Making sustainability a reality on Ontario farms

Friday, April 8, 2016

Two things are missing from most sustainability plans – the need for farmers to be profitable to be sustainable and provision for the province's population growth. The Sustainable Farm Coalition plans to rectify that

by DON STONEMAN

Sustainability, an often nebulous and misused expression, is fast becoming a term with meaning on Ontario farms.

If provincial farm groups have their way and sustainability's landing is soft, you won't be buried under a blizzard of paper. You will get credit for participating in the existing Environmental Farm Plan and Growing Your Farm Profits workshop, and there won't be a crater in your farm's profitability.

That's the goal of the Sustainable Farm Coalition steering committee, formed last year in Ontario. Members include the major general farm organizations, the President's Council (representing 37 commodity organizations), Farm and Food Care Ontario, and the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association.

Committee chair Gord Surgeoner says a key member is the Provision Coalition, representing 11 food and beverage manufacturing associations in Ontario. The companies purchase 60 per cent of the farm products in the province. Significantly, the coalition includes representatives from two non-governmental organizations, often critics of agriculture. They "would prefer not to be known at this time. You would recognize their names." Those NGOs "are working to find solutions. They are not being confrontational at all."

Two things are missing from most current sustainability plans, Surgeoner says. One is the need for farmers to be profitable in order to be sustainable. And the other is that "we add a city of Guelph to the population of Ontario every year. That's four million more people in 25 years. How do we feed those people?"  

Surgeoner says one of the challenges is that programs that are labelled as sustainable and aimed at farmers don't take into account that farms go a long way towards meeting those program goals already if they have developed Environmental Farm Plans and have also attended Growing Your Farm Profits management workshops.

He wants food companies and processors to agree to these programs as a standard and then add their own product differentiation requirements on top, rather than having farmers start from the bottom up with every program from every buyer.

Ontario Pork is the first Ontario commodity out of the gate with a social responsibility report released in late March and other groups are at various stages of following. Groupe AGÉCO, the Quebec company that developed the protocols and the plan, has done similar work for several commodities in Alberta and for the Quebec pork producer organization, Éleveurs de porcs du Québec.

Last fall, Dairy Farmers of Canada announced it is conducting a life-cycle analysis of milk production to determine its carbon footprint. The dairy industry already has its proAction initiative plan, which includes food safety, traceability and animal welfare.

Graham Lloyd, director of communications for Dairy Farmers of Ontario, says sustainability for the dairy industry includes a succession plan at DFO so that key knowledge isn't lost as staff retires.

Egg Farmers of Ontario has sustainability written into its 2016 business plan, says spokesman Bill Mitchell, but at press time was mum about a looming announcement of an initiative.

Ontario's beef industry is mostly handling sustainability issues nationally with the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB).

Beef is both typical and atypical in how a sustainability plan is developed. Recently, it published a list of key indicators – points that can be measured to determine if an operation is sustainable. A 90-day public review ends in early April. Because there are so many ways to produce beef, it is tougher than either pork or poultry to measure for sustainability, says Ontario agriculture ministry sustainability specialist Christoph Wand.

A February report by the CRSB says "the indicators are intended to be outcome-based, rather than prescriptive;" which means that there is no set number but the goal is to aim in those directions. The indicators are "measurable; based on science and expert opinion; and address key concerns around sustainable beef production."

The indicators do not explicitly express economics, one of the three pillars of sustainability. The report says "this is intentional, in part due to privacy concerns, but also because the CRSB believes that economic viability must be an overarching theme and taken into consideration in the interpretation and application of each indicator."

Ontario Pork has grasped the nettle of financial viability, at least to some degree, in its social responsibility report released in March. While most pig farms monitor current costs of production carefully, they do not have a financial strategy for the future and the Ontario Pork report noted this. BF

Why sustainability matters
Cher Mereweather, executive director of the Provision Coalition, saw an evolution several years ago when large food corporations, trying to reduce their environmental footprint and costs, realized that the big impacts of their food production came from the production of the raw materials they bought, including things like palm oil grown where rain forests had been torn down.

Companies saw the risk in their supply chain and tried to manage it, Mereweather says. Now they have evolved again and are aiming for responsible sourcing, which is where sustainability comes in. Driving all this is the easy access to information on the Internet, social media and the so-called millennials, consumers born between the early 1980 and mid-1990s who wonder where food comes from and how it is produced. And that's where groups like the Sustainable Farm Coalition fit in.

Sustainability is short for sustainable development, coined in the 1987 "Our Common Future" report of United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.

The Brundtland report defined sustainable development as "development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" and there was a sharp focus on environmental issues. Nearly 30 years later, that definition has made its way into the vocabulary of organizations today that are engaged in developing sustainability reports for corporations and for farm groups.

Last month, Ontario Pork released its inaugural social responsibility report, pledging to raise the bar on a variety of "key indicators" that include employee relations, animal welfare, financial planning as well as environmental issues.

In 2004, Britain's Financial Times listed Brundtland as the fourth most influential European of the previous 25 years, behind Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher. Maybe stretch that to 35 years. BF