Shaghayegh Tajvidi: If you are a human who eats, this episode is for you. Whether it’s droughts in countries we import food from or a heat dome destroying Canadian crops, the climate emergency is showing up on all of our plates. It’s a major threat to food security and the livelihoods of thousands of farmers.

Polly Leger: Agriculture isn’t just a victim of climate change -- it’s also a driving force.
Between 8 and percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas contributions come from the farming industry,  it kind of just depends on who you ask. And that’s not even counting the long journey of food being trucked or flown from the farm to your table.

Shaghayegh:  That’s just the impact of farming itself.

Polly: and the crops and livestock that we raise.

Shaghayegh: I’m Shaghayegh Tajvidi,

Polly: I’m Polly Leger.

Shaghayegh: From Canada’s National Observer, this is Race Against Climate Change.

Polly: On today’s show National Observer founder and editor in chief, Linda Solomon Wood, sits down with author and professor Lenore Newman, on the realities of food security and climate change.

Linda Solomon Wood: We have nine years to cut our emissions in half. So how does food play into that?

Lenore Newman:  Food is actually the biggest piece of the puzzle by far. It's a good news, bad news story.

Polly: Plus, the future of meat without animals, and why regenerative farming is Canada’s next climate darling.

Shaghayegh:  But first, I want to tell you about a photo.

NEWSCAST: It’s Tuesday night. The deadly consequences of Canada’s record shattering heat. Dozens of sudden deaths in B.C. The connection to climate change.

Shaghayegh: It was circulating on Twitter, last July, taken from an Okanagan vineyard. You can see it on our website.

There are green vines climbing on to neat fences. Beyond them you see these dusty hills dotted with trees.

The sky is thick with smoke, and one hill in the distance is glowing orange from the wildfires, they’re tearing across the valley. If it wasn’t for patches of blue sky at the edges of the photo, you wouldn’t know it was taken during the day.

The person who captured this isn’t a journalist, like me, or a firefighter. They're a migrant farmworker on the frontlines of one of B.C.’s worst wildfire seasons. That vineyard is their job site.

No matter where you are in this country, this is a snapshot of the climate crisis wreaking havoc in real time on Canada’s food system and its most vulnerable workers.

Robyn Bunn: So we’re looking down a slope towards the lake, through the rows…

Shaghayegh: It’s July. I’m in the Okanagan Valley at a working vineyard.  It looks pretty similar to the Twitter photo, and I’m with Robyn Bunn.

Robyn: The skies are pretty smokey
Shaghayegh: We’re been out here for just 36 minutes and I'm starting to feel a little, like..

Shaghayegh We can’t see fire, but we can definitely taste smoke. Robyn advocates for migrant workers, and she’s been living in Kelowna for years.

Robyn: We get a huge influx of people coming in every year, because it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful place to visit. It is so heavily marketed to tourists.

Shaghayegh: As we look out toward pristine grape vines at a popular Kelowna winery, it’s a little eerie.

Robyn: It feels like there's two different cities or two different communities.

Shaghayegh: Robyn might as well be telling me a ghost story. At least a story of people who are “invisible”, who have a totally different experience of the Okanagan compared to the tourists who come for beaches, spas and wine tours.

Robyn: So the Okanagan, the central Okanagan Valley is home to some of the largest orchards in Canada. This is a billion dollar a year industry. And the industry absolutely does not run without migrant laborers coming from Mexico and Jamaica. And they don't experience this place the same way other people do.

Shaghayegh: Robyn is a member of a group called Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture, or RAMA for short.

Robyn: Farm workers generally, but migrant labour in particular, are completely invisible in this narrative around how food gets to our tables. Because they are so invisible people don't think about the issues and the challenges that they face.

Shaghayegh: They hear a lot about what it’s like to be a seasonal farm worker in Canada.

Robyn: Workers coming from Mexico or from Jamaica are hired by a single employer. They cannot change jobs, they have to live where the employer tells them to live, usually on farm. And there's no pathway to permanent residency when you're working through one of these programs.

Sound up from protest: “Status for all, we say  and now! That’s what we’re asking Justin Trudeau to do”

Shaghayegh: Migrant workers come to this country to work in all kinds of jobs,but 60 per cent wind up in agriculture.

In North America, the agricultural sector is one of the most dangerous when it comes to heat deaths. And in a way, that makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot more heat working in fields in California or central Mexico, but Canada’s catching up.

NEWSCAST: Vancouver is baking yet again tonight in a record smashing heatwave…

Shaghayegh: This past summer as B.C.s temperatures reached the highest ever recorded in this country--

Robyn: Workers were telling us that they had no way of cooling down from the heat, they had no relief whatsoever. So not only are they working in these extreme heat conditions, outside, they would go home after their shift and not have anything within their housing units that would help them to cool down.

We realized quickly that there was nothing in any sort of housing policy or regulations that mandated that they be provided with things like fans, or air conditioning. In weather that was above 40 degrees. How fucking irresponsible of employers for for just abandoning their workers.

Shaghayegh: Grim work conditions aren't exactly new in this sector. In fact, they’re well documented. But throw in climate severity and all the landscapes, including labour and politics, are increasingly unpredictable.

Robyn:The reason why we have so many people coming here every year to work is because there aren't enough Canadians who are willing to do this kind of work. These programs exist because there is a need.
We also know that agriculture is one of the sectors that's most vulnerable to climate change. And not just in the Okanagan but in all of the sending countries where people are coming from to work.
We're still wrestling with with what to do, what is a good solution that includes migrant workers when we're talking about climate solutions for agriculture, when we're talking water,  when we're talking about our food supply.

Shaghayegh: When it comes to this race against climate change, we are still wrestling with what a good solution is. And so much of the conversations around decarbonizing and Net Zero focus on the numbers. Understandably. But for us to eat, while the climate breaks down in real time, involves a lot of human cost.

The extent of that isn't easily captured in the climate reports we read. But it does play out in fields all across Canada where the immigration system meets unparalleled weather events, leaving those who feed us quite literally, in the smoke.

Robyn: The most vulnerable workers need to be included in these conversations about how are we going to sustain agriculture as the climate changes? Because without the workers, we don't have agriculture. We won't be able to feed ourselves in the same way.

Shaghayegh: So what can be done? For RAMA this includes stronger legal status for workers, inclusion into the communities they help feed, and climate safety.   
For others, it’s transforming the entire way we farm. More on that, coming up.

***

Shaghayegh: People who own farms, and people who work on them, are extremely vulnerable in this climate emergency. But the way we farm on an industrial scale is also a huge source of emissions.  And the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, singled out methane as a greenhouse gas we need to act on immediately. So Polly, why?

Polly: Because methane has a lot more warming power in the short term. In the first 10 years methane’s in the atmosphere, it traps heat at a rate 80 times that of CO2.  So CO2 lasts longer, but methane does a lot more damage in this decade.

Shaghayegh: And we have very little runway in the short term if we’re going to cut emissions in half in nine years. How is this a farm problem though?

Polly:  Agriculture is one of the main sources of methane. Globally, it’s right up there with fracking and orphan wells. But in Canada, about three per cent of all of our GHG emissions come from cows alone.
So cows are ruminants, they’ve got four stomachs, just like goats and sheep. And they burp methane as part of their digestive process, so it’s just built into the cow.

Shaghayegh:  So what’s the cattle industry doing about all this?

Polly: They’re trying to find ways to limit the amount of methane cows produce. Imagine an antacid for cows.

Fawn Jackson: So there are some products, that essentially would be a feed additive, that they're doing trials in Canada right now. And it looks like it can reduce methane emissions, around 20, to actually up to 70%.

Polly: That’s Fawn Jackson, is the climate lead for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association.
Fawn’s talking about a feed additive from a Dutch company. Other scientists here in Canada are looking at seaweed as a feed solution, which could lower, at least in part, the industry’s emissions.

Shaghayegh: Aside from methane, the IPCC also singled out another greenhouse gas villian in agriculture, and that’s Nitrous oxide.

Polly: Talk about a monster -- this one is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Shaghayegh: I … don’t know how to respond to that.

Polly: Yeah!  I mean, who can. The other thing is that it comes from what we put ON our soil. Here’s Karen Ross, is a farmer and she’s also the director of Farmers for Climate Solutions.

Karen Ross: The single largest growing source of emissions in our sector comes from nitrogen fertilizer use.

Shaghayegh:  So nitrous oxide comes from fertilizer, but don’t we need that to grow crops?

Polly: So this is the extremely basic version of Soil 101. Plants need nitrogen to grow, so farmers use a ton of nitrogen fertilizer to boost their crops. But the flip side of this is if you use TOO MUCH nitrogen fertilizer it turns into nitrous oxide, which again, has a huge warming effect, way more powerful than CO2.

Farmers for Climate Solutions, FCS, looked at all the different ways farms could lower their GHG emissions. Basically asking what will make the biggest cut to the sector’s emissions across the board.

Shaghayegh: So what would that be?

Polly: Their top priority was: help farmers use less nitrogen fertilizer. Essentially by trying to get the earth to do the heavy lifting for them.  

Shaghayegh: I have no idea what that entails.

Polly: It’s part of this whole suite of farming practises called regenerative farming.  FCS actually came up with a shortlist of what would have the most impact in Canada

Shaghayegh: Okay! Number one!

Polly: Cover cropping,basically growing a second crop after you harvest your cash crop, so that you don’t have bare earth in the off season.

Shaghayegh: So how is that good, what does it actually do?

Polly: It keeps your soil from blowing away and degrading over the winter and if your soil degrades, then you need to use more nitrogen fertilizer.

Shaghayegh: What else you got?

Polly: We’ve got rotational grazing-- basically moving your cows around

Shaghayegh: Just moving them around?  

Polly: yeah! So they’re not in one place for the whole summer and don’t overgraze a single area. Again, you don't want the solid to degrade.

Shaghayegh:  And lastly?

Polly: Protecting wetlands and trees on farms.

Shaghayegh: So what would all of together this do for GHG emissions?

Polly: If you just look at the top two priorities, so that’s Cover cropping and better use of nitrogen fertilizers, these two actions alone could equal taking a million cars off the road for a year. That’s like, ALL OF OTTAWA

Shaghayegh: So we’re got an Ottawa-sized amount of impact. There’s to be some uptake to this?

Polly: Yeah! A couple of days before the federal election was called, the Minister of Agriculture announced $200 million for exactly just this: cover cropping, rotational grazing, and nitrogen management.

Shaghayegh: $200 million doesn’t seem like much cash?

Polly: That’s kind of the incredible thing. These solutions aren't that expensive.

So  if you have stronger soil,  you use less nitrogen fertilizer and you’re also making your farm more resilient to drought or floods

Shaghayegh: Which we know is an increasing threat for farms across Canada. And ‘natural climate solutions’ also come up a lot in these conversations. Gimmie the rundown.

Polly: Natural climate solutions are kind of similar to regenerative farming in that it’s about working with an ecosystem to turn it into a carbon sink. So planting new trees,  establishing wetlands and ultimately better agricultural practises.

Shaghayegh: What would be the climate opportunity here?

Polly: A major study that came out this summer found that by the end of the decade, 2030, natural climate solutions could capture 78 megatonnes of CO2 equivalents. Which is like powering every home in Canada for three whole years. Three years!

Shaghayegh: Three years? How much do farming practises play into all of that?

Polly: Nearly half of that CO2 capture that I mentioned, the 78 megatonnes, comes from better agricultural practises.

Karen Ross: Eight growing seasons doesn't feel that far away, to significantly change the emission curve in our sector. But at the same time, we're not starting from nothing. There’s lots of farmer led innovation from our fields directly that we can draw on to scale up the transition we need to see in our sector.

Shaghayegh: We know that capturing carbon is a huge part of getting to net zero  but we can’t do it unless we’re actually just emitting less as a whole. Next sowing the seeds of hope: We’re looking at Canada’s looming food insecurity.

Polly: And solutions that could be at your local box store?

***

Lenore Newman: Yeah, most people like me for radio and podcasts, also live events with lots of old people. I'm very popular.

Polly: This Lenore Newman.

Lenore:  In general, I'm insanely loud.

Polly: She has a Canada Research Chair in food security in the environment. And she's--

Lenore:  The director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. I research food and agriculture, especially looking at how agricultural technology can address climate change.

Polly: She sat down with the founder and editor in chief of Canada's National Observer, Linda Solomon Wood. Here's part of that conversation:

Linda Solomon Wood: We have nine years to cut our emissions in half. So how does food play into that?

Lenore:  Food is actually the biggest piece of the puzzle by far. We've really underestimated the climate impact of the food system. It's a good news, bad news story. And the bad news is the impact of the food system is extremely large.
Just as an example, our latest estimate suggests that the cattle industry alone might be 6% of the global total, which is kind of unimaginable.
Now, the good news is because the food system is so big, it takes up 40% of the Earth's land surface, that isn't glaciated, so 40%.  The good news, it's so big, and so inefficient, that we could return, even say, 20% of that land, to wilderness. That would have a massive impact. And it can actually be a climate positive. And in a perfect world, the food system should be sinking carbon.

Linda: So returning 20% of the land to nature. You make that kind of sound possible, but really is it?

Lenore : Oh, it's totally possible, and it's required. Part of the reason it's required is we're seeing this ramp up of impact of the food system. Because all around the world people are moving more toward diets that look like the North American diet. That are heavy and animal proteins, people are wanting more meat. And what we know is we can't scale our system to feed everyone the way we eat. What we need to do is overhaul the whole food system globally. And I really do believe it could be massively smaller in climate impact, water impact and land impact. And I think that will be necessary.

Linda: That's really promising. So I'd like to know, you know, the first thing I think about is what are governments doing? What is Canada doing?

Lenore: You know, I really see this from a theoretical standpoint as a holy trinity. In that, the first thing we have to do is massively lower the amount of animal protein we're using in the system. We know this, I mean, it's, it's the biggest part of the climate footprint of the food system.

And Canada's a real potential winner because we produce so much plant based material. I mean, we're one of the world's biggest producers of crops, such as oats and peas, and all the things that go into plant based proteins. So that plant base shift should be a real win for Canada. And the Canadian government has been supporting that.

And there's been a lot more talk lately about regenerative agriculture for what's left and looking at grass fed animals rather than grain fed. Where we do have animals in the system, we want them to be part of an ecosystem, but it means they'll be much less of them. Which is why you need the first thing, you need the plant based protein so you can drastically downsize the animal side.

Linda: You're talking about less animal based protein. For me and you and all of us, we have to eat less hamburgers, we have to eat fewer steaks. I'm not sure the public is ready for that, are you?

Lenore: Well, I think they are. But I also think one of the nice things is that a lot of the impact is hidden in the system. So for example, about 70% of global dairy production goes into milk solids. It goes into protein powder that goes into things like cereal bars. You can replace that and no one even knows it was ever there. And so you haven't taken away people’s Stilton. I've always been very fond of Stilton. But you have cut, you know four fifths just by getting rid of the things people don't see.

A good part of my work is looking at how can we really roll out vertical agriculture. The example I give is, I want to be able to grow lettuce in January in Vancouver, on a small parcel enough for the entire province so we don't need Californian imports, because we're not going to have them soon. And huge climate footprint, poor quality actually gets to us. We can replace all of our vegetable and small fruit production with indoor. That is much more efficient. You know, that's the thing I yell from the rooftops at the governments right now. And I'm very hopeful that B.C. will be a strong leader in that.

Linda : So you're out yelling from the rooftops about indoor agriculture?

Lenore: Yes, most definitely. Because I look at it as local, local, local, year round. And that is the key piece. It's why you need the technology.

Linda:  Can you paint a picture for me of what that looks like indoor agriculture, at the local level. Say in a city like Vancouver or Toronto?

Lenore: Yes, for sure. So, if we look at the crops where this really works well-- leafy greens, small fruits. We're at a point technologically thanks to better LED lighting, real advances in plant breeding as well, where we could grow all the lettuce for the Lower Mainland on about 100 acres. And it would look like a Costco, it would literally look like a giant box sitting on hopefully a kind of poor quality piece of farmland. And all the lettuce would come from that box.

 So you'd walk in, and you would see a lot of plants stacked on top of each other in hydroponic growing solution. And I've been in facilities like this, and they're quite beautiful. You don't need pesticides, you don't need herbicides. And you're growing fast, efficiently, it uses very little water, it's stunning.

There's also a neat labor piece that I like in that it's becoming increasingly dangerous to be a field worker where you’re doing dangerous, low paid seasonal work. And in increasingly bad conditions. As it gets hotter, you're exposed to pesticides, herbicides. In a plant factory or vertical growing facility, it's a year round job. A lot of it is automated and it's much safer, and you're not exposed to a bunch of dangerous chemicals. I think it's such a win. It's probably the tech that we're going to see just unfolding. And we are! And we're seeing governments like Ontario and Alberta, really doubling down on this tech.   

Linda:  You’ve just painted a picture, a kind of factory indoor farming, it looks a lot more beautiful than what I'm going to see when I go into Costco.

Lenore: There are models of this that could really be quite lovely. And what's even better is we're figuring out how to put more and more crops into such an environment. An acre of indoor farm done this well displaces about 50 acres of outdoor farming. So you free up this mass amount of land.

Linda:  What role does indoor farming have to play with cutting carbon emissions?

Lenore : It's absolutely central. Up until this summer, we had a pretty good idea of how we were going to adapt to climate change. When we experienced the heat dome it kind of sent a shock through the people like me who studied this, because it shouldn't have been possible.

We have berries withering and dropping off the vines. Raspberries were devastated. Blueberries were damaged pretty heavily. Then we started to get really weird stuff. All the shellfish died. And we started to get reports of cherries sun burning on one side so badly they were practically cooked.

And then we're watching this heat dome move across the continent, and it hits the prairies. We know that there was massive loss of fodder. And the cattle industry is frantically culling animals who will starve to death.

We were ready to adapt to climate change to a degree. It was 20 degrees above normal. We can't produce food in a world where that‘s suddenly something. So what we're all hoping is that it really was a one in 1000 year event. Which the weather modelers are telling us under 1.5 degrees of climate change, it will be 40 degrees in Vancouver once every 1000 years. And I mean unlikely things happen.

The other option is really terrifying-- it’s that we passed a nonlinear point in the system at which suddenly it will be 40 degrees every couple years. We need to produce food using as much technology as we can. And we have to realize the problem isn't the technology, it’s policy. If your policy outcome becomes what's best for the planet, then you end up okay.

Linda: If what's best for the climate were to guide Canada's policy regarding food, what would the top priorities be for Canada?

Lenore: Top priorities for Canada would be a rapid wartime program to roll out year-round production indoors, where Canadians live. And the health benefits, the labor benefits of that would be massive.

Second, would be to shift as much as possible in the animal sector to regenerative, which means you're gonna have a lot less animals.

We don't have good cross-country agricultural policy because agriculture is a weird beast. It's split between provinces and feds. What I would love to see is instead of a Minister of Agriculture, more of a Minister of Food Security, addressing the problem as part of a bigger system, and really drilling down into what's the best thing to do.

I think we should set a really bold goal that will actually be a bit hard, and then put some money into it. Let's make agriculture in Canada carbon neutral by, let's say 2030 or 2035. Something that's a bit of a push. Setting goals for 2050-- it's too far away, it's too far out. You can coast through a lot of political cycles before you actually have to do anything, and by then it's too late.

Linda:  Thank you so much, Lenore.

Lenore: Oh, it's my pleasure. Always

Linda: Great to be with you.

***

Polly: Shaghayegh.

Shaghayegh:  Polly.

Polly: What if I could tell you we could order Galapagos tortoise dumplings?

Shaghayegh: : You know they’re endangered, right?

Polly: I know it sounds like I’m suggesting we eat like, one of those songbirds that you drown in brandy, and then fry in a horrible way and then you have to eat it with a napkin over your face to hide your shame from God?

Shaghayegh: Are you serious?

Polly: But I’m talking about eating a Galapagos tortoise without ever harming one. It all comes down to the promise of cellular agriculture, which is the idea of eating meat without raising any animals.

Shaghayegh: : I think you’re going to cue someone who’s going to tell us about that

Polly: Oh yeah, here’s Isha Datar.

Isha Datar: So the idea is, instead of raising a cow and keeping it lactating to have cow’s milk, we could look at the milk directly -- okay this is made of several proteins, fats, water, and a couple other things. How can we make those proteins directly using cell culture technologies, rather than a whole cow?

Polly: Isha’s from Edmonton. She’s the executive director of New Harvest. It’s a kind of cellular-agriculture accelerator. Ao she’s trying to move the whole idea of lab-cultured meat forward and what that could mean for decarbonizing agriculture.

Isha: I kind of draw this parallel between factory farming and coal mining, where it's very dirty, it's very dangerous, but it gets the job done. Which is why we keep doing it. You know, the difference between coal and factory farming is we mostly factory farms, we don't have alternatives. We don't have the solar and wind and all that kind of stuff, for meat. And so I see cell-cultured foods as creating some resilience in our food system by creating agriculture that's off the land and isn't prone to the same risks.

You know, we could grow anything from cells. We just think about nuggets and burgers and things, because that's what meat looks like today. But the concept of meat goes out the window when you're growing food from cells.

I tasted a steak chip, it was like as thin as a potato chip, but made of meat because cells grow in thin layers. Meat, milk and eggs as we know it today, like those boundaries are falling away. And we have this completely new toolset for producing food.

If I have one kind of call to action for people, it’s to realize that there is a connectedness with all of the issues that we're facing today in society. We don't need to think about cellular agriculture as just a food issue. There is a just world where everything adds up. It's hard to see because our world is complex, but I really do think it's possible.

And so I invite everyone to zoom way, way, way, way out. And think about the last time we made it through climate change, which was 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. We invented agriculture, which is a huge thing. You know, we domesticated animals, and we domesticated plants. And it got us through 10,000 years. It's that kind of shift that we need to see in the next 10 years. Great!

It's not going to be one policy, one technology, one anything. It's about seeing our inherent interconnectedness and trying to re-envision a completely radically new world.

Shaghayegh: Envisioning a radical new world. That seems simple, right Polly? What were your key takeaways?

Polly: Okay, number one, we need to recognize that the agriculture industry itself plays a huge role in decarbonizing. We’ve got to look at ways that people are treated within the system. We’ve got to look at new ways of doing agriculture so that it’s more climate friendly. And that’s really kind of going back in time to these regenerative farming practises, so that we use less nitrogen, so that we’re producing less methane. And ultimately, we need to think about farming in totally different spheres, both in the field and maybe in a lab.

Shaghayegh: So, what we grow, how we grow it, and the ways workers are treated. We’re going to need fundamental shifts to the way we do food and that comes with pressure on the federal and provincial governments to change labour and immigration laws, invest in climate-friendly agricultural practises, and take on new ways of growing things.

Polly: And like, Farming can seem like it takes place in this whole detached other world, and we just pick up the goods at the grocery store. But realizing there are so many immediate things farmers can be doing right now to be more  climate friendly, I gotta tell ya, I’m really… rooting for it…

Shaghayegh is that a pun??

Polly: You could say all these farm solutions are growing on me

ST: We’re not doing that

Polly: Lettuce be optimistic Shaghayegh, they’re unbeleafable.  Truly… knocking my stocks off.

Shaghayegh: Special thanks this week to our guests! You can find more of their work in our show notes, and way more climate writing at  Nationalobserver.com.

Polly: As journalists covering the climate emergency, we know that our connection to place matters. We can’t talk about our race to net zero, without recognizing the colonial structures we work in. We want to thank the people who spoke with us across Turtle Island.

Shaghayegh:  Canada’s National Observer wouldn’t exist without founder and editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood.

Polly: This show was produced and edited by me, Polly Leger

Shaghayegh:   and me, Shaghayegh Tajvidi.

Polly: Thanks to our promotions and comms team, Suzanne Dhaliwal and Luke Ottenhof.

Shaghayegh: Fact check by Dana Filek Gibson and Marc Fawcett-Atkinson. Artwork by Ata Ojani.

Polly: Final audio mix by Tyler Gillis at Aftertouch Audio. Music this week from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Jacqueline Nunes, Jay Richlin, Tammara Soma and Karen Beauchemin.

Shaghayegh: Race Against Climate Change is a joint project from Canada’s National Observer and the Canadian Centre for Journalism. You can follow us on twitter @NatObserver.

Polly: If you like the podcast, please subscribe and give us a rating -- wherever you find your podcasts. Be-LEAF me, It really helps other people find the show!

Shaghayegh: I’m cutting you off.