Published October 21, 2023

Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

Early October was a busy time for reports on the farm economy, with the National Farmers’ Union co-publishing an important and thoughtful report on the mental-health crisis in farming and the Royal Bank of Canada releasing a document titled A New Ag Deal.

It would be lovely, and very timely, to be able to tell you that this is a story of cause and effect, of problem named and problem solved. But if you’re a small or medium producer on a never-ending treadmill trying to make ends meet, there’s not a whole lot of hope in the deep thought emanating from Canada’s biggest bank.

Naming the root cause

The mental health report, a joint production of the Saskatchewan-based National Farmers’ Union and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, is titled Looking Upstream. Drawing on interviews and surveys with Canadian farmers and farm workers, it leaps over the surface signs of a rampaging mental-health crisis to get at the root cause.

“At the heart of the farmer mental-health crisis is pervasive economic uncertainty and precarity,” the union stated in a release. Yet, “therapeutic efforts remain focused on addressing the downstream impacts of the problem and not the underlying (upstream) causes of poor farmer mental health.”

In the words of some study participants:

“All of the risk of producing food is put on the farmers, while all of the protection and profits go to large corporations. It makes the hard work feel futile some days.”

“Farmers are on the front lines of climate change and it’s exhausting and traumatizing at times. In the B.C. context, we’ve experienced several years of intense pressure from wildfires, heat domes and flooding, all of which have taken an incredible toll on our farms and farmers.”

Strikingly, in contrast to a mental-health profession that mostly just focuses on “fixing” individuals, the report calls for policy action to deliver:

• Better economic stability for farmers and farm workers;

• More support to help farmers make the transition to sustainable farming practices;

• Expanding the federal goals for agriculture to include food sovereignty;

• Rebuilding rural infrastructure;

• Addressing discrimination and violence in the sector;

• Making more mental-health care available to farmers.

More pressure from above

While the report was in production, the Royal Bank was hard at work on its New Ag Deal, a nine-point plan to make Canada’s corporate food sector more competitive with its international peers. Those competitors “are laying the foundations for formidable climate-smart food supply chains backed by sizeable funding and bold policy measures,” the bank warns. And — you can close your eyes and script the next part by rote — Canadian investments (which is to say, Canadian taxpayer subsidies) are falling behind.

The RBC report, produced with the Arrell Food Institute and Boston Consulting Group, calls for new policies that treat soil as an asset class, methane reductions as a profit opportunity, supply chains as strategic drivers, farm technology and talent as future competitive advantages, and corporate consumers as drivers of market change. And it makes some important points:

• Done right, soil carbon credits can turn regenerative practices that restore the soil and boost productivity into a new revenue stream for farmers who adopt them.

• A database of farm climate practices would be a good step forward.

• Early adopters of low-carbon farming techniques should receive credit for their work and their leadership (though the words “regenerative” and “sustainable” are curiously absent from this recommendation).

• Procurement is indeed a powerful, essential tool to reshape markets and deliver faster, deeper carbon cuts.

But Darrin Qualman, the National Farmers’ Union’s director of climate crisis policy and action, sees a lot to worry about in an analysis that promises big things, with its allusion to transformative policies like the Green New Deal. The problems begin with what he casts as the RBC’s “ominous” language for monetizing soil carbon capture.

“It’s very ill-conceived,” Qualman said. “Soil is a lot of things, but it should probably never be an asset class. It should not be financialized based on market forces or the ability to capture profit.”

And the approach to methane capture relies on biodigesters that have been in development for 40 or 50 years, have seen only limited deployment, are too expensive for most farms to afford (hence, the call for public subsidies), and aren’t as useful for smaller, more distributed operations.

“What the report looks like it’s designed to do is to manage the numbers around emissions so that some of the largest corporations in the chain can make their emissions go away,” enabling mega-operations like Maple Leaf Foods to “tell their investors they’re reducing their emissions to net-zero,” Qualman warned.

All of which does exactly nothing to relieve the day-to-day pressure on farmers.

“That pressure comes from income shortfall, for sure, and it also comes from climate impacts,” he said.

And “the other thing that creates pressure is just this treadmill farmers are on to produce more each year, get bigger and bigger each year, and take on debt.”

Yet, the RBC report “seems to be completely compatible with the increasing size and growth of farm units and exponential growth in farm debt, which is a huge issue that you would think banks might want to deal with.”

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