Senator Rob Black advocates for agriculture

Jan 11, 2023

The Honourable Rob Black, Senator for Ontario, spent 2022 advocating for agricultural and rural communities inside and outside of the Red Chamber.

In Ottawa, Black highlighted challenges and opportunities facing rural and agricultural communities through his interventions in the Senate Chamber after connecting with countless organizations in his East Block office. As chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, he also oversaw 29 meetings where the committee heard from 115 witnesses on topics relating to legislation and special studies. These special studies included a look at the impacts of the British Columbia floods and the start of the long-awaited new soil health study, which Senator Black originally proposed in 2019.

Off the Hill, he spoke at meetings of Soil and Crop Associations and Federations of Agriculture, attended a variety of industry showcases and summits, and travelled across Canada to connect with community leaders and to Scotland to attend the World Congress of Soil Science. Senator Black took these opportunities to learn more about various issues facing the industry, such as labour strategies, red-tape regulations, food security, the role of soil health in the context of climate change, and more.

“Canada’s agriculture and agri-food industries faced increased pressure in 2022 related to supply chain concerns and rising prices as well as other compounding factors, such as climate change and geopolitical tensions,” said Black. “I was proud to see our agricultural communities rally together to support each other and our food supply chain. At the outset of 2023, I am hopeful that we will see increased support from all levels of government and the public as agriculture works to feed not only Canadians, but the entire world.”

Although agriculture is one of Canada’s oldest and most important industries, it is often not prioritized in policy-building. Black is looking forward to continuing his efforts to support agricultural and rural communities in 2023, both in the Red Chamber and off Parliament Hill.

Source : The Grower

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.