COLUMN - Nuts 'n Bolts

by Shane Sadorski

In my previous article, I wrote about how folks in the cattle industry have for a very long time provided our society and planet with a wide range of environmental benefits just by deciding to be cattle producers. I wrote about how we as a society have for too long undervalued the environmental contributions you make to the public good (largely at your cost) by choosing to run cattle sustainably on your well-managed perennial cover.

The MCPA is hammering this point home to government and the urban public with its proposal for an Environmental and Rural Stewardship Incentive program in Manitoba. We as a society get so much more from your farm operation than just beef. The big four are: (1) your perennial cover and farm management reduces nutrients in our waterways, (2) your farm’s carbon sinks reclaim carbon and fight climate change, (3) your perennial cover and farm management provides habitat that maintains biodiversity, and (4) your perennial cover is good ol’ fashioned soil conservation and there are major food security benefits that come from that.

In this article, I want to share with you a few of the details of what MCPA is proposing with our Environmental and Rural Stewardship Incentive program.

This program is an EG&S (ecological goods & services) program. What this boils down to is to have society send you a price signal that puts a dollar value on the environmental benefits (goods & services) listed above and giving you the option of acting on it. It’s all about finding out the true full value of your farm to society and having society offer you something for that value.

The way we see this working is along these lines.

You are a responsible, dedicated cattle producer. Your farm management decisions result in you producing not only excellent quality beef but vital environmental benefits. You follow all the government regs (even when they sometimes seem silly or pointless). You’ve taken the time to set up an Environmental Farm Plan and maybe even gone a step further and invested in some BMPs (beneficial management practices). Either way, your farm outputs are now beef + EG&S.

Like your cattle, there comes the time to take those valuable farm outputs to market. You voluntarily call up a neutral, 3rd-party agency (MCPA is thinking of a re-vamped Farm Stewardship Association of Manitoba, but that’s something subject to negotiation) who sends out an expert assessor who does a confidential on-farm assessment to measure what and how much EG&S your farm is producing. They determine that you indeed meet all the baseline criteria and give you a certificate verifying that your farm is producing X amount of EG&S. Maybe even give you some tips on how to increase/maximize your EG&S output. That’s step one: certification.

Next, certificate in hand, you decide to pay a visit to the government agency responsible for buying EG&S in Manitoba (we’re suggesting something like Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corp., but it could easily be something else). This agency has been given the budget from the Province and the Feds to buy up EG&S on behalf of everyone in Manitoba. After all, remember that all Manitobans share in the benefits of your EG&S. This agency accepts your EG&S certificate as proof of output, opens a file, you sign a supply contract, and they start paying you your fair due for your EG&S. Cheque is in the mail.

Okay, it’s a bit more than that because government quite rightfully wants to be sure that taxpayers are actually getting what they are purchasing from you and that you aren’t trying to pull as fast one, getting paid for pasture that is no longer there or any other cuts you made to your contracted EG&S supply.

But that’s what those confidential 3rd-party verifiers are for – they act as the confidential auditors that come by every so often for a check-up, just to be sure you’re farm still matches up with the certificate they issued you. If you’ve made any changes to your farm that changes the amount of EG&S you are supplying, the auditor revises the certificate and lets the government know the numbers have changed. Payments are then adjusted accordingly – or outright discontinued if you’re trying to be a shyster with the taxpayer.

But why government in all this? Why not just make a system to market the EG&S directly to individuals or the public. Why not let the market do it?

In theory, this could happen and would be the preferred solution, but we are a long way off from this being at all practical. We’re closest to this with carbon offset trading, but even there, it’s a long road ahead – and quite bluntly the environment can’t wait.

As frontline conservationists, we know this. Wetlands and other perennial cover are disappearing fast in agricultural Canada and what’s left today is about as scare as an AgriStability payment. With everything going on in our industry, there’s a lot of exit from the cattle business in the offing and the forecast is for a substantial land use transition where perennial cover goes under the plow as farmers shift to doing something other than raise cattle. We as a society can’t wait years and years for a private market solution to develop. We have to bolster the family cattle operation today or it will be too late for the environment.

And even if we were to solve a lot of the technical problems around creating private markets for all of our different EG&S, there is still a bigger reality. The fact is that while your EG&S output is an essential good and service to our society at a collective level, at the individual level they amount to luxury goods. In economic tight spots, buying EG&S takes a big back seat to paying the grocery bill. No point in trying to market something that no one is buying.

And really, that’s where our proposal comes in. If we as individual citizens of Manitoba and Canada are unable to attach proper value to the essential environmental goods and services being produced in rural Canada, then it’s high time we bought them collectively through our government. Because the alternative – forcing farmers to generate these essential goods by regulation and government order – is definitely something that has proven not to work.