Is it time for a Manhattan Project on pulse crop development?
If those who want to see greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer cut are sincere about achieving that challenging goal, perhaps it is. We need to create a big bang in crop development.
Boosting pulse crops in the prairie grower’s rotations would slash greenhouse gas emissions, lessen farmers’ risk to both weather and markets, and propel the pulse market out of the “special crops” category.
For farmers, more pulse inclusion would be a win-win-win.
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What’s not to like about that?
Maybe the fact that it would take money-money-money.
Crop and variety development doesn’t come cheap. Scientists, labs, research centres, scientifically valid field testing and everything regulatory required to bring new varieties to market cost big bucks, which is why you see most of that work being done in the biggest crops in the richest markets.
Smaller crops and smaller markets for seed (which often includes Canada) struggle to get funding to develop the crops and the varieties their farmers rely upon. This is a perennial problem cited by many of the crop commodity leaders I chat with. Getting companies to invest the millions of dollars needed to improve the crops we grow in the Canadian West is hard when investing for corn and soybeans in the U.S. Midwest offers a much bigger market and potential for blockbuster returns.
Canola has a tough time attracting money compared to corn and soybeans. The kind of wheat we grow up here struggles against wheat from areas that produce much, much more.
Imagine how hard it is to attract crop development interest and cash for the funky little crops we grow, like oats, flax, malting barley and pulse crops.
Those crops’ commodity groups do a good job of investing their money into research and development, but it’s chump change compared to the big crops. When even canola struggles to get investment interest, imagine what it’s like for those minor acreage crops we like growing. Imagine what it’s like trying to convince private researchers to invest in something like saskatoon berry breeding when there just doesn’t seem much nearby upside and money-making potential.
This makes sense in pure market economic terms. Companies should invest where they see the greatest potential gains. Those gains will generally come from producing innovations and unique products that customers are able to get the greatest benefit from.
The better the return for customers, the more they will pay for the product and the more they will want it. For crops, that means that what helps farmers the most is what they’ll be most willing to pay for.
In utilitarian terms, most of the money should be flowing to the biggest crops that have the greatest potential for getting bigger and better. The small crops ain’t getting the dough because they aren’t offering the biggest loaves. The greatest number of farmers will benefit from the greatest gains in the biggest crops. That’s market morality. It’s not wrong.
But it ignores what economists call “externalities,” which are costs or benefits that don’t appear in the pricing of a good or service.
For the federal Liberal government, and for much of society, including our leading corporations and food companies, greenhouse gas emissions are a critical externality they want controlled. If it is accepted that carbon and other emissions are causing climate change, something that many climate scientists say will have catastrophically large costs upon all of humanity and the planet, then the cost of spewing more into the atmosphere should be included in the cost of producing goods and doing things that emit more. That will reduce consumption of that thing and encourage consumption of things that don’t bring that cost.
This is where “carbon pricing” comes from, as well as carbon credits, transfers, premiums for low-emission products and a host of other attempts to jam the cost of environmental damage into the price of something.
Much farmer spleen has been vented over the federal government’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer use by 30 percent. While the target remains non-mandatory, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau restated last week, many farmers (and me, for what it’s worth) fear that once a target is set, it’s hard to back away from, and then it becomes increasingly likely that it will be made mandatory in the future.
This raises the risk of greenhouse gas taxes, various sorts of prohibitions and onerous verification requirements being imposed on farmers.
This would cause unbelievable political bloodshed and a tsunami of ill will across Canada’s farm country. It would weaken and drain our farmers, not build and strengthen them.
But another approach could achieve the latter.
It would be so much better for those wanting major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to focus on investing in things that would cut emissions while improving the situation of farmers.
That’s where pulse crops fit perfectly. As 4R fertilizer expert Mario Tenuta of the University of Manitoba has been out on the farm show circuit demonstrating all winter, upping the inclusion of pulse crops in the prairie farmer’s rotation could play an enormous role in cutting emissions, improving long-term yields, reducing disease risks, boosting profitability and giving the farmer a better spread of crops.
Growing a pulse crop cuts fertilizer use that year, reduces it the next year, and makes the yields of wheat and canola crops better and more stable over the long term. (The farm management team at Manitoba Agriculture has done a great job of modelling this in recent years.)
However, pulse crops are finicky. They are often fragile, in the way that canola was back in the 1990s when it was seen as the most delicate of crops. The markets are small and can be frustrating and undependable. Their small acreage lends itself to the boom-and-bust cycles that scare off many cautious farmers. Nightmare susceptibility to diseases like Aphanomyces put some growers off altogether.
A lot of farmers don’t bother going beyond canola-wheat-canola or canola-snow-canola due to these challenges.
Whatever the government does in the future, if it gets tougher on emissions reductions, it’s going to cost. Direct costs on farmers are one thing, through carbon taxes, fertilizer application limits or other attempts to beat down fertilizer usage. But anything that causes farmers to cut fertilizer use in crops that need fertilizer will hurt not just farmers, but all of Canada too, as production is restricted, exports constrained and national economic performance weaker than it should be.
One way or the other, it’s going to cost Canada to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from crop farming, but it would be far better to take that cost in the form of investing in boosting farmers’ crop choices, yields and returns, rather than nailing them with taxes and costs that weaken everybody.
As noted above, this wouldn’t be cheap, and the private sector can’t be relied upon to provide public goods that aren’t paid for.
Back in the days when we had to beat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for the sake of our national survival, we (or at least our allies, the Americans) were wise enough to see that a war-ending innovation like the atomic bomb was possible to produce, but only with a vast investment of public money. Incremental development by private sector partners would not do enough, fast enough.
The Manhattan Project was born, brought vast resources into play, and created something awesome that would not have otherwise been possible. The results were morally ambiguous, but scientifically and militarily undeniable.
Protein Industries Canada has already shown that the federal government is willing to fund positive development of plant protein, which has benefited pulse crop demand. But this is just a toe in the water of what we could be doing. If we want to see farmers slash greenhouse gas emissions, become less vulnerable to the boom-and-bust cycle, and enrich the national economy and federal treasury — and do it before 2050 — we don’t need a thousand points of light: we need the big man-made bang.
If the government is serious about its target, it’s time to pour big money into pulse crop development. We’re not talking here about millions of dollars, but billions. This might sound silly, but if you want big results, you’d better be willing to make a big investment.
Back in 1945 one project shook the world and shot down the rising sun. Maybe a smaller one up here today could help shut down the rising temperatures that threaten us as much as those threats did then.
