LUMSDEN, Sask. – While federal and provincial politicians stood at a podium on his farm extolling the virtues of environmental farm plans, Jim Latrace stood aside, talking about the water contamination disaster at Walkerton, Ont., seven years ago.
“I read that the farmer involved was protected because he had good environmental practices,” Latrace said on his seed farm north of Regina in mid-September.
“It was a wake-up call and as soon as environmental farm plans were available in 2005, I was one of the first to go through the process.”
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The Walkerton water contamination happened after a farmer near the town spread tonnes of manure, followed by several days of record May rainfall that washed some of the manure into the town water supply. Seven people died and more than 2,000 became ill. But a subsequent judicial inquiry absolved the farmer.
“The primary, if not the only, source of the contamination was manure that had been spread on a farm near Well 5,” wrote justice Dennis O’Connor in his 2002 report. “The owner of this farm followed proper practices and should not be faulted.”
Latrace enrolled in a workshop, had a work plan approved to improve the environmental side of his farm and made changes that ranged from moving a fertilizer storage bin and buying a global positioning system to improving the accuracy of chemical application and getting a consultant’s advice on fertilizer and chemical practices.
“I think it is protection,” Latrace told reporters. “An environmental plan deals with ‘what happens if?’ We haven’t had the if here yet but we have to be ready.”
The environmental farm plan program has become the runaway success story of the agricultural policy framework.
Since it was rolled out in 2005 as a federal-provincial program, more than 50,000 farmers across Canada have taken the workshop, developed an improvement plan and started the work. Governments rebate between 30 and 50 percent of the costs for most projects and expect to spend more than $600 million by March 31, 2008, when the program expires unless it is extended or renewed.
Ken Belcher, who teaches environmental resource economics at the University of Saskatchewan, said farmers have many motivations for signing up – tax dollar incentives, risk aversion and responding to consumer environmental sensibilities.
“I would say it started as a way to avoid risk but as farmers calculate the benefits and potential costs, it has become much more,” he said. “Farmers are interested in stewardship and interested in being seen to be good stewards so this is a way to do that. The offer of money gets them in the door but they quickly learn the benefits are far greater.”
Belcher said the program should be seen as the latest in a series of environmental initiatives that have built over the years, ranging from the Senate report Soils at Risk in the 1980s through Walkerton and various programs that stress the environmental consequences of erosion, water contamination and improper chemical application.
But ironically, a program that is popular and successful appears to be at risk.
Program advocates and administrators note that unless federal and provincial ministers negotiate a new policy framework soon or agree to extend existing programs, it expires March 31 and the impact on enrolments will begin to be felt by early winter.
Ministers insist they want to see the program continue but have not yet made the decisions to ensure it does.
“This is an opportunity for agriculture to show society that it is doing its part and farmers have responded,” Manitoba program administrator Wanda McFadyen said.
“If it dies in the spring of ’08, all the good work that has been going on will stall and there will be a lot of frustration in the countryside.”
