Two Alberta farmers at the centre of a $35 million hit to Alberta’s seed potato export business say they have probably been falsely accused.
Ernie VanBoom, owner of Northbank Potato Farms Ltd. where the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said it found a potato infected with golden nematode in late 2007, told MPs recently he doubts there was an infected potato plant.
CFIA has tested close to 40,000 soil samples from the farm and not found another infection since the original discovery, which halted potato production on the farm and closed the U.S. border to Alberta seed potatoes.
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“Our contention is we don’t believe the science is there,” said Northbank co-owner Cecil Goutbeck.
“We’re not sure that there are nematodes on our farm.”
In testimony to the House of Commons agriculture committee, VanBoom always referred to the “alleged” case of nematode and suggested CFIA continues soil testing because it does not want to admit it made a mistake.
“We think we’re being a little bit used as kind of a pawn maybe to protect their reputation,” he said.
“I have to come out and say that.”
The thousands of negative soil tests have created “a mountain of scientific evidence calling into question the validity of the original find. CFIA stood alone in its dismissive stance with respect to the possibility of human error,” said VanBoom.
Conservative MPs took up the point when they grilled senior CFIA officials later in the meeting.
Officials refused to concede that there is any possibility the first test result was faulty.
“You continue to talk as if this farm has PCN (potato cyst nematode) and all the evidence that has come forward today, even the nodding of your own heads, suggests to me that not everybody around this room is convinced that this farm even has PCN,” Alberta MP Brian Storseth bluntly told CFIA vice-president of operations Cameron Prince.
“That is the issue here.”
He suggested the first sample could have been contaminated in the CFIA lab where nematode-infected potatoes from Quebec had been tested earlier.
“It seems obvious to all members of this committee … that there is at least the chance that this may have been an error.”
Martine Dubuc, CFIA vice-president for science, said cross-contamination is not possible. The Quebec samples were there several weeks earlier and the lab had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected after.
Later, Ontario Conservative Bev Shipley picked up the theme.
“When we look at this particular farm, it looks like it has been targeted,” he told Prince.
“You took one sample that found a perceived, maybe, we aren’t sure, nematode. You continually took thousands upon thousands upon thousands and have not found any(more). That almost leaves the impression that you’re trying to cover yourself. We’ve got to find something here.”
Agency officials said they sympathized with the farmers but must follow the rules in the Canada-U.S. agreement.
Those rules will change soon, based on a recently negotiated agreement to limit regulation of nematode-contaminated land to the precise field and not the whole farm.
The new rules, when implemented, will also end the policy of suspending exports from the entire province rather than the affected farms. Until the U.S. border re-opened to Alberta seed potatoes from non-regulated farms, the industry estimated $35 million in sales had been lost.
CFIA officials said they will move as quickly as they can to allow the Northbank farm back into the potato business, but at least one more year of soil testing will be necessary before that can happen.
VanBoom told MPs the nematode incident has devastated the farm, kept it out of the lucrative potato export business and made it difficult to operate the grain and oilseed side of the business because CFIA rules require that field equipment and trucks be thoroughly washed and cleaned after every trip into the fields.
Other potato farmers in the area have been affected, land values have dropped, potato customers in the U.S. have been lost and many local landowners have said they will no longer rent land to potato operations.
“To put it simply, the events triggered by the activities of the CFIA in the fall of 2007 have all but destroyed the viability of our once-wonderful farm,” VanBoom told MPs.
“We wait to be released from this trap and to be given back our farm and our livelihood.”
