By David Dodge
The National Farmer’s Union (NFU) wants us to imagine a future with more local agriculture, dramatically reduced fertilizer use, high levels of soil health and grazing systems that help retain biodiversity and reduce emissions associated with livestock.
This vision is presented in “A Vision of a near-zero-emission farm and food system for Canada,” a new report by the NFU.
One of the report’s authors is Darrin Qualman who is no longer farming, but he still lives on a family farm just outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He is the director of climate crisis policy and action with the NFU.
The report paints a possible future in which farming is turned on its head away from a trajectory of record emissions, growing use of fertilizers, rising costs, small numbers of farmers and small margins for those farmers.
For the last 100 years, a blip in the 10,000 year history of farming, “we’ve pushed more and more energy into food-production systems,” says the report. These energy inputs are in the forms of machinery and fuels, pumped irrigation water, iron and steel, high-tech seeds, petrochemicals and especially energy -intensive fertilizers such as nitrogen, says the report.
Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions grew 23 per cent between 1990 and 2018 in Canada and amount to between eight and 10 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.
These emissions come from three big boxes: fuel (10-20%), livestock (30-40%) and fertilizers (30-40%), says Qualman.
You often hear good things about local, resilient food systems, but agriculture in Canada has been going in the opposite direction for many years. Processing plants are distantly located mega facilities which necessitates long transportation networks. The beef you eat may have been grown just outside your city, but it may have travelled long distances for processing and packaging and then back again to your local store.
“COVID has revealed how these very large, concentrated plants are real choke points and risk areas for the food system,” says Qualman. Indeed the site of the largest COVID outbreak in Canada was at a large meat processing plant near High River, Alberta. At least 950 staff at the plant tested positive.
Fertilizers – use less smarter
“The first thing we do is we stop using more and more fertilizers in Canada,” says Qualman. “Farmers have farmed for the better part of 10,000 years and for 9,900 of those years they didn’t affect the atmosphere or the climate.”
His point is farming doesn’t necessarily produce emissions, fuel and fertilizers do.
The NFU does have an idealistic vision for a rediscovered sustainable and resilient form of farming, but Qualman says this doesn’t mean abandoning all the big farms. Farmers need to use less fertilizer, use it more efficiently when it is used, and produce fertilizers “without a lot of CO2 emissions from the fertilizer factories.”
“We think that there are ways that we can pursue this, so that will maintain adequate yields, but at the same time, reduce the dependence on fertilizer.”
Fuel Efficiency – more local
This is an area that’s being grappled with these days. For long-haul trucking more trucks will be electric or hydrogen powered, says Qualman, but shortening supply chains and rebuilding local food economies can help too.
Farm equipment faces the same challenges. Can we make electric or hydrogen powered farm equipment? Qualman isn’t sure where this will land, and he clearly understands the challenge: “We’ve got 160 million acres of farmland in Canada and it’s going to be hard to farm that without tractors.”
Renewable fuels could also certainly help reduce emissions on the farm.
Livestock – more grasslands
The late and former Premier Ralph Klein of Alberta used to famously refer to “Cow farts.” But cows actually belch methane. There are no magic pill solutions for this, but Qualman says livestock and grazing animals have been around on earth for a long time and were once part of a sustainable system.
There are things that can be done. “We sometimes say that grazing livestock can be a climate problem. But that grazing system is really a climate solution and maintaining those grasslands and building those soils is a real climate solution too,” says Qualman.
Part of the answer is look at how much grassland we have in Canada. And then figure out what number of grazing animals would be best to maximize the health of the grazing land and size your livestock production that way.”
In the end this could mean less beef and higher quality beef that might cost a little more and provide better margins for farmers. Eating less beef isn’t a bad thing and producing fewer emissions from the beef being produced is a win win.
Green is the new black
At the beginning of the 20th century farmers began using plows and discs “And that really was the great liberation of carbon out of the soils and Western Canada, and much of North America,” says Qualman.
One of the things he says in the report over and over is that “in order to reduce emissions farmers need to get more of what they need from biology and less from industry.”
“We need more biodiversity in those fields. We need to keep those fields green and growing as much as possible, says Qualman. This means using cover crops, shoulder season crops and “we really need to look at how natural ecosystems work and see that as a bit of a model for agriculture.”
Farm and Farmer resilience
“We really understand that there has to be transformative change here, a really incredible change and it has to happen fairly quickly,” says Qualman.
And any move to build a climate friendly and resilient food system should bring resilience to farmers and farming too.
There are whole range of “pathologies in agriculture right now.” Farm debt in Canada reached $115 billion in 2020, more than that of many nations. Mid last century farmer’s margins were about 50 per cent in Canada. By 2005 farmers were in the red on average and today margins are between five and 10 per cent.
And as a consequence, “we’re losing farmers at a very rapid rate. We’ve lost two thirds of our young farmers just since 1991.” He says farming is heading for a demographic cliff.
A vision for Food Resilience
“Cities have existed for 5,000 years,” and “For 99 per cent of that time, most cities sourced their food from surrounding farmland–from their foodsheds.”
By refocusing on low-energy-use, low-emission food systems we can focus on local food production and processing.
The report envisions acquiring and repurposing a donut of land surrounding cities that is dedicated to local food production.
The small parcels of land would be available to young would-be farmers, retired people, new Canadians, greenhouse growers, small-flock livestock producers, herb growers, orchardists and vegetable producers.
Battery electric trucks would follow regular routes, picking up food for distribution to local processors, warehouses and markets.
Tax incentives, land trusts, low interest loans and markets supported by procurement help make the economics work at small scale.
Ideas like this, says the NFU increases the number of farmers, supports diverse production methods that can adapt to climate change and bring resilience through local food sourcing. The idea helps contain urban sprawl, involves more people in the food system and creates a “well-tended beautiful countryside.”
The effort is accompanied by disincentives for food emissions and encourages citizens to eat “in season” to reduce transport and urban planning support local food retail stores in more neighbourhoods.
It’s ideas like this that do indeed turn agriculture on its head, beginning to focus on quality, low emissions foods instead of “the prime directive for Canadian agriculture” – “maximizing exports.”
Lower exports are balanced somewhat by fewer imports the report suggests.
The report is not a prescription for agriculture to get to near-net-zero, but it does demonstrate possibilities that can play a role in transforming our current high input, high emissions, high-cost food system with low margins for farmers to one that uses fewer inputs, produces fewer emissions, has lower cost and higher margins and larger numbers of farmers.
The report is called “Imagine if…A Vision of a near-zero-emission farm and food system for Canada” and it’s available from the National Farmers Union website.