Why growers may never reconcile the carbon tax

Apr 27, 2022

Every rumble of a farm engine now signals higher costs. As of April 1, the federal government added 11 cents/litre for gasoline and diesel, with no exemption for Canadian farmers producing food. It’s a carbon tax that will be ratcheting up by $15/tonne every year until 2030.

“It’s a source of frustration,” says Ken Wall, Sandy Shore Farms, Port Burwell, Ontario. “The real question is whether carbon taxes change the way we as consumers live our lives. The concept of a tax is to change behaviour. The problem for agriculture is that there is no viable alternative to diesel fuel.”

The reality is that the carbon tax stresses margins for everyone up and down the food chain. As Wall points out, that makes Canadian farmers less competitive against imports. His asparagus competes against Mexican product that had lower input costs before implementation of the tax. And an unwanted perverse outcome quite possibly could be that Canadian farmers decide to downsize or quit operations altogether. The unintended result would be a higher carbon output from more imports being hauled into Canada by boat, plane and truck.

“It’s a non-winning formula,” says Wall. “It’s a tough conversation to have with elected officials and the public. The moment that you say that carbon taxes are hurting agriculture, you are pegged as being anti-environment. And of course, that’s not the case. Farmers are all in for the environment with their care of the soil and water. My fear is that Canada will lose production capacity in horticulture, the ability to grow local food. But it’s a tough argument with the political class and the media commentariat.”

The vast majority of elected officials, both federally and provincially, are urbanites. So, there’s no quick sound bite to explain the farm to plate story of globally interconnected networks. Carbon taxes alone won’t sink agriculture but when layered on top of other, ever-increasing farming costs, they are inarguably detrimental to the spirit of growing food.

Pictures can often paint a thousand bites in telling this story, though. Look no further than the aerial shots of flooding in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley in November 2021.

As Jason Smith, chair of the BC Blueberry Council explains, it may take years to replant and regain the 750 to 1,000 acres of blueberries affected by flooding. Adding carbon taxes to a sector already stretched by recovery, strikes most BC growers as counter-intuitive.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”