Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis report generates media interest
Key conclusions include:
- The climate crisis is a threat to Canadian farms, but also an opportunity to re-orient our farms to become more integrated, life-sustaining and community-sustaining.
- The farm crisis and the climate crisis share many of the same causes, and many of the same solutions.
- The climate crisis will increasingly impact the ability of Canadian farms to produce food. If we fail to plan, we plan to fail.
- Priority must be placed on incentivizing low-input, low-emission agricultural approaches.
The Canadian Press and Alaska Highway News (December 11, 2019),
Alaska Highway News (December 11, 2019),
Manitoba Co-operator (December 12, 2019),
CBC – Edmonton (December 12, 2019),
Radio-Canada- Manitoba (December 12, 2019),
Manitoba Co-operator (December 12, 2019),
Manitoba Co-operator (December 12, 2019),
Manitoba Co-operator (December 12, 2019),
Radio Canada International (December 13, 2019),
AgCanada.com (December 13, 2019),
*Mention in Rabble.ca (December 11, 2019),
Yorkton This Week (December 14, 2019),
*Mention in The Chronicle Herald (December 17, 2019),
Introduction and Executive Summary
The farm crisis and the climate crisis share many of the same causes, and many of the same solutions.
6.4 degrees Celsius. That’s the amount of warming that may ravage many areas of Canada this century.
Unless we do something. This report outlines how farm families can contribute to doing something.
The climate crisis is real, unfolding rapidly, causing destruction, and accelerating. If we do not change course its effects will be devastating. Unless Canada and all other nations act rapidly to reduce emissions—to restructure our energy, manufacturing, transportation, communication, and food systems—we will drive temperatures upward so far, and destabilize the climate so much, that our societies and ecosystems will be massively damaged. Unless we act now to slash emissions, we will trigger or intensify droughts and famines, mass migrations, sea level rise that will submerge some island nations, economic decline or collapse, the loss of much of the planet’s rainforests and coral reefs, desertification, feedbacks that further accelerate warming, and the most rapid extinction event in 65 million years.(1)
Closer to home, farming and food production in many areas of Canada will be severely affected, negatively impacting the entire Canadian economy. This and more will transpire if we continue down the current path.
In addition to a climate crisis, we also have a farm crisis. Canadian farm debt has nearly doubled since 2000 and now stands at a record $106 billion. Over the last three decades, the agribusiness corporations that supply fertilizers, chemicals, machinery, fuels, technologies, services, credit, and other materials and services have captured 95% of all farm revenues, leaving farmers just 5%. Even during the relatively good times since 2007, the majority of farm family household income has had to come from off-farm work, taxpayer-funded support programs, and other non-farm sources.
High input costs, low margins and net incomes, and expensive land and machinery have led to an expulsion of farm families from the land, with one-third leaving in just the past generation. Worse still, young farmers—those under the age of 35—are being forced out at twice the rate of farmers overall; Canada has lost more than two-thirds of its young farmers since 1991. Unless Canadian agricultural policies are wholly restructured there may be just 100,000 farms left by mid-century and the sector may come to be dominated by huge operations. Family farms are being systematically destroyed by dysfunctional, extractive, agribusiness-controlled markets and ill-conceived and damaging government policies.
The preceding paragraphs paint a bleak picture—a grim future. But these worst-case scenarios do not have to come to pass. They will come to pass if farmers, other citizens, and our elected leaders do not act. But we have alternatives. There is time and there is good news. We can change course, restructure and redirect, and move toward solutions.
We can build a future that includes family farms, vibrant communities, and a habitable climate. And, for farmers and all Canadians who care about our food system, movement toward a better future begins with a key insight: the farm crisis and the climate crisis share many of the same causes, and many of the same solutions.
At the core of agricultural policies in Canada and many other nations is a focus on maximizing agri-food production and exports. But maximizing agricultural outputs has also led us to maximize agricultural inputs.
Canadian farmers have tripled nitrogen fertilizer use since 1980. They have doubled or tripled pesticide use since 1990. Farmers have been pushed to adopt a maximum-output, maximum-input production approach.
The result, however, is that over the past generation input suppliers have captured 95 cents out of every dollar farmers received from the markets. Fertilizer, chemical, fuel, machinery companies and banks have installed themselves as the primary beneficiaries of Canadian agricultural wealth creation. This unrelenting and aggressive wealth extraction threatens to drain and collapse the family farm sector by mid-century.
So, where’s the good news? It begins with the knowledge that a focus on high-output, high-input agriculture is the primary cause of the farm crisis and the primary cause of the increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from our farms and food-production systems. It begins with the realization that as we reduce farm input use we can increase net farm income and reduce GHG emissions. Here is a provocative
idea: farming does not produce greenhouse gas emissions; agricultural inputs produce greenhouse gas emissions. The emissions coming out of our farm and food systems are simply the downstream outputs of the petro-industrial inputs we push in. Push in millions of gallons of fossil fuels and they will come out as millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. Push in megatonnes of fertilizers and they will come out as megatonnes of nitrous oxide. As we have doubled and redoubled input use, we have doubled and redoubled the GHG emissions from agriculture.
The seemingly inescapable conclusion is this: any low-emission food-production system will be a low-input food production system. And as we change policies and approaches to reduce and optimize input use, farm incomes can rise. The solution to the farm crisis and the solution to the climate crisis are, to a large degree, the same: a decreased dependence on high-emission petro-industrial farm inputs and an increasing reliance on ecological cycles, biology, energy from the sun, and the knowledge, wisdom, and judgment of farm families on the land.
Two things happen when farmers become overdependent on petro-industrial inputs: emissions go up, and incomes go down.
In addition to a big-picture look at the causes of the farm and climate crises, this report also contains detailed plans for helping ease both—dozens of specific, concrete actions. It contains a catalogue of onfarm measures and government policies that can, as a package, reduce GHG emissions from Canadian farms by approximately 30% by 2030 and perhaps by 50% by 2050. These potential measures and policies include:
• Reimagining Canadian agriculture: rejecting current policies focused on maximizing exports and production, maximizing inputs, and minimizing the number of farmers; and substituting a new approach focused on sustainability, reducing inputs and attendant emissions, raising farm incomes, and increasing the number of farms and farmers.
• Diversifying our production approaches by supporting alternatives such as organic, holistic, and agroecological production systems.
• Increasing the efficiency of fertilizer production and use, maximizing natural sources of fertility, reducing fertilizer consumption, and providing alternatives to purchased inputs.
• Encouraging the use of cover crops, intercropping and multi-cropping, and enhanced rotations.
• Shifting, as much as possible, from fossil fuels to electricity, because electricity can be a low emission power source. This means that we need to look at electric farm machinery: trucks and smaller equipment, and also small and medium-sized tractors.
• Increasing the efficiency of all on-farm energy use and retrofitting homes and farm buildings.
• Maximizing on-farm renewable-energy production as well as locally and
cooperatively owned large-scale solar and wind power projects.
• Reducing food waste, minimizing over-processing and denutritionalization of food (corn puffs and sugar snacks) rethinking biofuels, and looking critically at bioenergy and biomaterials schemes.
• Minimizing transport distances and rejecting the senseless toing and froing of food, export-fixated agricultural policies, the destruction of local food systems, and the maximization of food miles.
• Shifting some land into set-aside programs, ecological reserves, and alternative land use systems (ALUS) and reversing the destruction of forests, tree bluffs, shelterbelts, and wetlands.
• Better managing manure, thus reducing emissions from that source.
• Rethinking cattle production systems in order to maximize the benefits (soil carbon building, healthy grassland ecosystems, sustainable mixed farms) while taking steps to deal with methane emissions.
• Minimizing the unnecessary and indefensible release of methane by the global oil-and-gas sector in order to make emissions space for cattle and other ruminants.
• Opening a conversation with farmers to consider how a carbon tax might be applied to agricultural inputs in a way that supports farm incomes; incentivizes a move toward low-input, low-emission approaches; financially rewards those who invest in emission-reduction technologies and retrofits; and helps speed a transition to sustainable production systems.
• Creating a Canadian Farm Resilience Administration (CFRA)—a super PFRA (Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration)—to help farmers protect soils, land, water, and our food-production capacities; support moves toward alternative land use, including wetland restoration and afforestation; and assist in the mobilization needed to meet our emission-reduction targets and stabilize our climate.
Farmers have a choice: take an active, lead role in discussions and implementation of emissions solutions, or cede control to others. Some people will make the case that agriculture is special—so important that it should be exempt from the need to cut emissions. But every sector of the economy will try to make that same case and promote the status quo.
Agriculture produces 12% of Canadian emissions. As our country works to cut its emissions by 30% or more by 2030 and to net zero by mid-century, agriculture, like other sectors, will have to make transformative changes. The physics of the atmospheric systems force upon us the realization that (agri)business as usual is not an option.
The policies and measures to reduce agricultural emissions summarized above and detailed below will raise concerns for many farm families. How will new approaches, government policies, taxes, and regulations impact their fragile financial positions? How can cash-strapped farmers find money to invest in new technologies and machinery? How can we transform and restructure agriculture when many of us are struggling just to stay afloat? The NFU does not discount these uncertainties and fears. The NFU is an organization of farm families. Its democratically-elected leaders are farmers—men, women, and youth who struggle every day with the many problems and worries that come with a life on the land. We do not underestimate the challenge. But the scale of the threat—ecological and economic devastation—means that rapid, aggressive action is far better than inaction. The transformations we have outlined in this report, and that we farm families must undertake in coming decades, will create risks. The NFU has drawn a roadmap intended to protect farm families, ecosystems, and future generations. That said, it is simply not possible to create a plan that transforms agriculture yet leaves it unchanged, that replaces large parts of our machinery stock but incurs no costs, or that spurs rapid change but creates no uncertainty or dislocation.
We have done our best to chart a course into the future, but our journey is not without perils and uncertainties. It is not without costs and sacrifices. The costs of the proposed actions, however, will be far lower than the cost of inaction or inadequate action—far lower than the costs of climate chaos and
scorched fields.
High-input agriculture is destroying the family farm and producing emissions that will destroy climate stability and economies and societies around the world. Low-input agriculture can free farmers from the profit-extracting embrace of corporate input suppliers, reduce costs, increase net farm incomes, and reduce emissions. At the heart of this report is an idea—a radical idea: Though a threat, the climate crisis is also an opportunity. It forces change upon us and this creates a chance—probably our last—to save the family farm. The climate crisis provides the opportunity and reason to partially unhook from the corporate input suppliers that are draining our farms and rural communities of their financial lifeblood and their populations. The National Farmers Union does not underestimate the climate risks we face or the uncertainties farm families must now endure, but we do want to say something that perhaps no other farm organization will say:
In this historical moment, as the physics of our atmosphere and climate system force us to reduce energy use and emissions, farm families have a chance, perhaps the last we will ever have, to break free from the corporations that extract our wealth, decimate our numbers, endanger our farms, in debt our futures, weaken our communities, and force our children to leave their farms.
Reducing input use, a key part of the solution to the climate crisis, is also the solution to the farm crisis.
We have known about climate change for decades. For example, more than three decades ago, in 1988, Canada hosted the world’s first large-scale climate conference that brought together scientists, experts, policymakers, elected officials, and the media. The World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere issued a final communique which stated that “humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” That same year governments and scientists came together to form the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen told a US congressional committee that climate change and global warming were already underway and that he was 99% certain that the cause was a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activities. More than 30 years later we have not only failed to act on this information, we have made the situation worse by increasing our emissions to record levels. We are in the fourth decade of the climate crisis. Nothing in this report should seem new.
Nor have the NFU and its farm family members only recently turned our attention to climate change. In a report to Canada’s Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry in February 2003—nearly 17 years ago—the NFU outlined the problem concisely:
We have constructed the most energy-inefficient food production and distribution system in human history. And each year, we increase the energy usage in, and greenhouse gas emissions from, our food system. Its energy-inefficiency (and inefficiencies in every other sector of our economy and society) now threatens to destabilize the natural systems upon which food production is based and
to dramatically reduce the amount of food available to Canadians and to people around the world.
Further, food production uncertainties resulting from human-induced climate change will manifest themselves at exactly the same time that humanity adds another three billion to its number. This combination of human-induced climate change, destabilized food production, water shortages, human population growth, and potential economic instability will strain, not only our ability to feed ourselves, but the very foundations of our civilizations. Climate change is a huge threat to Canada and other nations.
Human-induced climate change also raises profound ethical issues: the most damaging effects of climate change—famine and economic collapse—will fall predominantly on the poorest nations, while it is predominantly the richest ones that created the problem.
Finally, human-induced climate change threatens to unleash ecosystem loss and species extinction unparalleled in millennia.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of taking swift action to deal with human-induced climate change.
After 17 years of rising energy consumption and rising emissions from agriculture, it remains “impossible to overstate the importance of taking swift action to deal with human-induced climate change.”
Although transformative change to cut emissions and stabilize our climate brings risks, it also opens the way for rewards. The necessary changes ahead bring the possibility of refocusing our farm and food systems— away from the push to increase yields, production, exports, and trade and toward increasing farm incomes and the number of people on the land taking care of the soil, water, and other species. We are looking at a future wherein agriculture must increasingly re-merge with nature and culture to create a much more integrated, life-sustaining, and community-sustaining agroecological model of human food provision, nutrition, and health. So, in reading this report, do not imagine the current world with some emission slowering techno-tweaks or some solar-panel incentives. Imagine a transformed world. This report is an initial roadmap to begin to navigate that transformation.
(1) That extinction event has already begun and will be accelerated by climate change. See, for instance, G. Ceballos et al.,
"Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction," Science Advances 1, no. 5 (2015). |
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