By Will Verboven Contributing Editor
Most folks involved in commercial production agriculture have already seen the relentless march of climate change (CC) ideology begin to affect their industry. It may not yet affect everyone in primary ag production, but it is all around us and certainly affects suppliers of every kind. It’s much more advanced in Western Europe, where the infamous European Union (EU) bureaucracy has inflicted absurd new green restrictions and regulations upon long-suffering farmers. Those EU regs got so bad that it resulted in waves of farmer tractor demonstrations across much of Europe. The protests were effective, and European governments have suspended implementation of the more absurd restrictions, but others remain.
We are not yet at the tractor protest stage in North America. However, environmental and politically correct restrictions have an insidious and incremental way of working their way into the ag production and processing sector. Up here in the Great White North, we already have an ever-rising carbon tax that affects the cost of crop and livestock production in one way or another. The Canadian government also proposes aspirational restrictions on fertilizer use and cattle methane to reduce emissions. Those aspirations will be driven by incentives and subsidies. Almost all of them are part of the mitigation process to reduce CO2 emissions to save the planet. However, trying to mitigate climate change through restrictions on ag emissions may be dooming millions to starvation now and in the near future.
Recently, a policy concepts paper authored by Al Mussell was released by Agri-Food Economic System Inc., an independent agriculture and food economic research organization located in Rockwood, Ontario. The paper is entitled “Climate Change Policy for Canadian Agriculture Should Refocus Policy on Adaptation.” It can be accessed at agrifoodecon.ca. The thrust of the study is that agriculture needs to adapt to CC by increasing our production to feed the world that will be more negatively affected by CC through severe food crop losses. That recommendation would be counter to present Canadian Liberal government’s ag emission reduction policy and aspirations. That policy was amplified by a senior ag department bureaucrat who asked, What would be the point of further ag production research if there was no planet left to save? Like most progressive-minded folks, they are convinced the world will end around 2030 without drastic emission reductions.
The policy paper points out that some aspirational fertilizer emission reduction ideas would actually reduce agricultural production. That’s a rather ominous situation when the world will be needing more food as a result of CC. That’s made even more concerning when Canada, along with the United States, is one of the few jurisdictions in the world that not only is a net food exporter but also has the potential to increase those exports even with CC.
It would seem common sense, even humanitarian, that considering Canada’s minuscule global emissions, we should adapt to increase food production to feed people worldwide when CC will devastate local food production. One could surmise that if global governments and extremist green groups’ ag emission mitigation aspirations are taken to their extremes to save the planet, all domestic livestock production would have to be eliminated to reduce global methane production. Crop production would have to be reduced to 16th-century organic peasant agriculture production levels. If that were to be global policy, hundreds of millions would promptly starve to death – but the planet could possibly be saved.
To dodge that humanitarian calamity, what would be best is to adapt agriculture to CC to at least prevent global starvation. But then CC may not quite be behaving everywhere as one might be led to believe. I cite local experience up here on the Canadian prairies.
About four years ago, I noted in a column that climate change (it was called global warming back then) had some benefits in increasing agricultural production in colder, frost-prone areas of Canada. The more obvious benefit was higher heat units, which could increase the geographic area of growing sun-loving corn and soybeans. Better yet, CC would extend frost-free days at both ends, which alone could increase most crop yields and quality. Both CC benefits would be advantageous to Alberta as they would expand corn-growing areas into north-central Alberta from the sunny south. It would also increase grain corn growing, which could replace most of the trainloads of such corn arriving from the U.S. Midwest destined for Alberta feedlots. Most corn grown in Alberta today is chopped up for silage for dairy farms and feedlots.
However, regardless of my enthusiasm for CC, according to the aforementioned recent study, the benefits have not happened much across the prairies over the past 10 years. That’s mostly because although there has been an increase in temperatures and frost-free days in other parts of Canada, it hasn’t changed much for the Canadian prairies over the same time period. Hence, the hope for more heat units and a significantly longer growing season has not yet come to fruition. From that aspect, it would seem climate change cannot be reliably depended upon evan when you want it!
