Mara Shaw on climate change and farming practices

Jeff Green | Jan 27, 2021

350 Kingston, an advocacy group of Kingston residents, dedicated to the fight against climate change, kicked off their virtual winter speakers series, Turning the Tide on Climate, on Monday night (January 25), with a talk about agriculture and climate change by Mara Shaw.

Mara Shaw is the Executive Director of the National Farmers Union. She previously worked as the Watershed Management Coordinator with Cataraqui Region Conservation, and as the Executive Director of the Loving Spoonful, a food program in Kingston.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) has an active local, #316, which is based in rural Kingston and Frontenac County. 

Shaw pointed out, at the start of her talk to 200 participants on Zoom, that one of the reasons that the NFU is able to advocate for farming practices, that will lessen the carbon emissions from agriculture, is that it is an organisation that serves the interests of its members, farm families across the country and those who support their efforts, and “does not take funding from major corporations.”

She said that “there is enormous money in agriculture. Corporate money is huge and vocal.”

While agriculture is a relatively small producer of greenhouse gases compared to other sectors, it is responsible for 12% of carbon emissions, the 6th largest sector.

“Agriculture has existed for 10,000 years, however, without contributing to climate change for almost all of that time. It is only the changes that came from high input agriculture that has changed that reality.”

She said that farming used to be a high margin activity, but over time with the advent of fossil fuel based nitrogen fertiliser and other industrial technologies it has become a low-margin activity.

“Increased agricultural gross revenues have not meant increases in the net revenue of farmers. A middle level made up of corporations such as Monsanto and John Deere, take most of that money, leaving farmers with the same or less revenue.” 

She said that a set of solutions that will make agriculture more sustainable for farm families, while at the same time addressing climate change, will come from reversing the trend towards high input agriculture and moving towards lower impacts, less use of industrial fertilisers and the return of diversified farming practices.

“This is consistent with what many people have been looking for, particular during the pandemic, when the demand for locally produced food has been unprecedented,” she said.

The average family in Canada pays only 9% of their income for food, a percentage that has decreased over the decades.  

“The problem is not the price of local food, it is making sure everyone has sufficient income to buy what they need locally. The NFU supports the basic income guarantee and a higher minimum wage” she said. 

Another argument in favour of industrial agricultural practice is what Shaw called “feeding the 10 billion” producing enough food for a burgeoning global population (There were 2.5 billion people in the world in 1950 and the population in 2050 is projected to be 9.75 billion according to united Nations statistics)

“It is a common trope that only industrial agriculture will sustain the global population, but the average world grain yield has increased faster than population growth for decades, and low input farming is more resilient, it does better in drought.”

One of the proposals, that the NFU has been promoting to the federal government, is to borrow from one of the mechanisms that prairie farmers employed when they were recovering from the dust bowl crisis of the 1930's.

“They formed a prairie farm resilience authority, which lasted until the Harper government closed it down. We are requesting that the government set up a new kind of authority that would be just as broad in its mandate, to help farmers make these transitions from high input to low input.”

She said that the federal government has been very receptive to this concept as it works towards addressing climate change. 

But the government also has other priorities which are not all consistent with sustainable agriculture, she pointed out.

“They have an aggressive policy regarding making food an export engine for the economy.”

Mara Shaw took a wide range of questions from the zoom audience after delivering her address. The session is being posted on Youtube this week.

The winter speakers series continues next week with a talk by Queen's Professor Dr. John Smol, a paleo-limnologist who has tracked the effects of climate change on lakes by studying the core sediments underneath lakes on the Canadian Shield.