It didn't take long for the usual suspects to slam supply management again. The Conservatives introduced a pretty clumsy bill pretending that it would allow Canada's competition bureau to oversee price differences between the same products sold in the U.S. and Canada. First it was Global news, then the National Post and the Globe, all added that if the government really wanted to ensure fair pricing it would get rid of supply management in dairy and poultry industries. Not so fast says Ottawa based trade consultant Peter Clark. Thanks to Derwin Clow for seeing this item that has a lot of hard information about how Europe and the U.S. in particular subsidize their farmers. What Clark doesn't say is that one big difference in Canada is that there are no additional cheques in the mail for dairy and poultry farmers, they get paid once from the marketplace. It would be nice if the national columnists would do a little more research.
Free trade in agriculture is a Holy Grail often espoused by those who do not understand the complexities of agricultural production or the extent of rules-breaking in global markets for farm products. It was not an accident that trade in agriculture was largely outside the GATT rules-based global trading system until 1994.
The brave experiment of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture has encountered considerable difficulty in building on initial progress. Key players are unwilling to adopt new disciplines. Add to this the fact that rules about subsidies and disciplines are written to accommodate the practices of the deep-pocketed subsidizers. Regional and Plurilateral Agreements cannot address these problems because they require multilateral solutions.
Even long-established free trade agreements are not immune to serious distortions resulting from the big vs. little game. Take, for example, the long running dispute over US Country of Origin Labelling (COOL) Rules. While it is difficult to argue against the desirability or legitimacy of providing consumer information (in this case, labelling) – this is not an unfettered right, particularly not when the workings of the US system under dispute are seen to adversely skew the market in favour of using domestic livestock at the expense of imported livestock. Canada and Mexico have experienced considerable disruption and damage to their exports of live swine and beef cattle due to the US measures. The dispute has been dragging on since 2009. The aggregate damage to Canadian beef cattle and hog producers already exceeds $2.5 billion.
The WTO has condemned the US COOL measure on three separate occasions. The most recent dispute settlement panel has rejected US arguments that their efforts to comply with initial losses were legitimate. This came as no surprise to those involved. The allegedly remedial measures introduced by Washington were worse than the flawed system they replaced.
On November 28, the US appealed this latest loss. This is a classic case of ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. Canada and Mexico are now threatening retaliation. This may be business as usual for Mexico, but it is not at all normal for Canada.
Negotiating market access in a world of such subsidies and subterfuge in farm policy is not easy. Japan is reluctant to engage in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks aimed at opening markets for sensitive products because Japanese farmers understand the dangers of competing head-on with US farmers who benefit from massive government subsidies. Indeed, Japan’s rice and dairy farmers are fully aware of the extent of US farm subsidies. It is a reality they cannot ignore.
Canada, too, is often under pressure about its import regimes for dairy and poultry products. There have been calls from restaurants for freer trade in dairy and poultry products (I can’t understand this – which restaurants face cross border competition?). Frankly, farm groups should not include interests dedicated to keeping food input costs as low as possible.
Some academics have a rather flawed view of free trade. Politicians, from former party leadership candidate Martha Hall Findlay to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, are beating the drum for freer trade with no apparent concern about fairness. Mr. Mulroney’s comments last week were a bit surprising. He was able to negotiate free trade with the US and then NAFTA without throwing Canadian dairy and poultry farmers under the bus. Before advocating unilateral concessions it behooves those trying to shape public opinion and negotiate strategies to research the facts and get them straight.
Let’s be clear – I support free trade but truly free trade requires must be made “free” by parties on both sides; it must also be fair – and this requires more than simply the removal of tariffs.
Many farm product markets are skewed by billions of dollars of ‘domestic support’ (i.e., subsidies), principally by the United States and the European Union. This brief on the EU’s CAP program shows the extent of direct payments to its farmers. The value of these direct payments is projected at €292.484 billion from 2014 to 2020. In two of the major exporting countries the benefits are particularly striking: in France the value of direct payments is €51.4 billion; in Germany, €35.5 billion.
Canadian pork producers will finally receive enhanced access to the EU under the recently-negotiated (though not yet active) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). It is limited access but much better than has been available to date. It is worth noting, however, that the EU continues to provide considerable support and market insulation for EU producers of pigmeat.
The latest version of the EU Dairy Policy (outlined here) contains numerous elements which provide market stability – including export refunds and market insulation – and clearly skew the market in favour of EU farmers. But, the problems of dairy trade are not unique or isolated to a few countries. US dairy farmers calculate that free trade in dairy with New Zealand would cost them billions of dollars a year.
Canada has tariff rate quotas for dairy products, as do 29 other WTO members, including the United States and the European Union. That is 57 countries in all. Canada imports 8% of its dairy consumption, the US about 4% and the EU about 2%.
The United States does not come to the negotiating table with clean hands on a number of farm products. Sugar is a constant source of problems (though Canada also shelters sugar refiners). And, Washington has decided to buy its way out of its WTO sins on cotton instead of respecting the rules.
The US has dumped and subsidized its way to dairy exports success. The graph below compares US costs of production for milk with farm gate prices for milk. Since the WTO Agreements entered into force, the US Farm Gate price for milk has never been above its cost of production. The average shortfall has been $4.57 centum weight (cwt) ranging from a low of $1.42 in 2007 to a high of $9.80 in 2009.
Dairy farmers in the US are compensated for these shortfalls – i.e., for the difference between the farm gate price and the cost of production – through ‘mailbox’ programs like MILC (Milk Income Loss Contract). US dairy farmers are also entitled to risk management insurance – via the Dairy Margin Protection Program and the Dairy Livestock Gross Margin programs – though it would be more accurate to refer to these as risk eliminationinsurance. These programs provide insurance which is donated outright or subsidized by USDA. They have given dairy farmers $4.00 per cwt or about 20% of the average cost of production over the past 19 years – without payment of any premium. The next $4.00 per cwt does require a premium but it is shared with/subsidized by USDA.
The US system provides dairy processors with below cost of production milk, which makes their prices more competitive in export markets. US dairy exports are dumped and or subsidized. While the US may defend the situation claiming that the purchase prices for milk by processors are actual market prices, the only way that US dairy farmers can sell at a loss, as they have over nearly 20 years, is for the government to subsidize and offset the losses.
Subsidization has no place in a free trade equation. It is not fair trade.
Peter Clark, a former Canadian trade negotiator, is president of Grey, Clark, Shih and Associates Ltd., an Ottawa-based international trade consultancy. He is a frequent media commentator and appears regularly before Parliamentary Committees, analyzing trade and commercial policy issues.
I'd been wanting to write about the Buddhist monks from Taiwan for quite a while. Getting information hasn't been easy, not necessarily because the monks are trying to hide anything, but they're very careful about how the public perceives them. There's also a very real language barrier. Then I heard the Amish were also looking at coming to PEI, so I thought I'd write about both. This was a column that followed... and I'm including a second news stories not because I'm concerned about the farming practices of the Amish but because it shows that even farming practices we assume to be "right" can have uninended consequences.
Our New Neighbours
It may not happen for another year, but when you see a
hitching post at the Tim Hortons in Montague, Souris or Kensington, you’ll know
that PEI is the new home for some young Amish families. The agriculture economy
has been very tough on farm families over the last fifteen years, and rural
numbers continue to decline, but similar to what happened in the 1960’s and
early ‘70’s, as PEI farmers get out, some willingly, others reluctantly, there
are those who see opportunities to move in. It was “back to the landers”, and Dutch tobacco, dairy and
potato farmers and their families back then. Now it’s Buddhist monks from
Taiwan, and possibly young Amish farm families from Ontario.
For the Amish it’s relatively cheap farmland, roads with
good shoulders for those horse and buggies, and, according to someone who
knows, yes even the Amish love Tim Hortons.There was a period in the 1970’s when farms in PEI’s potato
belt around Kensington were considered the most valuable in the country.That changed as valuable seed potato
markets were lost, and farmers were forced to switch to producing for the much
less profitable french fry business. At the same time farmland around Amish and
Mennonite communities in Ontario has shot up in value because of urban
expansion,and profitable corn and
soybean markets.Taken together
PEI’s farmland is seen as a bargain, and gives young Amish families a chance to
farm.
The story is a little more complicated, and difficult to get
at, with the Buddhist monks and their supporters from Taiwan.Taiwan is a highly industrialized,
wealthy, capitalist country that exists precariously close to China, it’s long
time ideological enemy. Buddhists in Taiwan know full well the violent
repression of Buddhism in Tibet by the Chinese, and this particular group
decided it was important to establish a home somewhere else in the world. The spiritual leader of the Moonlight
Foundation, a woman named Jin, had been moved by the selfless medical work of
Canadian Dr. Norman Bethune during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1940’s,
so Canada seemed like a good place to look.Why rural eastern PEI? The question is often answered:
“Because it’s quiet”. In other words, the monks need distance from the big city
to practice the meditation that’s so important to their beliefs.It’s probably fair to say that just
like the Amish, the monks were attracted to relatively cheap farmland,but, unlike the Amish, there was also a
need for modern communication and transportation links, and the ability to move
containers of soybean by sea back to Taiwan for processing.
Let’s be honest. It’s been unnerving for some to see saffron
robed young men tilling and weeding vegetable and flower beds in Heatherdale and Little Sands, large
teaching facilities being built, and the purchase of thousands of acres of land
in Eastern PEI by the organization. How many farms does the group expect to buy? What’s it going
to do with the many farms it’s already purchased? These are questions still looking for answers. The group says
this about its intentions: “The main goal of the Foundation is to bring
happiness to all beings while promoting understanding and social harmony among
different cultures.”Among other
activities it has created sanctuaries for farm animals including horses that
are no longer wanted, and “promotes organic and natural farming to preserve and
restore natural resources, including planting trees”.Another stated goal is to relieve poverty, so don’t be
surprised if there’s another large offering of winter coats to the Salvation
Army this winter. I could think of worse neighbours.
The organization’s ability to pay cash for everything from
farmland, to construction projects, to a dedicated high speed internet line to
Little Sands, to winter tires, comes from sources familiar to any church, it’s lay
members. Again Taiwan is a wealthy country, and well heeled business people
view financial support of the foundation as contributing to the spiritual well
being of themselves and others. There is also a business component to the
organization which operates more than 70 supermarkets in Taiwan.It has to import a huge percentage of
the food these sell. There was a
delegation including the premier that went to Taiwan a few months ago to look
for opportunities to supply this market. There has also been some discussion of
operating a soybean processing plant here on PEI. All of these could provide solid profitable markets for local
farmers.
And don’t forget that no one is forcing PEI farmers to sell, in fact for
many it’s been a relief to find a willing buyer.There’s also no question that both of these groups will
operate outsidethe conventional
farm economy, the Amish looking for simplicity, and self sufficiency, the
Taiwanese monks are committed to organic farming “to heal people and the
earth.” And they do something
else. A PEI farm family who’d faced tough times was talking business with an
agent for the monks. The farmers said they felt respected, that they were doing
something of value, something they hadn’t felt from the conventional food
marketing system, and even other Islanders. The monks
still have to win the trust of many of their neighbours, but for me, that one
action was a good start.
The Amish: Makers of jam, fine cabinetry, and polluted rivers
by Rona Kobell
Many Amish people have denounced the Discovery Channel’s Amish Mafia TV show, now entering its fourth season, in part because the contrived show
has brought them unwanted attention from law enforcement. It furthered a
perception they would rather not have out there — that behind the Little House on the Prairie façade lurks a seedy underground rife with drug use, exorcisms, and counterfeit homemade goods.
But the environmental cops have always been much more interested in
what was underground in the most literal sense — the pollution seeping
into waterways from manure in the soil.
In late 2009, federal agents swooped into a collection of Amish farms
in a quiet area of Lancaster County, Pa., where they found troubling
evidence of water pollution: High concentrations of nitrates and E. coli
bacteria in the water wells, loose manure not properly stored in tanks
or sheds, and few livestock fences to keep cows from standing (and
presumably defecating) in streams.
EPA inspectors found violations on 85 percent of the Amish farms.
They warned the farmers that about half of their drinking water was
contaminated with pathogens, and that they needed plans to bring their
farms into the modern age of pollution control and conservation.
It’s not like some of the Amish farmers weren’t aware of these
problems. One of them had just installed a water-treatment system
because he believed the pollution caused his cows to birth dead calves.
And the wider damage to the Chesapeake has been well-reported in the
region: Excess manure from farms leads to algae blooms that contribute
to large swaths of “dead zones,” where crabs and fish are so deprived of
oxygen that they can’t survive.
Nevertheless, Amish farmers today remember the Watson Run Sting as a watershed moment, when they suddenly had to deal with an entity they go out of their way to avoid: the government.
“Plain Sect”
Amish eschew any kind of government intervention. They consider
themselves sovereign. They neither pay into social security and
government health benefits nor receive them. They speak their own
language and attend their own schools. They follow their own scriptures
and codes. So it’s not surprising that some of their farms wouldn’t be
up to EPA’s codes.
But while they don’t contribute to government benefits, they continue
to be a major contributor to the pollution flowing through the
Chesapeake Bay. Agriculture is the largest source of pollution in the
Chesapeake, which is fed by a 64,000-square-mile watershed that includes
parts of six states and Washington, D.C. The EPA has identified three
pollution “hot spots,” where its scientists have concluded a
disproportionate amount of pollution is coming relative to size: the
Shenandoah Valley, the Delmarva Peninsula, and the Amish’s home base in
Lancaster County.
The Shenandoah Valley and the Delmarva Peninsula include many concentrated animal feeding operations
— large-scale farms in laymen’s language — with thousands of chickens
or cows. They require a federal permit and a great deal of oversight. By
contrast, the Lancaster County farms tend to be small, with a few dozen
head of milk cows, heifers, or horses on each. And yet they are
prodigious polluters. In 2007, Lancaster County generated 61 million
pounds of manure. That is six times more than what other counties
generated, according to The New York Times.
Often, state officials blame each other for the bay’s pollution;
Maryland is fond of pointing a finger at Pennsylvania for dumping its
sediment downstream; Virginia officials are miffed that Maryland leaders
try to take all the credit for restoration work; and West Virginia’s
own attorney general is suing the EPA over its mandatory Chesapeake Bay
Total Maximum Daily Load. But in the case of Watson’s Run, there is no
one else to blame but the farmers.
“Watson Run is a headwater stream without any influence of any
upstream water bodies,” the EPA Summary Paper reads. “Therefore, stream
impairments in Watson Run are not being caused by upstream sources.”
The agency is now requiring farmers to follow the state laws already
in place and develop plans to control sediment, store manure, and
dispose of dead animals. Most farmers know they have to take these steps
— not just because the EPA says so, but because their land and water
will be healthier if they do. So perhaps it’s no surprise that after
Watson Run, more than a few Amish farmers have been willing to lose a
little of their religion over the government-aid question.
The U.S. Farm Bill and state programs offer millions of dollars in
assistance to Chesapeake Bay farmers every year for practices that
reduce pollution from farms. They include fencing cattle from streams,
retrofitting barns to collect stormwater, taking land out of production
to plant forested buffers along streams, and building manure storage
facilities. None are cheap. A manure storage facility alone can cost up
to $150,000. Add to that the planning, accounting, and monitoring of
federal funds, and Amish farmers are looking at a long and involved
relationship with government officialsm, whether they like it or not.
Plus, they’re starting from behind. The horse-drawn plow looks
pastoral against the wheat fields, but it tears up the soil, promotes
erosion, and does not keep the manure where it should be — where the
plants are. While more sophisticated farmers might need a little
assistance, the Plain Sect farmers, in many cases, are starting from a
place well in the past.
Still, more money is on the way: The National Fish and Wildlife
Foundation just announced nearly $400,000 in grants to the Lancaster
Farmland Trust to help clean up the Pequea Creek watershed, which
includes Watson Run.
One Amish farmer, Sam Zook, who has a 50-head dairy farm in the
Strasburg area of Lancaster County, even invited reporters on a tour of
his new $150,000 manure storage shed. Interviews were OK, so long as no
one took photographs of him. The Amish believe taking photos of their
faces violates scripture.
Zook decided to accept state help because he couldn’t have afforded
the project on his own. He said he was less worried about government
fines and regulation than about what he could see for himself — that the
cows’ waste was flowing into a waterway on his farm.
“I realized every time it rained, it rained on my barnyard, and it
flushed my barnyard down to the stream, and it kind of bothered me,”
Zook said.
At some point, it may come to pass that farmers won’t have a choice
in accepting tougher regulations; the EPA has put the Chesapeake Bay on a
pollution diet, and many of the reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus
must come from agriculture.
Farmers can implement practices on their own, but not many of them
have an extra $150,000 for a manure-storage shed, or even the smaller
amounts required to put in forested buffer strips and grass waterways.
And farmers may be experts in how soybeans grow, but they don’t
necessarily know how to design and build the state-of-the-art
infrastructure needed to control pollution. The government has people
who can do that, and in many cases, they’ll do it for free or low-cost.
Lamonte Garber, a watershed restoration manager for the nonprofit
Stroud Water Research Center who has spent nearly two decades working
with Amish farmers, said progress is moving forward, albeit at
horse-and-buggy pace.
“It alerted farmers in the area, including Amish farmers, that there
was the potential of door-to-door visits and review of plans of
facilities,” Garber said of Watson Run. “It was a significant message.”
I was trying to make a point about the importance of organic matter, and crop rotations, but had to backtrack on some of it.
Fighting Wireworm May Save the Potato Industry
Wireworms are nothing but trouble for farmers. Voracious
worms that feast on grain , fruit,grasses, root crops, and whatever else farmers have planted. The damage
is usually enough to keep produce from being acceptable on blemish free
supermarket shelves. Wireworms
have forced some families to quit farming, costing others thousands of
dollars.Depending on the species
they emerge as click beetles every 2 to 5 years and can fly somewhere else to
do extend their damage. So Petrie have you lost your mind??
It’s how farmers are being forced to fight wireworm that I
find interesting, maybe hopeful.In Canada Thimet is the only insecticide that works, but after several
extensions it’s supposed to lose its registration in 2015, with nothing in the
pipeline to replace it.So farmers
are being forced to look at crop rotations with brown mustard and buckwheat,
which have proven to be quite an effective way to control wireworm numbers. The
crops are cut and plowed under, not harvested, and release bio-toxins that kill
and control wireworm populations. Here’s the thing. Thinking about crop rotations as a
way to improve the quality of the “money maker” crop in the second, third or fourth year ofa rotation is a welcome return to how
farmers used tothink about crop
rotations.More recently, because
farmers have been paid so poorly for table and processing potatoes, the second
and third years of a rotation have to be money makers too, so soybeans, and
corn have become popular rotation crops. They are certainly more valuable than
barley or hay, but they’re harvested late with little chance for fall cover
crops, and do little to improve organic matter levelsin the soil. And I can’t think of anything that’s more
important to reversing the negative cycle of nitrate and pesticide leaching,
anoxic rivers,sedimentation, and
now the growing need for irrigation,than improving soil quality. And that just won’t happen unless crop rotation
is taken seriously, and rotation crops are viewed as ways of improving soil
structure and health,not of
keeping farmers from going bankrupt.
I had the privilegeof interviewing many of the old hands in the potato industry, the movers
and leaders through the 60’s, 70’s and 1980’s (the videos can be seen on the
Youtube channel of the PEI Potato Board). They all worry about the brutal economics in the potato
industry, prices they’d seen in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s while the cost of
production has skyrocketed. Many worry about the shortcuts farmers have been
forced to take to survive, the growth in farm size as farmers chase economies
of scale. All worry about the future of the industry.Several spoke passionately aboutthe crop rotations that worked for them. Yes, they’d say,there would be a lot of sod to wrestle
with in the potatoes grown after a hay crop, but you had to do it to keep the
soil healthy.Some talked about
the importance of keeping cattle to have the manure to put back on the
land.All accepted that if you
could break even on a rotation crop, generate a little cash at the elevators
delivering grain,that was fine,
because it was the potatoes that had to pay the bills,and quality and yield came from
good soils.These guys know what
they’re talking about.
I’m not saying this is an issue on every farm, and these
concerns are hardly new. The latest came from the group looking at the series
of fishkills in Barclay’s Brook in West Prince:
“The Action Committee found that soil in some land
backing onto the Barclay Brook has low
organic matter levels as a result of intensive farm
management practices leading to a greater
likelihood of soil erosion and increased surface
runoff. The Action Committee understands
similar circumstances probably occur at locations
throughout the province making watercourses more
vulnerable to contaminated surface runoff.”
I really wish wireworm wasn’t the reason for
farmers to think again about the proper use of crop rotations. Unfortunately
wireworm is particularly fond of grass which should be an important part of
rebuilding soil organic levels,but mustard and buckwheat are both good sources of organic matter
too.All of this requires more
research, some regulatory backbone to enforce crop rotation rules (including
common sense and flexibility, increasing organic matter should be the
yardstick), and big buyers like Cavendish Farms not countingon rotation crops to keep farmers
solvent. They’re needed to rebuild
soil quality, not backstop cheap potatoes.
Fessing Up
I have to confess to having a bad attitude towards corn, not
the sweet stuff we get to enjoy for a couple of monthes in the summer, but the
grain corn grown for livestock feed and increasingly for dozens of industrial
uses like ethanol. It started in the 1970’s when I’d done some reporting on
atrazine, a herbicide widely used with corn at the time,one of those endocrine disrupters
that’s become the most persistent contaminant in rural well water in the United
States.Atrazine was banned in
Europe a decade ago. Corn is also
linked to the huge change in U.S. farm policy in the 1970’s that shifted the
government’s role of maintaining stable commodity prices by buying up
surpluses, and releasing holdings during shortages, to subsidizing production
of certain commodities like corn and soybeans, and Earl Butz’s famous order to
U.S. farmers to “plant fence post to fence post.” All of this had a huge impact on Maritime livestock producers
who couldn’t produce feedgrains as cheaply as the U.S. mid-west, and Western
Canada.More recently my attitude
towards corn got worse when it became the base commodity to produce
ethanol.Corn is a starch that has
to be “cooked” first to produce the sugars that can be distilled into alcohol,
so it’s greenhouse gas advantage is negligible. Sugar beets, sugar cane, etc
are better candidates to do this.I
then let my corn bias show in the last column when I presented it as a poor
rotation crop for farmers. I’m here to acknowledge it doesn’t have to be.
When I moved to PEI in the late 1970’s I was able to let
corn go. There was very little grown here because the season and heat units
needed to produce reliable harvests just weren’t available on the Island. The
climate hasn’t changed much but there are now shorter season varieties giving
PEI farmers a chance to produce grain corn, and a drive around the country is
ample evidence that many farmers are doing just that. It’s still a little risky
in the Fall, not so much that the corn won’t mature, but whether farmers can
harvest at the right moisture level to allow it to store properly.Drying costs are high, and soybeans
often take priority for drying at the grain elevators.
The corn or maise plant itself is interesting and unusual.
Scientists call it a “C4”, a small group of plants that are more efficient at
photosynthesis, grab more CO2 out of the air, can better withstand dry
conditions and heat, and under normal conditions produce more plant material
than grasses and other small grains.And something else that’s worth noting, most of the corn grown now is
GMO “round-up ready” which means glyphosphateis used as a herbicide rather than the more potentially
dangerous atrazine.
Most importantly (and what I failed to acknowledge) is that
corn can add a lot of organic matter to the soil.Many farmers harvest just the cob leaving the rest of the
plant (what’s called the stover) available to be disked back in, or left as a
cover through the winter. A local grain corn grower in eastern PEI where there
are sandier soils has seen organic levels improved after years of growing
potatoes. Some farmers harvest the
whole plant as silage, but they’re almost always livestock producers with
manure to put back on the land.
And there’s one other important role that corn and soybeans are
playing on PEI.They’ve given
farmers other cash crop choices than potatoes and that could be increasingly
important in the future. The demand for potatoes, both in processing and table
markets is falling and farmers need to make smart decisions. Ignoring market
trends, planting the same as always and hoping a market will be found is not a
proven path to financial success, quite the opposite in fact. An over supplied
potato market is nothing but financial misery. Of course corn and soybeans are commodities too, and PEI
farmers remain price takers. The price outlook for corn is not good right now
with bumper crops coming off U.S. farms.
There’s one other wrinkle when it comes to corn here. There
was a PEI court case that had to decide whether corn is a row crop as defined under
the Crop Rotation Act. The judge ruled it isn’t but should be seen as a “grain”
crop. That means it could be more
widely used in a potato rotation even with increased enforcement. I’ll now keep
a more open mind to that possibility.
You could hear Ed Rice trying to find the balance when he was asked about concerns for Charlottetown's water supply now that its new well field is out there in farming country. Yes it's a concern, but no this latest fish kill isn't a risk, but yes it's something we'll pay attention to in the future. The good people of Miltonvale have their own worries. They've hired a local watershed group to monitor water use by Charlottetown so they don't end with dry streams or wells like what's happened in the Winter River watershed.
It was one of Ed Rice's comments that caught my ear. He was being pressed about recent efforts to stop the use of pesticides on PEI. He cautioned that homeowners use many of the same pesticides as farmers. I thought that was a courageous thing for him to say. The easy thing for a politician, particularly one from an urban community, and one who's taken on responsibility for the quality and supply of water for Charlottetown would have been to say he'd welcome the move. He didn't and I respect that.
I've written and reported on pesticide issues for many many years, and I'm sure I'm as stuck in my own beliefs as anyone else. For what it's worth here's some of what I believe, and I'm still trying to learn:
1. I'm not trying to be stupid or hard headed, but I'm not sure what a "pesticide-free" PEI really means. I think Stewart Hill has got it right. He taught ecological agriculture at MacDonald College outside Montreal for decades. I had invited him to lecture a class I was teaching at Carleton University in the mid 1970's. I was also an "organic" market gardener at the time (see earlier post). He thinks pesticides have been and always will be used in agriculture, the question is which ones and how they're used. I had asked him about using captan, a fairly toxic fungicide, on seeds planted early in the Spring when it's cold and wet. He said if it's necessary to get the seeds to germinate and grow, he had no problem with that. His view was that as long as farmers made the effort to truly understand the pests or diseases they're fighting, and then determined the product or action that would have the least impact on the environment, then that's what they should do. And he's still telling audiences and students that there are examples where a targeted synthetic pesticide is better to use than a broad spectrum organic insecticide which kills every bug. I had flea beetles chewing up broccoli and cauliflower seedlings, I'd lost dozens in the last ten days. I hand picked, sprayed water, etc. Finally I dragged out some rotenone dust to kill them off. It was that or not having any brocolli in the freezer. Did I use a pesticide? Did I also kill beneficial insects? Yup. And if I was doing this on a commercial basis the problem would be bigger, and a solution much more necessary.
2. Organic farmers use pesticides too, and some like Kocide and rotenone, kill fish as efficiently as the fungicides and insectcides used in conventional agriculture. The difference is that organic farmers manage their soils much more effectively, longer rotations, high organic levels, so they're much, much less risk. So preventing fish kills isn't just as an issue of "going organic", but making sure that pesticides, all pesticides, are kept out of waterways.
3. People's fear and anger is really directed at potato farming. I think there was a great opportunity missed in the mid 1990's as the industry expanded to supply the new french fry plants (now plant after Mccain announced it's leaving) that the government and many in the farming community resisted the common sense recommendations coming out of Elmer MacDonald's Roundtable report: the need for proper buffer zones, using organic matter as a measure of sustainable farming practices, restrictions on row cropping on sloping land, proper crop rotations, and so on. We've waited almost twenty years for some of these to be implemented, and are still waiting on others. Would it have prevented fish kills, dead zones in rivers, nitrates in wells? I don't know. I think it would have made these problems occasional, and manageable. Now they're the expected, and that makes it much more difficult for politicians and farm leaders to create confidence that they know what they're doing. That's when joining the "pesticide free" team seems like the only answer. And for what it's worth, don't forget the dozens of watersheds where fish still thrive even after heavy rains, and don't be surprised if the cause of the North River fish kill wasn't a potato field but something else. And if that's the case, no that doesn't mean everything is OK.
4. Two of the most condemned pesticides these days are neonicitinoids, and glyphosphate (our old pal Round-up), and for good reason. Here's the but. It's not as if either were introduced into a Garden of Eden that's now been poisoned. When both were initially introduced they were replacing herbicides and insecticides that were far more damaging to the environment, and people, some of the old World War Two nerve agents, and herbicides like agent orange and paraquat. The problem with both (and I've written a fair amount on this before) is how they're used. GMO roundup ready crops have lead to millions of acres of farmland saturated with glyphosphate, and the same issue with the neonics, coating grain and corn seed. It's estimated that more than 80% of the neonics being used every year never get close to a real pest, but hurt beneficials like bees.
And here's a well written article from this week on what happens when pesticides aren't used properly. The really aggravating thing for me is that the pesticide companies never seem to have to answer for how their products are used, and then they benefit again when they're no longer effective.
Invader Batters Rural America, Shrugging Off Herbicides
Photo
Scott Harper, the weed expert
at Harper Brothers Farms in Indiana, inspected a soybean field for
invasive, herbicide-resistant weeds known as palmers.Credit
Daniel Acker for The New York Times WHEATFIELD,
Ind. — The Terminator — that relentless, seemingly indestructible
villain of the 1980s action movie — is back. And he is living amid the
soybeans at Harper Brothers Farms.
About
100 miles northwest of Indianapolis, amid 8,000 lush acres farmed by
Dave Harper, his brother Mike and their sons, the Arnold Schwarzenegger
of weeds refuses to die. Three growing seasons after surfacing in a
single field, it is a daily presence in a quarter of the Harper spread
and has a foothold in a third more. Its oval leaves and spindly seed
heads blanket roadsides and jut above orderly soybean rows like
skyscrapers poking through cloud banks. It shrugs off extreme drought
and heat. At up to six inches in diameter, its stalk is thick enough to
damage farm equipment.
“You
swear that you killed it,” said Scott Harper, Dave Harper’s son and the
farm’s 28-year-old resident weed expert. “And then it gets a little
green on it, and it comes right back.”
Botanists call the weed palmer amaranth.
But perhaps the most fitting, if less known, name is carelessweed. In
barely a decade, it has devastated Southern cotton farms and is poised
to wreak havoc in the Midwest — all because farmers got careless.
Photo
Mr. Harper uprooted a palmer
by hand, the last resort in fighting the weed. Each plant can produce up
to 200,000 seeds in an average field.Credit
Daniel Acker for The New York Times
Palmer,
as farmers nicknamed it, is the most notorious of a growing number of
weeds that are immune to the gold standard of herbicides, glyphosate.
Cheap, comparatively safe and deadly to many weeds, glyphosate has been a
favorite ever since the Monsanto Company introduced it under the name Roundup in the mid-1970s.
After
Monsanto began selling crops genetically engineered to resist
glyphosate in the 1990s, the herbicide’s use soared. Farmers who once
juggled an array of herbicides — what killed weeds in a cotton field
might kill cornstalks in a cornfield — suddenly had a single herbicide
that could be applied to almost all major crops without harming them.
There
were even environmental benefits: Farmers relied less on other, more
dangerous weed killers. And they abandoned techniques like tilling that
discouraged weed growth, but hastened erosion and moisture loss.
But
constantly dousing crops in glyphosate exacted a price. Weeds with
glyphosate-resisting genetic mutations appeared faster and more often —
16 types of weed so far in the United States. A 2012 survey concluded
that glyphosate-resistant weeds had infested enough acreage of American
farmland to cover a plot nearly as big as Oregon, and that the total
infestation had grown 51 percent in one year. Glyphosate-resistant
palmers first surfaced in 2005, in a field in Macon County, Ga. Nine
years later, they are in at least 24 states.
“There’s
no substantive argument about whether the problem’s gotten far worse in
this era of genetically resistant crops,” said Charles Benbrook, a
professor and pesticide expert at Washington State University. “The
advent of herbicide-tolerant crops made it possible for farmers to load
up so much herbicide on one crop that it was inevitable that it would
develop resistance.”
Now
farmers are going back to older techniques to control weeds, using more
varieties of herbicides, resuming tilling — and worse.
Palmer
amaranth is the prime example. Consider the cotton fields that blanket
many Southern farms: Without glyphosate, almost no herbicides can kill
the weed without also damaging cotton plants. Some farmers have mowed
their crops to keep palmer seeds from maturing. In 2009, Georgia spent
$11 million to send laborers into a million acres of cotton fields to
pull palmers out by hand.
For many farmers, including the Harpers, manual labor has become a last resort in the battle against carelessweed.
Photo
Herbicides lose effectiveness as palmers grow.Credit
Daniel Acker for The New York Times
“I
consider myself a Roundup baby, and it was great,” Scott Harper said.
“You didn’t have to think about anything. And now we get this weed that
flips everything on its head.”
The
Harpers’ 2,500-acre soybean crop is an object lesson in palmer’s
adaptability and how far farmers must go just to keep it in check.
Palmer
amaranths seem as if they were designed by nature to outwit herbicides
and farmers. Unlike many weeds, it has male and female versions,
increasing genetic diversity — and the chances of a herbicide-resistant
mutation — in each new seed. And each plant is astonishingly prolific,
producing up to 200,000 seeds in an average field, said Dave Mortensen, a
professor of weed and plant ecology at Pennsylvania State University.
“If
one out of millions or billions of seeds contains a unique trait that
confers resistance to herbicide,” he said, “it doesn’t take long when a
plant is that fecund for it to become the dominant gene.”
William
G. Johnson, a Purdue University professor of botany and plant
pathology, said the weed probably arrived at the Harpers’ farm in
typical fashion: in manure, purchased as fertilizer, from cows that ate
cottonseed — and, inadvertently, palmer seeds.
The
Harpers initially mistook the weed for waterhemp, a close relative.
Before they learned otherwise, combines had already harvested fields
containing mature palmer seed pods and had spread the seed far and wide.
A
glyphosate-resistant palmer is a mighty beast indeed. Its seeds can
germinate any time during the growing season, so herbicide sprayed in
April is useless against a palmer that appears in July. Once sprouted,
palmer amaranth can grow more than two inches a day. Once it exceeds
four inches, even herbicides for which it lacks resistance begin to lose
their effectiveness.
The
Harpers have kept palmers at bay in their 5,500 acres of corn by
spraying dicamba, a weed killer that is benign to corn. Soybeans are a
different matter.
Photo
Scott Harper put herbicide on an infested field. Herbicides lose effectiveness as palmers grow.Credit
Daniel Acker for The New York Times
Last
year, the Harpers sprayed palmer-infested fields several times with
glyphosate and two other herbicides, pushing herbicide costs to $80 an
acre from $15. About eight in 10 palmers died. The rest wilted for a
couple of weeks, then resumed growing.
This
year, they are trying a different chemical cocktail that raises
herbicide costs only to $45 an acre. Their big gun, a herbicide that
blocks palmers from synthesizing amino acids, was sprayed on July 3, the
first of two applications allowed each summer.
“I
came back from the Fourth of July weekend, and they looked dead,” Mr.
Harper said. “I said, ‘I think we smoked ’em.’ My dad says, ‘Awesome.’ ”
He paused. “Ten days later, there’s green coming all over them again.”
Should the second herbicide application fail, Mr. Harper said, he is unsure what to do next.
More
broadly, experts in glyphosate’s travails — farmers, scientists,
regulators, the herbicide industry, environmentalists — feel much the
same way.
The
industry has readied a new barrage of genetically engineered crops that
tolerate other weed killers. The Environmental Protection Agency is set
to approve plans by Dow AgroSciences to sell soybean seeds
that tolerate not only glyphosate, but a much older herbicide, 2,4-D,
and a third widely used herbicide, glufosinate. Monsanto hopes to market
soybeans and cotton next year that resist dicamba.
Dr.
Mortensen and others say the companies are simply repeating the history
that made palmers resistant to glyphosate. He says natural solutions,
like planting what are known as cover crops that keep light from
reaching germinating palmers, may cost more but are also effective.
Mr.
Harper said he believes Dr. Mortensen is right. He also said he cannot
wait for Monsanto and Dow to begin hawking their new soybeans anyway.
“I’m
not stupid. I know you can only ride a pony so far,” he said. “It’ll
probably take another 10 years before palmer becomes a real big problem
again. But that just brought me 10 years I didn’t have.”
I did it for four years in the 1970's and was always one truck breakdown from bankruptcy. If I hadn't been growing some of that "wacky tobacky" I'd have lost the ten acres of poor farmland I was trying to make a living off of. Market gardening, small scale farming, whatever you want to call it is very hard work with very few rewards. It was the beans that always got me. You'd spend thirty minutes picking 15 pounds, and know the reward would be about five bucks. I was very lucky. Through bizarre and undeserved circumstances I ended up making a living writing and talking about growing food instead. I pay back by always giving farmers more than they're asking for, and trying to remind people that if we want these young headstrong farmers to keep at it we've got to find some way to make sure they're properly paid. This was captured in a good piece in the New York Times today. It's a conversation I've heard many times amongst market gardeners here.
NEW
HAVEN — AT a farm-to-table dinner recently, I sat huddled in a corner
with some other farmers, out of earshot of the foodies happily eating
kale and freshly shucked oysters. We were comparing business models and
profit margins, and it quickly became clear that all of us were working
in the red.
The dirty secret
of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer
isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we head out to
second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat. Ninety-one percent
of all farm households rely on multiple sources of income. Health care,
paying for our kids’ college, preparing for retirement? Not happening.
With the overwhelming majority of American farmers operating at a loss —
the median farm income was negative $1,453 in 2012 — farmers can barely keep the chickens fed and the lights on.
Others
of us rely almost entirely on Department of Agriculture or foundation
grants, not retail sales, to generate farm income. And young farmers,
unable to afford land, are increasingly forced into neo-feudal
relationships, working the fields of wealthy landowners. Little wonder
the median age for farmers and ranchers is now 56.
My
experience proves the trend. To make ends meet as a farmer over the
last decade, I’ve hustled wooden crafts to tourists on the streets of
New York, driven lumber trucks, and worked part time for any nonprofit
that could stomach the stink of mud on my boots. Laden with college debt
and only intermittently able to afford health care, my partner and I
have acquired a favorite pastime in our house: dreaming about having
kids. It’s cheaper than the real thing.
But
what about the thousands of high-priced community-supported agriculture
programs and farmers’ markets that have sprouted up around the country?
Nope. These new venues were promising when they proliferated over a
decade ago, but now, with so many programs to choose from, there is
increasing pressure for farmers to reduce prices in cities like my
hometown, New Haven. And while weekend farmers’ markets remain precious
community spaces, sales volumes are often too low to translate into
living wages for your much-loved small-scale farmer.
Especially
in urban areas, supporting your local farmer may actually mean buying
produce from former hedge fund managers or tax lawyers who have quit the
rat race to get some dirt under their fingernails. We call it hobby
farming, where recreational “farms” are allowed to sell their products
at the same farmers’ markets as commercial farms. It’s all about
property taxes, not food production. As Forbes magazine suggested to its readers
in its 2012 Investment Guide, now is the time to “farm like a
billionaire,” because even a small amount of retail sales — as low as
$500 a year in New Jersey — allows landowners to harvest more tax breaks
than tomatoes.
On
top of that, we’re now competing with nonprofit farms. Released from
the yoke of profit, farms like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Stone
Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., are doing some of the most innovative
work in the farming sector, but neither is subject to the iron heel of
the free market. Growing Power
alone received over $6.8 million in grants over the last five years, and
its produce is now available in Walgreens stores. Stone Barns was
started with a $30 million grant from David Rockefeller. How’s a young farmer to compete with that?
As
one grower told me, “When these nonprofit farms want a new tractor,
they ask the board of directors, but we have to go begging to the bank.”
And
then there are the chefs. Restaurants bait their menus with homages to
local food, attracting flocks of customers willing to pay 30 bucks a
plate. But running a restaurant is a low-margin, cutthroat business, and
chefs have to pay the bills, too. To do so, chefs often use a rule of
thumb: Keep food costs to 30 percent of the price of the meal. But
organic farming is an even higher-risk, higher-cost venture, so capping
the farmer’s take to a small sliver of the plate ensures that working
the land remains a beggar’s game.
The
food movement — led by celebrity chefs, advocacy journalists, students
and NGOs — is missing, ironically, the perspective of the people doing
the actual work of growing food. Their platform has been largely based
on how to provide good, healthy food, while it has ignored the core
economic inequities and contradictions embedded in our food system.
Unlike
our current small-bore campaigns, previous food movements of the 1880s,
1930s and 1970s were led by highly organized farmers’ organizations —
like the American Agricultural Movement, National Farmers Union and
Colored Farmers’ National Alliance — trailblazing new paths for the
economy.
They went toe to
toe with Big Ag: crashing shareholder meetings; building co-ops and
political parties; and lobbying for price stabilization. In the late
1970s, for example, small-scale family farmers organized a series of
protests under the slogan “Parity Not Charity,” demanding a moratorium
on foreclosures, as well as the stabilization of crop prices to ensure
that farmers could make a living wage. They mobilized thousands of fellow farmers to direct action,
including the 1979 Tractorcade, where 900 tractors — some driven
thousands of miles — descended on Washington to shut down the nation’s
capital.
It’s not the food
movement’s fault that we’ve been left behind. It has turned food into
one of the defining issues of our generation. But now it’s time for
farmers to shape our own agenda. We need to fight for loan forgiveness
for college grads who pursue agriculture; programs to turn farmers from
tenants into landowners; guaranteed affordable health care; and shifting
subsidies from factory farms to family farms. We need to take the lead
in shaping a new food economy by building our own production hubs and
distribution systems. And we need to support workers up and down the
supply chain who are fighting for better wages so that their families
can afford to buy the food we grow.
But
none of these demands will be met until we start our own organizations —
as in generations past — and shape a vision of a new food economy that
ensures that growing good food also means making a good living.
I’m going to apologize right now if you’re eating breakfast,
particularly if it includes a nice bit of bacon and a lovely runny egg.
Look away now, because this column is about the crappy things we do to
animals in our pursuit of a cheap breakfast – or lunch, or dinner, or
one of the 60 snacks that seem to fall between.
I’m a meat eater, an omnivore, a slurper of chicken soup and a
cruncher of bacon, but sometimes I wonder how I can continue when faced
with the reality of animals’ largely miserable journey from feedlot to
plate. Like many people, I feel a momentary revulsion whenever I see one
of those undercover videos of chicks being thrown live into grinders,
pigs unable to turn in their crates and cows beaten with iron bars.
Then, a day later, I’m glad I have enough loose change in my wallet to
buy a club sandwich.
Those videos, which tell the story of the
real costs associated with cheap, factory-farmed food, are painful to
watch. They are shaming. And, for that reason, they are also under
threat in the United States, where so-called “ag-gag” laws punish anyone
who goes undercover at a farm or processing plant to take surreptitious
video (the term “ag-gag” was coined by The New York Times food writer
Mark Bittman.)
Seven states in the U.S. have these laws, which
punish whistle-blowers who either try to expose cruel practices, or who
falsify their applications to get jobs in the agriculture industry
(which is how activists capture their evidence). Nearly 20 other states
have tried to pass similar legislation.
You might have seen some
of the video that these laws would block, such as the footage of cows
being rammed with a forklift, shot secretly by the U.S. Humane Society
in 2007. That particular exposé of a California slaughterhouse and its
cruel, unhealthy practices led to the largest meat recall in U.S.
history.
In Idaho and Utah, a disparate group – including
animal-rights and First Amendment activists, alongside food-safety
groups and unions – have launched challenges to the ag-gag laws in
federal courts. In Washington, investigative journalist Will Potter has a
successful Kickstarter campaign called “Drone on the Farm” to subvert
ag-gag laws by using airborne cameras to photograph factories from
above.
But their opponents, who raise the meat and bring it to
market, have deep pockets, and rely on the public’s desire for cheap
chicken to outweigh its passing disgust. (In both Canada and the U.S.,
consumption of red meat has fallen over the past three decades, but
demand for poultry has soared, if you’ll pardon a bad pun.)
As the
Guardian newspaper wrote in recent undercover exposé of vile conditions
in U.K. chicken-processing plants, where two-thirds of fresh chicken is
infected with the potentially toxic campylobacter bacteria, “poultry
firms and retailers are locked in to an economic structure of their own
making in their race to produce the cheapest possible chicken.” But who
demands the cut-rate nugget and the fire-sale fajita? That would be us,
the consumers.
We may not have ag-gag laws in Canada, but we still
rely on the undercover surveillance of activist groups like Mercy for
Animals to expose the dirty links in our food chain. In two recent
high-profile cases, Mercy for Animals revealed alleged abuses (and got
action) that would otherwise have been overlooked. Its undercover
investigators released a video showing the suffering of live turkeys at
Hybrid Turkeys in Ontario, which led to 11 charges of animal cruelty
being laid against the company.
At Chilliwack Cattle Sales, the
country’s largest dairy producer, Mercy for Animals captured footage of
cows being beaten and abused with farm machinery by young employees who
whooped with glee. The question “who tortures cows for fun” is not one I
am equipped to address, but at least when I watched the footage I was
pretty sure I could identify the dumb animals in the frame. Those
workers were fired, and the company’s milk temporarily boycotted. Once
again, public outrage soon faded.
I’m sure Mercy for Animals would
like us all to turn vegan so they could hang up their cameras, but this
is not likely to happen in the near future. In the meantime, we could
at least acknowledge the price we pay for convenience, and cost-saving,
and have the guts to look it in the eye.
There's been some good reporting on the use of neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticide, found on everything from flea collars for pets, to seed coating on the most widely grown crops, soybeans and corn. It replaced a class of pesticides called organphosphates which are close chemical relatives to nerve gases developed in the second world war, and therefore toxic to mammals (people). The neonicotinoids are relatively safer for us, but have a debilitating impact on the behavior of bees, and are clearly linked to the a huge jump in bee mortality around the world. Ontario has now announced it will bring in restrictions on its use, following a similar move in Europe. Commercial grain farmers are fighting back, and this week the Conference Board of Canada jumped in with it's own report, partly funded by grain farmers, and Crop Life Canada, the trade association for the large pesticide manufacturers. PEI potato growers and other farmers do use a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid as a systemic pesticide when planting. The upside is there isn't the need for insecticide spraying, and fortunately bees have little interest in potato flowers as a source of pollen, but there is growing evidence that neonicotinoids remain active for years, and even at very low levels can negatively impact bee behavior. Here are some recent stories on new developments, and a column I wrote a few months ago.
Pesticide linked to bee deaths to be restricted in Ontario
by Eric Atkins
Ontario intends to become the first province to restrict the use of a
controversial pesticide linked to bee deaths, requiring farmers and
other commercial growers to apply for permits to plant seeds treated
with neonicotinoid insecticides.
The government wants to limit the
blanket use of the seed treatment, while balancing the protection of
insect pollinators with the needs of farmers to guard their crops and
livelihoods against insects.
The provincial agriculture ministry will soon begin holding meetings
with farmers, beekeepers and pesticide makers with the goal of having a
licensing system in place by the fall, when growers order seeds for next
year.
“We are committed to working with stakeholders to develop a
system that targets the use of neonicotinoid-treated seed only to areas
or circumstances where there is demonstrated need,” said Jeff Leal,
Ontario’s Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
“Our
intention is to work with the industry to move away from the widespread,
indiscriminate use of neonicotinoid-based pesticides,” he said.
“Ideally, we would have a structure in place for the 2015 planting season – that is what we are working toward.”
Neonicotinoids,
– neonics for short – protect seeds and plants from worms and other
crop-destroying insects, and have been blamed by several studies and
Health Canada for the widespread collapse in colonies of honey bees,
butterflies and other pollinators.
Bees are exposed to
neonicotinoids in two ways: by eating the pollen, or by ingesting or
carrying back to the hive the neonic-infused field dust kicked up by the
tractor and planter. A University of Saskatchewan biologist found the
chemicals in the province’s streams, ditches and insects, and even up
the food chain in birds. To reduce the dust, neonic suppliers such as
Bayer AG and Syngenta have begun supplying the seeds with a wax-based
lubricant, under the direction of Health Canada. But the lubricant,
combined with modified planting machines, reduces dust by only 20 per
cent.
The use of neonicotinoids has been banned temporarily in
Europe, but are unregulated in Canada and the United States. Ontario
does not have the power to ban pesticides, which are regulated by Health
Canada, but the province can control or ban their sale.
The
connection between bee deaths and the pesticides is murky. Some studies
point to parasitic mites and viruses as the more likely causes of bee
deaths, in addition to winter starvation and loss of habitat. Some say
insects do not absorb lethal doses of the insecticide through pollen,
though beekeepers and others maintain even small amounts can weaken bees
and make them susceptible to other maladies. However, beekeepers in
Western Canada have not seen their colonies collapse, even though their
hives feed on the flowers of canola, a crop that is treated with
neonicotinoids.
Most of the bee deaths have been concentrated in
Ontario, a province with the warm summers best suited to growing corn, a
grain used in biofuels and animal feed. Ontario grows more than 60 per
cent of the country’s corn, and corn is thought to be most closely
linked to the province’s bee deaths. The irregular shape and size of the
seeds, combined with the compressed-air planters, make the planting
process quite dusty.
Beekeepers in Ontario say their winter losses
have risen to as high as 50 per cent from 15 per cent before
neonicotinoids became popular, and many want the pesticide banned.
However, that view is not shared by all beekeepers in the province, nor
the Canadian Honey Council, which represents 7,000 apiarists across the
country.
Rod Scarlett, executive director of the group said he
welcomes a reduction in the use of neonicotinoids. But he doubts the
effectiveness of a licensing system because farmers and government
officials might not know at the beginning of the season where the
pesticide is or isn’t needed.
“We want to ensure farmers don’t suffer,” Mr. Scarlett said in an interview from his office near Edmonton.
Growers
of flowers, fruits and vegetables are also heavy users of the
insecticide. Neonicotinoid proponents note the chemical is not absorbed
by humans, and it is much more effective, cheaper and safer than the
older insecticides it replaced.
“Even the crop protection
companies will tell you neonics kills bees. They are designed to be an
insecticide,” Mr. Scarlett said. “The bigger question in the mind of the
Canadian Honey Council is, what’s next? How do we mitigate the risk? If
that product isn’t available for farmers to use, do they go back to
organophosphates, which are far worse for mammals and insects?”
Ontario
is home to about 3,000 of the country’s 7,000 beekeepers. Most
beekeepers know to keep their bees away from corn fields during
planting. But given the prevalence of the crop, and the high density of
Ontario’s farmland, this is often not possible, Mr. Scarlett said.
Ontario
has taken other steps to support the honey industry, providing $105 per
hive to those who lose 40 per cent of their bees, and committing
$1.2-million to research on pollinator health and farming methods.
Neonics restrictions risk killing some Ontario grain farms: Conference Board
Ontario’s plans to move away from a controversial – yet highly
popular – class of pesticides believed to be killing bees risk costing
the province’s grain farmers millions of dollars in lost acreages, a new
Conference Board of Canada report warned Thursday.
“We estimate that such a restriction [on neonicotinoids] would cause
farms to exit the market or reduce acreage, costing Ontario farmers more
than $630 million annually in lost revenue and reducing Ontario’s GDP
by nearly $440 million,” the report reads.
Neonicotinoids – or neonics – are used as a coating on corn, soybean
and canola seeds. Systemic in nature, the insecticides permeate the
entire plant, protecting it from harmful pests. The chemicals are
developed by Bayer and Syngenta.
The report comes just days after Ontario’s Agriculture Minister Jeff
Leal announced he plans to restrict the use of neonics, a move that
would see the province become the first in Canada to regulate the
insecticide.
The move has been heralded by most Ontario beekeepers, who argue the
current level of bee deaths is unsustainable. Grain farmers, along with a
handful of commercial beekeepers, though, are convinced the
restrictions will mean lower yields, with some farmers forced out of
business.
“Farm income is not evenly distributed. Some farmers are in a strong
financial position, while others break even or operate at a loss,” the
report notes.
“Depending on their financial performance, farms will likely either
reduce their production or exit the industry in response to higher
production costs, lowers crop yields, or a combination of both,” if
tougher regulations are imposed, the board warned.
A restriction, the report adds, would put Ontario farmers at a
competitive disadvantage because “no restriction on their use has been
implemented in Canada or the United States.”
The move would be particularly devastating for Ontario corn and
soybean growers who would see higher input costs in a market already
dominated by larger American growers, the report cautioned. Corn and
soybeans are the two largest grain and oilseed crops grown in Ontario,
worth some $3.5 billion in farm cash receipts in 2012.
Farmers would also be forced to purchase more expensive insecticides
should Ontario follow through on plans to restrict the chemical,” the
report reads. And, while some alternatives are available, the report
warned neonics are also “used to control some insects for which there is
no alternative.”
Instead, growers would be forced to use foliar sprays (sprayed onto
the plant’s leaves during growth), the report argues, which can be less
effective.
The eighty-page Conference Board report was funded in part by the
Grain Farmers of Ontario and CropLife Canada – two proponents of the use
of neonicotinoid pesticides.
The study was launched at the request of Grain Farmers of Ontario,
who asked the Conference Board of Canada to conduct an “independent
economic analysis of a hypothetical restriction” on neonics.
Highly controversial, neonics are at the heart of a divisive and
public debate within Canada’s farming community. Beekeepers,
environmentalists and several scientists insist the chemicals are
responsible for major bee deaths – averaging around 30 per cent per year
– losses they say are simply unsustainable.
They want the insecticides banned for a minimum of four years – a
move that would see Canada fall in step with the European Union. The EU
imposed a two-year moratorium on three neonicotinoid pesticides in 2013 –
a moratorium many expect will be extended past its 2015 deadline.
The pesticides are currently being reviewed by Health Canada’s Pest
Management Agency (PMRA) – the body responsible for regulating pesticide
used in Canada.
While their final report is not expected until sometime in 2015,
preliminary findings by the agency in September 2013 determined
contaminated dust during planting has contributed to bee deaths in
Ontario and Quebec.
As a result of their findings, the agency ordered grain farmers to
use a new seed lubricant – used to ease the flow of seeds through the
planter – during the 2014 planting season. The new lubricant is meant to
reduce the amount of dust created. Its effectiveness, though, is still
unknown.
The Senate Agriculture and Forestry committee is currently conducting
a detailed and lengthy study on bee health. Their final report is
expected in December 2014.
Meanwhile, the federal government has repeatedly insisted it will not
consider restricting the use of neonics until the PMRA report is made
public or the science becomes more “conclusive.”
Ontario farm fields are buzzing this summer – not with bees, but with
controversy. At issue is a proposed provincial ban on the sale of
neonicotinoids, a type of pesticide that protects crops but stands
accused of killing bees. Bee farmers claim it has decimated their hives,
while grain farmers call their accusations junk science. And now a Conference Board of Canada report
warns that the proposed ban would force some farmers out of business,
and cost farmers – and the province – hundreds of millions in lost
revenue.
Neonocotinoids, or neonics, have been around for two decades. Instead
of spraying them on their fields, which can affect other crops and
organisms, farmers purchase seed pre-coated with the compound, and the
product is present throughout the plant. In Canada, they are heavily
used in the west for grain crops: some 19 million acres of canola, for
example, are pollinated by bees, and 100 percent treated with
neonicotinoids.
Between 2007 and 2012 the Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency
reported no bee kills associated with neonics in all of western Canada.
There have been some reported issues in corn fields with corn dust
affecting bee populations. Consequently, last year the PMRA proposed not
to ban the product, but to use different seeding techniques to
eliminate the dust.
However, in Ontario, many bee growers are convinced that neonics are killing their bees. The Ontario Beekeeper Association’s website is awash in articles about the evils of neonicotinoids. At the same time, other studies suggest that fungicides are
a far greater threat to bee health. Other suspects in mass bee deaths
include harsh winters, viruses and the varroa mite, a tiny parasitic
insect which feeds on the bees “blood” and causes them to become prone
to infections.
The
bee population in Canada has actually grown, from 600,000 colonies in
2000 to 700,000 in 2012. Around the world, bee colonies are also
increasing, despite the increasing use of the products.
The Ontario law would bring the province in line with the European
Union, which voted to ban neonics because of alleged bee deaths. What
Canadians may not know is that the country that drove the European ban
on neonics, France, did so not for reasons of science, but politics.
Domestic pressure by French environmentalists had pushed that country
to ban the substance, which disadvantaged their farmers, and led France
to seek an EU ban to level the playing field. The French went so far as
to issue a press release that misrepresented the data on neonics and
bees (which did not support a ban) in their efforts. At the end of 2013,
a two-year EU ban took effect.
Recent evidence is making many Europeans rethink the ban. Research published this spring in the Journal of the Entomological Society of America
found that soybean and cotton plants grown from neonic-treated seed had
no traces of neonics in soybean flowers or cotton nectar. They did find
microscopic traces of neonics in corn at levels of 2.3 parts per
billion, levels so small that the American EPA considers them
insignificant. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Gus Lorenz, concluded
that neonics are “not being expressed in the reproductive parts of the plants.” Canadian researcher Cynthia Scott-Dupree of the University of Guelph reached similar conclusions, finding “no effects or “poor performance” in treatment colonies” of bees who feasted on neonicotinoid-treated crops.
Studies that have established negative effects have been done in the
lab, exposing bees directly to the chemical, in a manner that would not
arguably happen when they pollinate treated plants. Some researchers
claim that over time, “sublethal” exposure in the field would achieve
the same effect. This flies in the face, however, of sheer numbers: the
bee population in Canada has actually grown, from 600,000 colonies in
2000 to 700,000 colonies in 2012. Around the world, bee colonies are
also increasing, despite the increasing use of the products.
What would happen if Ontario bans neonics – and other provinces
follow suit? Farmers would turn to other pesticides, such as
organophosphates and pyrethroids, both of which have been proven toxic
to bees, and which aren’t exactly embraced by environmentalist for human
consumption, either. If the Wynne government rushes to judgement on
neonics, it risks hurting crop farmers and consumers, by lowering yields
and increasing prices. And that buzzing they hear won’t be bees, but
angry voters.
Time to Take Their Own Advice
Pesticide companies are hard to love. They
make a lot of money even when their customers don’t, and whatever the science
says there’s a gnawing feeling amongst many that pesticide use is behind
growing cancer numbers and environmental degradation.
The companies play the public relations
game as well as anyone. When family
doctors promote the idea that cosmetic use of pesticides should be banned, you
can bet that Crop Life Canada, the trade association representing developers
and distributors of pesticides, will argue that all products are approved by
Health Canada, and if used properly pose no risk.
We will hear more from Crop Life in the
months ahead as debate heats up over the use of neonicotinoids, the widely used
family of insecticides that’s been
linked to bee deaths. Neonicotinoids are facing regulatory reviews in Europe, new
label requirements in the United States, and a growing social media campaign
opposing their use here in Canada.
Crop Life should pay attention to a section
of its own website that could help us understand the risks of neonicotinoids,
and how they might be used more safely:
The
responsible use of crop protection products is undertaken within the context of
promoting Integrated Pest Management strategies, with the underlying principles
that a crop protection product should be used only when necessary – using the
right tool at the right time, in the right place and in the right way.
That’s in fact close to what Rachael
Carson, the godmother of modern environmentalism was saying in Silent Spring:
"It’s not my contention that
chemical pesticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put
poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands
of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potential for harm...
"
That’s not how
neonicotinoids are used. Seeds are
coatedwith the insecticide before
planting and every stalk or plant becomes a source ofthe pesticide. There are benefits to this,
farmers don’t need to regularly spray during the summer, but it’s still a far
cry from “Integrated Pest Management” called for by Crop Life: sampling to find
if insect levels are serious enough to need a pesticide and then using “only when necessary – using the right tool at the right time, in
the right place and in the right way.”
There’s a similar issue with
“round-up ready” crops, the GMO soybeans, corn, and canola varieties so widely
grown in North America. They resist glyphosphate, a relatively safe
herbicide.It’s become very convenient
for farmers to use these GMO crops and control weeds with one or two passes of
Round-up. But nature has responded (as it always does) and created super weeds
that themselves resist glyphosphate.Again
this isn’t using herbicides “when necessary, and in the right place”, but
blanketing millions of acres with one product, with the resulting “resistance”
that’s the inevitable result.The
pesticide companies then get the additional benefit of developing new
herbicides to control the superweeds, with the patents and profits that go
along with that.
No doubt the media will present the
fight over neonicotinoids as all or nothing, a ban or hell in a hand basket. Maybe
the more important question is how these products are used, that convenience
for farmers, and profits for pesticide companies has trumped common sense and
biology. Crop Life could take a leadership role in changing the nature of the
debate, and all it has to do is follow it’s own advice.
The
bee population in Canada has actually grown, from 600,000 colonies in
2000 to 700,000 in 2012. Around the world, bee colonies are also
increasing, despite the increasing use of the products.
The Ontario law would bring the province in line with the European
Union, which voted to ban neonics because of alleged bee deaths. What
Canadians may not know is that the country that drove the European ban
on neonics, France, did so not for reasons of science, but politics.
Domestic pressure by French environmentalists had pushed that country
to ban the substance, which disadvantaged their farmers, and led France
to seek an EU ban to level the playing field. The French went so far as
to issue a press release that misrepresented the data on neonics and
bees (which did not support a ban) in their efforts. At the end of 2013,
a two-year EU ban took effect.