I grew up farming in Saskatchewan, in the heart of Canada’s Prairie grainland area—one of the world’s great “breadbaskets.” My family and I grew canola, barley, oats, peas, lentils, wheat, and a variety of other crops. More often than not, the weather was favourable and the crops abundant.
Unfortunately, the world has come to take the Prairies and other breadbaskets for granted and to unthinkingly demand more and more of them—to feed growing populations and supply unwise biofuel schemes. But limits on fossil fuel and fertilizer inputs, the growing need to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions, and, most of all, impending climate impacts mean that we must not be blasé about continued profusions of cheap and plentiful farm products. Unless we take wise, ambitious, and rapid steps, in coming decades many parts of the world may be breadbaskets no more.
Crop production tonnage continues to rise in Canada, so much of what follows is prospective—it describes certain negative scenarios possible in the future. These negative scenarios become more likely as we continue to emit GHGs and further destabilize the global climate. What follows outlines some of those negative scenarios.
Simply stated, climate change could devastate Canadian agriculture and food production in coming decades; a multi-decade drought could unfold and sear our food-producing areas, wither our crops, and parch and damage our soils. The Prairies, which host 84 per cent of Canadian farmland, could be the hardest hit, potentially getting much hotter and probably also drier.
It is increasingly likely that Earth will warm by a global average of nearly three degrees Celsius this century. Recently, the UK’s Guardian newspaper polled 400 UN IPCC climate scientists and most predicted temperature increases of 2.5 or three degrees Celsius this century. Similarly, the UN’s annual Emissions Gap Report tells us we are on track for 2.5 to 2.9 degrees of warming, even taking into account the already announced programs and actions to limit emissions. Forget 1.5 degrees; we’re on track for nearly double that.
The preceding is bad news for everyone on Earth, but the news for most Canadian farmers is worse. The Canadian Prairies lie in the centre of a continent, at a relatively northerly latitude. Continental interiors are warming much faster than the global average; the same is true for northern areas. We are seeing the Prairies warm twice as fast as the global average rate and projections are that this will continue. So, this huge food-producing area is on track for five or six degrees of warming this century. Climate change may also bring more rain (or not), but if temperatures rise faster than rainfall, evaporation will overwhelm precipitation and soils will get drier, even if average precipitation rises.
Moreover, averages don’t matter. A destabilized climate will bring more volatility—more protracted and intense extremes, including intense heatwaves and droughts alternating with damaging precipitation events. Even if multi-year “average” rainfall is near normal or increases, farmers might lose one year’s crop to drought and see the next year’s heavily damaged by relentless fall rains. Worse, a Prairie region five or six degrees hotter could become home to multi-year droughts.
These potential future climate impacts come atop massive risks already part of our long-term Prairie climate. University of Regina scientist Dr. Dave Sauchyn has demonstrated that the wettest, most benign period on the Prairies in the past 500+ years was the period after settlement, and that long multi-year droughts were more common before the 1900s (Sauchyn et al., 2002). That pre-1900 drought pattern could return. If it does, it will be made much worse by an additional five or six degrees of heat. Imagine the 1930s drought, but longer and hotter. Sauchyn and his co-authors note that “the immediate impacts of future global warming may be to return the prairie environment to past conditions in which persistent aridity was recorded for intervals of decades or longer.” He is talking about multi-year or multi-decade droughts.
With five or six degrees of warming, some parts of the Prairies may become non-viable for crop production. There may be farmland abandonment or a forced return to grass.
But potentially devastating climate impacts are just one of several converging risks, dysfunctions, and vulnerabilities that may be forming an agricultural polycrisis. Here is a tour of some of the others:
Canadian farm debt is high and rapidly rising. Indebtedness has risen for 31 years straight—in bad times and good. In just the past 11 years, debt has doubled—to $146 billion. That’s an average of $1,000 per acre of Canadian farmland. And since some farms carry relatively little debt, the $1,000-per-acre average implies that many farms are carrying double or triple that amount. With debt doubling and redoubling, interest payments are also rising. In 2023, farmers paid just under $7 billion in interest—triple the amount in 2010.
In addition to being increasingly dependent on debt, farmers also depend upon taxpayer-funded support programs. Over the past three years, net transfers to farmers via cost-shared programs such as crop insurance have averaged $5 billion per year. To put it another way: since 2008, when the “good times” returned for farmers, tax-funded transfers have made up 36 per cent of realized net farm income. Without those billions in taxpayer transfers, farming would look very different—many farmers would be hard pressed to make their interest payments or pay other expenses.
Canadian agriculture is a paradox—seemingly prosperous yet financially vulnerable at the same time. On the one hand, we must acknowledge the huge profits being captured by farms with large land bases. For example, grain farms with perhaps 7,000, 10,000, or 20,000+ acres are reaping large surpluses—hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year. On top of these annual cash surpluses from operations, these farms are piling up, at least on paper, significant wealth as a result of galloping land-price increases. On very large farms, asset appreciation can add millions of dollars in wealth in just a few years.
But the preceding is occurring even as per-acre margins continue to erode. Very large farms are not making large profits per acre: they are making relatively small profits per acre, but on a huge number of acres. Per-acre margins today and in recent years are near historic lows. Peaks in per-acre margins in recent years (struggling to reach $100 per acre) are below the inflation-adjusted troughs of the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s.
Agriculture is supporting a number of farms in seeming prosperity, but it is supporting a much smaller number of farms. Compared to previous “good times”—say, the 1970s and early ’80s—the number of farms supported in relative prosperity today is perhaps 20 or 30 per cent as large. Big farms are reaping big profits because they are profiting from the land that previously supported four or six families. Overall profitability is not high: aggregate profits are low. Net income in Canadian agriculture is far below its 1940s to 1980s levels, but it is divided among fewer hands.
So, from one perspective, large farms seem prosperous. But from another perspective, a confluence of low per-acre margins, high and rising debt, chronic dependence on taxpayer-funded transfers, and the need to cover ground that should be supporting several farm families instead of just one gives a different perspective on the current “boom.”
Prairie agriculture is vulnerable and faces very high risks from looming climate impacts. But before we return to those potential impacts, let’s look at other aspects of our potential agricultural polycrisis.
Looking objectively at most sectors of national and global economies, most are far outside the bounds of sustainability. Mining, industry, forestry, fishing, etc. are all unsustainable at current levels, yet all continue to expand. Virtually all human systems are now unsustainable, and moving away from, not toward, sustainability. It is worth considering that the same is true for agriculture. A few facts: Canadian agriculture doubled its fuel use over the past 31 years, doubled its fertilizer use over the past 18 years, and doubled its use of chemical herbicides and insecticides over the past 13. Like all parts of national and global economies, agriculture is less sustainable.
The preceding is not, however, a criticism of farmers, but rather a way to illuminate the driving forces within agriculture. Farmers are on a treadmill, spurred by agribusiness corporations to run ever faster—squeezed to produce ever-higher yields and outputs, usually via the use of ever-larger quantities of inputs. Farmer profits depend not only on producing, but on producing more and more each year. And this maximum-output, maximum-input system is pushing farmers farther away from sustainability and toward a more violent collision with emissions limits and planetary boundaries.
Focusing on one aspect of the sustainability problem, agricultural GHG emissions, we see that those are rising, despite a global framework wherein emissions must fall and all sectors must approach net zero by 2050—just 25 years from now. How will a highly indebted agricultural system seemingly addicted to ever-increasing output (and hence increasing input use) maintain itself when emissions limits press downward with intensifying force on emissions and input use? On one side loom climate impacts and on the other loom roadblocks to business as usual, imposed by the need to do agriculture differently in a world constrained by energy, emissions, and biospheric limits.
The 1970s and early-’80s boom gave way to a two-decade farm crisis period wherein farmers were plagued by high interest rates, frequent droughts, poor prices, and negative margins. Over that period, nearly 100 per cent of net income came from taxpayer-funded programs and farm families were forced to augment their income through off-farm work. It is hard to know what the future holds for grain prices or farm prosperity, but there are clear risks. And if economic bad times return amid record-high debt and intensifying climate impacts, the results could be disastrous. It is hard to overstate the risks of climate impacts upon an already vulnerable agricultural sector.
So what should we do? Though there are no “solutions” per se, there are many positive responses we could make now to minimize the risks to our Prairie breadbasket. Many readers will expect just such a list of positive changes here. But let’s omit that list. Why? Because, too often, such lists of “solutions” serve merely to dispel anxiety—to defuse concerns, to give the impression that remedies are at hand and, surely, someone will ensure we do the right thing.
Let us be clear: though solutions exist, we are not pursuing them. Rather, we are moving away from them. Farm debt is not falling, it is rapidly rising. Overdependence on taxpayer dollars is not abating—it is a chronic feature of farm finance. Agricultural GHG emissions and input use are not falling; we are not moving in directions that align with emission-reduction commitments or planetary boundaries, but instead away. We continue to expel farmers and super-size our farms, with the largest now above 100,000 acres. We continue to dismantle policies, programs, and institutions that previously gave farmers power in the marketplace and we continue to turn the system over to increasing corporate control, with the result being farmers forced to run ever faster on the input-use and output treadmill. Yes, we could list here the positive changes that must be made to begin to safeguard our Prairie breadbasket, but much more important than any such list is the clear-eyed acknowledgement that we are moving away from solutions, not toward them.
There is much we can do to make our farms and food systems less dependent on petroleum-derived inputs and debt. There is much we can do to make our farms and food systems less vulnerable to inevitable climate shocks, but at this moment, overall, we are doing the opposite—we are going the wrong way. Key to preserving our Prairie breadbasket is having the courage to fundamentally change direction.
