For 30 years, Gérald Chouinard visited Quebec orchards every week of the growing season, helping apple growers use fewer pesticides. Today, his right hand trembles as he speaks. Medication controls perhaps half of it, the former agronomist and researcher says. Some days, even cooking or walking is hard.

Chouinard was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, at 56. In 2022, Quebec’s administrative labour tribunal ruled that his illness was directly linked to his job, which for 20 years exposed him to more than 40 pesticides sprayed in orchards. His employer, Quebec’s Agriculture Ministry, did not contest the claim. The province’s workplace safety board told him he was the first such case.

Now he is challenging Ottawa. A House of Commons petition he launched closed last week with 21,410 signatures. It targets two federal budget bills: C-30, passed in June, which lets cabinet approve pesticides Health Canada has found too risky for the environment, and C-31, still before Parliament, which would end the requirement that every pesticide be fully re-evaluated at least once every 15 years.

“It’s a complete change of direction,” Chouinard told The Narwhal in French. “For decades, we’ve been going in one direction to reduce the risks, reduce the use of these products. … Now, suddenly, two bills that go the other way.”

These bills arrived as recent studies have documented a link between some pesticides and the risk of health issues like Parkinson’s and cancer, and as the federal government’s own data shows how much is still unresolved about pesticides in Canadian water.

In late October, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development — part of the auditor general’s office — released an audit of Health Canada’s water monitoring program for pesticides. It was largely positive: the program, launched in 2024, works as intended, and its data is already shaping regulatory decisions. But the auditors also found the department “took limited action on higher-risk pesticides.”

In 2024, sampling partners collected nearly 4,000 water samples. Thirty of the 233 pesticides analyzed exceeded levels Health Canada considers safe for aquatic life. Four landed in the highest-risk group, the audit found. Two of the four pesticides Health Canada identified to The Narwhal are what are known as neonicotinoids — insecticides long linked to harm to bees and aquatic insects.

Yet for half of these highest-risk pesticides, the auditors found, Health Canada had not started looking at whether action was needed. The department spokesperson said it is waiting for quality-checked 2025 data, though preliminary results “showed some exceedance patterns.” The audit also found Health Canada has no thresholds for action when pesticides exceed levels that may pose a risk to human health. The department agreed to draft them by June 2027, then consult the public.

The auditors point to an insecticide called clothianidin as an example of the monitoring program doing its job. A neonicotinoid used on corn, potatoes and other field crops, it is known to be harmful to pollinators. In 2024, the report found the clothianidin limit was exceeded 360 times, more than any other pesticide, at sites in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. Health Canada used that data to widen a re-evaluation of the insecticide, under way since 2016, to include its effects on aquatic invertebrates.

“Without the sampling results from the program, Health Canada would not have had the data on clothianidin to support these actions,” the auditors wrote. And even those actions are less drastic than those taken by the European Union, which now bars imported food containing detectable residues of clothianidin — which could impact everything from oranges and potatoes to beans, oil and coffee —  after a three-year transition that ends this year.

That kind of review is exactly what Chouinard fears is now at risk.

The feds and industry say changing pesticide rules helps food security

In June, Parliament passed Bill C-30, which implemented the government’s spring economic update. Tucked inside were amendments to the Pest Control Products Act, the law that governs pesticides in Canada.

The amendments let cabinet authorize a pesticide even after Health Canada concludes its environmental risks are unacceptable, if ministers decide it is needed for economic or food security.

The government fast-tracked the bill, limiting House debate and wrapping up committee study in two hours. The Senate committee that studied the bill concluded changes of this significance “should have warranted a separate study rather than being included in an omnibus bill.”

So far, cabinet has not used its new power to approve a pesticide, the health minister’s press secretary Alexandre Bergeron told The Narwhal.

The government frames the changes as part of a wider push on food security. In June, Ottawa unveiled a $3.2-billion national food security strategy it says was aimed at lowering grocery bills.

Industry welcomed the shift. “Food security is, ultimately, national security,” Darren Anderson, CEO of Canadian pesticide maker Vive Crop Protection, told the Senate agriculture committee in June. He said he had long asked the regulator to consider economic factors in pesticide decisions, and called C-31’s review changes “much more of an efficiency play.”

Most major farm groups agreed. Stéphanie Levasseur of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture told the Senate finance committee the organization would “welcome and support the recognition of economic and food security,” as long as implementation doesn’t add bureaucracy or delays. The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada “strongly supports” the changes, Chris Duyvelshoff, chair of crop protection, said, while insisting food security must not weaken health or environmental protection.

But not all farmers are on the same page. In June, the National Farmers Union asked members of Parliament to scrap the pesticide changes altogether. Cabinet deliberations stay confidential for 20 years, the union noted, so the public would not learn why a pesticide was approved until any effects were irreversible. The union also raised concerns about well-resourced companies lobbying for Health Canada exemptions.

Chouinard doesn’t blame farmers. Climate change has brought warmer temperatures, which in turn bring more insects and more disease, he said, which makes it harder for growers to limit chemical use. “They’re the first victims” of both climate change and pesticide exposure, he said.

Feds will also drop required re-evaluations of pesticides

A second bill, C-31, still before Parliament, would go further. Today, Health Canada must re-evaluate every registered pesticide at least once every 15 years. A re-evaluation can require new studies from the manufacturer or consult the public. C-31 would replace that with an “assessment” of information already available. A full re-evaluation would be required only if the health or environmental risks have “increased significantly.”

A transitional provision would also let the minister end re-evaluations already underway on the same basis.

“The 15-year checkpoint remains in place,” Alexandre Bergeron, press secretary to Health Minister Marjorie Michel, said in an email. “These changes will help reduce backlogs and ensure regulatory resources are focused on higher-risk products and emerging concerns, rather than automatically reviewing products simply because 15 years have passed.”

Backlogs are real: the clothianidin re-evaluation has now run for a decade. Health Canada said it has “no plans” to end it, but did not say how many other ongoing reviews could be affected.

Chouinard saw the effect of re-evaluation in the orchards himself. As part of his work, he tracked the toxicity of all the products applied there, compiling what he calls a “risk index” for the pesticides used. “We could see that the risk index, over the years, was going down,” he said, explaining that “products with high risk indices tend to disappear during re-evaluations. And new products that come on the market tend to have lower risk indices. … So, year after year, the record improves.”

He now fears dangerous products “could stay on the market much longer.” The new criteria, he said, are vague and “subject to outside pressure rather than based on science.”

Other critics say the government’s economic argument is weak. Pesticides can’t ensure food security, they say, when Canada is the world’s fourth-largest pesticide importer. It imported $3.02 billion worth between September 2025 and August 2026, about 72 per cent of it from the U.S., according to data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

With that dependence, loosening the rules won’t protect Canada’s crops or food supply, according to Pascal Priori, who coordinates a support network for pesticide victims run by the Quebec Public Health Association. “Deregulating does not strengthen our sovereignty or our agricultural competitiveness,” he told the House finance committee on Oct. 8. “On the contrary, it weakens it.”

Trade is also at stake. The European Union’s rules on pesticide residues cover more than one neonicotinoid, which the coalition opposing Canada’s changes warns could put up to $1.4 billion in exports at risk — just as Ottawa tries to diversify trade away from the U.S.

Pushback on pesticide bills spans the country

The pushback isn’t limited to Quebec. In Saanich, B.C., on Vancouver Island, Alena Gavrilenko, a fourth-year political science student at the University of Victoria, runs volunteer workshops on growing and canning organic food. Her neighbourhood recently built a seed library.

When the pesticide changes came up at a workshop this summer, she launched her own House of Commons petition. It has about 2,700 signatures, more than 1,000 of them from Ontario.

The consensus in her community, she said, is that “science should decide whether a pesticide is safe, not cabinet.” She also questions the government’s affordability argument. 

“Nobody has shown that this power will even lower grocery prices,” she said. “Food prices are high, farmers need the tools, but I don’t think this is the way to go about it.”

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Like many farmers, Nick Matheson has multiple weather apps on his phone. 

“If I find something I don’t like, I switch apps,” he laughs during a phone interview.

No amount of forecasting, however, could have prepared Matheson for the deluge of rain that hit his Stonewall-area grain and cattle farm this spring — or for the lingering challenges that have trickled through the rest of his season.

“I’m still in it,” he says in mid-October. “And I won’t be out of it until the snow flies at this point. And even then, I’ll probably be dealing with some residual effects come next spring.”

The region north of Winnipeg was drenched with 255 millimetres of rain over a 13-hour period on June 9 — a storm the local mayor described as “unprecedented.” Matheson awoke to an overflowing rain gauge, hail damage and 300 acres — a quarter of his cropland — destroyed by flooding. A promising year with “unreal” early-season germination was quashed overnight.

Since then, his herd of 100 cow-calf pairs has been plagued by insects and hoof rot, a bacterial infection triggered by muddy conditions. Harvest hasn’t gone much better. During a recent tour of his property 30 kilometres north of Winnipeg, Matheson points out patchy wheat and flax fields with poor yields and subpar plant quality. He’s also fighting weeds that have thrived in damaged fields.

Matheson, 42, is the sixth generation of his family to farm this land. Despite several recent years of drought, the extreme weather of 2026 stands out.

“It’s the worst Dad’s seen. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Matheson says. “But we just make do, pick ourselves up and try to not let it get in our head. … You’ve just gotta roll with the punches.”

Extreme weather events, from floods to droughts to wildfires, are expected to become more frequent and severe with climate change. Those in Manitoba’s agriculture sector are split on how to prepare for these kinds of unpredictable events and whether mitigation is even possible.

‘Keep the wolves at bay’: Insurance payouts in the millions keep farmers afloat

Matheson is one of hundreds of farmers to make insurance claims with the Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation related to overland flooding this season. The provincial Crown corporation, which covers weather-related farm perils, paid out $11 million this year for 478 excess moisture claims on about 157,000 acres that were too wet to seed, David Van Deynze, the corporation’s chief product officer, says. It also received 790 crop damage claims across 180,000 acres; those payouts won’t be tallied until after harvest season.

Since most farmers pay for seed and inputs like fertilizer upfront, often through loans, insurance can be an important business tool when the weather goes sideways, Van Deynze says in an interview.

“Requirements to pay off those loans on an annual basis don’t stop, whether you have a good crop or a bad crop,” he says. “We hope insurance can keep the wolves at bay and allow them to continue to farm.”

Van Deynze says excess moisture insurance has become a “very major” part of the corporation’s portfolio since it was introduced in 2000, with drought being the other main cause of crop loss in Manitoba. 

He believes losses from the extreme drought of 2021, which saw Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation pay a record $570 million in indemnities, would’ve been worse without modern farming adaptations, such as new crop varieties and minimum tillage, which aims to limit the amount of soil plowed during seeding and after harvest.

At the same time, Van Deynze says there’s often little farmers can do to prepare for localized natural disasters. 

“No matter how hard you try … to mitigate losses, it seems like there’s still times where Mother Nature’s going to win out,” he says.

Farmers see risks, but also benefits, from a changing climate

Despite the spectre of extreme weather, many who spoke with The Narwhal/Free Press are optimistic about the possible agricultural benefits of climate change — such as warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.

“I live in northern Manitoba, if the environment is warming, it’s good for me from an economic perspective,” rancher Peter Tokar says. “It will bring about new pests and whatnot, but I think with the way I manage things … I should be the most resilient when it happens.”

Tokar grows cash crops and manages 450 head of cattle on 2,200 acres of grassland near Swan River, Man. He credits regenerative farming practices for saving his season after the region 500 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg was hit with a once-in-a-200-year flash flood in June, followed by a second major downpour less than a month later. It was Swan River’s fourth-wettest summer on record, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

When the water receded, part of his pastureland was covered with more than a foot of silt deposited from the nearby Duck Mountain Provincial Park escarpment. 

The shelterbelts around Tokar’s property kept floodwater debris at bay and his pastures recovered quickly thanks to years of rotational grazing, a practice of moving livestock frequently through small sections of pasture which allows grazed areas to regrow and helps improve soil structure, carbon sequestration and water dynamics. He expects the silt-covered fields to bounce back over the next year.

“What I have been doing actually worked really, really well,” he says.

While Tokar enjoys the environmental benefits of rotational grazing, he ultimately adopted the practice for cost-saving reasons. His cows need less feed because they’re able to graze for longer and leaving fields idle requires less fuel, labour and fewer chemicals, like pesticides, he says.

Tokar has found like-minded peers through the Manitoba Forage & Grassland Association, which promotes regenerative agricultural practices within the livestock industry. Soil and water health are “vitally important” to extreme weather and climate resilience, Duncan Morrison, the association’s executive director, says.

The grassland association has developed a climate forecasting tool, called Aquanty, to help local producers understand how extreme weather and heat will impact their groundwater supply and what kinds of management tools, such as rotational grazing, can be deployed today to protect those resources.

“We’re interested in how we can recharge the aquifer through grasslands and wetlands, which are both key parts of grazing systems,” Morrison says.

The Aquanty project recently expanded to several cattle-producing regions in Alberta, B.C., Ontario and Quebec with funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Manitoba has 14 watershed districts that provide farmers with funding for projects that protect local water resources and improve regional climate resilience. The Prairie Watersheds Climate Program, for example, incentivizes the use of rotational grazing, nitrogen management and cover cropping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve soil health.

The Swan Lake Watershed District — which encompasses Swan River and a 7,200-square-kilometre section of Manitoba’s northern parkland region — has been inundated by applications from farmers for stream-bank-stabilization projects to shore up on-farm riverbanks eroded by this year’s flooding. 

“I had eight projects for 2027 and that just got blown out of the water,” district manager Edward Shao says. “I think I have 45 file folders on my desk that were brought in after July.” 

Shao spends much of his time encouraging farmers to maintain the natural features of their land — like shelterbelts, wetlands and riparian zones — that act as buffers during extreme weather events. Preventative measures can be a hard sell in normal times, due to the financial pressures of industrial farming, he says. 

“A lot of producers farm up to the water’s edge and crop every inch of land,” Shao says, adding the worst damage occurred on farms without the aforementioned buffers.

“There might not be any effects when there’s no flooding, but in a year like this you see a lot of impact.” 

Shao acknowledges there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to climate resilience, but hopes this year’s flood helps locals prepare for future extreme weather events.

‘I don’t have that crystal ball’: farmers prepare for a future of reacting to change

Back in Stonewall, Nick Matheson isn’t planning on changing how he manages his farm in light of this year’s flooding. He says he already practices minimal tillage, plants cover crops between annual harvests and keeps wetlands on his property intact.

“I don’t think there’s a lot I can plan for because I don’t have that crystal ball to see further in the future, so I’ll probably just carry on with what I’m doing,” he says.

Robert Misko, a grain farmer and head of council for the Municipality of Roblin, agrees that extreme weather is hard to plan for — even with the cutting-edge management practices.

“We try to use whatever technology that’s going to make us more efficient and more sustainable. Farmers, we’re pretty adaptive,” Misko, who manages a 7,000-acre grain operation, says.

Agriculture accounts for 27 per cent of Manitoba’s greenhouse gas emissions, but, at the moment, Misko doesn’t see many viable alternatives for individual farmers to make a dent in that number.

“We rely on diesel. I can’t buy an electric combine. I can’t buy an electric tractor to pull an air seeder,” he says.

“Climate change is sadly something that, as farmers, we have very limited control over and we don’t really have a lot of levers that we can pull to slow it down. We just have to try to adapt to it,” he adds.

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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It is easy to get lost in the numbers when talking about fracking in Alberta: to be temporarily dazzled by the growth of production, the insatiable thirst for water and the profits that follow. 

The practice has seen a dramatic increase over the past 13 years, with production rising sevenfold between 2013 and 2024 to the equivalent of more than 640 million barrels of oil per year. Water consumption also soared 335 per cent, from 6.5 billion litres to almost 30 billion litres of freshwater per year.

Those sorts of figures are almost impossible to comprehend. You could count how many swimming pools that water might fill (164 million), or try to imagine a stack of barrels teetering high into the atmosphere, but what does that really mean?

In parts of rural Alberta, you don’t need those kinds of mental gymnastics to understand the scale of the industry and its impact. The evidence is all around you. Creeks run dry. Hoses and pumps seem to line every ditch. Then there are the trucks and drilling and noise.

This is particularly true in the rural areas of west-central Alberta, a long stretch of the province sandwiched between the foothills to the west and the frenetic Calgary-Edmonton corridor to the east.

It’s here where ranches, farms and communities sit side by side with a fracking boom that is outcompeting the locals for water.

What we saw this summer

Looking back on the past ten years, the summer of 2026 was an anomaly for the area of Alberta an hour drive southwest of Edmonton. Parched fields were inundated with rain early in the season, and rivers and creeks flowed with renewed vigour. Some areas received more rainfall than ever before.

But that moisture wasn’t enough to quell concerns from some residents in the Blindman and Medicine River watersheds, where fracking activity has been increasing — and water concerns are front and centre. 

Fracking involves injecting water deep into the ground to break up rock where gas is trapped in tight crevasses, often thousands of metres under the surface. That water, vast quantities of it, is almost entirely lost to the water cycle as it remains trapped in the reservoirs that previously held gas. The water that does come to the surface is contaminated.

The Narwhal spent a day travelling through the Rimbey, Alta., area with Daniel Iseli-Otto and Assar Grinde, two members of the Blindman River Watershed Society, in July this year, visiting impacted landowners, following pumping hoses to enormous reservoirs and stopping for a photoshoot among Grinde’s cattle.

There’s an image in many a head of what kind of people raise concerns over oil and gas. Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney often dismissed those with environmental concerns as “foreign-funded radicals,” but those stereotypes don’t hold.

Butch and Nicole Smith, who live in the area, blame the construction of a massive reservoir across from their isolated property for the decline of their bison herd. They’re moving. 

Grinde, whose family has owned its ranch for generations, talks about watching the creek on that land dry up and how the oil and gas companies were still pumping water for fracking while he was left with mud. 

Iseli-Otto curses as we turn onto another gravel road, heavily pitted from the trucks moving back and forth from a fracking reservoir site. “This is industrial pulverization of county roads,” he says, as he slows down in his Ram 3500 pickup truck.

Dana Kreil, the chair of the nearby Medicine River Watershed Society, and a councillor for Lacombe County, jumped in Iseli-Otto’s truck in the afternoon. She says the road in front of her home was “trashed” by one company active in the area.

“I want them to get a bill,” she says.

Not just fracking, not just the Blindman

Travelling through rural Alberta, it feels like the frustrations that come alongside the pay cheques and the royalties of the broader oil and gas industry are increasing in step with a years-long trend of companies failing to pay their share — whether they frack wells or not. 

Even with record profits, investments and jobs don’t stack up the way they used to. Too often, oil and gas companies fail to pay their bills, and that has consequences. Unpaid municipal taxes hurt local governments — and eat into budgets for things like road maintenance — and unpaid leases force landowners to seek government compensation on behalf of delinquent companies. At the same time, there are more and more orphan and inactive wells. 

All of those local impacts intertwine with the changing climate and the associated droughts, fires and floods.

Grinde says no one really thinks of the water the companies pull from the rivers and underground aquifers until there’s not enough to go around, and then it becomes a priority. And although the summer of 2026 was altogether too wet for many farmers, the drought years are predicted to return as part of a longer-term pattern of increased volatility. 

The cause of those swings in climate are once again related to big numbers that are hard to grasp. 

$168 billion in revenue. $22 billion in royalties the government relies on. 310 billion litres of water consumed by Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Then there’s the five billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from global oil and gas production, seven billion tonnes from transportation and the unfathomable heating of oceans. 

The big picture is abstract; hard to fathom. But here at Blindman Creek, the impacts are tangible. 

“It’s really obvious that it’s an issue, but it’s really hard to make it concrete for people,” Iseli-Otto says. “This is an issue for people in Calgary, this is an issue for people in Edmonton, but they don’t know. The amount of water that’s getting sucked out is mind blowing.”

Updated on Oct. 15, 2026, at 2:05 p.m. MT: This story has been updated to clarify that the five billion tonnes from global oil and gas production and seven billion tonnes from transportation refers to tonnes of emissions.

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Norm Lamothe soiled his undies twice. The second time, he was much happier with the result. 

Soiled them — in a manner of speaking that is. After two months, buried in the ground, the cotton fabric of a once-pristine set of white men’s briefs had largely disappeared, and mostly just the elastic waistband remained. It was a sign changes in farming techniques were paying off. 

Lamothe runs the family-owned Woodleigh Farms outside Peterborough, Ont. Far from the realm of bodily functions, the brief burial experiment — dubbed a “Soil Your Undies” test — is popular in farm country. It’s a simple, albeit cheekily named, way of measuring just how active the tiny organisms like bacteria and fungi are in soil — and by extension, how healthy the soil is. Just bury a plain cotton undergarment, wait a couple months and dig it back up. The organisms chew up the natural cotton fabric, so more microbial activity means a more degraded undergarment. Dig up a fully intact set of tighty-whiteys, and you know the soil in that area needs some TLC. 

Lamothe first diagnosed his poor soil by doing a Soil Your Undies test in 2015.

“That’s really what started my journey down the soil health path,” Lamothe says, standing in front of one full pair of Hanes and the tattered remains of another, lovingly displayed on his office wall. “Much to our chagrin, they were completely intact.”

It was a self-described “wake-up call” to improve his farm’s practices for the climate, biodiversity and his own business resilience. 

The environmental impact of farming is an extraordinarily complicated subject, and the footprint agriculture leaves is suitably quite varied. In terms of emissions, agriculture accounts for about eight per cent of our national total, or 10 per cent if you include emissions from energy use on farms. The culprits are many: nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, can escape to the atmosphere from soil. Cattle, sheep and other ruminant livestock create methane — another greenhouse gas — through their digestive processes and release it into the atmosphere, mostly by way of belching. And carbon dioxide is released by decaying plant matter.

Another major source of emissions is fossil fuels. Diesel, made from crude oil, is the main fuel source for the vast majority of tractors and other farm equipment, and fossil fuels — used on and off farms — are the single greatest contributor to climate change globally.

On the flip side, some farming methods can also be a real boon for ecology. Grazing cattle on native grasslands or in pastures with a diverse array of plants (called forage crops in farming circles) can benefit soil health and bird communities, while sequestering enormous amounts of carbon. On the other hand, regular ploughing and excessive fertilizer use can be harmful to soil and waterways. When it comes to environmental impact, the reality on the ground often necessitates doing things that are both better and worse for the environment.

Lamothe isn’t unique in his drive to find climate solutions on his farm. He joined peer groups like the Ontario Soil Network and Farmers for Climate Solutions for guidance, and to support others looking to make positive change. There are farmers and ranchers across Canada — and across the globe — doing this work. I’ve had the good fortune to meet many of them, as a farmer myself, as well as a journalist. They are doing their best to produce the food and commodities we all rely on, in a way that leaves the land in a better place. Some are motivated by water quality and biodiversity, others by profitability and resiliency in the face of extreme weather conditions like heat waves, floods and drought. Some have their eye on trade disruptions and other business challenges forcing them to rethink the status quo. 

Each has a compelling story. And not every one involves undies.

Energy

Lamothe’s farmyard sits at the end of a meandering tree-flanked driveway, eventually opening to buildings set partway up a gentle slope. The landscape here is a mix of rolling pasture, cropland and woodland — all things a flat-lander like myself can appreciate; from the centre of the county where my family farms in southwestern Ontario, it’s so flat you can see the skyscrapers of metropolitan Detroit, about 33 kilometres away as the crow flies, on a clear day. From Lamothe’s driveway, I can’t even see the extent of his property.

Photographer Bryan Dickie and I arrive to find Lamothe in the greenhouse near a cluster of outbuildings and then a pasture where a flock of sheep graze at the far end. Past the outbuildings, we can see the beginnings of his crop fields.

As is typical on farms, there is a little bit of everything everywhere at Woodleigh. Not messy, but clearly busy.

Lamothe is rinsing a pile of plastic flower pots used in the greenhouse —  a structure he calls a “passive solar” facility. It’s built with a sloped roof to capture ambient heat at the peak. That heat gets pulled down into the ground where it’s stored in ducts during the hottest parts of the day. That heat can then be recovered in the cooler months, and at night when the temperature drops, keeping the greenhouse above freezing, even when it is -25 C outside. No additional heating is needed.

Reducing fossil fuel use, as it turns out, is just one of Lamothe’s many proclivities. Norm assures me he “absolutely loves” his fully electric pickup truck, not least because it saves him about $6,500 a year in fuel. 

Another is soil health, ever since that fateful and telling first untarnished pair of Hanes.

Soil

The two most common field crops in Ontario are seed corn — the kind used for animal feed, ethanol and myriad other purposes — and soybeans, both for human and livestock consumption. Winter wheat, which is planted in autumn, typically into recently harvested soybean fields, takes third place. A typical yearly crop rotation for farmers in much of Ontario will involve at least a couple of these. What farmers plant ultimately comes down to economics. Corn and soybeans tend to pay better than winter grains, meaning the latter can sometimes fall out of favour.

Soil health, however, thrives on diversity. 

Keeping different crops in the rotation adds different root structures, helping to break up hard soil to create better water retention and provide a more biodiverse environment that, in turn, supports a wider (read: healthier) variety of soil organisms. Long-term research trials from the University of Guelph have shown more diversity helps build soil health, as well as crop yields. 

Lamothe’s crop rotation was once dominated by corn and soybeans. Adding wheat and oats was one of the first things he did after failing that undies test. When I visit in July, Lamothe’s fields are flush with corn, soybeans and oats. He’ll sow winter wheat on some of his soybean acres later in the year. On areas of the farm that have historically been less productive, he planted trees and native grasses. Cover crops — planted to improve soil, rather than for harvest and sale — will go on his winter wheat fields after they’re harvested.

He also started growing hay on areas prone to erosion, so there would always be roots present to anchor the soil. 

Then came the sheep. 

In 2022, Lamothe brought in the flock to graze the hay. The manure from the sheep flock also reintroduces nutrients to the fields — alongside compost Lamothe makes from wood chips, crop residue and other organic waste. 

Ten years after burying his first pair of britches, Lamothe tried soiling his undies again. The results were much better.

“Whether the change came from our practices or differing weather conditions is up for debate, but certainly we saw we had microbial activity,” he says, adding the physical remains, framed in his office, “make a nice conversation piece with people in here wondering why there is underwear on the wall.”

Carbon

A common challenge for farmers — myself included — is ensuring crops get the nutrients they need at the right time. Sometimes there might not be enough of a given nutrient in the soil, like phosphorus or boron. In other cases, the amount is fine, but they timing is off. 

Fertilizers help, which brings us to another outbuilding on Lamothe’s farm. This one is rich with the smell of barbecue smoke. 

It was the main farm workshop in a past life, a large steel shed that’s more steampunk than down-in-the-country. Conveyor belts and hay bale elevators connect two large trailers with steel sifters, feeding into a cylindrical dryer the size of a bus. It’s all part of Lamothe’s latest venture: a biochar production system.

Biochar is a black, charcoal-like substance created by heating organic material, like wood, in an oxygen-free environment (known as pyrolysis, if you’re technically inclined). The process starts with wood chips from the farm’s forestry business — as I said, there’s a little bit of everything here — which are loaded from old trailers, previously used for hauling potatoes, onto the conveyors and sifters, where they’re sorted by size. Chips that are too big or small are removed for composting, while what remains is put through the dryer, then into a burner.

“Ecologically speaking, this plant is very efficient because we’re using the energy it’s creating to run the whole system,” Lamothe says. And even the acidic byproduct of this process, known as “wood vinegar” — a product similar to the liquid smoke you might use in barbecue sauce — has valuable properties for soil. It helps with plant growth and acts as a natural pesticide.

Biochar is full of carbon, which when added to soil, becomes soil organic carbon — an indicator of good soil health. It helps to regulate nutrients in the soil, microbial activity and moisture. Combined with compost and manure, that can translate to more nutrients slowly released to crops over a long period.

“We’re taking all that carbon that would otherwise go up in the atmosphere and sequestering it in these particles that are going into the soil forever,” Lamothe says. On an annual basis, running at full capacity, the system will sequester 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, making approximately 500 tonnes of biochar. 

“That’s net — after all the trucking, the forestry activities, moving of materials,” Lamothe says. “That’s pretty remarkable, and it says something about what could be done at scale for the environment in this country.”

Biodiversity

On the other side of the urban hive that is the Greater Toronto Area, and closer to my own family’s farm, I find myself looking at a beautiful herd of Hereford cattle. They’re grazing, rather lazily, in what to the untrained eye might look like a pasture overrun by weeds.

It’s actually a 19-acre tallgrass prairie, established by farmer Blake Vince in 2018. Here, outside Chatham, Ont., we’re in what’s known as the Carolinian forest zone that covers the southernmost part of Ontario, and peters out just north of Toronto. Vince is cultivating grasses like big bluestem, flowers like black-eyed Susan, prairie dock and much more. My favourite might be the compass plant, with its weird leathery leaves that look almost tropical. The prairie has become Vince’s self-described “happy place,” and is the result of years spent trying to improve his farm’s ecology.

Vince planted the tallgrass prairie as part of a federal government initiative to bring at-risk species back to agricultural lands. Insects, birds — and the birders that come with them — have arrived from near and far. One memorable birding visitor, Boris from Bulgaria, encouraged Vince to sell coffee at the roadside. “He said ‘Charge $10 a cup. People will pay. You’ll make money,’ ” Vince says with a chuckle. As of this writing, he’s opted to not pursue that particular revenue stream.

Most recently, the cattle brought the prairie pasture to another level. 

Despite their reputation as a source of methane — a potent greenhouse gas that breaks down into carbon dioxide over about a decade — Vince says livestock can complete the proverbial circle on farms. Among rows of crops and cover crops, or on pastures, cattle add nutrients to the soil (via manure) and encourage nutrient cycling as they eat the plants, which regrow, pulling more carbon into the soil. He introduced the small herd of Herefords to his fields, where they graze in different areas on a rotating basis, including the prairie.

The side benefit was yet more insects — including dung beetles, highly valued for their ability to transfer nutrients from manure into the soil — and more birds to eat those insects. 

He encourages me to “just listen” as I go by the prairie. The chirping, buzzing and other sounds of life are distinctly loud compared to the adjacent corn and soybean fields, and get louder the closer you get.

“I wanted to do something for nature,” Vince says. “And realized the only person stopping me was the guy looking back in the mirror.”

Water

Like myself, Vince farms a landscape that is very flat, relatively void of trees and intersected everywhere by roads and drainage infrastructure like culverts. In 2011, when nearby Lake Erie endured a particularly severe summer of algae blooms and attention focused on the farms sprawling across that flat land, Vince started thinking more about the impact his own farm had on the surrounding environment. 

Generally speaking, algae are organisms found in water that can rapidly expand into large blooms if they encounter excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus — two elements used extensively on farms. In turn, large algae blooms can create toxins and low-oxygen “dead zones” in the water. Lake Erie is particularly prone to algae blooms because of its warm, shallow waters that encourage growth.

Excess nutrients come from many sources, including municipal and industrial wastewater. On the farm, nutrient runoff can spike when fields are hit with heavy rain shortly after fertilizer is applied. Because nutrients bind to soil particles, soil loss from wind or water erosion can also contribute to algae blooms. The nutrient losses from individual farms might be small, but because agriculture dominates the landscape here, repeated small losses add up. 

While he can’t control municipal water systems or the weather, Vince recognized he could exert more control over how much water and nutrients his soil was capable of holding. In 2013, he enrolled in an agricultural scholarship program — the same one I completed earlier this year in biodiversity and climate solutions — to investigate methods of keeping soil, and soil nutrients, in the field where they belong.

By the end of the two-year program, Vince had adopted a new mantra: “roots, not iron.” It means using plant roots to manage the soil, rather than metal tillage equipment. As Lamothe saw, living roots improve the soil’s ability to hold water like a sponge, whereas a hard surface lets it run off. All of it helps keep soil and soil nutrients in the field, and out of local waterways.

And these days, with up to 18 different cover crops potentially growing in his fields during parts of the year, there is almost never bare soil left to potentially wash or blow away.

As the soil holds the water better, it helps insulate crops from drier conditions. That’s key, as more severe swings in weather conditions are being seen by farmers as the climate changes. With so many nutrients inherent and available in his soils, Vince’s fertilizer bill is also substantially lower. He estimates saving “a minimum of 10 per cent” each year for nitrogen fertilizer, which “is a huge cost savings” for nitrogen-hungry crops like corn and wheat. Nutrients can still leave his fields after a heavy rain, but data he collected in partnership with his local conservation authority indicate he’s losing less overall. 

And remember that Soil Your Undies test that kicked off Lamothe’s journey into underground health? Vince is one of the originators. He buried his first pair of briefs in 2015, and helped kick off a trend that, just this year, won an Ig Nobel Prize — a parody of the prestigious awards — for soil science.

“Soil is a collection of living, breathing organisms,” Vince says. “We need to learn to appreciate and respect them.”

Economics and the environment

Across Canada, farms operate on slim margins. Land and equipment are horrendously expensive, and for most, the price they earn for their crops and livestock is beyond their control.

I like to say farming, just the biology of farming, is inherently complex. Then add to that the complexity of weather — with climate change bringing on even more variability, and the occasional introduction of new crop and livestock diseases — along with economics, politics, family and social dynamics, even what it takes to keep machinery running. Most of the time, farmers and ranchers want to do whatever they can to reduce the number and size of variables they face. Trying something new more often adds uncertainty, rather than reducing it. 

I know this firsthand. On our farm, for example, we have been trying to introduce more cover crops after we harvest soybeans. The first year, our cover crop of oats hardly grew because we planted it too late. Another year, the spring was so wet we couldn’t drive machinery into the field to knock back the cereal rye cover crop, meaning it was chest-high and a pain to deal with come spring planting. 

Still, we want to try new things. A lot of farmers do.

There’s the Bernard family, from Prince Edward Island, who are rebuilding their soils and local biodiversity by incorporating cattle into their organic cereal crop business. In Manitoba, the Nerbas family have adopted a grazing system that maximizes the time their pastures have to regrow, supporting their farm’s biodiversity and carbon sequestration potential. Sean Smith, another Manitoban, has partnered with local conservation groups to turn a low-lying and unprofitable part of his family’s farm into a naturalized wetland. 

I could go on.

Lamothe and Vince are the first to tell you they don’t have everything figured out — and likely never will. Investing in ecology on the farm can be complicated, frustrating and require constant troubleshooting. It took time for them to get where they are, and whatever they try next will necessitate the same learning process. But it can be fun, and rewarding as well.

Back in July, as we walked through one of Vince’s fields, some parts waist- or knee-high with a cover crop of crimson clover and cereal rye, I nearly stepped on a wild turkey hen. She was minding her clutch of eggs and I could barely make out her brown-feathered form among the greenery. It’s a sign that I should watch where I’m walking, but also that Vince’s efforts have done a lot for above-ground ecology. White-tailed deer also like to bed down in the thick green cover.

Just the day before, Vince had planted corn directly into that cover crop. In a little more than four months, he’ll harvest it. In spring, the cycle will start again.

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Alberta has introduced new rules that will allow landowners to destroy broad categories of wetlands across the province without seeking government approval. It’s a move the province calls common sense and critics call worrying. 

“What I’m seeing is what I like to refer to as policy-based evidence making,” said Tracy Scott, who recently retired from his role as head of industry and government relations with Ducks Unlimited Canada, a wetland conservation organization.

The changes to the province’s Water Act will allow farmers to remove what are known as temporary and seasonal wetlands on private land to improve crop efficiency. Temporary wetlands are covered by water for a few weeks in spring or after a heavy rainfall, according to the government — they can be dips in the landscape where water naturally pools. Seasonal wetlands hold water for most of the growing season but dry out by the fall.

Previously, landowners had to pay for a detailed assessment of the impacts of such moves, and pay for wetland replacement costs. 

“Farmers should not have to spend thousands of dollars and wait on government approval to carry out routine work on their own land,” Grant Hunter, the minister of environment and protected areas, said in a news release. “We are restoring private property rights and getting government out of the way where it doesn’t need to be.”

That sort of language irks Kennedy Halvorson, a conservation specialist at the Alberta Wilderness Association.

“It’s a bit of deceptive messaging, kind of depicting these wetlands as if they have no value, they’re just a hindrance for our producers,” she said. 

“The reality is that these wetlands have a lot of ecological value. They’re basically the only other sort of water bodies that exist other than the rivers.”

Halvorson said there is plenty of scientific research to show wetlands help retain water in dry years, help prevent flooding, filter things like pesticides and herbicides, recharge groundwater and provide habitat. 

She says the changes put the vast majority of the remaining prairie wetlands at risk — approximately 94 per cent.

Wetland ‘benefits accrue to society’

Wetlands are among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. They’re home to countless species of birds, bugs and animals. But rapid human development, including agriculture, has ravaged many wetlands.

Globally, experts estimate more than half the world’s wetlands are gone. In Canada, approximately 70 per cent of historic wetlands have been degraded or dried up. Three-quarters of what are known as prairie pothole wetlands have been lost to agricultural developments and some areas have lost 90 per cent of their wetland cover.

Alberta’s changes apply to a broad swath of wetlands classified as “non-permanent.”

“Whether wetlands are large or small, temporary or permanent, they all make a positive difference,” reads Alberta’s landowner guide to wetland policy. 

And they can be a nuisance for farmers trying to operate large machinery and increase crop yields.

“The changes will make it easier for farmers to cultivate, seed, spray, ditch, drain and infill on their own cropland without going through an unnecessary approval process,” the government said in a press release.

These types of wetlands cause “production inefficiencies,” Sarah Weigum, the chair of Alberta British Columbia Seed Growers Association, said in the government’s press release announcing the changes. “By managing these short-lived wet areas and reducing their impacts earlier in the season, it allows farmers to have greater efficiency in the field.” 

Scott, a farmer himself near Camrose, Alta., says working around wetlands is “not fun,” and he can understand some of the frustration for landowners. 

“The challenge here is that the benefits accrue to society, by and large,” he says. “The landowners bear the cost.”

Wetlands do provide agricultural benefits, too: they provide habitat for pollinators, nutrients for crops, pest control and contaminant filtering. They store carbon and help manage water flow during droughts and floods. Healthy wetlands absorb phosphorus and nitrogen, helping manage explosions of algal blooms.

In the past, provincial governments relied heavily on research and consultation to develop policy to protect wetlands, something Scott said this government has turned away from. 

“We do have a policy that I was heavily involved in, in 2013, that involved extensive consultation as well as review of the available science, of which there is a lot,” Scott said. 

“This change is, in my opinion, based on political favour.”

The office of the minister of Environment and Protected Areas and the office of the minister of Agriculture and Irrigation did not respond to questions from The Narwhal by publication time.

Halvorson said another element of the changes may mean wetlands that were established as part of the province’s wetland replacement program, which forced landowners or companies who wanted to destroy a wetland to pay to construct a new wetland in another location, could also now be destroyed without penalty.

“How do we ensure that those wetlands that have been funded to be restored or replaced aren’t now just also at risk of being lost or degraded?” she wonders. 

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My parents were farmers before they came to Canada in the late 1980s. So were my grandparents. I grew up here, never farming, but also never entirely distant from it.

Some of my strongest connections to my family’s history in Punjab came from the back seat of my parents’ car. I remember trips to farms in and around Brampton, Ont., to find vegetables my parents grew up eating in India: okra, bitter gourd, fenugreek, coriander and other produce that would later be cooked into sabzi, a lightly sautéed vegetable dish eaten with flatbreads like roti.

For me, those trips meant getting a taste of a country I hadn’t grown up in.

For my parents, they meant something different.

They brought back memories of working alongside their parents and siblings. After immigrating to Canada, their family members eventually scattered to different countries and continents and those experiences became harder to return to.

Going to the farm offered a small piece of it.

Thousands of people now experience this nostalgia through their phones. In the past few years, several farmers in the Brampton area have taken to social media to share their crops, farming practices and the knowledge behind how they grow food. There’s King Subzi Farm (@kingsubzifarm) northwest of the city, in Caledon, Ont., along with Balle Balle Heritage Farm (@balleballeheritagefarm).

Sarbat Farm (@sarbatfarm), northeast of Brampton, has just over 5,000 followers on TikTok alone, watching reel after reel of daily life on the farm and chickens roaming the land. Driving there, in early August, I got to see it in person, this time from the front seat: fields filled with fresh garlic and serrano chilli peppers, tractors moving through the land and families arriving to buy produce — and a taste of home.

South Asians were farming in Canada in the early 1900s

The connection between farming, food and migration has existed in Canada for more than a century. Tarlok Singh Sahota is the director of the Lakehead University’s agricultural research station in Thunder Bay, Ont., and studied agronomy at Punjab Agricultural University in India. He says Punjabi farmers have been involved in Canadian agriculture for generations, particularly in British Columbia.

Historical records compiled by the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley show that by 1909, 35 South Asians were working on farms in Mission and Matsqui in B.C.’s Lower Fraser Valley. By 1923, records listed 25 farms among businesses owned or operated by the province’s relatively small South Asian community. The earliest record in Ontario is 1914, when a group of Sikh men worked as farmhands on an estate near Pickering, east of Toronto.

Today, Statistics Canada data shows 8,960 Sikh people worked in agriculture in Canada in 2021, representing about 2.1 per cent of people working in the industry. By comparison, 771,790 Sikhs live in Canada, making up 2.1 per cent of the country’s total population.

“Farming is in our blood, so they started owning farms or farming as soon as possible so they could do it,” Sahota says.

In places such as Brampton, which 340,000 South Asians call home, that history of farming is meeting a growing market for vegetables that are everyday ingredients in Punjabi kitchens, Sahota says, but less common on conventional Ontario farms.

Many of these vegetables can require intensive watering and care to ensure a controlled and reliable moisture supply, separate from natural rainfall throughout the growing season, he says.

There is also the knowledge that comes from understanding the crop itself, what it looks like, how it grows and when it should be harvested.

“That’s why most of these things are grown by Punjabis or Asian communities,” Sahota says.“For most people here, this is a specialized cultivation, specialized farming. It is what you call high-value crops in a way.” 

Whether farmers can grow those crops commercially ultimately comes down to demand.

“Because there’s a big population, then there’s a demand,” Sahota says of Brampton. “Whatever you grow, if there is no demand, you won’t grow that.”

Family, friends and farming outside Brampton, Ont.

Jaswinder Singh Sran came to Canada in 2008. His 19-year-old son, Gurveer Singh Sran, says his father grew up farming in India and had long dreamed of doing it again.

Gurveer remembers hearing stories about his father operating a combine — the machine used to harvest a variety of crops from oats to rice and more — when he was about 18 and travelling to other parts of India where farmers would pay him to harvest their crops.

“My dad always had a dream to farm in Canada,” Gurveer says. But it would be years before that opportunity arrived.

The family started farming the 400-acre property in 2020. There is a whole team behind Sarbat Farm, from those tending and harvesting the vegetables that sprawl across tree-lined fields, to the people selling the goods at a farmstand on the property. When I visit on a Sunday, it’s teeming with customers, filling bags of green chickpeas and pattypan squash, under a big, white tent. 

Balkaran Dhillon is also a part of that team. He bought land in 2017 that became the site of Sarbat Farm.

Dhillon, too, grew up farming in India. “When I was three years old, I always went with my parents to sit with the tractors and grow vegetables and other crops like wheat, mustard, chickpeas and cotton,” Dhillon says.

He moved to Canada in 2001. Dhillon met Jaswinder, who was doing general contracting work, in 2020. They set about starting the farm together.

The name Sarbat derives from the phrase “Sarbat da bhala” in the Punjabi language, Dhillon says, which translates to “blessings or welfare for all.” They chose the name to reflect their desire to help feed everyone.

Adapting farming practices for the climate and environment

While much of the team at Sarbat brought knowledge of farming from India to Ontario, it has required adaptation.

The biggest difference, Dhillion says, is the weather.

“It is hard, especially because of the very small [growing] season and winter,” Dhillon says.

But they have found ways to stretch the growing season and learned some of the local norms for seasonal planting. Garlic is planted in the fall, Dhillon says, whereas in India bulbs could be buried into the winter months. Some plants are started in greenhouses in February, allowing them to be transplanted soon after temperatures rise in the spring.

A couple years after starting the farm, the owners converted to organic farming practices, Sarjeet Singh Jhabelwali, another family friend who oversees some of the farming operations, explains.

“We want to prove that farming can be done without chemicals and fertilizers. Farming can be done without tampering with nature,” he says in an interview, conducted in Punjabi.

For Jhabelwali, the approach is part of a broader vision for agriculture that he wants the community to understand, particularly younger generations.

“We are polluting the environment. Species are disappearing,” he says. He attributes this, in part, to the use of pesticides. Health Canada studies and regulates pesticide use – what is allowed and how much – but generally recognizes that pesticides are one of several factors contributing to the loss of pollinators and other impacts on humans and the environment.

Dhillon says avoiding pesticides makes the work more labour-intensive because weeds have to be removed by hand rather than sprayed, but it’s better for the environment and creates jobs.

He estimates the operation employs about 40 to 50 people, many of them relatives, friends and older workers who already know how to farm.

For Gurveer, who helps during the summer and around his school schedule, the fields represent both his father’s past and something his family could carry forward.

“Everything is hand-cultivated, so just seeing the fields itself, without any weeds, without using pesticides, that’s a big achievement,” he says.

Passing farming knowledge to a new generation

The farming knowledge at Sarbat, and other farms in the area, may be coming from an older generation, but the way the farm reaches customers is distinctly modern.

Sarbat Farm began using TikTok to promote its produce in 2024. At first, the family simply experimented with posting videos. Then one went viral.

“Our main message is to attract people toward pesticide-safe food produce because there’s definitely a taste difference,” Gurveer says. 

But Jhabelwali sees the social media presence as more than advertising. He says about 50,000 people visited the farm last year and expects that number to double this year. The more people who see the farm online and visit in person, he says, the more opportunities there are to show people how their food is grown.

“The people who visit will come and see how the vegetables are being grown. The new youth who come will gain awareness,” Jhabelwali says.

He believes younger generations are particularly well-positioned to seek out that information. “Our new youth have good language skills and command. They read and write. They use ChatGPT and search for everything we’re talking about,” he says.

The farming tradition once passed primarily through generation to generation can now reach thousands of people through a phone screen. And those screens are, perhaps surprisingly, bringing people back onto the land, Jhabelwali says.

“The community is what supports us,” Gurveer says.

Dhillon notices it most among older visitors. They come to see the tractors. They walk through the fields. Some want to pick their own vegetables — an experience the farm has been considering expanding.

“A lot of people come here to refresh their memory,” Dhillon says.

Gurveer hears it directly from visitors.

“People feel connected with their roots here,” he says. 

“You don’t get to feel that a lot in Canada.”

Rajpreet Sahota is a community and policy reporting fellow. Her position is funded in part by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input.

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Starting next month, Ontario hunters will have a shot at sandhill cranes — for the first time in a century.

The long-legged, grey birds with a nearly two-metre wingspan are widespread across Ontario from the Great Lakes as far north as southern James Bay — nesting in wetlands and swampy areas after migrating up from the southern United States and Mexico in the spring.

Mark Peck recalls waking up at 4 a.m. to see thousands of sandhill cranes fly over the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where 80 per cent of the species migrate to rest and eat before flying back south for the winter. 

Like Peck, many of them travel from Canada, while others make the journey from Alaska and Siberia.

“It was an incredible experience. … There were about 10,000 sandhill cranes, all on the river,” Peck, president of Ontario Field Ornithologists, said. “As the sun was coming up, the birds were slowly leaving, but they were dancing and bugling, and it was just an awesome experience. … I think it would be hard to hunt after witnessing that.”

Sandhill cranes have a distinct, rattling bugle call that can be heard up to four kilometres away. To Peck, it’s akin to the call of a common loon or the howl of a wolf, a “beautiful sound of nature.” Their distinctive mating dance — wings flapping, beak pecking and legs strutting — have been widely captured and shared online.

While birders love them, sandhill cranes have a long and complex history in Ontario. 

In the early 20th century, the species was hunted to near-extirpation in the province, meaning they were almost locally extinct. In the last few decades, thanks to increased protection from unregulated hunting and more sources of food from agriculture, they have surpassed population expectations. To some, this is a huge success.

“It really is a wonderful, good news story,” Peck said. “They’ve made a remarkable comeback. I’m 67. When I was growing up, it was unusual to see a sandhill crane in southern Ontario. Now, they breed across the province.”

Not everyone sees it as good news, though. Farmers in Algoma, Timmins and as far as Thunder Bay have advocated for an open hunting season in northern Ontario. They say sandhill cranes have caused extensive damage to their crops, wreaking havoc in the spring by pulling up freshly planted seedlings, and again in the fall before harvest.

“It is very discouraging to certain farmers that they’re planting their spring crops, and these birds are coming in and just annihilating it,” Bill Groenheide, Northern Ontario director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, said. “Farmers are having an increase of up to 30 per cent loss in their crops.”

Birgit Martin, who farms on Manitoulin Island, told Ontario Grain Farmer Magazine she has had to replant 25 per cent of her corn acres due to sandhill crane damage. 

Sandhill cranes are omnivores and eat a wide variety of food including insects, plant roots, small animals like rodents and frogs, berries, seeds and even other small birds. But when they find themselves in agricultural areas during the fall migration, the crops hit the hardest are corn, soybeans and potatoes, Groenheide said — some of the most common, and profitable, crops for Ontario farmers.

“When so many birds come into one area and totally destroy your livelihood, there’s got to be compensation somewhere,” Groenheide said. The province’s wildlife damage compensation program focuses on livestock, and doesn’t cover crop losses to migratory birds. “There’s got to be something done about it.”

Ontario sandhill crane hunt allows for one bird per hunter per day

Ontario farmers have been asking the government to open a hunt for years. Environment and Climate Change Canada assessed the status of sandhill cranes earlier this year and found that a “conservative” hunt would have a “minimal impact” on the population of sandhill cranes — which is currently more than 103,000 strong, and considered to have a large, increasing population size. It proposed a hunt running for 14 days, with a “small bag limit” of one bird per day that will allow the federal government to carefully monitor the harvest in the first four years of implementation.

While Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources determines harvesting regulations for most wildlife in the province, the federal environment department oversees migratory birds, like sandhill cranes.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s population objective for the cranes sits between 30,000 and 60,000, and explains on its website that a “managed harvest” could slow or stabilize population growth and potentially minimize crop damage.

The federal agency told The Narwhal in an email that the primary goal of this open season is to provide additional hunting opportunity, adding that “while the intent of the season is not to significantly decrease the sandhill crane population in Ontario and Quebec,” the season may also provide “some direct relief of conflicts.” They also said there may be some indirect reduction of conflicts as hunted sandhill cranes may respond better to scare techniques used by farmers to protect their crops, such as propane cannons that make loud noises.

“Obviously that’s great from a recovery perspective … that this population was able to rebound to that extent,” Matthew Robbins, a fish and wildlife biologist at Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, said. “It also means that, based on the modelling that exists, they can certainly handle some sustainable use.” 

The current hunt will allow Canadian residents to hunt one sandhill crane per person per day in the area around Hudson and James Bay, from Sept. 1 through 14, and on farmland only in other parts of northern and central Ontario including Algoma, Nipissing and Temiskaming, on Sept. 12 through 25. A similarly limited hunt is being opened in Quebec this September as well. 

This new season creates opportunity for hunters and gourmets — sandhill cranes are known to some as “ribeye of the sky” for their rich, red meat — that the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters says is appropriately limited to start.

“The proposal is a very conservative approach,” Robbins said. He doesn’t anticipate a significant hit to the population as a result of the hunt, but says slowing the population growth by some amount may help those farm conflicts.

“It would be worth exploring expanding it in some capacity as long as we can ensure that that’s going to be sustainable,” Robbins said. “From a conservation perspective, it definitely makes sense to start this off from a fairly cautious position, and then go from there.”

Peck is also optimistic about the conservative nature of the hunt’s parameters. But conservation organizations like Ontario Nature have argued reinstating a sandhill crane hunt is a “controversial and concerning proposal.” The birds can live up to 30 years in the wild, meaning they take a long time to mature, while very few of their young survive to adulthood. This makes it more difficult for populations to replenish quickly if adults are killed off.  

The federal government said it received opposing comments from an animal welfare organization, ornithology and naturalist groups, birdwatchers, an unnamed First Nation and individuals during the public comment period last winter.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says on its website that the current strategy accounts for sandhill crane life history and low productivity by allowing only a very limited harvest. It argues the “daily bag limit is intentionally set below” the level the population can sustainably support, and that the population is still expected to grow, though more slowly than if there were no hunt.

At the same time, Groenheide from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture worries the plan for the hunt is not enough to protect farmers, but Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it does not anticipate making changes to the proposed harvest framework until the end of the 2029-30 hunting season.

“In Canada, they want to regulate it because they want to drop the amount of birds [killed], and I do understand that,” Groenheide said. “But on the flip side, how do we protect the farmers?”

Farmers organization wants higher sandhill crane harvest and in more areas

In early 2024, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture released a statement recommending Environment and Climate Change Canada alter its plans. The organization wants farmers to be allowed to defend their crops from sandhill cranes at any point during the year, as well as increased hunting limits, more hunting areas and an earlier season. 

While changes have not been reflected in the final regulations, Groenheide said this year’s hunt is a good first step.

“It’s great to see these birds in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong,” Groenheide said. “But there has to be a playing field. Farmers are out there and the value of their crops is in big demand. There’s a lot of money put into this. They’re losing it all. They’re getting nothing for it. So there has to be a trade-off somewhere.”

He said the way this species is managed represents part of a larger picture related to expanding agriculture in northern Ontario, proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness in April 2026.

“We have ministers now wanting to expand the north, wanting the great clay belt to be opened up and all that,” Groenheide said. “I always call it the great frontier of the north.”

“It’s great land,” Groenheide said, but farming new areas comes with new challenges. Wildlife like deer, bear, moose and elk can conflict with agriculture as farming expands northward, he said.

“It’s their territory, so how do we work around it? How do we compensate farmers if we are inviting them out there?” Groenheide said. “There’s got to be a plan.”

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Assar Grinde is the kind of man whose calm is infectious, even as he rattles off an encyclopedic knowledge of facts about drought, water and the impacts of fracking on the region he calls home. A cattle rancher by trade who studied geology at the University of Alberta, you get the sense he’d rather be tending his herd than fighting with regulators and oil and gas companies.

But on a Sunday in early July after a morning on the ranch, he sits in the back of his friend Daniel Iseli-Otto’s truck, sporting a sweater knit by Iseli-Otto’s mom, and talks about the reasons he can’t just walk away.

It started three years ago when Lloyd Creek — a tributary of the Blindman River, which runs through the land Grinde’s family has ranched for generations — dried up. It was something he’d never seen before and he says the oil and gas companies were still pulling water from the river.

“We wanted to make sure that the river didn’t dry up because we thought that was crazy,” Grinde says.

He and Iseli-Otto helped found the Blindman River Watershed Society and dove into the labyrinth of data used by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the equally bewildering bureaucratic divisions of the provincial government.

It’s a funny time to be talking about the stress on the Blindman River watershed and the concerns he and Iseli-Otto have when it comes to the vast quantities of fresh water being used by oil and gas companies for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

The fields around Rimbey, Alta., about 200 kilometres north of Calgary, are saturated in surreal hues of green, stark against the grey skies of an abnormally wet July that has brought much-needed rain.

It’s a far cry from the drought-like conditions of May and June, conditions that have become all too common in a region suffering through a decade-long dry spell.

But the sudden rush of water isn’t enough to quell the concerns of area ranchers and residents who watched that creek run dry and their drinking wells drop. They say the rain isn’t enough to make up for how much has been lost from the aquifers — the deep underground natural reservoirs that feed those wells.

And then there’s the issue of oil and gas companies using billions of litres of water to crack open the earth beneath those green fields and exploit one of the hottest gas fields going, the Duvernay. They take surface water when there isn’t any to spare, and a fleeting moment of plenty might only make it worse, according to landowners who met with The Narwhal.

Grinde says promises were made by those companies, but rarely kept.

“ ‘We’re going to be taking the water at high flows when there’s too much of it, and we’ll store it and then use it when we need it.’ That was the industry’s sales pitch,” he says, driving through the region southwest of Edmonton along with Iseli-Otto. “But then we’ve been in a drought eight of the last 10 years, and they are still pulling water down.”

Dana Kreil, the chair of the nearby Medicine River Watershed Society, and a councillor for Lacombe County, says there’s no trust in the province to monitor the water and to intervene. Her society has bought its own monitoring equipment and is pressuring the government for solutions.

“You can’t fool the locals,” she says, making it clear she’s speaking for the watershed society and not the county. “There are people telling me the top of their runners wouldn’t get wet in that river. So you can’t tell me that those are acceptable levels for pumping from there.”

‘You only get conflict when there’s scarcity’

The Blindman River, as well as the Medicine, aren’t among the great waterways of the world. With enough momentum, it wouldn’t be hard to leap from one bank to the other. They are slow and meandering, but they are critical to ranchers and farmers.

They are also tenuous.

Neither river is fed by the mountain glaciers to the west. They rely instead on spring runoff and underground aquifers to keep water flowing. This year’s early-summer drenching is an indication of the feast and famine cycles expected to be the norm as the climate shifts — droughts with sudden onslaughts of rain. Grinde says his ranch received almost as much rain in June as it did the entire year previous.

For decades, fracking companies here have been injecting water deep into the ground to break up rock holding gaseous wealth in tight crevasses. That water, vast quantities of it, is almost entirely permanently lost to the water cycle as it remains trapped in the reservoirs that previously held gas. The practice was largely accepted by area landowners, but then water became scarce and drilling activity increased.

“We haven’t had to care about fresh water because we never had this issue before,” Grinde says. “You only get conflict when there’s scarcity, and you have that imbalance between supply and demand, and that’s really what’s happened in the last few years.”

Once Grinde and others started paying attention, they discovered a system of what they say is weak oversight, weak data and regulatory capitulation.

Water use is overseen by both Alberta’s Environment Ministry and the energy regulator — depending on who’s using the resource — and Grinde says it leads to a lot of plausible deniability. Water monitoring in the area is based on a federal government sensor 50 kilometres away in Blackfalds, Alta., but Grinde says it doesn’t actually measure the flow of the river, just the water pressure. Even if it did, Grinde thinks the minimum flows established by the province to determine when a company can pull river water for fracking are too low.

The Alberta Energy Regulator did not answer a question about the monitoring situation on Blindman River, but said monitoring is used to inform when a company can divert water. It noted that monitoring can be seen on the Alberta Rivers site.

The regulator says companies are responsible for measuring flow if there is no station nearby.

“So then that kind of led us down this path of trying to figure out: ‘Do you guys have rules around it?’ ” asked Grinde.

For some in the area, the answer is more uncertain than they’re comfortable with.

Company wants to pull billions of litres from critical freshwater aquifer

In March, Spartan Delta, a fracking company operating in the area, applied for a water licence to pump a maximum of 475 million litres of water per year — about 2.4 million bathtubs’ worth — from the Paskapoo Formation, a vast underground freshwater reservoir that stretches south past Calgary and north past the Athabasca River near Fox Creek.

That raised red flags for those in the region already worried about a strained system.

Grinde wants the government to prevent oil and gas companies from accessing shallow fresh groundwater for fracking, implementing a ban now so that it doesn’t have to draft new rules in the midst of a full-blown crisis.

“Right now [the companies] say, ‘Well, we don’t have any more surface water available to get licensed, we’re just going to start drilling shallow groundwater wells,’ which is really concerning because we don’t know enough about the groundwater, and it’s so vital to everybody who’s living here,” he says.

Tens of thousands of wells tap into the aquifer for drinking water, as do towns across Alberta. According to a report by the federal government, the Paskapoo “supports more groundwater wells than any other aquifer system in the Canadian Prairies,” making it “the most significant supply of groundwater” in the whole region.

That same federal report — published almost 20 years ago — also cautioned the aquifer is slow to recharge and the amount of water that can be pulled from the aquifer might be limited and may have already been exceeded in 2008.

Spartan Delta already pumps water from the Medicine River, with hoses stretching along ditches and culverts throughout the region pulling water into massive reservoirs. It also uses recycled water from its operations, but that only accounts for approximately 10 per cent of its use.

In 2024, the latest year of data from the Alberta Energy Regulator, Spartan Delta used approximately 171 million litres of fresh water for fracking. Its latest application shows the company estimates it will need much more than this, around 1.5 billion litres per year for the next 10 years.

The company did not answer emailed questions but sent a statement instead, saying it is focused on “responsible, sustainable development of oil and gas.”

Spartan Delta said it adheres to all rules and regulations set out by the regulator, Alberta’s Environment Ministry and local bylaws.

“All of our water use is determined by Alberta Environment,” reads a portion of its statement. “The company receives temporary diversion approvals, term licences and has undergone several audits to validate we are in compliance with all of the terms of the water approvals. All resident concerns are evaluated by the appropriate regulating body of our activities during the approval process.”

The regulator also did not directly answer questions emailed by The Narwhal, but did provide information on water use. An unidentified spokesperson said the regulator reviews all water licence applications and considers risks to individuals and the environment. The spokesperson added there are restrictions on water use if levels drop below prescribed thresholds and that restrictions can also be implemented in response to “landowner concerns.”

Analysis on aquifers is conducted by hydrogeology experts, the email said.

Though landowners are concerned about Spartan Delta’s water use, the company is a small player compared to others.

Parallax Energy Operations used almost one billion litres in 2024, while Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., one of the largest oil and gas companies in Canada, used 2.9 billion litres of fresh water for operations across the province. Overall, fracking consumed 20 billion litres of fresh water in 2024, up sharply from the seven billion litres consumed in 2013.

Grinde’s goal is to prove to the province and the regulator that the aquifer is dropping, realizing that officials could just turn around and say, well, it’s a drought.

“But even if it is a drought, the volume of water that the companies are using for fracking is accelerating that,” he says. “It could be that if there’s only a certain amount of water, you have to justify the use for certain things, right? So maybe you have to talk about hierarchy of use.”

Time and again, Grinde, Kreil and Iseli-Otto talk about the amount of work required to collect information, to get in touch with provincial officials, to make someone listen. Without decades of data, the response from officials and companies is: prove it.

“It’s the province’s job,” Kreil says. “It’s not the watershed society’s job. We’re volunteers.”

The provincial government did not respond to questions emailed by The Narwhal.

Alberta ranchers say their bison herd collapsed when a fracking company moved in

It’s easy to look out across the fields and patches of trees and imagine the landscape in central Alberta is largely unchanged, but Iseli-Otto, who works as a carpenter and has lived here his whole life, looks out his truck window and remembers bush where fields now stretch — a child’s wilderness transformed into cropland. It’s a reminder of how quickly things can change. How the immutable becomes a memory.

The change can be slow, or it can come on in a relative blink.

Tucked into a secluded corner of the countryside, is the home of Butch and Nicole Smith, two bison ranchers who have lived and worked in the area for decades, with the dream — shared by one of their daughters — of passing their ranch to the next generation.

Inside the home, a stuffed cougar looks down from its final perch above the kitchen, and the walls are covered in framed rodeo photos showing the victories of the family’s horses. Tail Light was the “team roping heading horse of the year.” Hickory, the “2011 pole bending horse of the year.” Their daughters have won an astonishing number of championship rodeo belts and saddles, all of which are on display.

A hint of the Smiths’ directness, and their frustration, comes in the form of a small sign by the kitchen table: “What (and I can’t stress this enough) the f*ck,” it reads.

Over bison burgers and sausages, the Smiths talk about how Spartan Delta cleared the land across from their feedlot and built two massive reservoirs two years ago to store the vast quantities of water the company pumps. They talk about how construction and pumping for the reservoirs, which bisect a wetland, led to startling changes in their bison herd.

“We started seeing the wildest behaviour from them,” Nicole says. “They’re very habitual animals.”

The herd was refusing to move to the areas they usually feed, and there was a sudden drop in their herd.

Nicole says they had 240 pregnant cows in the fall of 2024, but only 194 live births.

“We had many dead calves, aborted calves and calves that starved as stressed mothers produce not enough milk,” she says.

The Smiths blame the stress of the industrial activity and the disruption to stubborn routines.

The Smiths, however, aren’t the types to sit back and watch. They say they’ve spoken with their MLA, Jason Nixon, with the premier, with two environment ministers — Rebecca Schulz and RJ Sigurdson — and Energy Minister Brian Jean. They are working with Ecojustice, an environmental legal outfit, and were invited by the Alberta NDP to sit in the legislature last spring after speaking with MLA Nagwan Al-Guneid.

Now, after two years of fighting, they’re losing faith and plan to move.

“Neither one of us is a — how do I say it — a sitter arounder. I’m not gonna sit here and be miserable. I can’t even walk anymore because both ways just reminds you of all of it,” Nicole says.

“I’m raging when I hit the end of my driveway — every single time.”

‘There’s very little oversight right now’

Tensions are high in the region where fracking butts up against homes and ranches. In early July, a rumour spread that some of the hoses that pump water from ponds and rivers were shot at, but the Alberta RCMP said there were no reports of an incident on that day. Perhaps most telling was that none of the people who spoke with The Narwhal seemed surprised, although no one supported the idea and warned of the danger of puncturing the high-pressure lines.

There is a real sense that landowners have been abandoned in favour of oil and gas.

Kreil, whose society includes representatives from eight municipalities, including Red Deer, Lacombe County and Sylvan Lake, said the group recently met with the minister of Environment and Protected Areas and the CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator to talk about the stress on the watershed. In its presentation, the society noted more than half of all fresh water in their watershed is allocated for oil and gas. Temporary water licences are almost entirely for fracking.

She says the minister told them to write a resolution calling for policy changes through the Rural Municipalities of Alberta — an organization which represents towns and districts across the province.

“I think he felt that he had dealt with us enough to say: ‘Write a resolution,’ ” she says.

Kreil stresses she’s not opposed to oil and gas, or to fracking in particular, but there has to be a balance.

“When we went to the minister, we said we want some solutions,” she says. “We’re not just coming here to bellyache and complain.”

Her organization wants to see more wastewater treated and reused, including municipal wastewater, to reduce or eliminate fresh water use. It wants better data on the state of the watersheds and a better understanding of drought and its impacts. And it wants new regulations governing use by agriculture, oil and gas and municipalities.

But those critical of the way fracking companies are operating all point their finger at the regulator when asked what the biggest problem is. The rules are weak and out of touch, responsibility is passed on and there’s no enforcement, they say.

“The problem with the Alberta Energy Regulator is there’s very little oversight right now,” Kreil says.

Iseli-Otto says he tried alerting a contact at the regulator about companies pumping from the Blindman River in May when the water levels were worryingly low, but nothing came of it.

Two days later, he was driving home and the pumps were running.

“So I texted him and I said, ‘Hey man, pumps are running, what’s going on? Why is this happening?,’ ” he says. In screenshots of the text messages shared with The Narwhal, Iseli-Otto then asks if someone from the regulator had checked to see if the pumps had stopped.

“That’s the point at which I got the automated text message saying this number is not monitored.”

Alberta pushes to double production, build pipelines

The regulator is an arms-length government body, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely independent. The government sets the overall policy direction for the regulator to follow, for example, and the government appoints the regulator’s board of directors.

Recently, it appointed David Yager to the board, a long-time friend of Premier Danielle Smith who also acts as one of her special advisors, and tasked him with overseeing a revamp of the organization.

There have also been revelations of direct intervention from the provincial government into regulatory decisions.

And the direction from the government is clear: it wants to double oil and gas production and it’s willing to incentivize companies to do so, even as it helps finance a new pipeline to the West Coast.

With the push for more production and without more stringent rules on water use, the problems in the area are likely to continue, or increase.

“We’ve had companies tell us ‘We’re not doing anything differently until the government tells us to,’ because it’s a competitive industry,” Grinde says.

“We said to the minister, as long as this is free, they will never change,” Kreil adds.

But in the end, something has to give, she says.

“You can’t be running the people out of water for oil.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

As you bite into a juicy peach this summer, thank Niagara. The southern Ontario region grows more than half of Canada’s tender fruits: more than 70 per cent of our peaches, plus many fragrant baskets of nectarines, plums, pears, cherries, grapes and apricots. 

Despite the bounty, climate change is taking a toll. Sour cherries took the hit this year, the industry group Ontario Tender Fruit says, with the crop all but wiped out by a cold winter and late frost. A summer of extreme heat and smoky skies have made farm work difficult, even dangerous. As weather becomes more intense and erratic, harvests across the country become unpredictable, too. 

Jay Subramanian’s job is to tackle that uncertainty. The University of Guelph professor works at the Vineland Research & Innovation Centre in Niagara, combining modern genetics and age-old techniques to develop futuristic tender fruit. Right now, he’s trying to breed peaches that last longer, both before and after being picked. In the orchard, growers could spare workers a day of harvest during extreme heat. At home, we’d have an extra day to enjoy them, reducing food waste. 

The process for breeding flowering plants is centuries old. First, you identify varieties with different desirable qualities. Then, you take pollen from “variety X,” as Subramanian puts it, and paste it onto the stigma — the sticky tip of the flower — of “variety Y.” Then, you see what grows. If the fruits of his labour bear the desired qualities, he consults a panel to make sure the new variety also has the right “colour, shape, taste, everything that is appealing.” 

Bringing a new variety to the public takes years. 

The market value of Ontario’s tender fruit was more than $94 million in 2025, and that figure doesn’t account for the wider industry around it. Yet Subramanian says finding money to protect it isn’t easy. The only recent government funding for developing climate-resilient tender fruit varieties in the province — from data collection and research to education and breeding — was slightly more than $1 million from the federal government. And that was two years ago. 

This lack of support, he says, is one reason the country’s crop of fruit breeders is shrinking.

“We used to have like 10 people or 12 people in Canada when I joined,” Subramanian, who was born in India, says. “Now it has gone down to four. And if any of us retire, the writing is on the wall. That has to change. That has to come not from us, not from the university. It has to come from somewhere above.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How are Ontario’s peach crops being affected by climate change? 

Jay Subramanian: I joined this job not too long ago — 24 years, but it’s not a very long period in crop evolution and things like that. Then, the first peaches here were harvested in the last week of July. [This year], we are already starting to see peaches ripen on July 10 — almost a three-week advancement within three decades.

That tells you how alarming the situation is in terms of climate change. Neither the breeder nor the marketing people nor the consumer can put something on the calendar like our parents or grandparents used to do — ‘Okay, this week I am going to get peaches from the farmers’ market and then do canning in my home.’ That’s all out of whack. 

[This July] we had temperatures crossing almost 33 C, 34 C, and that’s also not good. When you go and look at the fruits, they are all burnt, as if they were just taken out of a barbecue on the top. It is that bad.

When I say the effects of climate change, I mean unpredictable and extreme weather, such as early or late frost, extreme heat, drought or too much rain. Today in mid-July in Toronto, it’s incredibly smoky because of fires up north. Is there anything I’m missing?

Another thing is our winters are not predictable anymore. Sometimes we have enough snow on the ground so that the groundwater is all filled up and the plants kind of muscle up during the winter. Sometimes we don’t get that. We just get a smattering of snow here and there and then we don’t have enough groundwater. That is also causing decline and unpredictability to the tender fruit crops.

What does this mean for you, as a breeder and a scientist? What is your day-to-day when you’re trying to make these fruits as climate-resilient as you can?

Just to back up, tender fruit breeding is a very long process. The varieties that we release now were bred 25 years ago. So I have to have a vision or a crystal ball to know what is going to happen — 25 years from now, what is going to happen? That is just not possible. 

Looking at what is going to happen, how we are going to breed, that is going to be challenging. But we are also contributing to global warming and climate change. When you have produce like tender fruits going to a landfill, they emanate quite a bit of methane and nitrous oxide when they are rotting. Nitrous oxide takes six times longer than a carbon molecule to get settled down back in the earth, so it is going to be up there in the atmosphere for much longer.  

We are trying to breed varieties that would stay better so that it doesn’t go to the landfill, varieties of tender fruits that will remain on the shelf and in the consumer’s house for two or three days extra. Twenty to 30 per cent of produce is wasted by the consumer. That is the part that I can control within my career, within my lifetime. 

On the front end, an early peach that is ripening now, or a late peach that’s going to ripen in September, they all flower at the same time. They all flower within that two-week window in May. But then, from flowering to fruit maturity, that time for some is short. For some, it is long. 

So we are trying to work on that one: if it flowers on day X, it is going to ripen 70 days after flowering. This part as a geneticist, as a breeder, we can control. It’s a long process, but that is doable by using modern genetics. It is a slow and patient study, but I’d be more than happy to take the initiative on that because I’m the only one left in Canada.

You’re the only what left in Canada?

Only tender fruit breeder, only peach breeder left in Canada. If I retire, R.I.P. for this position.

How did that happen?

That’s a good question. Almost all through the world, for any publicly funded research program, they are looking at the industry to support this breeding. If you take a place like California, yes, their industry is huge — by even getting something like five cents from an agricultural check-off fund, they can support like five scientists. Certain crops, like corn, soybean, canola, wheat, these are huge industries. It’s easy. It’s possible. 

But our industry here is just very, very tiny. It is a very vital industry because we supply more than 50 per cent of tender fruits for Canada from this tiny little bowl in the south corner of Ontario. So that value is something people in power have to recognize.

In terms of the science, can you say a bit more? You want more control over the ripening process?

Well, ripening is a very long scientific process. Over the past 75 years, there’s quite a bit of study that has gone into the ripening process, how it is managed, what are all the genes involved and all those things. Using genetics, we can either accelerate it or we can delay it. That part we can do by breeding.

We know the genetics, we know what variety X can do, what variety Y can do, what we expect when we hybridize X and Y, things like that. If we take varieties that are ripening early, and if we put that pollen on the flowers that are ripening late, can we get something in-between? 

Along with ripening, I assume you’re also working, for example, on trees that are more resilient if there’s too much rain, or not enough rain.

To some extent, we can control that part by genetics. Another thing that we are working on is to make sure the varieties that we develop are resistant to some of the diseases. We are in Niagara, and the place is normally rainy and humid, and this is a heaven for pathogens like fungus and bacteria to grow. Especially when they see the fruits — fruit is full of sugar — and then they just go kaboom after that. 

By breeding varieties that are naturally resistant, we are also reducing the number of sprays that a farmer has to do. In that way, you can also help reduce climate change effects, because the operation of the machine, the pesticides themselves, all those things contribute to climate change. 

Is there a success that you’ve had in your career worth highlighting?

It’s a little bit early, but I think I have enough conviction to say that we are now developing a new series of peaches that can stay a little longer on the tree, on the shelf, as well as on the consumer table. Significantly longer, and they still taste very much like the normal peach. In fact, some of them are much sweeter. 

Probably in the next five, six years, we will be releasing varieties belonging to that particular group. Some of the press people call them the ‘neat peach.’

I personally really love a messy peach, though. I feel like that’s part of the peach experience. 

That is because we are here [in southern Ontario]. We are spoiled with the good stuff.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Summary

• While Black and racialized farm workers make up a large chunk of the country’s agricultural workforce, Black farm owners are still a slim minority in Canada.
• This wasn’t always the case, and historical Black Canadian settlements, like the Black Settlement in Oro Township near Barrie, Ont., provided land and housing for Black farmers in the early 19th century.
• One of the primary barriers to farm access and ownership is the high cost of land; programs like farm rentals and urban farms are trying to bridge the gap.

Along a dusty bike trail of crushed gravel, the blue-grey waters of Kempenfelt Bay shimmer through large trees with leafy branches overhead. On one side stands an Ontario Heritage Trust plaque, recognizing the historic Black community of Oro, Ont. 

On bicycle rides along the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, I ride for fun and adventure and to find the Black history hidden in the countryside. As a scholar and writer, I research how race intersects with nature. In this case, it is how farming and farmlands — a part of nature we can all connect with — criss-cross with race.

In southwestern Ontario, I’ve taken detours to visit the former Black villages known as the Buxton Settlement and the Puce River Community, near the border with Detroit. In other places I look for Ontario Heritage plaques, old churches and fading headstones in unregistered cemeteries. These are often the only indicators that Black communities once thrived in rural Ontario and that Black farmers owned their farms.

In the 19th century, the area around Lake Simcoe, including Oro (now Oro-Medonte), was filled with Black farmers and their families. There are similar heritage plaques scattered across rural areas and small towns in Ontario such as Fergus, Cainsville, Lucan and Dresden. Once a common sight, today Black farm owners are rare, while Black farm workers are a backbone of agricultural labour in Canada. Each year, some 36,000 Black and brown farm workers come to Canada for the farming season.

The average age of a farmer is 56 years in Canada. They are getting old and tired, greying out of the years of dawn-to-dusk work on the farm. While there has been an increase in the number of female farmers, one statistic has barely changed — the tiny number of Black, Indigenous and racialized farmers. In Ontario, only five per cent of farmers are from diverse ethnocultural groups, which includes racialized groups.

Yet, in Toronto, some 56 per cent of the population is racialized, according to Statistics Canada. This demographic drift is not reflected in farming. So, where will the next generation of young farmers come from in Ontario? Who will grow the food that we all need to eat and live?

Farmland is precious to both farmers and non-farmers, but the competition for farmland is fierce. Data from Ontario Farmland Trust shows Ontario has lost 18 per cent of its farmland in recent decades to urban development and aggregate mining. Each day, Ontario is losing 319 acres, or 129 hectares, of farmland to development. Once the farmland is paved over, it is lost forever.

“The number one issue is access to land for Black farmers,” Claire Perttula, president of the BIPOC caucus of the National Farmers Union, said. “Land is so expensive. To put together a down payment you need millions. Working in agriculture you won’t make that down payment.” 

Created in 2021, the caucus represents racialized farmers, land stewards and farm workers from across the country. It builds community and advocates for their interests.

“Farmland should be treated as a public good and not just as a private one for profit,” Perttula said. “We need a different system of farm ownership and use that would prioritize the people farming the land. This helps them make a go of it and earn a living.”

No Black farmers but lots of Black farm workers

Cycling along the backroads of the Niagara Wine Route in Ontario, I passed scores of Black men tending to grapevines in vineyards, apples in orchards and peas and beans in fields. I stopped to chat with them as they were the only other Black people I had seen so far that summer in the countryside. The men were Jamaican and migrant farm workers. 

Farm workers till the land, plant the seeds and harvest the crops. In Canada, those farm workers are most likely to be Black or brown. The labourers are migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America who are hired under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Each year, they arrive in Canada in the spring, and must leave in autumn when their contracts end. Nearly half of all agricultural workers in Canada are hired under this program. They labour in every province where there are farms. Some farm workers have been coming to Canada for decades. As temporary foreign workers, they are mostly ineligible for citizenship.

On the other side of the country, Jamaican migrant workers also labour in the wineries and orchards of the Okanagan Valley, B.C. I now expect to see them everywhere in my travels in rural areas or small towns. So why the stark racial divide in farming in Canada, where white farmers reap the profits and Black and brown farm workers sweat under the sun? 

Free farmland for some

In the United States, Black farmers were proverbially promised “40 acres and a mule” — immortalized in the name of Spike Lee’s film production company — a reparation of sorts, at the end of slavery. No such promises were made to formerly enslaved people in Canada, when slavery was abolished here in 1834. 

White homesteaders, however, got their free acres of land under various land grant schemes. In Ontario, for instance, the 1868 Free Grants and Homestead Act gave free land to farmers, who got the title and legal ownership if they cleared the forested land and built a farmhouse within five years. Roads to support colonization were constructed across the province to make it easier for the settlers to arrive and claim their free land. The railways did the same across the country a few decades later. The free farmland was, and still is, all Indigenous land.

The only land scheme in southern Ontario that was specifically for Black people was the Black Settlement in Oro Township, near Barrie, Ont. The free land grants were in part a reward for the Black veterans who fought to protect Canada in the War of 1812 when the United States invaded. However, over time the settlement faded as the land was poor for farming, and it was too far from major roads and thus difficult to reach markets to sell the produce. 

“The problem is not just for Black farmers alone, but it’s worst for them,” Bamidele Adekunle said. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph, and co-editor of the book Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables.

“It’s the commodification of land,” Adekunle said. “There is a serious competition between real estate and agriculture for land. When land is commodified, its use moves to things that are more profitable. It moves out of the reach of most farmers.”

Access to modern farmland is a massive challenge for any new farmer. Those that don’t inherit the family farm can buy their own, but only if they have the money, and prices are increasing each year. In 2024 the price for a hectare of farmland and buildings in Ontario was $20,782.

Consider an average city block is roughly one hectare in size. The average size of a farm in Ontario is now 249 acres, or 100 hectares. That means an average commercial farm in Ontario costs about $5 million. This means that small family-owned farms are fading into the past along with milk pails, churning butter by hand and Anne of Green Gables. 

Buying traditional farmland is out of reach for many Black farmers, without some form of financial help. The FarmStart program was supposed to kickstart that help. Started in 2005, the program was an incubator for potential farmers, providing them with mentoring, and teaching farming and technical skills. One thing the now-shuttered program struggled to provide was access to land to grow food. 

New solutions for an old farmland problem

“There are some alternative and affordable pathways into farming,” Martin Straathof, the executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust, said. The non-profit was set up to keep farmers farming by protecting farmland from non-agricultural uses. The trust has advocated for solutions to make farming accessible, such as a conservation easement agreement, which guarantees land will continue to be used for farming.

“The easement creates stability for tenant farmers who can rent the farmland,” Straathof said. “It gives new farmers access to land and the security that they need to keep farming.” 

The farmland is still the private property of the owners under the conservation easement agreement, but it can only be used for farming. Similarly, farmland trusts keep agricultural land protected for that use, even after farming families move on. Some farmers may not have anyone to inherit the family farm or want to leave farmland as their legacy. They can donate the land to a farmland trust, which in turn can lease the land to tenant farmers.

Around the Greater Toronto Area, nature is protected from urban sprawl by the Greenbelt Act. There are calls for similar legislation to shelter prime farmland from development, known as a foodbelt. Bill 21, the Protect Our Food Act, passed first reading in parliament in 2025 and proposes to protect the fertile agricultural lands of southern Ontario from non-agricultural uses. Put forward by Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner and Independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the act could help curve the rapid loss of farmland across southern Ontario.

Additionally, climate change is affecting agriculture in Canada. It is uprooting assumptions about what can and can’t be grown in the land of the “Great White North.” The warming climate impacts crops, farm animals, the soil, insects and diseases. Some traditional crops such as wheat and canola don’t do well when stressed by heat. 

The warmer and longer growing season caused by climate change means that some tropical crops can be farmed in Canada, though. Sweet potatoes are now grown in Ontario as a commercial crop. If the climate change even further, it might be possible to grow other tropical staples such as yam, rice and bananas. However, you need farmers who know how to do so. These are familiar crops for Black and other racialized farmers. They already have the skill and knowledge to grow them. But they can’t use the skills or meet the potential demand for the crops if they have no access to farmland.

“You need a minimum of five acres to be a commercial farmer,” said Jacqueline Dwyer, the farmer and co-founder of Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective. “The system is against us. The lack of finance. The lack of resources. The lack of land. The system won’t change without pressure.”

Urban farms are another accessible route into farming for Black farmers. There are quite a few Black urban farmers or farm organizations in the Toronto area such as Afri-Can Food Basket, Black Creek Community Farm, Adinkra Farm and Zawadi Farm. Each of these play an important role in reconnecting people to the source of their food and provide culturally appropriate foods for the Black community. These foods include yam, callaloo and okra. However, urban farms have their limits as there is no pathway from there to owning or operating a rural farm for Black farmers. 

“Youth are not getting into agriculture because there is no land,” Dwyer said. “Young people are pushed out of farming. They call themselves landless farmers.”

In many ways, farming is at a crossroads in Ontario. The pipeline into farming is leaking, due to a mismatch between old and new farmers, and it will worsen in the future unless things change. The majority of farmers are old, White and near retirement. They own farmland. The province is multiracial due to demographic shifts and so the next generation of young farmers are most likely to be Black and racialized. They do not own farmland. 

The gap between those who have and do not have farmland must close if we are all going to eat. 

Spring is here and fresh joy fills the air. The birds and butterflies are returning from the tropics. So too are the Black and brown migrant farmer workers. The farmland is awake and it is time to sow. We need Black farmers now, and they too need to reap, if we are all to eat.

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Summary

• B.C. is a world-leading mushroom producer with much of the provincial crop being exported to the United States.
• Recently, the United States Department of Commerce added tariffs to Canadian-grown mushrooms on the grounds they receive unfair government subsidies.
• One B.C.-based mushroom farm is fighting the tariffs, but more could be coming by the end of the year.

Mushrooms may not be the first crop that comes to mind when you think of high-tech agriculture. But in B.C., Agaricus bisporus — the fungal species sold in grocery stores as button mushrooms, creminis and portobellos — are grown using cutting-edge techniques.

“If you go back 10 or 15 years, you would travel to Holland to find the most productive, leading-edge mushroom facilities in the world,” Lewis Macleod, CEO of South Mill Champs Mushrooms, said in an interview with The Narwhal. “Today, you travel to Holland and British Columbia.”

In 2017, Pennsylvania-based South Mill merged with Aldergrove-based Champ’s Mushrooms to form South Mill Champs. The company now supplies more B.C-grown mushrooms to the U.S. market than any other, around 22,675 tonnes per year. 

Before B.C.’s mushroom tech boom, farms often mimicked more natural growing conditions. Modern B.C. farms use what’s called the Dutch method: metal shelves heaped with a mixture of manure and straw to cultivate their crops. The mushrooms are grown in air-tight facilities that are closely controlled for temperature and humidity. Unlike other indoor crops, mushrooms don’t need much light to grow. The buildings are dim, the opposite of brightly lit commercial greenhouses. This method results in faster growing, better quality mushrooms and fewer pests, according to Macleod. But it’s not as common in the U.S.

Nearly all Canadian mushroom exports — 98 per cent in 2024 — are sold in the U.S. As B.C.’s technologically advanced mushroom industry has grown into a global leader, some American producers have accused Canadian growers of benefiting from unfair government subsidies. It’s set off a trade dispute that could reshape the cross-border market.

B.C. mushroom trade sparks U.S. concerns

If you ask B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, mushrooms are among the most unique of the province’s commercial crops.

“They have to be harvested 24 hours a day and they grow in the dark,” Popham said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of technology that’s been coming around, a lot of innovation that is allowing for different types of harvesting [and] different types of lighting conditions.”

This innovation may be part of what sparked a trade complaint from a group of U.S. mushroom producers last year.

A September 2025 petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce from the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition argued fresh Canadian mushrooms are being “unfairly” subsidized by government programs.

“Canadian producers are exporting fresh mushrooms to the United States at prices below fair value and are benefiting from countervailable subsidies provided by the government of Canada,” the petition says. “These practices have resulted in significant negative impacts on U.S. mushroom growers and packers, including lost sales, depressed prices and declining profitability.” 

In fact, none of the subsidies provided by Canadian governments specifically target the mushroom industry and are instead directed at farmers generally.

But in May, the Commerce Department agreed with the U.S. petitioners and applied duties on some Canadian mushroom producers. The preliminary decision concluded Canadian governments do unfairly subsidize mushroom production. 

For now, about two dozen Canadian mushroom producers are facing a 2.84 per cent tariff on the mushrooms they sell in the U.S.

South Mill Champs is contesting the Commerce Department’s decision, which Mushrooms Canada, the national trade association representing Canadian mushroom growers, called “deeply flawed.”

“It’s using regulatory tactics to stifle healthy competition,” Macleod said.

Champ’s Mushrooms was handed a 1.62 per cent tariff by the Commerce Department. 

The Commerce Department has yet to decide on whether to hit Canadian mushrooms with anti-dumping duties, a type of tariff applied to imported goods that are being sold at lower prices, as a way to protect domestic producers.

Government subsidies aren’t specific to mushrooms — and U.S. growers get them too

There’s no denying Canadian mushroom growers receive support from the government. B.C. producers do not have to pay provincial sales tax on equipment for their businesses and can also access grant programs that support agricultural operations.

The province also offers funding to help farms cover the cost of adopting new technologies, but Popham pointed out none of the province’s programs are targeted specifically at bolstering B.C. mushrooms.

“It’s not specific at all to the mushroom industry,” Popham said. “It’s just the way we support farmers in B.C.”

And that means the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition’s complaint lacks merit under U.S. trade law, according to Mushrooms Canada CEO Ryan Koeslag.

“It is difficult to reconcile Commerce’s preliminary approach with the fact that comparable agricultural tax treatment exists in the United States,” Koeslag said in a statement after the Commerce Department’s preliminary duties were announced. “Canadian mushroom growers are not receiving special treatment. They are operating under ordinary rules that apply to farmers.”

The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about these criticisms of its decision and whether it will assess tax exemptions available to U.S. mushroom farmers before reaching its final decision on the tariffs. The Narwhal also contacted Giorgio Fresh Co., one of the U.S. companies that formed the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition, for comment but did not receive a response.

Macleod doesn’t believe the trade complaint is really about subsidy programs at all.

“This case is not about the U.S. versus Canada — it’s about companies who have invested in new infrastructure and those who haven’t invested in new infrastructure,” he said.

Most Canadian-grown mushrooms are grown using the Dutch method, Macleod explained. This technique gives growers large, reliable yields quickly, he added, while also reducing pest pressures and creating mushrooms that consumers prefer.

In the U.S., the majority of mushrooms are grown on wood shelves, an older technique that isn’t as efficient as the Dutch method.

Growing mushrooms on wood makes it “very hard to consistently produce a fine-looking mushroom and ensure disease doesn’t at times of the year really damage the crop,” Macleod said.

South Mill Champs’ U.S. operations have learned a lot about the benefits of modern mushroom growing from their Canadian counterparts, he added.

Switching from wood-based cultivation to the Dutch method isn’t cheap, though government grant programs and tax exemptions can help take the edge off the costs. Macleod said it takes years for a mushroom farm to see a return on investment into a whole new cultivation set-up. But the new technology can reduce ongoing costs, increase revenue and open the door to further technological innovation, he added. 

With new cultivation systems in place, Popham said some B.C. farms are introducing robots to harvest their mushrooms.

“Technology is taking over what I would call mundane tasks,” she said, adding human workers are still needed to oversee the machines.

“They don’t expect, as they bring in technology, to see displacement of labour. It’s adding to a better quality of workplace, which is really cool.”

Robots can’t harvest mushrooms grown using wood-based shelving, Macleod said, potentially putting old-style producers at even more of a disadvantage.

“If you don’t have new infrastructure, you have to build from scratch,” he said.

Final decision on additional cross-border costs for B.C. mushroom growers could take months

While additional duties on Canadian mushrooms could be announced within weeks, a final determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce may not come for months. Macleod is hopeful the final determination will be that Canadian-grown mushrooms do not harm U.S. producers.

“I really do not think less mushrooms will be exported from Canada into the U.S.,” he said. “Duties paid will mean ultimately the consumer pays more for mushrooms, which is bad for the consumer and the industry.”

Popham believes that B.C.-grown mushrooms are popular because of the industry’s embrace of innovation and its proximity to the U.S. market.

“I hope that what results from this most recent challenge is that there’s an acknowledgement that we’re just doing it really, really well,” she said.

At a time when many British Columbians want to support locally grown food, mushrooms are a perfect choice, she added.

“When we talk about being more resilient and growing more at home, mushrooms have been there the whole time,”Popham said. “I think that when consumers understand how big of an industry it is here and I think that this is another feather in our cap.”

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