Ontario farm groups to launch sustainable farm plan

Friday, September 11, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The notion that farms need to be profitable to be sustainable is being built into a new industry program that will quantify the Ontario farm sector’s commitment to produce food sustainably.

Called Farm, Food & Beyond: Our Commitment to Sustainability, the program builds on the Environmental Farm Plan by expanding the scope to include “a whole farm sustainability plan that addresses environmental practices along with economic and social issues important for sustainability,” according to a Sept. 8 press release from the Farm, Food  & Beyond steering committee.

UPDATE Sept. 15, 2015: More details of the plan can be found here. END OF UPDATE

The steering committee will unveil the initiative at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show in Woodstock on Tuesday. It will also release a report, called Our Commitment to Sustainability, that’s the basis for the project.

The steering committee members are: Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario, the Presidents’ Council, the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association, Ontario Agri Food Technologies, Farm & Food Care Ontario and the Provision Coalition.

Don McCabe, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, says, “sustainability is economic, it is social and it is environmental. The farm has to have profitability; it has to make money.”

If farms are unprofitable, they can’t help people or the environment “or do things that you want to do to improve the environment,” he notes.

McCabe says the environmental farm plan program will continue but it will become “one pillar within a larger sustainability plan.”

The environmental farm plan program was introduced 22 years ago. It’s a voluntary program where farmers attend a workshop and complete a written assessment of 23 different areas of their farm highlighting environmental strengths, outlining areas of concern and developing action plans with timetables to improve conditions. Government funding is available for some improvement projects.

Commodity and farm groups in Ontario created the environmental farm plan program for the agricultural industry to be proactive on environmental stewardship.

“The sustainability plan will take that environmental pillar that we have in the environmental farm plan and build upon it to add sections on social and economic performance,” McCabe explains.

Lorne Small, Christian Farmers president, says the agricultural industry is focusing on sustainability because major food retailers, food manufacturers and the food service industry want assurances their food supplies are produced using sustainable farm practices. “The major food retailers are saying consumers want sustainability throughout the system and they’re moving it back to the farm level.”

Small says in some cases the marketplace is now outlining what farmers must do in various areas of agricultural production, such as the ethical care of animals and the use of crop enhancement products, instead of governments setting rules for farmers.

“This is coming at us from a whole different direction and it’s not local – it’s from big, international companies,” says Small. “We’re saying we should have agriculture out in front of the curve here.”

McCabe says consumer and supply chain scrutiny to determine if farming practices are sustainable is increasing and “we need to be ready to address it.”

The release says Sustainable Farm & Food Plans will be built on the efforts of existing programs, including environmental farm plans, food safety, codes of practice, regulatory standards and various commodity initiatives “to build a cohesive program that encompasses the whole farm rather than a commodity-specific approach.”

Small says it’s like an update of the environmental farm plan “but it incorporates this whole sustainability initiative, which includes the environment, the people component and the realization that everyone in that chain has to be profitable. This is the first time, in my opinion, the major retailers have said farmers have to be profitable too if they are to be sustainable.” BF