called the Alberta Greenhouse Rebate Program. This is a two-year pilot program ending on December 31st, 2018. It is vital for the competitiveness of the greenhouse industry that this program be extended. Data from Statistics Canada for the vegetable industry shows that 69 per cent of the total production area in Canada is grown in Ontario, followed by 20 per cent in British Columbia. Alberta is small in comparison at 3 per cent of the total.
The province of British Columbia has an equivalent greenhouse carbon tax relief grant, and as such, it is very important to have a level playing field within Canada for greenhouse growers.
Alberta producers face strong competition from the United States and Mexico. Alberta is a net importer of greenhouse products; hence, producers in these areas have lower costs for labour and no carbon taxation. It is challenging for Canadian producers to compete in an environment of rising carbon pricing when imported produce is not subject to this.
The second threat is the definition of “agriculture.” The Alberta greenhouse industry is threatened by changes to definitions of agriculture. Several provincial and municipal jurisdictions are changing definitions for employment standards code and land-use bylaws to exclude greenhouse operations from the definitions of agricultural operations. This causes changes to building codes, hours of operation, and labour cost increases to name a few. It is highly detrimental to our industry and gives a great hesitation to those considering investing in their businesses.
Consistency in recognition of greenhouses as agricultural operations is vital.
The third threat is sources of employment. The greenhouse industry employs a large number of low-skilled workers. The following national occupational classification codes describe the roles: 8431, general farm worker; 8432, greenhouse workers; and 8611 harvesting labourers.
The availability of this skill set in Alberta is low, and when it is available, turnover is high. The RedHat Co-op had a 93 percent turnover rate for local employees in 2016. As such, the industry relies heavily on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program for the continued operation and growth of the industry. The costs of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program have increased significantly over time, which is challenging for the industry, and the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has been denied to cooperatives that have packaging facilities that are not co-located with their members’ greenhouses. This is threatening the viability of cooperatives in Alberta and is something that the industry urgently leads to rectify.
In the past, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program was available to cooperatives; the denial is a recent federal change.
The fourth threat is employment standards. In Alberta, greenhouses, mushrooms, and sod farms are not considered farm and ranch under the Employment Standards Code. This is a recent change from January 1, 2018, and it means that not only are greenhouses not on a level playing field within Canada, but also not within agriculture.
As you can see, these factors together have significant compounding effects. Carbon pricing, minimum wage increases, rising costs of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, holiday pay, and overtime benefits create significant compounding effects on the viability of the industry. This fact cannot be understated and has several operations in Alberta considering ceasing and exiting the industry. These are serious threats to our industry.
When we look at the role that federal and provincial governments play, we see these as opportunities in our SWOT analysis. The first opportunity is aligning definitions. As I mentioned, recognition of the greenhouse industry as primary agricultural production in federal, provincial, and municipal jurisdictions, recognition that greenhouse-owned cooperatives are also agricultural producers and should qualify for the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.
Defining cannabis as an agricultural operation is also important as a key area of growth in our industry. Energy efficiency. Programs to support the implementation of available energy efficiency measures in the greenhouse industry are important. Until such time as the research on carbon dioxide sequestration in the greenhouse with the aim of developing carbon credits for such projects is completed, rebate programs to reduce the threat of carbon taxation are critical.
On-site generation: Financial support for on-site power and heat generation, which is cogeneration from natural gas, geothermal, solar, and wind, includes support for the application process, which is highly technical and time-consuming with provincial regulators such as the Alberta Utilities Commission and Alberta Environment.
Insurance: protection from rising insurance rates through federal financing agencies, for example, Farm Credit Canada and provincial financial institutions such as ATB and AFSC.
In conclusion, the greenhouse industry in Alberta is currently resilient and growing. Climate change and carbon pricing policy does have impacts, and it does pose a serious threat but also opportunities for our industry. The opportunities are in the policy area, and where we need your assistance is to ensure the continued viability of our industry. We want to continue our good news story, that of vibrant family business of growing cooperatives and of expanding local food, floriculture, and forest seedling production.
We ask that you support us in this quest. The opportunity for the federal and provincial governments is in consistency of policy and recognition of the unique nature of this small but growing industry. Thank you again for the opportunity to address you. I welcome any questions that you have.
The Chair: Thank you for your presentation.
Next we’ll go to Dr. Cattani.
Mr. Cattani: Thank you. I apologize for the handouts that you have, but I will try to make it easy to follow them.
I’m going to talk about perennial greens today, something you may not ever have heard about, and something that is developing around the world. Hopefully I can provide some answers to questions you had in the previous session and give you some things to think about.
The overview will be some of the benefits of producing perennial seed crops. It’s an industry that is predominantly in Western Canada. I will talk a bit about perennial seed production and then use of perennial grains and how that would fit into some of the things that I’ll address earlier.
Benefits of perennial seed crops, and I’m going to focus my comments predominantly on C3 or cool season plants. They have entire season photosynthetic capacity, unlike crops that we seed, and until that plant emerges, there is no green tissue from which to capture the carbon. Then they senesce prior to harvest, and again, you are left without photosynthetic tissue on that land until usually the next year when it is reseeded.
These crops can be photosynthetically active down to 1 degree Celsius, and even at 1.5, there are notations that it’s at 17 per cent of its maximum. So these are able to take the carbon out the air through the entire growing season, unlike an annual crop which does so when it’s planted.
Another advantage is that you plant once, harvest many times, so plant one year, and you’d harvest for three, four, five, years. Benefits are reduction in implement costs, tillage, seeding costs, all of those things would be reduced. The greenhouse gases that are associated with those activities on the farm are thus reduced.
They provide year-round ground cover, which provides an excellent erosion control. You don’t have bare soil; you have plant material covering the area. This plant material, because it is actively growing, uses water at these times of the year, so there’s less water for runoff, less water for leeching minerals through the soil, as well.
Many of the benefits of perennial crops or perennial seed crops are in the soil. They provide soil health. We heard earlier about the microorganisms, the orthopods and the earth worms and everything that live in the soil. These have perennial root systems; however, the root systems are not necessarily perennial. They grow and die throughout the year adding to the carbon pool in the soil, allowing that to be converted into soil organic matter.
Carbon sequestration is a major benefit of these crops because they do grow all year long. They need a root system all year round. They put roots deeper into the soil than our annual crops and put more of their energy into roots and into survival mechanisms that are required to last from year to year. So this material is mainly underneath the soil.
Another advantage is perennial root systems are better able to uptake mineral nutrients or manure, whatever form of fertility is applied to these areas. Their root systems, because they are larger and perennial in nature are less likely to leech minerals through them.
Perennial seed production actually has a fairly long history in Canada. The turf seed production industry actually started on P.E.I. back in the 1940s and has forage seed production, which are also perennials. I’ve provided data on the last 12 years. On average, about 64,000 hectares are in perennial seed production. I think the highest year was approximately 78,000 hectares, and they’re cyclical markets due in part to prices of seed, demand for seed. Seed demand usually goes up after some sort of catastrophic weather event.
In 2016, all but 50 hectares were produced in the four Western provinces and in perennial seed production. B.C. is part of this, with the Peace River area being a component of the industry.
The problem with trying to get these benefits from more perennial seed production through forages is that that would mean an increase in the land area utilized by animals. Personally, I don’t foresee the animal industry increasing at a large enough rate to more than maybe double this production area.
If we want to get the benefits from growing perennial seeds in our cropping systems, we will have to look for a commodity-type crop. Over the last 40 years but predominantly in the last 10 to15 years, there has been a strong push for developing perennial grain crops. By having a commodity-type product, you could easily increase the number of acres or the number of hectares seeded to perennials for seed production and get the benefits over a wider tract of land.
In Western Canada, we foresee the main seed crop being intermediate wheat grass. It is a wide relative of wheat. It does have gluten, it’s just very poor. It’s also under the tradename of Kernza, and that’s only when it’s produced organically. So intermediate wheat could be produced conventionally, and the processors and food manufacturers would accept it under conventional seed production.
I would like to note, as well, that perennial rice is probably two to five years away from commercialization in China, so this is not just temperate North America, this is worldwide. There are other crops that are being worked on — perennial sorghum, perennial pigeon pea through a retuning system in its production. There is a wide number of crops that could be included in this effort worldwide.
I often get asked, “Will producers accept a new seed crop or a new production crop?” I’ll use the example of canola in Manitoba. I’ve provided a graph of data on its production. Pre-food grade or canola when it was rapeseed for industrial use, acreages were really quite small. Around the mid-1970s when we started working toward canola, both the acres started increasing and the investment in breeding and in agronomy increased. The seed yields are probably two and a half to three times what they were pre-canola. So the investment in seed production and in breeding has proven fruitful.
Another advantage to using perennial grains is that they are a dual-use crop. Just because you’re harvesting your grain doesn’t mean that the growth that hasn’t gone into the seed itself cannot be utilized by animals. Under an organic system, you’d be probably best off to graze it immediately after harvest to get the nutrients back onto the land through the animals processing it. That would be required for the next year’s production in a conventional system. I would recommend a different system, and that would be a fall-winter stockpile-type grazing. The beef industry is saving money by keeping animals longer on the pasture, approximately 25 cents an animal per day. Part of that is disposing of the manure from confined feeding, but also producing feed that would have to be shipped and fed to animals in confinement.
The final thing I’d like to highlight is what can they be used for. Most of you have probably not heard of perennial grains or how they’ve been utilized. They can be blended with wheat just like you blend any other flower to make rye bread, for example. As I mentioned earlier, it has gluten; it’s just very poor quality gluten. It really doesn’t lend itself to yeast-raised products; however, there are no issues with sour dough products. I’ve pictured bread on one of the pages there. Again, blended with wheat, it produces a really good product.
Some people have been putting up to 20 per cent Kernza in commercialized beer production, in the mash used to produce the beer. That is on the market and being sold right now. It can be used in many other products, pancakes, anything where you don’t need yeast to raise, so anything you’d use baking powder for raising, so pancakes, muffins, tortilla chips, flatbreads. I’ve had it cooked as a grain similar to naked oats or what’s that called; “prairie rice” I think it’s marketed under.
And there’s interest in substituting it into cereals and granola bars by General Mills. I am told that they hope to have a trial product out within the next year for consumer preferences.
I’d like to thank you for inviting me here to talk to you about this somewhat different subject.
The Chair: It is somewhat specialized but great to hear about it. Thank you both for your presentations. We’ll go to questions now, and Senator Maltais will lead off.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I would like to welcome our two witnesses. If I’m not mistaken, De Paoli is an Italian name, I believe.
Ms. De Paoli, your greenhouse group can employ up to 3,000 people regardless of the season. You said that these are small family businesses and that is their strength. And you are absolutely right. Do these small businesses transfer from family to family or do young people go elsewhere? Do the owners have to sell to other people or are these greenhouses operated from generation to generation?
[English]
Ms. De Paoli: Thank you for the question. We do see a very strong family succession. Some of the Alberta greenhouse growers are in their third and fourth generations of the same family. Succession planning is a huge challenge in the whole agricultural industry, not just the greenhouse industry. It’s very personal within families, but we do see a very strong component in the greenhouse industry. The largest greenhouse in Alberta is a family business, and we see this in the flower industry and the vegetable industry, that it is the same family and different generations of the family who maintain the business.
There are also cases of families acquiring other family’s businesses, but it is more common for succession within one family.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You also said that you recycle water from the greenhouses. Before this water is returned to the greenhouse — it is a cycle — is it filtered? Does it remove all the parasites or pests that could end up in the water?
[English]
Ms. De Paoli: Thank you, yes. There’s typically a water treatment plant within the greenhouse, depending on which technology is utilized, but it can be sanitized either with chemicals or with ozone to prevent bacteria and parasites. Treatment of the water is important. In a controlled growing environment, it’s very important to ensure overall that pests, whether they be in the water or in the air, are controlled.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You mentioned another problem that is out of your control: the cost of insurance. Your association has 143 members grouped under a cooperative. I think the co-op is able to negotiate better rates. You have the cooperated here in Alberta. So I think it would be beneficial for your co-op to tap into other markets for better prices. The cost of insurance has a direct influence on the cost of your vegetable production. When we talk about a 20 per cent increase it is a lot. The producer’s margin between profitability and non-profitability is dreadfully undermined. That is a little bit of advice for you.
You talked about it briefly, but are greenhouse growers in Alberta interested in cannabis?
[English]
Ms. De Paoli: I’ll start with the insurance. What we’re finding is that regardless of the insurance company, prices are increasing significantly, just due to the amount of claims generally in Alberta. We’ve seen floods and hail and all these events. So, yes, a cooperative and grouping together does help, but we are just finding overall, regardless of how well we can negotiate, the premiums are significantly increasing.
On cannabis, the Alberta Greenhouse Growers Association does have some cannabis members, and increasingly, we are seeing this market develop as we move towards legalization. I will say it is a new product, so it is somewhat controversial within the membership. It’s a different group of people, often not family businesses entering into the cannabis business. It’s corporations and new entrants to the industry. I see this as an opportunity for the greenhouse industry. It brings with it the challenges of integrating new businesses into an existing industry. That’s something we’re actively working on, and we certainly see growth in this area. A lot of announcements currently and a lot of consolidation in the cannabis industry. For us, we’re working on which are going to get built and which are just making announcements. All that’s happening at the moment.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You are like me. You are surprised at the number of new farmers coming to the market. Because of cannabis cultivation, we did not know those budding farmers who were scattered across Canada, but who had never spoken openly about their vocation as a farmer. So, it is all new. And that is good.
I have one last question. The products that come out of your greenhouses, your vegetables, are you able to sell them in your province or the neighbouring provinces, or do you have to export them?
[English]
Ms. De Paoli: Alberta is a net importer of greenhouse vegetables, which means that our production primarily stays in the province. There are some exports to Manitoba and Saskatchewan. There are some new lettuce operations who are exporting down to the U.S., but on the net basis, we’re very much an importer. The main imports come from Ontario, British Columbia, the U.S. and Mexico, so a wide variety of places.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Are greenhouse crops grown on arable land or on land that is more or less suitable for growing crops, such as grain and so on? Are greenhouse crops grown on land that is more or less arable?
[English]
Ms. De Paoli: The majority of greenhouses in Alberta are located, for example, in Medicine Hat, where the land is very dry. They’ve not irrigated so it is not particularly useful for tillage. For example, soil erosion is a big issue and the availability of water.
Typically the greenhouses are located around Medicine Hat’s where it’s very warm climatically. They get more sunshine hours than other areas. You do see greenhouses sometimes close to cities. It’s not typical. You can locate a greenhouse on any land basically. You could locate it in an industrial area. It’s more about light availability, water, and access to the electricity system. It is more typical to be located in a rural area, but you don’t need to take prime agricultural land for greenhouses. It could be any land, even roof tops.
The other thing to mention is that we are seeing the growth of vertical farming, so vertical farming could be using containers. It could be using a room like this. It’s a different type of greenhouse, but we are seeing that growth. It does not use agricultural land and relies on artificial lighting. It’s possible to grow virtually anywhere now.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you.
Mr. Cattani, I am happy to hear from you. I have heard about it before, but not with such precision. Perennial grains. Is there a future? Will it replace canola? Will it replace corn? Will it replace barley, wheat?
[English]
Mr. Cattani: I don’t foresee it replacing current crops. I think we need to get something into our current systems that reduces the degradation of the soil through our annual cropping systems. Probably Iowa would be a good reference where they plant corn soybean, which unfortunately is where Manitoba may be heading. In Iowa, they’ve reduced the crop soil qualities to the extent that they’re now putting perennial prairie strips back into these fields to keep the soil healthy and on the field.
I see it fitting well into a system of the same annual crops you mentioned. Annual crops generally have annual weeds; perennial crops generally have perennial weeds. By growing, say, four years of a perennial crop, you will reduce the annual weed-seed bank and thus maybe give your annual crops a benefit. Conversely by growing annuals for three or four years and then putting your perennial in, you will probably reduce your perennial weeds. It could fit quite well into your current production systems.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: What you are saying is very interesting.
The committee travelled to China last year, and some agricultural experts suggested that the rice crop, which has been grown since time began, has degraded the soil. Unfortunately, they do not have the means to let the land lie fallow for a few years to rebuild soil quality, which would mean that the rice, instead of growing tall, is smaller. Could this be a solution? You talked about perennial rice. Could this be a solution for those countries?
[English]
Mr. Cattani: That is where it’s being worked on right now, so they already have it. I think Yunnan province is where the work has been going on, and it has been in conjunction with the International Rice Research Institute out of the Philippines. Yes, it is there right now. It was originally envisioned as an upland rice replacement on land that is subject to erosion and soil degradation.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Here in Canada, does rice grow to maturity? Yes? We have enough sunshine for that?
[English]
Mr. Cattani: No, we don’t grow any rice here at all, other than wild rice. We don’t have the same type of rice crops they would have there. Rice is mainly grown in tropical, subtropical areas. Maybe the Southern U.S. could utilize it as well.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I would like to understand more about perennial grains. I will give you an example, and you can correct me if I am wrong.
I plant wheat in April and will harvest it in August or September. With perennial grain, I will not need to plant this wheat again. It would grow back on its own the following year. Have I understood that correctly?
[English]
Mr. Cattani: Yes, the perennial wheat grass would plant once and harvest for a number of years. The aims of the breeding programs are to get plants that yield consistently year after year. We will see fluctuations in yield like we see in every crop depending on heat, drought, too much moisture, all of those factors. The idea is to plant once, harvest numerous times. Potentially I would think on the current materials we’re working with four to five years of harvest.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Is it the same principle for perennial flowers in flower beds? They are planted once, and they grow back every year for a certain number of years?
[English]
Mr. Cattani: It’s the same thing. They have an annual cycle. After their first seed production, the cycle begins right at that point and goes through the next harvest and the next harvest and the next harvest. Seed once, harvest for a number of years. Like many of our perennial flowers that you’ve mentioned, they can get a little sod bound, so to speak, and we have to look at methods of renovating stands after a certain period of time.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: For a certain number of years. Thank you.
[English]
The Chair: I’m looking at the photograph on page 4, the perennial wheat grass versus the annual wheat grass. There is a huge difference in the amount of organic matter being left in the soil. In terms of carbon sequestration, that’s a significant factor. It reminds me a little more of what the native prairie would have looked like. I mean, the roots were very, very deep, and I’m assuming the native prairie could have sequestered a lot more carbon as a result of that.
Mr. Cattani: That’s true. Many of the studies that are looking into perennial grains cite a lot of the prairie work. The major difference would be the diversity of plants in a native prairie where we would have nitrogen fixers, native legumes, things like that, a number of forbs which would have other ecosystem benefits. It’s not quite the prairie, but it’s not annual agriculture; it’s somewhere in between.
The Chair: Senator Maltais asked my questions regarding marijuana, so his curiosity was great.
Thank you, folks, for being here today. That was very informative, and we really appreciate having you with us.
I’d like to welcome our next panelists and give a bit of an explanation of what we’re about. I’m Diane Griffin, senator from Prince Edward Island and chair of the committee, and with me is the deputy chair, Senator Maltais, who is from Quebec. We had a couple of other senators with us, but they got called back to Ottawa on business today.
We’re visiting Western Canada. We’ve done a trip to Eastern Canada for the same purpose, and that is to look at how climate change is impacting agriculture, agri-food, and the forestry sectors. We’ve been in British Columbia for two days before coming here on Tuesday evening. We’ve had some excellent panels in both places and a field trip to the forest research labs at the University of British Columbia.
The floor is yours.
Christine Murray, Director, Agricultural Technologies, Alberta Innovates: Good morning. I’m Christine Murray. I’m with Alberta Innovates, the largest research and innovation agency here in Alberta.
Ross Chow, my colleague, is with a subsidiary corporation of Alberta Innovates. We’re focused on accelerating research, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the bio sector, clean energy, and health. We’re a strategic funding agency, we collaborate with other funders in Alberta, Canada, and beyond.
We fund research at research institutions, universities, colleges, and with industry, and I’m going to focus my remarks on applied research and opportunities in agriculture, forestry, water, and ecosystem services with a focus on how that research may contribute to adaptability in the face of climate change.
I’m going to start in agriculture. In agriculture, new crop introductions are focused as an adaptation. With global warming, the growing patterns of crops in the major regions of Canada are expected to change. Along with advances in plant breeding and technology, Alberta Innovates has considered a scenario to fund the adaptation of new crops to Alberta’s changing growing season. We are funding projects focused on shorter season corn hybrids, promising genotypes and agronomic practices for soybeans, and the development of high yielding dry bean cultivars, improving genetics in wheat to tolerate biotic and abiotic stress and improving potato breeding with double haploid technology.
The adaptation of crops to abiotic and biotic stress, climate change does not only impact agriculture from warming temperatures but also from higher incidences of extreme-weather events, including early and late frost, hail, flooding, nighttime temperature, and drought. Most research indicates that disease and pest activity and occurrence will also increase under climate change, leading to a greater risk of crop losses. Research projects in this area work on improving drought tolerance, nitrogen and water use efficiency, yield and sustainability in barley, spring wheat genetics to improve tolerance to planting and cold soils.
The mitigation of greenhouse gases in the agriculture sector: Approximately 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide originate from the agriculture sector. Some of the major sources of GHGs in agriculture include methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from synthetic fertilizers, and carbon dioxide that is released during soil cultivation.
Research projects at Alberta Innovates is supporting to address these sources are projects to improve livestock genetics and feed efficiencies that also reduce livestock days on feed and methane emissions, improving plant nitrogen acquisition, fertilizer types and other non-fertilizer plant growth soil additives and the promotion of reduced tillage and other agronomic practices that sequester soil carbon.
A number of opportunities could potentially arise from climate change. While the evidence and literature to date overwhelmingly suggests that climate change will have negative consequences for agriculture and food production, the challenge poses an opportunity for new innovations in this field. Examples of opportunities include the potential for new arable land coming into production, longer and warmer growing seasons, and yield improvements in crops.
Alberta Innovates also has participated in the smart agri-food supercluster development. This work that was a supercluster proposal continues and focuses on improvements in growing more high quality food, reducing environmental impacts in agriculture and food production practices, conserving our soil, water, and air, improving health and food safety, reducing waste from farm to fork, and improving access to affordable nutrition. Smart ag will use and develop the most advanced tools: digital remote sensing, sensors, data development and analysis, and the supporting solutions to address these issues.
I’m going to make a few remarks on forestry in adaptation to climate change also. In forestry, climate change will likely have many effects on ecosystem functioning. In comparison to other terrestrial biomes, northern circumpolar boreal forests and tundra are exposed to greater warming. There is little evidence that it will significantly increase wood production. Tree species are likely to become increasingly maladapted to new conditions. There will be slow species migration. There is an expectation of increases in large scale disturbances such as fire, and insect and disease life cycles may change and be better adapted to warming temperatures.
Research projects that Alberta Innovates supports to address this are projects predicting the impact in management activities on forest carbon pools in biodiversity, the development of seed transfer guidelines and breeding populations for Alberta to address climate change, science-based management tools to support ecosystem-based management of forests in southwestern Alberta, genomics of western gall rust, resistance in lodgepole pine for tree improvement, and uncovering the natural physiological variation driving lodgepole pine resistance to western gall rust. Western gall rust is a disease that the Government of Alberta has deemed a major concern.
We also are supporting and working in the water innovation area and how that is being impacted by climate change. Clearly the impact of climate change on irrigation, groundwater, and watersheds is deeply connected to the adaptability of forests and agriculture and of course all humanity.
Alberta Innovates Water Innovation Program is a flagship program for the Government of Alberta, and it’s focused on the advancement of knowledge and innovation in support of the Water for Life Strategy and Alberta’s water research and innovation Strategy. It has the following goals: building projects to enhance scientific understanding and developing best practices in managing water security, risk, and vulnerability; ensuring excellence in watershed stewardship and ecosystem management; developing energy efficient technologies for increased water conservation, efficiency, and productivity. Projects supported through the water innovation program have four key themes: future water supply; watershed management; healthy aquatic ecosystems; water conservation, efficiency, and productivity; and water quality protection.
My last comment is on ecosystem services. Ecosystems services of course are the benefits that people receive from nature. These benefits include everything from food and clean drinking water, to human health benefits from nature, to soil formation, to carbon sequestration, to recreational uses of land. At this time, CO2 credits are one ecosystem service that are currently traded. Using a market for managing ecosystem services and biodiversity is an important opportunity and hits numerous competitive priorities within the agriculture, forestry, and energy sectors, including the green economy, environmental productivity and competitiveness, digital platforms, informatics, and sustainability.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
The Chair: Dr. Chow?
Ross Chow, Executive Director, InnoTech Alberta: I’d like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present and tell you a little bit about InnoTech Alberta.
It was a lot of fun to talk to our senior scientific staff and look at what their insights of climate change could be. One thing that was clearly stated to me was the expansion of the agricultural land into the northern regions of Alberta. There would have to be special considerations as to the logistics because we’re moving our agricultural crops away from our traditional transport corridors, and there would potentially be a greenhouse gas implication to that. There was also the chance that we would need to rebuild relevant infrastructure in the southern climates of Alberta if we had warmer climatic conditions there. The expansion of agricultural land, as my colleague said, will have a positive influence on greenhouse gas through sequestration in crops.
The last thing that was raised is that the expansion into the northern climates of Alberta will bring more multiple users onto the landscape. We will have more conflicts between forestry, agriculture, and our energy sectors.
I’d like to actually take the remainder of the time to describe some of the initiatives that are under execution at InnoTech Alberta that fall under the general themes of crop adaptation, biodiversity monitoring, and since Christine covered ecosystem services so well, I will skip on that piece. You can see that our organizations are very well aligned with what we’re looking at.
Under crop adaptation, we’re looking at maintaining yield under abiotic and biotic stress. Our crop development and management team at InnoTech is looking at new varietals under the species of barley, wheat, and canola under abiotic, which we define as “clay changing physical conditions,” as well as biotic, which is actually the influence of insects, as well as plant-based stresses like moulds.
One quick fact: In 2017, 53 new varietal grain crops came into the marketplace. This is a highly dynamic marketplace. The chances of getting new crops in to adapt to climate changes is highly accelerated.
Biotic and abiotic stresses are actually connected because as a plant or a crop gets stressed under one condition, it makes it more vulnerable to exposure to a different condition. While we have a 600-acre test farm at Vegreville, it is unsuitable for testing because it is subject to the vagrancies of whatever the weather is that year. We just invested in seven new-growth chambers in our laboratories there, and that will allow us to simulate the variety of conditions that climate change could impact in the development of the new varietal cereal crops.
The next initiative that I want to talk to you about is the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, or ABMI. It was actually established in 2007 and has collected biodiversity data across the province since its inception. Their relationship to InnoTech Alberta is that we run their field sampling program. As well, we have a director in their science office.
Data is collected for mammals, birds, plants, mosses, lichens, mites, and aquatic invertebrates. There are more than 1,000 grid sites that have been surveyed to track change of species over time, and in addition to that, there are 4,000 targeted sites that are surveyed to describe habitat association with the species on that landscape. Recently ABMI released a report for native vegetation, and human footprint change over time has been documented, so you can actually see where humans have had an effect on the landscape. All the data collected are publically available. They can be used by academic institutions or other institutions. So far the data has been used for informing forest harvest planning.
Habitats used by multiple bird species have been identified, and harvest planning sequences have actually been altered to minimize the effect on those bird species.
Sustainability of forest harvest operations has to do with the forest management area, targets and impacts. It is also used by the province to determine the status of wild species, and it also supports the biodiversity management framework in the province.
The last point I want to put forward is that it actually looks at the ability to look at climate change effects in the province because it’s been going on, and it has established a very good baseline. You may ask “How do you distinguish natural effects from induced landscape effects?” The sites that have been selected and tested represent industrial disturbance, as well as natural areas. There is the ability in this program to look at the different changes in biodiversity as influenced by climate change.
I was going to talk about ecosystem services and the market, but I think my colleague covered it well, and I’d be happy to answer questions on that.
Last, I’d like to touch on the ever-changing role of the applied research organizations across this country. Whether that is a provincial research organization or a federal research organization, our role has been changing over time. I define “applied research” as taking technical knowledge and applying it to a business issue. It is not the fundamental research where we’re actually looking at trying to expand our scientific knowledge base; we actually want to apply this technical knowledge to an outcome. The future of this is actually having collaborative networks across this country, and as much as InnoTech Alberta can reach out to our federal counterparts, if we could stimulate something as an outcome from this committee that would bode really well for Canada in the future.
The Chair: Senator Maltais will ask the first question.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Good morning, Ms. Murray and Mr. Chow. Thank you very much for your briefs.
Ms. Murray, you talked about new plants in your applied research. You mentioned dry beans. Have you studied other plants in the course of your research?
[English]
Ms. Murray: Some of the big opportunities and development are in corn and soybeans, which I also mentioned. Those crops are moving across the Prairies. They’re just moving into southern and soybeans are actually moving in. Of course, they’re displacing other crops, but in the dry bean territory, there is chickpeas, lentils, of course many varieties of dry beans, great northerns, pinto and all those sort of things. Those would be all new development projects, and we are of course collaborating with either industry partners. We are not the breeders for corn, that’s people like Pioneer. The lead breeders for much of the dry bean, chickpeas and lentils, is actually at the University of Saskatchewan, and they are collaborating with researchers in Alberta to adapt those crops to southern Alberta.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you. You also talked about animal genetics. In British Columbia, we met with academics who explained to us that because of future climate change, animal genetics will be affected and that they are currently working to find animal genetics — primarily beef — that could better adapt to climate change, in other words, longer and warmer summers, periods of drought, periods of rain and the arrival of new pests. Where are you on this?
[English]
Ms. Murray: In Alberta, the main beef research program is called Livestock Gentec, and it’s located at the University of Alberta, but it has actually networked across Canada and Australia and South America. The focus has been on finding specific traits in animals, such as in this case, residual feed intake, which is a trait that is actually passed on from parents to young cattle. It means that cattle can more effectively use the feed that they’re given, and they grow faster. I mentioned fewer days on feed, which means that they grow faster, and they would come to maturity faster. They would also reduce the methane emissions because they have fewer days on feed. That is one of the many projects of Livestock Gentec and that big group of researchers.
There’s also a great deal of research in methane reduction in cattle in Alberta and Western Canada, and some of that research is happening at the University of Lethbridge and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge. And so these are projects that are focused on feeding regimes that would actually reduce the overall methane that cattle produce because they’re becoming more efficient, and their rumen is more efficient and therefore producing less methane. These systems are consistent with trying to be productive and competitive but also reducing the overall methane that cattle are producing. That would be a couple of the main areas that Livestock Gentec is focused on.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: When you talk about reducing pasture time, could that affect cattle weights?
[English]
Ms. Murray: Yes. The market, of course, decides what size an animal should be and how you’re going to feed them productively. Therefore, it is about days on feed and more productivity, more efficiency in that system. I did say Livestock Gentec has a focus on beef, but they also research swine and poultry. All of these livestock are being researched to increase overall efficiency, and that of course contributes to reduction of methane and also increased competitiveness.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Right. You mentioned new lands that will have to be harvested in the future. What is the current state of these lands?
[English]
Ms. Murray: Those are northern lands, and Ross spoke to those lands. They would be probably considered marginal, and they may be for pasture. They could move from pasture to a higher level of productivity for annual or perennial crops, and they could possibly still be in forests. So it would mean clearing new lands that have now enough growing degree days to actually be productive for crops. This is a change of land use. It’s not new land; we’re not creating new land. It just means that it’s moving out of one use and into another, which has implications, certainly sustainability questions, as well as carbon sequestration questions. That might be the opportunity because we may be losing lands out of productivity in places that are much drier and much hotter.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You also talked about forestry and water management. How do you come up with a way to manage water properly so that it is more productive in forestry?
[English]
Ms. Murray: Forests are an ecosystem service actually, and they manage water because, of course, they’re holding water in the system. We are not managing water for forest productivity. We rely on forests for protecting riparian areas and cleaning water systems by holding soil in place and managing nutrients, but we’re not managing water for forest productivity. We would be managing the ecosystem that water and forests exist in. Where we do manage water productivity is in agriculture. Southern Alberta has an enormous amount of irrigated land, and that land productivity and that water productivity is about making sure every drop of water is contributing to crop production.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you.
Mr. Chow, you talked about biotic stress. Could you talk more about that? I do not have your university training in biotic stress. Explain it to me.
[English]
Mr. Chow: Biotic stress is stress that is induced by living organisms, whether it’s a pest or an insect that actually consumes the plant. The best example of a plant-based one would be black clubroot that has affected canola substantially. Biotic stress is stress put on the plant by another living organism.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You also talked about the research you did on animals, here in Alberta. What about fish, rivers and lakes? Have you done any research on that?
[English]
Mr. Chow: The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute looks at aquatic species, and there is a baseline of species distribution and changes over time. In very selective circumstances, we will do research on fish. You may know that, whirling disease, a disease that affects trout, was recently detected in Alberta. We have established a new lab in conjunction with the Government of Alberta that is dedicated to looking at the spread and the detection of whirling disease in the province.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Could climate change be the cause of this trout disease?
[English]
Mr. Chow: I don’t think so. I think whirling disease has been detected in Montana, and I think there is a natural migration or it could be that because the science is getting better we can detect it now at an earlier stage.
The Chair: The minister responsible for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, announced a new research funding program on February 28. It was the Canadian Agricultural Partnership. This is to help deal with climate changes issues. I’m wondering if that is of any potential use to each of you in your organizations. You’re dealing more with applied research. I’m not sure whether it applies to applied research or whether it’s other research. Perhaps you’re aware of it and may have an idea if it would be beneficial to you?
Ms. Murray: I’m not completely up to date on that program, but it is part of the federal/provincial collaborations on agriculture. Many of those programs are available to research organizations, especially if they’re doing research in collaboration with commodity organizations, and often the commodity organization is the driver for that research.
Alberta Innovates collaborates in what’s called the Agriculture Funding Consortium, which is a one-intake system for researchers to put ideas forward on agricultural research. The commodity organizations, are at the table. Different organizations take on the funding of approved projects. That program may be part of the collaborative funding model. That’s a very strong model in Alberta of collaborative funding with whoever is out there and able to leverage whatever research funds are available.
The Chair: Dr. Chow?
Mr. Chow: I’m not actually aware of this particular funding program. We have been focused on the programs that have been announced through the innovation science ministry. What has worked really well for us are collaborations with our federal counterparts in putting forward joint proposals. I think it speaks to my last request, that of capitalizing on our individual expertise and delivering a more relevant program that could impact in a faster time frame.
The Chair: I was pleased to learn about the Alberta biomonitoring institute. I think that’s tremendous; 100 grid sites and 4,000 targeted sites, that’s an impressive number. I was also pleased to hear that you’re looking at birds and other creatures, not just agricultural crops or animals. When you chose your sites, you indicated they were both former industrial sites as well as natural sites. How long has this project been in place?
Mr. Chow: Ever since its inception in 2007, data has been collected. If you like, there are 10 years of data concerning all these different things across three different ecological areas across Alberta. They actually sample in the south, the northeast, and the northwest. They don’t sample every year. It’s enough work that they pick one zone every year. Over ten years, you’ve actually visited these ecological areas three times.
The Chair: Very impressive.
Mr. Chow: It is something that Alberta can be immensely proud of. I really think the biodiversity monitoring institute is very unusual, and it’s one of a kind in Canada.
The Chair: In your presentations, you both did an excellent job of presenting what the situation is now and what you’re doing in regard to climate change in terms of applied research and implementation.
As you know, governments have basically two big toolkits to work with: One is regulatory, where we can say “thou shalt do this” or “thou shalt not do that.” The second one of course is the economic instruments toolkit. This would be such things as research funding or other policies to try and encourage appropriate behaviour or desired behaviour and to negate other behaviour that’s not so desired.
We will be making recommendations of course to the federal government. I know that multi-levels of government are involved in land use, and generally it would be the municipal and provincial levels most involved. However, in terms of economic instruments, the federal government is a major player potentially.
The question is what two things would each of you recommend in terms of looking at climate change and the impact on the landscape that we should make to the federal government as a result of the study?
Mr. Chow: Go ahead, that’s a big question.
Ms. Murray: You certainly get it from our point of view coming from the research community. I think there is an enormous amount of work on sustainability in agriculture and forestry. We have bits and pieces. We have the Biodiversity Monitoring Network, we have some of the other research that we’re doing to address areas of development and research to adaptation. However, we don’t necessarily have the big picture covered.
I talked about plant agriculture, animal agriculture, water, and forestry. They’re part of a very large system, and we need systems research. The biodiversity monitoring network is almost part of a systems research, but it is not focused necessarily on the questions that agriculture and forestry are needing to deal with.
I would say we need a continued commitment to sustainability research and long-term research. One of the things that we suffer from in all public funding of research is short timelines and the next sexy thing. We’re looking sometimes at four-year funding systems. I’m pretty sure that the new agriculture partnership is a five-year partnership. That is not long term when we’re talking about things like biodiversity monitoring or forestry. So we need to have a much longer term system that allows research to continue for many, many years.
Yesterday, I was at the University of Lethbridge talking to a researcher who is using 30-year averages from Environment Canada on data and has been able to evaluate the climate change and the increasing productive growing season based on 30-year averages from 1950 to today. That is a much longer term period of collecting data and understanding data and analyzing data than we generally have. If we’re going to address climate change, that is not a short-term exercise. We need commitments to long-term programs.
I guess that’s my big one.
Mr. Chow: Thanks for giving me the thinking time because that’s a very big question.
For me, we have to clearly define what we want as an outcome, and we haven’t necessarily done that well. What do we want as an outcome and then how can we march toward it. We run into this challenge with the research staff at InnoTech Alberta all the time. There’s lots of good short-term ideas, but are they going toward the outcome we want, and is it customized to the broad landscape that we have across Canada. There may be a different solution for each ecosystem that we have across the country.
That will be important. I think that will be the monitoring piece, things like ABMI because we have to know if we’re progressing toward our outcome, but it’s very important for us to define what that outcome is. What are we striving for? Then the technology and everything else follows behind. If we’re talking about all the new shiny technologies of artificial intelligence or machine learning, how does that help us deliver the outcomes for the country that we’re looking for?
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Starting from a definite goal for the future, I think that funding for researchers should be recurrent. It takes accountability, after a number of years, maybe two or three, to see if we are still moving toward the goal we want to achieve. Of course, while doing research, other things come up. Should we focus first on the objective, which is recurrent funding, accountability after a period determined by the researchers? Because I do not know anything about it and neither does the government. So it would be up to you to say, after two or three years, where we are going and if we are still moving in a straight line toward the goal.
[English]
Mr. Chow: I agree absolutely with your statement. Not only should we be funding research, we should be looking at what research we’re funding because to genuinely get those outcomes that we’re looking for across the country, it is not only at the early stage research. I’m guessing that somewhere along the line, investment will have to include agricultural producers or forestry companies or perhaps a mix of different industries because they can actually implement those outcomes and achieve that larger goal that we’re looking for.
The Chair: Terrific, thank you very much. We’re so pleased to have had you here.
(The committee adjourned.)