opinion
This week, the Auditor General released an assessment of the federal government’s implementation of climate change plans for agriculture. and the results were not good.
My first reaction to this goal was neither shock nor surprise. Because the goals seemed lofty, hard to measure, disconnected from real practice, and more about grabbing headlines than actually making a difference.
In March 2023, RealAgristudies collaborated with the Canadian Agriculture and Food Policy Institute (CAPI) to question farmers about sustainability programs and incentives to better understand their position. If we assume that there is a link between specific practices and sustainability goals, we need a deeper understanding of what motivates farmers to engage in those practices (see the full CAPI report). read) here).
At the time of the survey, 27% of farmers (regardless of geography) said they were enrolled in a private or government program that encourages the adoption of sustainable farming practices.
Among farmers who did participate in the program, 40% said they would have adopted those practices with or without incentives, and 46% said this was true for some but not all practices, indicating that incentives were effective. Only 14% said so. Required for actual recruitment. Incentivized driving practices were more common in eastern Canada than in western Canada.
If, without incentives, only 45 percent of crop farmers and 35 percent of livestock farmers would have adopted this practice, incentive-based funding such as the On-Farm Climate Action Fund (OFCAF) No wonder government programs have a hard time succeeding. Add to this the fact that government funding has not been linked to the results that many stakeholders consider to be effective. It also raises the question of whether government funding should be focused entirely on other areas, such as research.
As I have said many times on RealAg Radio and in keynotes, relying on climate change ideology to address change is ineffective and will lead to significant resentment among agricultural audiences. Stakeholders who want to drive change need to talk about return on investment.
Because ROI for some practices is difficult to measure and research is only just beginning to produce good data, governments in Canada and across the border are seeking to lower barriers to adoption by addressing upfront costs through incentives. Masu. In our survey, 63 percent of farmers said they were interested in participating in an incentive program, but only 23 percent said the current incentive amount was sufficient.
As shown below, 78 percent of farmers say current government programs have little or no impact on their practices. Again, the system seems to lack any real efficiency.
Fifty-seven percent of farmers felt that performance-based incentives were preferable instead of up-front incentives to reduce farmer risk, while 13 percent disagreed. Although it seems better to give monetary rewards to actual results, measurement is often not that simple or practical.
If current or future governments are to move the needle towards climate-related goals, a deeper understanding of farmers is needed. I think there are a lot of assumptions being made about what drives decisions, changes and actions at the farm level. As the Auditor General has pointed out, it is clear that the current strategy is ineffective in many ways.
