AgriSuccess
Taking trucking out of farming will be tough
By Hugh Maynard
Food miles – how far the food on supermarket shelves travelled – is a big issue now. This is being driven (no pun intended!) by concerns about the impact of transportation on climate change and the evolving socio-economic context around food production: why are we putting local farmers out of business and trucking our food an average of 2,500 kilometres before it gets served at the dinner table?
A good question, but one that has two sides to its coin. Saskatchewan wouldn’t be – well, Saskatchewan – without wheat and the ability to export around the world. All types of agricultural produce have to be shipped some distance given the concentrations of urban populations where the bulk of consumers reside. And a great deal of energy can be expended just moving around trying to locate local foods for the now famous “100-mile diet.”
The global economy for food has been around for a long time, and it’s not about to go away given that there are areas of the world that offer a natural advantage in the types of food produced. The real issue is not just the miles that food travels, but the total impact – socially and environmentally – of the global trade in food.
Even with the abandonment of short-track railroads across Canada, there’s still less environmental impact from shipping a trainload of western wheat to eastern cities compared with lots of smaller truckloads making local deliveries. And is producing greenhouse tomatoes in a Canadian winter more energy efficient than trucking them from Florida or filling empty planes coming back from Chile?
Local food production deserves renewed importance in policy and program decision-making because of the socio-economic benefits that it brings to both producing (rural) and consuming (urban) communities. But it can’t be exempt from the environmental judgments being made on food imports that travel from afar, and this is where opportunity knocks.
Farmers still have to truck their local produce to market regardless of distance, so here’s an opportunity to use biodiesel to make the trips more environmentally friendly. There are plenty of other opportunities to convert biomass into energy for carbon-neutral food production: wood or grain-hull pellets for the greenhouse furnace, or manure for co-generation of electricity to use in refrigeration and other processing.
The Canadian Farm Business Management Council provides lots of information on different ways producers can use bio-energy.
Interested producers can even go one step further by signing up to buy carbon credits – some of which will come back to the agriculture sector in support of activities that help reduce the carbon footprint of farming. Many producers are interested in selling carbon credits, but a farm could also buy credits for the same reasons that some other businesses do.
A Canadian organization offering the offset service is Planetair, among several others. It’s also a great marketing tool to show consumers that producers are capitalizing on their ability to effect change related to climate change, and a good way to keep on truckin’ in an environmentally friendly way.
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