Fertilize emissions plan has serious implications
By Lethbridge Herald on August 25, 2022.
Editor:
The federal government launched consultations with Canadians asking about its climate change policies aimed at significantly reducing fertilizer emissions. Have you heard about it?
The deadline for your comments is Aug. 3. Farmers believe it will adversely impact food production and may affect global food shortage and ultimately increase poverty.
The target is achieved by controlling direct and indirect emissions from the application of fertilizer.
Have you heard one word from the Minister of Agriculture MP Marie-Claude Bibeau defending the agriculture industry?
Slashing fertilizer use by 20 per cent could cost Canadian farmers more than $48 billion in lost sales by 2030 due to low yields according to a Fertilizer Canada study.
Several provincial agricultural ministers have denounced the government’s fertilizer emissions reduction plan.
The world is expecting Canada and its farmers to increase production and help the government solve world global food shortages.
Farmers in Europe are standing up against similar climate change policies. It is time farmers and Canadian consumers stand up to PM Trudeau and his Minister of Environment, Steven Guilbeault, who have no idea how serious the implications of this fertilizer reduction policy are, and their arbitrary goal.
It is time for action!
Storm clouds are hanging over the agriculture industry.
Ed Granger
Lethbridge
14-13
“Canada’s convoy movement waved the Dutch flag. Then conspiracy theories swirled about fertilizer and bugs”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/freedom-convoy-farmers-protest-netherlands-dutch-flag-1.6558902
First, if Canada wishes to ‘feed the world’, we can begin by growing more nutritional food (i.e. not potato chips, sugar and fodder).
Second, Canada can reduce food waste (roughly 50% from farm to fork).
Third, we can encourage smart applications of chemicals on food crops (reducing nutrient loading that is damaging our fresh water in rivers and lakes).
And lastly, we can encourage improved farming methods, from current industrial agriculture that kills the soil.
And this conversation ignores the significant climate and health impacts of fertizer use – and the dollars signs related to them.
It is interesting that our Prime Minister is promoting ammonia as a fuel for Germany while questioning it’s use as a fertilizer.
https://www.producer.com/markets/fertilizer-makers-turn-attention-to-ammonia-as-a-fuel/
It is interesting that you don’t understand the different emissions from them. Not to mention water contamination, eutrophication of rivers and lakes across the prairies, etc.
I understand the Boomers want to glide the rest of their lives guilt-free of the environmental and economic damage they have created, but the rest of us want a livable future.
Your final point is well made, and should reflected upon by anyone who claims they don’t want to burden future generations.
Please refer to the National Farmers Union vis a vis an informed plan of action.
https://www.nfu.ca/campaigns/climate-change/
Thanks IMO! That should keep SophieR and me busy for a while.
While it may be true that our federal government has announced all these future changes in global agriculture but not how it will happen here, it does appear that “Europe” may be better positioned to do these transitions into better technologies with better infrastructure and farmer support networks/subsidies. Time will only tell here, how ‘free market enterprise,’ and ‘letting the market decide,’ will deal with new and better agricultural technologies. Will it be only be “Big Ag’ that will manage/afford, the coming changes? Let’s hear the plan. Will it get the same consideration as the process involved, for example, with dairy marketing boards/subsidies?