Podcast: How has the science of producing food changed?

Clinton Monchuk: (00:07)

From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask a Farmer. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk. A Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food.

Clinton Monchuk: (00:27)

We are very privileged to have Ian Affleck with us. Ian, how are you doing today?

Ian Affleck: (00:31)

Good, how are you? And thank you very much for inviting me on to chat about agriculture and science and all things in between.

Clinton Monchuk: (00:38)

Today we’re, we’re going to be talking a little bit about how science has kind of changed in food production and we sense a little bit of that I think on the consumer side that they’re not too sure how things have changed. But before we get into that, Ian, I think everybody needs to know a little bit more about you.

Ian Affleck: (00:55)

So I grew up on a potato farm in Prince Edward Island. Nothing stereotypical about that at all. Growing up in that space and seeing kind of all the innovations that came with agriculture and just got me really excited about what science was delivering. And I’ve since seen my mom and dad put that to work on the farm. So then I went off to the Nova Scotia Agriculture College and did a degree in agronomy there. And then from there I went to, as you mentioned, University of Guelph and did my master’s in horticulture. So looking at some different crops, touched a lot on plant breeding and statistics there. So that kind of got me into the plant breeding science side of things. Then I went, did 10 years at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in product safety, seed regulations, government-related stuff there.

Ian Affleck: (01:39)

And then have been here at CropLife Canada for about the last eight or nine years as the Vice President of Plant Biotechnology. So focusing on working with the sector in terms of what’s new and exciting innovations and solutions are the plant science companies which belong to our trade association. What are they trying to bring to the market to help farmers kind of deal with what mother nature is constantly throwing at them or how to improve the economic and the environmental sustainability of their operations? So it’s been kind of a longer journey, but yeah, from the farm to university to the government and now in the private sector working on these broader goals.

Clinton Monchuk: (02:15)

So Ian, one of the things that, I think a lot of consumers are, they’re removed from the farm, right? So, we have generations removed from the farm and they’re not too sure how food is being produced. Can you explain maybe how some of these advancements, I guess, have changed since the 1970s, 1960s. Those were the practices that they kind of understand like the science of plants have changed so much since then. And do you want to just talk about some of those advancements and just why things change too, right?

Ian Affleck: (02:51)

Yeah, I think that things have changed. I think that that’s one thing, but I think what some folks have, if you haven’t had a chance to spend time on a farm or if you aren’t fortunate enough to know someone that’s in farming, is that farming has always been changing from the dawn of time of farming. So go back 10,000 years when the first caveman figured out that, you know, instead of being a hunter gatherer, I’m going to drop these seeds outside my hut and I’m just going to pull those out of the ground instead of having to run out into a meadow somewhere, picking individual wheat plants out of the ground. They were your first geneticists. They didn’t know it back then, but when they were keeping the tallest stock or the biggest seeds for the next year, they were selecting the best genetics.

Ian Affleck: (03:31)

So that was a slow march toward progress over about 10,000 years. Domesticating all these wild varieties into things that worked for agriculture. You know, we didn’t have Brussels sprouts until 600 BC. Sometimes people think that agriculture was this static box up until like the 1950s and then all of a sudden it started changing. But it’s always been changing. Maybe we haven’t had the technology to make those beneficial changes as efficiently as we’re making them now, but we’ve always been changing. The grapefruit didn’t exist until 1750. That’s not gene editing, that’s not genetic engineering or GMOs. That’s just people figuring out the genetics of plants and how to make them better and better for agriculture. And then I think, as you mentioned kind of right there in the sixties is when we had the green revolution. And you’ll often hear people talk about the green revolution.

Ian Affleck: (04:20)

But the details of what happened there was kind of a better understanding of genetics, the ability to make varieties that just produce more food, and then the accessibility to all the other tools that help a farmer do that on scale. So farm machinery, fertilizer, pesticides to protect the crops. Information about agronomy just became more widely available. The ability to distribute textbooks on how to grow wheat better. So this whole revolution of information and machinery and chemistry and fertilizer and then the plant genetics– it all came together at the same time. And that’s when we were able to move that technological bar forward. You know, instead of every 5,000 years we were doing it by the decade, but we had to, because that’s how we brought so many people out of starvation over that time. That’s not minimizing that there’s not still people suffering today, but we made some really great gains in being able to grow food and deliver food around the world.

Ian Affleck: (05:19)

So that’s what I kind of see from it. It’s not that it wasn’t changing, it’s that people might not have known all the change in the past and then this change then out of context seems like something quite drastic. But it’s really just a continuation of that same effort to make things better and better. And, you know, working in the seed space, it all starts with the seed, right? The maximum you can get out of a field is only the maximum potential of that seed. And it’s all about taking the seed with the most potential and then getting a hundred percent of that potential at the end of the year. Meanwhile, the lack of rain or the bugs or everything’s going to try to rob you of that opportunity and how are you going to get it to that great outcome?

Clinton Monchuk: (06:00)

The fact that we’ve advanced so much on the plant side, yet we have fewer people who are starving worldwide. Right? We don’t really understand how good we have it until you kind of go back and look at the stats. Do you want to talk a little bit about how much that productivity has actually increased to kind of feed this world? Obviously, we have more people now and we’re projected to have even more up until about 2050. Maybe just talk about some of those advancements and how we’ve done it.

Ian Affleck: (06:34)

And I think this is one of the hard parts of the discussion. It’s in no way minimizing that there’s still work to be done. There’s still more people that need to be brought out of poverty. There’s still more food security needed around the world. Absolutely. But what we were able to do through genetics, and I’ll focus on genetics because that’s my background. That’s where I’m the most comfortable talking, but it’s that green revolution. The beginning of that was really about dwarf varieties of wheat and rice. So again, we’re not into GMOs or gene editing yet. This is just Norman Borlaug, an amazing scientist, who figured out how to make shorter wheat varieties that produced more grain. They didn’t fall over in the wind as much. There are more robust and that led to so much more food being available around the world in the same space that you were farming in, you were just able to produce more food.

Ian Affleck: (07:17)

So as you keep moving that forward, as we get better and better varieties and we add things like, genetic engineering technology on the table, or what’s going to be very new soon is the gene editing technology that’s all about the same idea. What new qualities can we give these plants that’s going to let them produce more food on the same land with even less inputs? And I think that’s something that comes along is, we talk about the green revolution in fertilizers and pesticides and machinery and sometimes that conjures up an uncomfortable view for folks. Maybe you could speak to this Clinton, but I know at my farm, my dad never wanted to put a dollar into that crop that he didn’t absolutely have to. If there’s any opportunity to use less seed, less water, less land, less fertilizer, less pesticide, you’re taking it.

Ian Affleck: (08:06)

There’s no desire to put more stuff into the field. Every minute you’re not in the field, you’re optimizing some other part of your operation. So I think that’s what sometimes it gets lost. It’s all about efficiencies and sustainability and how you can make those varieties that do so much of that work within the seed so that you don’t have to do it outside the seed. And GMOs were a great example of that and a success worldwide: 450 million acres of GMOs growing around the world is just a testament to how much they’ve been able to help agriculture in that food production challenge that we have.

Clinton Monchuk: (08:41)

There’s a lot of confusion or uncertainty around it. So they see the name genetic engineering or GMOs and they’re not too sure what that actually involves. Do you want to just talk about like what does that mean?

Ian Affleck: (08:54)

The Canadian Center for Food Integrity did some really good public polling on this just recently and they asked a question that just never occurred to me to ask, even when I’m having this discussion with friends about, like they’re asking about GMOs and I’m explaining the technology to them. And I never asked is like, what do you think of plant breeding, period. Like before we talk about genetic modification and gene editing and this new cool like headline-grabbing stuff. How do you feel about plant breeding? Which, like I said, we’ve been doing that for like 10,000 years. It’s the basis of agriculture, to breed better plants every year. What’s plant breeding? People breed plants? Like, is that a real thing? Like I’ve sat in focus groups where people said that’s not a real job. Like nobody has the job plant breeder. Right? And you’re like, , whoa, there’s whole university programs on this.

Ian Affleck: (09:38)

It’s, it’s huge. So in that Centre for Food Integrity piece, instead of saying what’s your comfort level with GMOs, the first question is, what’s your comfort level with plant breeding? Only 7% of Canadians said they had a positive view of plant breeding and 11%, or it might be the other way around, it might be 11 and 7. But either way, a very small group were positive and about the same amount had a negative view of plant breeding period. So then when you add GMOs on top of that, you get 15 or 20% of people have a comfortable view of it, 30% have a negative view or, or a negative reaction. If 11% weren’t comfortable with plant breeding, it’s totally acceptable. It’s totally expected to have 30% not be comfortable with GMOs. You’re building on something. So this is within the context of genetic improvement of crops over 10,000 years.

Ian Affleck: (10:26)

And this is now just, we’re more and more precise about the way that we do it. And I think about technologies like, just as I was preparing for this and thinking of the green revolution and realizing my dad really started farming in, you know, the late sixties, early seventies. So he came in right at that point when all that technology was arriving at the farm. Not GMOs yet at that point, but I remember going up into the attic of the barn and there was this thing that was like a wheelbarrow and it had almost looked like a riverboat cruise kind of propeller on it. And I’m like, what is that? And he’s like, oh, that’s what I did when I was 10 years old. I’d walk that through the potato fields and the big flaps would knock the Colorado potato beetles off the top and into the net at the bottom.

Ian Affleck: (11:13)

And that was the only thing we had to get those bugs off the plants. So before that piece of technology, it was your fingers, how many acres can you crush bugs with your fingers in a day? He’s like, and then we got this thing which allowed us to like grow three times as much potatoes because I can move so much faster. Then comes pesticides which allow you to do it even more efficiently. And he’s like, even the best I was doing, getting it off with this wheelbarrow thing, by the time I got to the other side of the field, I could see how much more damage they had done since when I started on the other corner of the field. Right? You just couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with these bugs. So you go forward to GMOs, take BT corn, insect-resistant corn.

Ian Affleck: (11:56)

So now the corn can keep the bugs off of it using a natural soil-based bacteria that the bugs don’t like. Now the farmer doesn’t have to go into that field at all. Saves them time, saves them fuel, doesn’t have to spray another chemical. So it’s saving them money overall, your operation’s more efficient. So like this is just this march of progress in agriculture about how we can protect that potential within the plant. So this is just another solution to the problem. We’ve been fighting with agriculture since the beginning of time, which is weeds, diseases and bugs. They’re constantly trying to take your stuff and a lack of rain. So drought tolerant, things like that as well. So that’s where it becomes so critical to find new technologies like this. And that’s not unique to GMOs, it’s not unique to gene editing. There’s a great wheat midge tolerant wheat variety that’s used in western Canada and that’s not GMOs and it’s not gene editing, it’s just great plant breeding . So it’s, they’re all just different ways to get to the same endpoint and that’s protecting your crops. But yeah, that really stuck out to me that we as a scientific community and as a plant breeding community, we really have to do outreach on what plant breeding is, period. Because it doesn’t feel fair to expect the consumer to suddenly be comfortable with an iteration on something they didn’t know you were doing in the first place. You have to give them that opportunity to get comfortable.

Clinton Monchuk: (13:19)

We had a huge garden growing up in Lanigan, Saskatchewan and we would typically sell a few potatoes off the farm just to locals in the town. We would go out there and pick the bugs by hand at that time. And I think later on as we got older and we were doing other things, then we had the powder that they’d put on the top to prevent that from taking place. But yeah, all to say that…

Ian Affleck: (13:43)

That’s the cool thing about that powder, right? Like that powder is the, is bacillus thuringiensis. So that’s the soil bacteria in powdered form that you would throw on top of the potatoes. What’s in the corn is the same thing. They just put it in the leaf. So I think this is what’s so cool about GMOs is that like a pesticide you can use in organic agriculture, which is that bacillus thurangensis powder is what the GMO is doing. So it’s like it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from: organic agriculture, conventional agriculture, GMOs, it’s all about using all these tools, figuring out how to put them together in a way that makes it the most effective for the farmer to use it.

Clinton Monchuk: (14:23)

Yeah, 100%. And you had mentioned a little bit about different, say the saw fly or midge or whatever it happens to be with wheat and some of the plant breeding that’s taken place. Like we had crops of wheat that were absolutely decimated with midge or sawfly would kind of cut the stem and the whole plant would fall over so then you couldn’t harvest it.

Ian Affleck: (14:43)

And that’s the amazing dedication of plant breeders, right? Like it takes like 10 years to put one of those varieties on the market. That’s just constant work in the field. Those plant breeders trying to develop that new technology. And this is where I think maybe I’ll give a quick explanation of like what GMOs are and what gene editing is. I think those are two kind of things you’re hearing in this space a lot. So when a plant breeder is trying to develop a new variety like wheat midge [tolerant] or whatever it might be, there’s dozens of different plant breeding tools on the table and they’ll use a mixture of these tools to try to, you know, guide the genetics toward the outcome they’re looking for when it comes to disease resistance and often insect resistance. It’s not usually a simple one gene just controls the whole thing, especially in disease resistance. There’s usually like a dozen different genes that all play into disease resistance.

Ian Affleck: (15:27)

So it’s really hard to make a new variety that’s more disease resistant than the last one and keep all the other good qualities that variety had. So this is where newer tools like GMOs and gene editing come in handy. So if you imagined a plant as like a novel and if you see another book on the other side of the desk and say if page 47 was just in this book, it would be so much better. So with GMO technology, I’m going to take that whole page out and I’m going to stick it in this book and now this book’s better. Gene editing is kind of going, if I could just change the “and” to an “or” on page 107, this would be so much better and maybe I need to change an “and” to “or” on six different pages.

Ian Affleck: (16:09)

So you’re not bringing in entirely new DNA from another plant, you’re just tweaking the DNA that’s already in there, which is what you were doing anyway with conventional breeding. You can just do it really precisely now instead of waiting for the random changes in the plant to give you that new makeup that you were looking for. So that’s kind of the difference for me between GMOs and gene editing. It’s kind of the cut and paste of a whole new page or just word editing the little thing you need to do in that plant in order to create a new variety. So what this does is it gives plant breeders even more tools to get to those outcomes even faster than they did before. So instead of 10 years and 5 million dollars to bring a new variety to market, maybe you can do it in six years and 3 million dollars.

Ian Affleck: (16:51)

And that matters because I think people also don’t understand that a lot of the research that goes into varietal development, some’s private sector, some’s funded by farm groups who have money that goes into research piles to try to figure out how to make these new crops. So it’s a lot of this research is both private company, it’s cooperation between private company and farmers or research institutions. And anything you can do to make that more efficient will allow us to adapt to the changing world around us and the battles that farmers are into. And maybe, the other thing I often mention is people will go, that’s a GMO variety and if I was a plant breeder, I’d be annoyed by that because you’re like, okay, so we GMO’d a trait into that at the end, but I bred that variety , like I still took eight years to make the base of the variety that you’ve put the trait into.

Ian Affleck: (17:39)

I think it gives the impression that you walk into a lab, you press a button and you make a GMO variety. Like it’s still years and years of plant breeding that someone had to put into that before you get to add it. I don’t know where I got this from, but it was like when someone builds a beautiful home, you don’t celebrate the hammer, you celebrate the carpenter . So the tool is genetic engineering. Yeah. But it’s the plant breeder who really made the magic happen to put all those pieces together and I think they’re the ones that deserve the credit for creating that tool at the end of the day.

Clinton Monchuk: (18:11)

You worked with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for 10 years you said. So maybe touch a little bit on how the regulatory process works because again, now listeners understand that there is a long process just to get that product to a commercial state. But what’s that regulatory process that ensures the safety of that new product coming onto farms and eventually onto tables?

Ian Affleck: (18:37)

Something that’s really important is kind of that general statement that foods on our shelves are safe, right? There’s standards and regulations, whether it be from finished foods right through to agriculture that farmers and food production companies have to meet specific to new plant varieties in Canada. It doesn’t matter if it’s conventionally bred, you know, any of the dozens of plant breeding tools, GMO, gene editing, it has to meet the environmental, animal feed and human food safety standards that are set out by the CFIA, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Health Canada. And then within that there’s times at which certain products they’re going to want to do an analysis of before they go on the market. So you’ve got to meet the standards no matter what. Sometimes the government wants to check your homework, and they’ve got clear guidance of when that happens.

Ian Affleck: (19:24)

And then they do post-market monitoring to make sure your food is always safe. They’re always checking the marketplace to make sure that food remains safe. So whether it’s a GMO variety, a gene edited variety, the public can be very confident that those things are safe. You know, we’ve been growing GMOs in Canada for almost 30 years in Canada and around the world, I think I said earlier, 450 million acres, 18 and a half million farmers around the world are growing it. About 60% of the GMO acreage around the world is in resource-poor or developing countries. So I think that’s something that often gets missed is that all of these countries, the 29 countries that grow GMOs, every one of them has done an independent safety assessment on all of those GMOs. It’s been proven safe over and over. I think there’s something like 4,500 independent safety assessments of the GMOs on the market.

Ian Affleck: (20:16)

And then when they move out into the world, they’re seeing that it’s the resource-poor farmer who has had some of the greatest benefits of this value added technology. So you can imagine here in North America, we could go buy the tractor, we could get the crop protection products, we could get the access to the fertilizer or the irrigation. There’s another massive part of the green revolution that I missed was irrigation. If you’re coming up in a really resource-poor developing nation, you don’t have access to just go buy a tractor, you can’t get the loan, you can’t get the tractor. So if you can embed the technology that’s going to protect the crop in the seed, you don’t need the tractor to put the crop protection on there. You don’t need it to use the insecticide because you’ve already got something that’s going to protect the crop before you plant it. You don’t need irrigation because you might have drought tolerant or water efficient crops. So this is so huge for these farmers who can’t get access to the same technology that we are so lucky to have free access to. And that doesn’t mean it’s a silver bullet, right? Like plant breeding or GMOs or gene editing. Is that a silver bullet? Two of the world’s agricultural challenges. It’s just one of the many parts of a bigger solution. So it’s just one cog in the wheel.

Clinton Monchuk: (21:32)

Why is it, do you think, that there’s acceptance of other genetic modified products like insulin with humans and that seems to be more readily accepted than maybe some of the GMOs? And, I’d just be curious to hear your thoughts on that because it was one thing, you know, it’s been around for a while and everybody who’s diabetic now uses a GMO insulin product. Right?

Ian Affleck: (21:59)

Yeah. I think there’s a couple things that come to my mind there. And some of this is just my own personal trying to understand this myself, right? I think the first generation of GMOs were really focused on farmer problems. So it was focused on managing weeds, managing insects, that was the big part of it. So if you haven’t had those challenges in your life of growing food and trying to keep the bugs off and the weeds out, it’s probably not going to make a ton of sense of why this is so important, right? Because you haven’t had that problem and that’s not your fault as a consumer. Like there’s nothing wrong with that, you just don’t need that. So when you add a new technology and you’re asking folks to be comfortable with it, but they don’t see a direct benefit to them. It doesn’t mean there isn’t massive benefits, which we can talk about in a minute, but it doesn’t impact their direct daily life.

Ian Affleck: (22:49)

To pair with that, in those early years when the technology was coming out, the companies viewed it as, and I think our industry sees we made an error here, well we’ll talk to our customers and our customers are the farmers, so we’ll explain the science and the benefits and the value to the farmers. And our customers aren’t the consumer, so someone else will talk to them. No: wrong, incorrect, poor assumption. It’s not the grocery store’s responsibility to educate the consumer on agricultural technology, their job is to sell the consumer what the consumer’s looking for, right? So I think we’ve learned that and hopefully with gene editing, I think we’re trying to do a better job of getting out and engaging with the public sooner to explain the technology. So I think there wasn’t anything really directly for them in it, it was for agriculture and we didn’t talk to them to explain why when a farmer controls their weeds, when it’s easier and you have less greenhouse gas emissions and more carbon sequestration in the soil and less food waste and more sustainability on the farm, why that’s good for you, the consumer. Whether it’s food, price or environment, we just didn’t make that connection for them.

Ian Affleck: (23:53)

And then the narrative got away from us after that. But I will say too that it’s true that folks, you know, at times are concerned about it or they have a negative reaction, but people will say we don’t want it to be a failure. Like GMOs, 450 million acres worldwide and 18 and a half million farmers isn’t a failure of an agricultural technology. It’s been a massive success, huge success. PR challenges, I think we’d be remiss not to note , it didn’t have the easiest ride from a PR point of view, but hugely successful in terms of an agricultural technology and what it’s provided. So I think that’s part of it for me is just, it’s difficult for folks to see the direct value, but when you have new technologies coming to the market, like the non-browning apple and the non-browning, non-bruising potato and the consumer’s like, this is great.

Ian Affleck: (24:44)

Now it’s less about being comfortable with it, but you’re more likely to trust in your institutions and the governments that are consistently providing you with safe food and go, oh well it’s safe so I’m cool with it and I see a value. So I don’t feel the need to go I’ll just stick with status quo. So that’s you know, as we get more technologies that matter to the public, people need to see value. If they’re going to prioritize learning a subject– because that’s what you’re asking them to do, study genetics to a small amount. If they’re going to put their time, which they don’t have much of, they better see a benefit. So you got to explain to them why the technology matters and then they’ll get interested and they’ll understand.

Clinton Monchuk: (25:32)

This brings us to our fun farm fact. Did you know that without the use of plant science in food production, we’d have 50% less food around the world? And you’ve already mentioned the fact that we’re using this plant science to grow more food, trying to use our resources to the best of our knowledge and benefit being environmentally friendly. All these things go hand in hand to make sure that we’re producing food. And if we didn’t have that technology, if we didn’t have that science, there’d be just be less people on the world period. Right?

Ian Affleck: (26:12)

Yeah. And you get it, like there’s a couple different unfortunate ways that goes. If you’re growing 50% less food, then that means to grow that food you need 50% more land and 50% more time and equipment and inputs and fertilizer and water. So if you’re going do that, if you weren’t able to leverage technology like we do, you’ll be looking at a whole different landscape. And one of the best ways to keep land in its most environmentally positive form is to leave it in the forest as much as we possibly can. Now that’s tough for agriculture too, right? Because when a farmer’s cutting down trees to make a field, we have to realize that as our cities grow, our cities are covering the best farmland in the country. So it’s pretty incredible, when you look at the land we farm in Canada by acreage, it’s almost flat for like the last 30 years I think.

Ian Affleck: (27:05)

We haven’t really changed our [agricultural] acreage, but we have changed our acreage because city footprints have grown significantly. So we’ve had to find new fields in order to make up for the fields that are being lost to the cities. But we’ve still managed to produce 50% more food on the same amount of land because of all the technology we’ve been able to put to agriculture. So that’s a real challenge for the agriculture community and that land that goes under Toronto or you know, Montreal or these cities that are expanding, that’s your prime, number one land. And the land you’re opening up somewhere else isn’t as good as that land. So not only have we produced more food on the same quantity of land, we’ve produced more food on the same quantity of less productive land. That’s harder land to farm because the best land is, it’s being..

Clinton Monchuk: (27:56)

Gobbled up.

Ian Affleck: (27:56)

You know, under the Yorkdale Mall in Toronto.

Clinton Monchuk: (27:59)

So getting back to consumer level and you talked a little bit about the Canadian Center for Food Integrity and we use a lot of their research every year when they do their studies. The top concern among Canadians was the rising cost of food. So putting this all into context of how all this different plant science is helping, how’s it helping control a little bit of that price of food for consumers? I think consumers are seeing it in the grocery stores that prices are going up but without some of the science and technology that we have, want to fathom a guess where the price of food would be at?

Ian Affleck: (28:38)

Oh, in some of the work that we’ve done, you know, an average food bill, this is pre-inflation for the average family of four, if you didn’t have access to plant science innovations, you’d see about a $4,400 increase in your annual food bills, which is pretty significant. And I think as we, in this moment of inflation, and again, plant science is no a silver bullet, but this is the difference between the food inflation rate and the total cost of food. So if you’re producing food at a lower cost, then when inflation hits kind of like compound interest, you’re multiplying a smaller number. You know, if a loaf of bread’s $2 when you start and then you get inflation, it goes to $4 bread. If you’re starting with $4 bread, it goes to $8 bread. That’s a big difference in how much you’re paying for food.

Ian Affleck: (29:27)

So this is where helping farmers stay efficient on the farm keeps the cost of production low, allows the farmer to make a better living and keeps that cost of production as a factor of overall food costs as low as we can. It’s not going to reduce inflation, it’s not going to turn global inflation numbers down, but it can make sure that our base number that we’re working with stays as small as it can so that it’s not there to be multiplied by inflation. And it allows the farmer the best opportunity they have to make profit on what they’re doing. Because if the farm’s not economically sustainable, then it, one, it can’t exist and it can’t afford to be as environmentally sustainable as they want to be. I think that’s like an economically sustainable farmer is the most environmentally sustainable farmer. If we restrict access to technology, that puts the farmer in a really tough spot.

Clinton Monchuk: (30:21)

Your family farm, my family farm, we have access to all these technologies in Canada and we talked about the regulatory process to make sure that new things will come to market that we can use into the future. What we’re seeing over in the European Union is a little bit different now. Right. So they’re now maybe backing off a little bit on the science. That’s now starting to affect their ability to produce food. So from your point of view, how would a process like that harm us here in Canada?

Ian Affleck: (30:55)

There’s a couple different layers because Europe’s a complicated space, right? You have so many countries with so many different approaches to governance all trying to cooperate together. But what it does seem is that they continue to politicize their science-based decision making systems. So in the development of their most recent farm to fork policy or the green deal, you see them making decisions on scientific topics based on the politics around it, instead of making the scientifically correct decision and then explaining why, even though that conversation might be difficult. And I think that’s a really challenging space because what it’s doing is it’s limiting their ability to produce food. And when their ability to produce food is limited, someone has to produce that food for them. Because they’re importing all that food from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, you name it, Australia.

Ian Affleck: (31:46)

So the food’s getting grown somewhere. It’s just, where is it going to get grown? So if you’re not using technology in your backyard, well then we need the technology so we can fill your food needs. You can say, okay, you’re, your your own jurisdiction. You can kind of make whatever good or bad decisions you want to make. But when you start applying those decisions to the rest of us and saying, you can’t export things to us that don’t meet our political ideals, now you’re reaching out and limiting Canadian farmers’ approach to agriculture because of your domestic policies in Europe. And this is the rub point we’re at right now. This isn’t happening all the time everywhere, but there’s indications of it happening more and more. And it’s very disappointing when there’s so many great innovations available that just aren’t being used. And I think we’ve seen in the news there’s been tractor demonstrations in Europe.

Ian Affleck: (32:32)

Frustration of farmers on this, you know, I think, one that would kind of stand out, it’s not in the biotech route. They’ve always had a challenging approach to biotechnology for GMOs where all the GMOs that we have here are approved in Europe, but they’re not allowed to be grown by their farmers. Specifically not for scientific reasons, just for social reasons they don’t want them. But what’s really unfortunate about that means our farmers get the benefit of them and their farmers don’t. They buy all those products from us anyway, so it’s really unfortunate. But recently with the kind of political discourse on neonic seed treatments, for example, and they took a really hard line in Europe that wasn’t based on science and they said we’re banning the neonics seed treatments, and then they gave out 600 exemptions a year to every commodity group that needed that pesticide.

Ian Affleck: (33:22)

So they said they banned it, but they really didn’t ban it because they were just letting everybody use it anyway just because it was safe. But now after a recent court decision, which was saying, I don’t think we’re going to allow you to provide delegations now. They’re really putting their agricultural production in a bind. You know, politics is something that should stay in that space and make sure that you’re leading with science when you make your decisions. Because farming is science. I don’t know if people make that connection enough, is that a farmer, we often say, you know, ia a, as a welder, ia a carpenter, ia a mechanic, and they’re also scientists. The amount of high technology and complex science that is used on a farm day to day, and this is just me, like I left the farm in, so 1998 and so it’s, you know, just between 98 and now, Clint, you must have seen so many technological and scientific advancements on your farm that I wasn’t even around for when I was on the farm.

Clinton Monchuk: (34:17)

Yeah. It’s amazing. My dad, who’s in his mid seventies has a tough time really even getting in our equipment with all the sensor technology and variable rate this and that. He’s just not used to it, right?

Ian Affleck: (34:31)

You say your dad, I was home in PEI last summer and I took my son home and we got into the planter. I had no idea how that thing worked. , I was doing that job 20 years ago and I sat in the tractor and I was like, I don’t even know how to put the planter down into the ground. And I don’t know what all these screens do anymore. Like, it was wild how much technology had come into the cab of that tractor to just make the farming so precise.

Clinton Monchuk: (34:58)

It really is amazing how, how it’s changed and not only the machinery, but the science and the new technologies in there. So I do want to say thank you very much, Ian, for being part of the podcast today. It’s great to just hear the progression of science, so everybody can get a little bit more understanding and knowledgeable about the subject.

Ian Affleck: (35:20)

Yeah, thanks. And I think, you know, the new thing on the block for plant breeding is that now you’ll see GMOs called traditional GMOs because gene editing’s like the new cool kid on the block. So now it’s like traditional GMOs and I love that GMOs are now old school tech. Like I love that they’re the super Nintendo to the Xbox, right? It’s like, those are, those are old school GMOs. But as gene editing comes along, I think that’s the really exciting part in plant breeding right now, which is our ability to tweak those genes that were hard to tweak and get that disease resistance. And while there would be big flashy things like high fiber wheat or you know, high oleic soybeans or healthy heart tomatoes and stuff like that. Where some of the biggest advancements are going to be is instead of getting a 6% more disease resistant wheat, you’re going to get a 12% more disease resistant wheat and then the next variety is going to be 12% again instead of six. And that compound interest of moving those things forward faster is going to be just as impactful as the really flashy kind of cool stuff, which will be really important. But the basic ability for plant breeds to move varieties forward, I think is something that’s going to be really, really helped by this technology moving forward.

Clinton: (36:36)

I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask A Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share this podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the Ask Us icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson and Michael Jordan, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton. Music by Andy Ellison.