L’affaire Louis Robert, 2020. Wood, natural dyes, ink. Dimensions 205 cm x 133.5 cm x 23 cm. Installation view, Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, Quebec. Photo courtesy www.ibghylemmens.com
By Nick Fonda
Local Journalism Initiative
There aren’t many agronomists who have a piece of artwork that carries their name, but Louis Robert is one.
“I was flabbergasted when my son told me that there was an exhibit at the Musée de la civilization in Quebec City and it included an artwork that was entitled L’affaire Louis Robert,” says the semi-retired agronomist. “The artists had previously invited me to see the sculpture. I couldn’t believe where it was being exhibited.”
The artwork consists of 128 pieces of wood of varied lengths. Half of the pieces are painted in a range of colours and half of the pieces are in natural wood of different hues. The blocks of wood are arranged in pairs with each pair consisting of a painted block and an unpainted block. The 64 pairs are arranged on three levels and are framed by a sturdy wooden structure. All the pairs are of uneven length. Sometimes the painted block is a little longer; sometimes it’s shorter. In all cases the difference in length is only very slight.
At first glance, the sculpture is enigmatic, mysterious, and unfathomable. If art is supposed to make you stop and reflect, then what is a viewer supposed to make of this?
The key to the artwork is its title, L’affaire Louis Robert. It is the experience he had that gives context to all those random sticks of wood and turns them into artwork.
They offer a visual depiction of a scientific study on the productivity of 64 commercial corn fields consisting of sections planted with seeds treated with neonicotinoids and adjacent sections planted with untreated seeds. The painted sticks represent the crop harvested from the treated seeds while the blocks in natural wood represent the control crop, from untreated seeds. The lengths of the blocks of wood corresponded to the crop yield in kilogram per hectare.
What is immediately obvious is that while the sticks vary in length, they are paired up in such a way that the sticks that make up a pair are of almost equal length.
What the sculpture is showing is that sometimes the pesticide increased the crop yield, and sometimes it didn’t. The difference in yield from treated versus untreaded seeds was, in scientific parlance, statistically negligible. A farmer might opt to use the pesticide on his fields but it might, or might not, help him get a marginally bigger crop.
The viewer of the artwork should also know that neonicotinoids, the chemicals used as pesticides, have a deadly effect on insects, birds, and other living organisms.
Louis Robert knew, by the time he was in Cegep, that biology was the field he wanted to work in. He began his university studies at Laval, but the following year changed course and enrolled at MacDonald College.
“I wasn’t sure what career to follow,” Louis says, “but as I looked around, biology seemed to have limited options. I envisaged agronomy as a form of applied biology. I saw the soil as the key to sustainable agriculture.”
After earning a Master’s degree from McGill University, he was hired, in 1989, as an agronomist by the Ministère de l’agriculture, des pêcheries, et de l’alimentation du Québec (MAPAQ). He was based in St-Hyacinthe and worked primarily with large-acreage crops such as corn, soy, and wheat.
“From the beginning, my job at MAPAQ was essentially communications,” Louis Robert explains. “At one time, MAPAQ offered consultation services to individual farmers. Because of budget cuts, that service was ended. Instead, MAPAQ began making information available through documentation and public meetings. This meant gathering and collating studies and scientific data to present the findings to farmers in practical terms. My job was to give farmers the information they needed to make informed decisions. Because it was my job at MAPAQ, over the years, I’ve written hundreds of articles and given hundreds of talks.”
One of the things he noticed was that MAPAQ itself was at times ignoring scientific research, even when it came from its own studies. Farmers were not necessarily being fully informed, especially with respect to the excessive use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Companies with vested interests sometimes had considerable say in the formulation of government policies.
“A major turning point came in 2017,” Louis says. “The government passed new legislation that offered whistleblowers protection from reprisal as long as they proceeded according to the norms that were set.”
“I acted according to the guidelines which had been set out,” he continues. “I spoke to my superiors. I asked for an internal review. Only after taking those steps did I start speaking to the press.”
At issue were the side effects of pesticides that made use of neonicotinoids. Pesticide manufacturers did not want it mentioned that neonicotinoids had devastating effects on the environment. They were pressuring scientists to stay mum on the topic.
In January of 2019, soon after going public, Louis Robert was fired by MAPAQ. In June of the same year, after the intervention of the Quebec Ombudsman, Louis Robert was rehired by MAPAQ.
“I was given the back pay I would have earned,” he says, “and I returned to my former position in St. Hyacinthe. I was strongly encouraged, including by my own union, to take a similar position in Granby, but I refused. Not taking up my old post would have felt like a defeat. I was not in the wrong. Everything I did was in conformity with the whistleblower legislation.”
Louis Robert’s situation was newsworthy and the English press as well as the French press gave his story considerable coverage. He was approached by a Quebec publisher, Éditions Multimondes, to write a book.
“It took about six months,” Louis notes. “It was an interesting exercise for me because I had been accumulating material for decades and the book forced me to bring it all together. I appreciated working with my editor who had me reappraise the way I structured parts of the book.”
Pour le bien de la terre was published in 2021. A slim volume of just under 150 pages, it makes the case that intense industrial agricultural practices are harming Quebec’s fertile soils. Among other things, the excess quantities of phosphate fertilizer being spread on farmland cause outbreaks of blue-green algae in our lakes and rivers.
One of Louis Robert’s concerns is the conflict of interests that agronomists sometimes face.
“There are about 3,300 agronomists in Quebec,” he says. “In MAPAQ alone there are about 130. Others work for the Union des Producteurs Agricole (UPA). Still others in much greater numbers are employed by the industries that cater to the agricultural community. Some are consultants to individual farmers. One of the problems we face is that some agronomists find themselves serving two masters—advising a farmer on the one hand and, at the same time, promoting products like pesticides and fertilizers.”
The conflict of interest problem might have been solved a few years ago when Louis Robert ran for president of the Order of Agronomists.
“I’ve been advocating for years that an agronomist should work for one entity at a time,” he says. “I ran on the promise to eliminate the potential for conflicts of interest. I lost by 15 votes.”
Today, Louis Robert is semi-retired. He left MAPAQ in 2022 but he continues to work as a consultant and speaker. Most recently, he addressed a group of about four dozen people in Bedford. His audience was made up largely of politicians and functionaries who came from Vermont and New York State as well as Quebec. All were there to consult on the problem of blue-green algae in Lake Champlain.
“Despite everything we know scientifically,” Louis Robert says, “we are still spreading too much phosphorus in our fields and using too many pesticides. Still, there’s room for optimism. Media attention and public sentiment can bring about change.”
As for the artwork, L’affaire Louis Robert, it was created by Marie Lou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy with the support of the Grantham Foundation which promotes the link between art and the environment. It is now housed at the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec in Quebec City.
