Ottawa Is Shutting Down Seven Agriculture Labs. Farmers Will Pay the Price

My grandmother used to tell a rolling personal anecdote about the dirty thirties, the principal beats of which were scarlet fever, grasshoppers, dust storms, and wheat crops full of rust, the fungal disease that wrought destruction on cereal crops across North America in the early half of the twentieth century. Her point was always to drive home the many scientific and agricultural improvements that had accrued over the course of her life. Disease-resistant strains of wheat, shelterbelt programs, canola seed, winter-hardy forage varieties, precision guidance technologies, and many other innovations originated from or were supported by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), the federal department focused on protecting, regulating, and improving Canadian agriculture.

• Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada is cutting 665 positions and almost $350 million in research and development spending
• Experts warn these cuts are short sighted and could lead to disastrous consequences for the Canadian agriculture industry
• A small divesture from agricultural risk management programs into research could increase productivity and growth by $2–3 billion per year

Last year, it was announced that, like the majority of national agencies, the AAFC would be subject to comprehensive cuts of 15 percent. Earlier this year, it was revealed that much of that pruning, including 665 positions and almost $350 million in spending, would focus on the research and development sector. Over the coming months, seven sites are set to close: three research and development centres in Guelph, Ontario, in Lacombe, Alberta, and in Quebec City, as well as four satellite research farms at Nappan, Nova Scotia, Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, and Scott and Indian Head, Saskatchewan. These closures will encompass a wide range of research programs, including food safety and food-borne pathogen control, soil-moisture conservation and drought research, and beef cattle genetics and breeding, in addition to the Organic and Regenerative Research Program in Swift Current.

Milton Dyck, national president of the Agriculture Union, says it was a case of cut first, ask questions later. “They looked at the costs, said, ‘What can we cut for 15 percent?’ Then they went back to the stations and asked, ‘What is the research that you’re doing there?’ Only now are they trying to do damage control.” The Agriculture Union, which states that 1,043 termination notices were served in January alone, has joined with municipal and urban organizations to advocate for the preservation of the condemned agricultural centres.

“It’s the exact opposite of what should happen in terms of promoting growth,” says Richard Gray, an agricultural and resource economics professor at the University of Saskatchewan. “It might look good on an accounting sheet. It’ll save a few million dollars, but it will jeopardize billions of dollars on the other side. It’s really dumb.”

Canada has a lengthy history of agriscience—the sites at Nappan and Indian Head, both established in 1887, were two of the country’s first experimental farms—and the long-term, non-commercial studies on plant breeding, agronomics, soil health, and livestock management done by the AAFC over the past century-and-a-half paid dividends for Canadian agriculture at a minimum of a twenty-to-one benefit-to-cost ratio, according to Gray’s research. “When it comes to genomics and understanding the aesthetics of crops, Canada’s ahead of most countries,” he says, adding that such accrued agricultural research has been done specifically for the conditions faced by the nation’s farmers.

The productivity index for a cross section of Canadian crops since the early twentieth century looks like a rising mountain; inputs—seed, fertilizer, pesticides, water, labour—remain low, while crop yields increase. “It’s a slow process, but it’s cumulative,” Gray says. “Once you have those higher-yielding varieties, they don’t disappear. In the meantime, the current breeders are using the best varieties to breed new varieties. They’re laddering on top of past success.” He cites the example that, between 2005 and 2014, the varieties developed by Canadian agricultural research resulted in a 4 percent higher yield for wheat—an amount that may not seem like much, but which, over thousands of acres, can add up for a farmer.

Chris Procyk, a cattle and grain farmer from Fillmore, Saskatchewan, credits farm research with providing the conditions needed for his farm to thrive. In particular, he points to the now widespread practice of zero-tillage farming, where crops are grown with minimal disturbance to the soil, an innovation pioneered in the 1970s at the Indian Head research farm. “We wouldn’t have grown the crops in our neck of the woods the last three, four, five years without that research,” he says. “But it needed to happen fifty years ago to benefit us today.”

While public funding still comprises the largest investor in Canada’s agricultural research, it has been steadily declining over the past three decades; today, Canada contributes less in terms of gross domestic product than Australia, India, China, Brazil, the United States, or the European Union. The current cuts echo former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Deficit Reduction Action Plan which, in its aim to eliminate a roughly $26 billion deficit, shuttered the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (and the community pastures and water management services under its remit), the Canadian Wheat Board, and Winnipeg’s Cereal Research Centre (which was established in 1925 as a measure to address rampaging cereal rust).

• Mega Barns Along the US Border Cause a Big Stink in Manitoba
• Canada Grows a Hell of a Lot of Lentils. Why Won’t We Eat Them?
• The Struggles of Sustainable Farming

In a statement to The Walrus, the AAFC said it will continue to be Canada’s largest agricultural research organization, with every province continuing to have at least one research centre. “Where we don’t have a presence,” the statement continued, “and research needs to occur in specific soils, climates, or production systems, we will continue to identify and pursue research opportunities through collaborations with provinces, universities, colleges, and producer groups.”

Even if the AAFC glides over questions regarding future projects, the loss of agrologists, field staff, and the cessation of ongoing studies disrupts a process whose impacts will only be understood when Canada is forced to look elsewhere for solutions to its agrarian quandaries. “I’ve been around since the 2012 cuts,” says Dyck. “They cut a lot of the climate change research. Nobody picked up the research programs that were gone.”

During the daily push-and-pull work of farming, where farmers’ mastery of the natural world is tested under incredibly extenuating circumstances (the United States–Israel attack on Iran spiked fuel and fertilizer prices ahead of the 2026 seeding season, affecting the crops farmers will opt to plant), research isn’t part of regular conversation. “If that work isn’t ongoing behind the scenes,” Procyk says, “At some point, farmers are going to pay the price.”

As Gray points out, most conversations regarding agrarian economics focus on the suite of business risk management (BRM) programs, introduced by the AAFC after high interest rates and low commodity values created a crisis in the farming industry in the 1980s. While programs such as AgriStability and AgriInvest provide good and immediate support and financial assurance for farmers, Gray suggests that, in the long run, investment in these risk-management programs is nowhere near as gainful as that channelled into research. “If you take ten or twenty years of research, there’s no [BRM] farm program out there that begins to touch that in terms of benefits,” he says. A small divestiture of those programs, Gray adds, re-routed into research, could increase farm productivity and growth by $2–3 billion per year.

All the while, concurrent with the cuts to its research and development branch, the AAFC has announced its recent expansion of its BRM programs. Ottawa’s garden may be overgrown, but thoughtful weeding will produce a better harvest than slash-and-burn. “We’re spending all the money where the returns are low,” says Gray. “It’s not like we have to imagine whether research works or not. We’re just stopping what we know works, which is crazy.”