The Environmental Farm Plan program, popular with farmers but largely abandoned by governments, could be a powerful way for producers to connect with customers, says an Ontario report.
“What we increasingly find is that purchasers of the product are asking different questions than they used to, questions about how the product was produced,” George Morris Centre senior research associate Al Mussell said July 5.
“We think the records farmers keep when part of an EFP has potential to be part of the answer but this re-search needs more work.”
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Mussell wrote a report for the George Morris Centre that suggested farm environmental plans “could be used as a platform to identify the sustainability practices expected by the food and bio-economy industries.”
The Ontario Soil and Crop Im-provement Association said last week Ontario has the world’s highest farmer support of voluntary EFP programs.
“For over 20 years, farmers have embraced the EPF as their guide to defining environmental sustain-ability,” he said in a statement reacting to the report.
“It would not require a lot of tweaking to incorporate additional components to satisfy the value chain.”
Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Mark Wales sees some irony in the conclusion, based on the rules of the five-year Growing Forward 2 farm policy framework that took effect April 1, agreed to by federal and provincial governments.
“The challenge is that we don’t have a functional environmental farm program under Growing Forward 2,” he said. “What has existed in Ontario for the past 20 years isn’t there anymore.”
He said under the first Growing Forward agreement, Ontario took money that should have been available for environmental farm plans and spent it elsewhere.
Instead of a $10 million annual allocation, the province cut it to less than $4 million.
“The demand didn’t change and if you cut the money by one-third or more, you have over-subscription in a matter of seconds.”
So in GF2, the environmental farm plan design was changed and it has become less effective in Ontario, said Wales.
“I wonder if the authors of the report understand the changes and how it affects the program.”
Some provinces still are delivering the program as it was originally intended, he said.
“Kudos to them. Ontario with its new system is very slow to roll out.”
He said new rules mean there is no peer review of EFP record keeping and no requirement to have done a workshop to apply for environmental funding.
“That is a concern because in the past you had to do the workshop and you had to be peer reviewed, you had to have a plan on things you wanted to do and that’s what you could apply for project money for so it was a well understood system,” said the OFA president.
“It was a good program, an effective program, 12,000 Ontario farmers took part and now we’ve changed the model. This is where the government is going so we have to support them but we also have to push them to get this thing moving.”
In Ontario, 2013 workshops do not happen until August, applications will be accepted in September and decisions will be made in November for funding.
