Are yield and sustainability natural enemies?

Productivity has long been the main focus of agricultural research in Canada – more bushels of grain, more pounds of beef, more litres of milk, all in aid of competitiveness and profitability.

Now there’s a new research priority on the block: sustainability, which often clashes with the deeply held belief that yield should dominate.

In Ottawa, the Central Experimental Farm (CEF) is a microcosm of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s research. It is the largest AAFC facility in urban Canada.

Why it matters: Higher yields might not always be in farmers’ best interests as market demand begins to shift.

“A lot of farms out west for AAFC are bigger, but none are within a city,” said CEF associate director Julie Chapados.

Large or small, east or west, rural or urban, the facilities are part of AAFC’s Sustainable Agriculture Strategy. It aims to address industry-wide issues and create a more sustainable future for Canadian agriculture.

Adaptability is a main area of focus in the SAS and it gets lots of attention at the CEF.

“We’re always trying to balance the public’s desire for quality food with certain attributes, like protein content, or malting [quality] for barley,” said Chapados. “But then we have to balance that with how it grows in the environment, the yield, how it’s resistant to different disease.”

She believes the public is now paying more attention to sustainability and it can be a challenge to simultaneously manage yield potential and sustainability concerns.

“Some of these traits, they don’t go hand in hand, so we’re always kind of juggling,” she said. “Just because your wheat produces a lot does not mean it’s resistant to disease or resistant to drought. So, it’s kind of a balance.

“We’re trying to make farming more resilient, so it’s evolving and we’re trying to fit into the global agricultural field as well.”

At AAFC, the conflict plays out in research; between a need to keep food production high and a need to maintain viability of crops in the future. The sustainable agriculture strategy is described as being built on “a solid foundation of regional strengths and diversity in order to rise to the climate change challenge,” also noting agriculture is “one of the sectors with the highest economic growth potential in Canada.”

In other words, crops must be sustainable while continuing to grow in large, profitable quantities.

This tension may pose challenges to many operations, but the power to change the system could lie with external parties, like consumers, distributors and foreign markets.

Different views

A recent report co-authored by Tyler McCann and Elisabeta Lika for the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute found that “farmers, in general, view themselves as good environmental stewards of the land.”

Many also consider themselves to be “sustainable improvers.”

This view offers a stark contrast to an August report published by the National Farmers Union, based on data from Environment and Climate Change Canada, which found greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture to be up 41 per cent since 1990.

The NFU report takes aim at the high yield mentality as one culprit for unsustainable practices.

As Darrin Qualman, a Saskatchewan farmer, author and researcher who prepared the NFU report puts it, “Canada has a real focus on maximizing yields.”

Qualman said Canada’s path of constant yield increases will likely lead to many adverse environmental effects because it means maximizing everything across the supply chain — including harmful practices.

“The initial focus is on maximizing agri-food exports, and that leads to a focus on maximizing yield, and that leads to a focus on maximizing inputs, and thus maximizing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Qualman.

That path leads to a less sustainable food production system, he said, but there’s been a shift over the past three decades or so, as more people begin to see climate change as a major disruptor of agricultural practices.

“In the 1990s and beyond, the inputs became a much bigger factor in that yield maximization project,” he said. “We first started seeing people discussing climate-related agriculture in the 1990s.”

Coming pressures

David Lapen, a research scientist at CEF, suspects international scrutiny of exports could set the tone for Canadian agricultural practices in the future. That scrutiny may come at the governmental level, but it’s just as likely to come as a result of changing market requirements driven by consumer demand.

“Whatever you want to call them, adapting to climate change, the circular economy … the markets will be looking for those things,” Lapen said.

That could come down to the farm level, where individual farm carbon footprints, for example, become an important factor in marketing that farm’s products.

“Maybe countries are going to be looking at carbon footprints or biodiversity footprints,” he said.

As an example, some countries might be unwilling to buy grain or oilseeds from land that had been recently deforested. In Western Canada, where grain is grown to be exported, large-scale intensive operations could be a turnoff.

Trends within the food world have an impact on the direction of sustainable agriculture as well. Lapen said the craze over food labelled organic led to a shift in consumer demand. It doesn’t take farmers long to respond to shifting market demands and seize emerging opportunities, he added.

“They’re feeling the vibe on the street, they know,” he said.

Chapados echoed the sentiment.

“Health crazes come and go. Oats had a big thing a few years ago … Quaker Oats promotes Cheerios as heart healthy, because it’s got good beta glucan, so then all the breeders were like ‘we’ve gotta increase beta glucan.’”

She mentioned a similar situation with the appeal of omega-3 eggs.

If public demand can change producers’ practices, it’s possible interest in sustainability could do the same.

Qualman also pointed to organic status as something farmers have had to work hard to attain in response to demand.

“We’ve had a long history of that in the organic sector,” he said. “And I’m not advocating organic in any way or advocating against it. I’m merely just pointing out that that exists, that farmers who do the extra management work to produce organically, they get a premium in the market.”

He said changes and trends in production will most often be driven by what farmers see as profitable endeavours.

“I think I think every farmer is trying to do the best they can to respond to the signals the market’s sending them,” Qualman said.

“We hope that every farmer can earn a good, stable net income. Now, if some part of the market wants to offer more for grain produced in a different way and the farmers can make a premium, that’s good.”

However, profitability is not guaranteed when it comes to sustainability.

Beth Hunter of Foodbridge, an initiative focused on regenerative food and farming, said many farmers feel they are asked to take a leap of faith when embracing change.

“All of those things involve talking about risk,” she said. “It could be a social risk around doing something that’s different, that’s not … the way the neighbours do it, the way that Dad did it.

“It can be a technical risk, which is around like, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never done this before and it’s doing something different. It might totally fail out the whole crop.’”

She said bold, potentially risky action from farmers is required to develop new practices and technologies.

“I think of them as champion farmers that have done amazing things,” she said. “You know, then the question is, can you reproduce it? Can you scale it?

“That’s what’s so interesting and fascinating, I think, about agriculture,” said Hunter. “It’s like one giant experiment. The problem is that it’s a slow experiment because you only get one take every year. But there’s so many producers all across the country that are all like scientists experimenting in the petri dish of their farms.”

Of course, a challenge in taking bold action on sustainability is overcoming the focus on yield, which Hunter said she still sees among producers.

“It seems to me like for some reason, the yield metric has gotten more … is it cultural? It has more sort of salience.

“There’s this sort of ‘feed(ing) the world is our responsibility’ narrative,” she said. “People will say like, ‘we need to keep up those yields, or we need to increase them.’”

This focus could be shifted toward profitability, she said, and that can be achieved through a demand for more sustainable ventures.

“The idea that yields should dominate above profits is something that, from a farmer’s perspective, it doesn’t really make sense,” she said.

“What I’m saying is that the cost savings from reducing some of your inputs is part of the sustainability, and having greater sustainability outcomes while also maintaining your profitability is one of the paths to getting where we want to get to.”

Many aspects of healthy, sustainable farming that would look attractive to consumers on product labels could also mean long-term profitability for farmers.

Healthy soil, for example, might be something consumers want. But soil with higher organic matter can also absorb more water in times of excess and hold it for later use in times of scarcity. A healthy soil microbiome also has greater resilience against pests and disease.

Farmers know this and they’ve been changing their practices. According to the CAPI report, “a significant proportion of farmers currently enrolled in government or private programs promoting sustainable farming practices indicated that they would have adopted these practices even without depending on third-party funding.

“This likely reflects that farmers are adopting sustainable practices that provide economic and other benefits.”

Qualman thinks the direction of farming practices are mostly dictated by the market.

“The market is actual corporations,” he said. “It’s food processing corporations and retail corporations.

And when we look at the long-term data on what those corporations are taking out of the grocery store dollar, it’s more and more. It’s an ever-increasing share.”

This can lead to a system in which producers are pressured into potentially unsustainable practices, which he likens to a treadmill.

“Farmers are focused on yield, but they’re also encouraged to be focused on yield,” Qualman said. “And what that turns into in practice is kind of a yield and input-use treadmill, that no matter what amount of yield farmers are generating, they’re spurred to increase that yield.”

Sustainability discussions might best be focused on inputs and materials, he added.

He has seen an increase in fuel use as well as pesticides over the past 30 years. The NFU’s report found emissions from fossil-fuel to be a major contributor to on-farm emissions.

“All of that is occurring against the background of rising emissions, rising energy inputs, rising fertilizer use, rising pesticide use, so there’s really good questions around sustainability – ones that really need to be explored more fully.”