Mitchell Beer

Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

It shouldn’t be so complicated to seize the opportunity for a second “cash crop” on a farm that needs the income, in a rural community that is looking for an economic boost.

Especially when that opportunity also taps into a farmer’s baked-in interest in doing the right thing to replace fossil fuels and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are bringing us ever closer to runaway climate change.

As renewable energy developers look to rural areas to site new solar and wind projects, many jurisdictions are moving to protect prime farmland — as they should. But along the way, those necessary restrictions run the risk of freezing out agrivoltaics, a method of siting solar-electric panels (photovoltaics) on farms in a way that doesn’t impede cultivation, and in some cases can even improve growing conditions.

Seizing the moment

Most of Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the U.S. Northeast and Midwest in mid-June experienced a heat dome that generated a humidex of 45°C. So it’s hard not to mix the sense of possibility with the amped-up urgency of not being able to spend very many minutes outdoors without feeling the effects. I can’t imagine how I’d be coping right now if my job had me working outdoors. And yet, if you’re reading this, you’re probably preparing for another sweltering day of early summer heat and drought. (Unless conditions have tipped into flood.)

That’s all the more reason to pay attention to the news coverage on agrivoltaics that has been streaming in from multiple directions — from Albert, Ohio and India. One story about four years ago talked about hiring sheep to clear the brush around the solar panels. (In fact, the headline about pairing grazing sheep with solar arrays showed a little humour: “for mutal baaa-nefit,” it read.)

More recently, when the U.S. announced $2 billion in loans and loan guarantees for rural renewables earlier this year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took direct aim at concerns about the best land being overrun with solar and wind farms.

“We’re obviously encouraging use of non-prime farmland for purposes of renewable energy,” Vilsack said.

But that common-sense messaging is too often lost as legislators try to strike the right balance while responding to the needless but rising public opposition to renewable energy projects of all kinds.

In May, a new regulation in Ontario raised the prospect of restricting renewables on prime farmland — once again, without initially distinguishing between options that help farms or harm them, in a province that has been gleefully promoting urban sprawl into farmland and protected areas.

In June, regulators in Maine set out to protect “high-value agricultural soils” by slapping special restrictions on solar projects, but not urban development.

Quebec has an opportunity to get this right as the National Assembly works its way through Bill 69, a new piece of legislation that’s meant to speed up the development of new electricity projects and allow for more private production. Protecting farmland has to be a basic bottom line. But protecting farm economies can and should be on the agenda, as well.

‘Second cash crop’

Whatever form of renewable energy system a farm installs — whether the “right” local answer is a solar array, one or a few wind turbines, a run-of-river hydro system, a biodigester or several of the above — there are dual interests at play.

• The urgent need for faster, deeper carbon cuts, to prevent future climate harm and eventually begin drawing down the carbon, methane and NO2 pollution that is already bringing sustained drought, killer heatwaves, choking wildfire smoke and wacky weather to a farm operation near you;

• The opportunity to reduce your power bills, increase your self-reliance in a grid emergency and, if provincial regulations allow it, sell your surplus power back to the utility.

To look at it another way: Imagine a small farming town that has lost its food processing plant sometime before the pandemic. No one under 30 plans to stay, because they see no job prospects. No one over 30 thinks that’s a good idea.

In that setting, I can’t fathom why anyone would want to descend on that community for a good, earnest talk about climate change and its impacts. Not when the visitors know, the community knows, and the community knows that the visitors know that depopulation will kill the town before drought, flood or wildfire get the chance. There’s absolutely no call to kick people when they’re down. And absolutely no reason to expect anyone to appreciate it.

But what if that conversation begins, and maybe ends, with a second cash crop that will bring income, jobs, and local resilience into the community, without damaging the land that people have been stewarding for decades and generations?

If that shift in thinking led to a surge in rural demand for practical renewable energy opportunities, rather than the misinformation and anxiety we’ve been seeing in recent years, would we start to see provincial legislation and programs that set out to solve multiple problems at once, rather than selling farm communities short?

And if that question makes even the slightest bit of sense…how do we begin to find out?

Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

An unprecedented 15-year trend of land grabbing has doubled the global price of farmland and is squeezing farmers on all sides, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems concludes in a new report released this month.

Around the world, “farmers and rural communities are losing land access as economic and tenure security deteriorate — making small-holder agriculture increasingly untenable,” the organization stated in a summary of the 87-page report.

While powerful investors and big agri-business tighten their control over land, international panel’s report adds, some parts of the response to the climate and biodiversity crises are adding to the pressure. “Green grabs” for carbon offsets, large-scale nature conservation, “clean” fuel production, and critical mineral extraction are all opening up new opportunities to commoditize farmland.

The research focuses mostly on developing countries, but Saskatchewan organic farmer and panel member Nettie Wiebe was one of the contributing authors.

“Imagine trying to start a farm when 70-per-cent of farmland is already controlled by just 1 per cent of the largest farms — and when land prices have risen for 20 years in a row, like in North America,” Wiebe said. “That’s the stark reality young farmers face. Farmland is increasingly owned not by farmers, but by speculators, pension funds and big agri-businesses looking to cash in.”

“Instead of opening the floodgates to speculative capital, governments need to halt bogus ‘green grabs’ and invest in rural development, sustainable farming and community-led conservation,” added panel member Sofía Monsalve Suárez, secretary general of FIAN International, an international human rights organization working for the right to food and nutrition. “We’ve got to make serious changes to democratize land if we want to ensure a sustainable future for nature, food and rural communities.”

The summary materials accompanying the report list four “leverage points” to shift the dire picture the panel paints:

• Halting green grabs and taking speculative investment out of land markets;

• Setting up integrated governance systems for land, environment and food systems;

• Supporting collective ownership and innovative financing for farmers;

• Developing a “new social contract” and ringing in a “new generation of land and agrarian reforms.”

Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

The next threat to your ability to manage your own farm as you see fit may be looming as close as your nearest field or equipment shed. But help is on the way, as long as the Canadian Senate gets its act together.

A bill now making its way through Parliament would allow producers to override the digital locks on farm machinery that can stop them from making best use of equipment they have purchased from competing manufacturers. The locks prevent the computerized systems in the machines from “talking” to each other. Breaking the code can net you a hefty fine under the federal Copyright Act, CBC reported last month.

In other words, it’s a clear-cut case of equipment makers’ copyright over their software (and proprietary approach to their hardware) impeding farmers from mixing and matching the machinery that best suits their operations and their budget.

Interoperability, or the lack thereof, is not quite everyday language. But for better and for worse, it’s getting there. For computer users, it’s the power cord from a PC that won’t connect to a Mac. This is, more or less, the way CBC explained the issue for a mainly urban audience.

Years ago, toll road operators in the United States had to put in a monumental effort to coordinate the five or six different electronic toll systems in different regions of the country so that truckers and other long-distance drivers could navigate the country without filling their windshields with multiple transponders.

Now, the same issue is landing in farm country, with equipment manufacturers claiming they need the digital locks to protect their proprietary technology and prevent hacking. And, really, how can we not take them at their word? They couldn’t possibly be trying to lock in their customers to buying their products forever  – could they?

How interoperability affects farms

You would think that a conversation about digital locks and handshakes between technologies would belong in Silicon Valley. And on some level, you would be right. But in 2021, a policy analyst at Western Economic Diversification Canada looked into the issue from the perspective of farm implement manufacturers who were already facing an “accelerated lockdown” of the software on combines and tractors.

The policy analyst, Gordon Cherwoniak, was particularly concerned about a $4-billion Canadian farm equipment sector, two-thirds of it located on the Prairies, that included 64 companies in Quebec.

Cherwoniak’s 11-page paper called on federal and provincial governments to work together to address a problem that spans several policy areas, including copyright, competition, consumer protection labelling, privacy, environmental policy related to e-waste and contract law. But three years ago, he was already warning that “the pace of technological change and the high business costs they add create challenges for many (small and medium enterprises) and puts them at a disadvantage.”

He found that:

• Digital companies that reach a certain size have a business incentive to lock in customers by limiting interoperability and raising the cost of switching to a competing technology.

• Patent owners can control access to a technology standard and make it unavailable to entire markets or segments.

• On the other hand, interoperability “facilitates interaction between different digital applications and platforms, which contributes to ease of market entry, promotes overall competitiveness and strengthens innovation,” all things we say we want in Canadian agriculture policies and practices.

Parliament to the rescue?

It looks like our elected representatives are trying to do the right thing.

Bill C-294, a private member’s bill sponsored by Saskatchewan Conservative MP Jerry Patzer, passed third reading in the House of Commons nearly a year ago with unanimous support from other parties. It lays out limited conditions under which an individual can circumvent the technological protection measure on a piece of software to make it operable with another system.

It’s a minor miracle that the bill has travelled this far. Private member’s bills are only rarely adopted – in Parliament or in provincial legislatures. But the next test lies ahead. Before a bill becomes law, it must be adopted by both the House and the Senate. Bill C-294 received its first of three readings in the Senate on June 15, 2023. And since then – crickets.

Now, the clock is running. The next federal election is expected in 2025, and any pending legislation that isn’t passed by then will die on the order paper. This means that it will have to be reintroduced in the next Parliament and start the review process from scratch. Meanwhile, farmers will be left to scratch out what solutions they can with equipment manufacturers who are maybe a bit too eager to protect their patents and their markets.

It isn’t impossible that the Senators will get this done. But there are no guarantees.

I’ve been following another Senate bill, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act, over the two years since it was first introduced. It finally received some perfunctory attention last fall, then in mid-April. But for the most part, all it has taken is one hostile, recalcitrant committee chair to stall an essential piece of legislation in its tracks.

So we’ll see how things do with interoperability, copyright infringement, and farmers’ right and ability to direct their own operations. It’s a good start that, at least in the House of Commons, MPs of all political stripes voted in favour of common sense.

Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

Cereal farmers can increase yields by more than one-third, cut climate-busting nitrous oxide emissions by 39 per cent and improve their operations’ greenhouse gas balance by a mind-bending 88 per cent by diversifying traditional wheat and maize monocultures with cash crops and legumes, according to a six-year study just completed in China.

The study published in the journal Nature Communications is one answer to the relentless spin farmers have been seeing from the national fertilizer lobby, adding to the growing body of evidence – both in theory and practice – that shows how new cropping practices contribute to more profitable operations with healthier soils.

Cereal grains aren’t nearly the biggest part of Quebec’s farm sector. But cereal farming still accounted for 2,159 jobs and $616.1 million in wages in 2023, according to  Cereals Canada, while the wider value chain delivered 51,693 jobs and nearly $9 billion in economic impact.

Apply the overall conclusions of this study from more widely, by adapting the general approach to other farm sectors, and you only magnify the front-line value of a climate solution that goes to the heart of building stronger farm businesses and local economies.

Yields up, emissions down

The research team led by Xiaolin Yang, associate professor at Beijing’s China Agricultural University and conducted in the part of China known as the North China Plain, demonstrated the benefits of changing up a traditional cereal monoculture, adding sweet potato as a cash crop and peanuts and soybeans as legumes. In addition to the big gains in yield, reduced nitrous emissions, and greenhouse gas balance, adding legumes stimulated soil microbial activity and delivered a 45-per-cent gain in soil health, based on selected physiochemical and biological properties.

Some of the biggest gains showed up in subsoil stocks, down to a depth of 90 centimetres.

“The large-scale adoption of diversified cropping systems in the North China Plain could increase cereal production by 32 per cent when wheat–maize follows alternative crops in rotation, and farmer income by 20 per cent, while benefiting the environment,” the study states, “emphasizing the significance of crop diversification for long-term agricultural resilience and soil health.”

The study also paints a picture of what happens when farms try to boost output year after year without taking care of the basic systems that make it physically sustainable. Between 1986 and 2016, the authors say, China increased crop production by 74 per cent, at the expense of a more than three-fold increase in fertilizer use — and food-related climate pollution to match.

“The loss of soil fertility, which may go along with the intensification of crop production, further complicates food production and exposes it to climate risks and environmental health concerns,” they write.

By contrast, integrated farming practices “offer a range of food crops to meet consumer demand for plant-based, healthy food — an increasing dietary trend in high- and upper-middle-income countries — while providing other agricultural products such as animal feed, industrial fibre or multi-purpose biofuels.”

‘Social novelty’ meets a systems approach

The North China Plain researchers stressed a wider array of reasons to adopt better cropping practices. A diversified crop rotation “will add significant ‘social novelty’ to the challenge of bringing essential food nutrients to dining tables without adversely affecting soil health,” delivering benefits “far beyond the agricultural benefits of crop diversification that are broadly recognized worldwide.”

The study cites other studies from North America, Europe, Africa and China that show rotational diversification:

• Increasing crop yields;

• Reducing the impact of adverse weather on ecosystem productivity;

• Enhancing system robustness;

• Delivering a “substitutive interaction” with fertilizer use that increases yields with lower dependency on synthetic inputs.

All told, the researchers say, “cropping diversification offers a comprehensive systems’ approach to enhance agro-ecosystem productivity and adaptability to changing climates worldwide,” while boosting the basic economics the enable any farm to deliver anything at all.

Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

One day, generations from now, when we write the history of how humanity just managed to avert the calamity of runaway climate change, Canada’s National Farmers Union will be inscribed as one of the heroes.

That is because the NFU is one of the organizations that endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is a global campaign led by Canada’s brilliant and irrepressible Tzeporah Berman, an environment activist and writer. It has so far drawn the support of 11 small countries; 95 cities, provinces and states; 2,234 organizations of all kinds; and nearly 625,000 individuals.

At its convention last month in Ottawa, the NFU did everyone a massive favour by endorsing the non-proliferation treaty.

“Farmers know how to pull our weight,” former NFU vice-president Glenn Wright said in a release. “We work hard. We also know how to adapt to drought, floods, blizzards, plough winds and whatever Mother Nature serves up. We dig in and we persevere.”

But “overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases is taking us far away from ‘normal,’ ” he added. “Our climate will continue to accelerate away from normal until we stabilize our emissions by addressing our addiction to fossil fuels.”

The purpose of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is stated in its name. I have been a fan of the treaty campaign, including its tone and tactics, even though I have my doubts that it will achieve its literal goal. How will enough big-power countries sign on and adopt a formal treaty in the very short time we have available to wrestle climate change to the ground? Not when international negotiators at COP28 can’t even entertain an agenda item to decided how, when and whether they might want to talk about agriculture and food. (“COP28” is short for “28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

Toward the end of the first week of the 12-day negotiating marathon in Dubai earlier this month, a discussion on decarbonization and adaptation of the global food and agriculture system was deferred to follow-up discussions next June.

As the U.K.’s Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit stated: “Observers were left frustrated with a sense that blocking tactics have, in effect, killed talks on food for another year, at least.”

But at this year’s COP, more than ever before, there were signs that momentum is shifting in favour of the purpose of a non-proliferation treaty — to urgently stop fossil fuel expansion. That would mean phasing down and phasing out oil, gas and coal production and ending the trillions of dollars each year that governments are pouring into subsidies to fabulously profitable fossil fuel companies. Then shifting those dollars to sectors like agriculture that hold the keys to climate progress.

As The Advocate went to press, it wasn’t clear whether fossil fuel phase-out language would make it into the final declaration. But it’s moving up the queue. It’ll be back next year and the next. And it is 100-per-cent clear that the more than 100 countries and countless advocates who support the phase-out will keep at it until the job is done.

I’m absolutely certain that the very notion of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, not to mention the smart, compelling tactics the campaign has used, will be one of the driving influences that eventually make a fossil fuel phase-out a reality. And that every single endorsing organization will have played a central role in making it happen. And that will include Canada’s National Farmers Union.

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.”