Agriculture in the Classroom Canada (AITC-C) has partnered with CropLife Canada to develop interactive teaching resources designed to help students explore some of the realities of modern farming by seeing how to successfully grow carrots, turnips and potatoes.

The resources draw on CropLife Canada’s Real Farm Lives documentary web series, which was created to showcase the work and lives of farm families across the country.

“Teachers play an instrumental role in shaping the future of our next generation by guiding students towards a deeper understanding and appreciation of the vital role agriculture has to play in our lives,” Mathieu Rouleau, Executive Director of AITC-C, said in a news release. “By fostering a deeper understanding of our agriculture and food system, we empower students to become informed citizens and stewards of our planet’s future.”

Season 3 of Real Farm Lives, which these resources are focused on, features the McKenna family from Prince Edward Island, who are deeply committed to growing high-quality food for their family and families across the country while leaving the land in better condition for the next generation.

Both AITC-C and CropLife Canada said they believe in providing accurate, balanced and current information to educators to promote agriculture education in Canadian classrooms. Resources like these help students build knowledge around key ideas such as food preparation, food waste and crop protection.

“We know that fewer and fewer kids have a direct connection to the farm. Through Real Farm Lives, we’ve provided an easy and engaging way for Canadians to look inside the lives of Canadian farm families and what it takes to grow our food.

“By connecting students with real farmers who sustainably grow safe, high-quality food, we hope they learn about some of the obstacles farmers have to tackle and the tools they need to do their jobs,” said Pierre Petelle, president and CEO, of CropLife Canada.

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Hepworth was among 78 appointments announced by governor general Mary Simon in late December.

The London, Ont., resident was recognized for his contributions to agriculture and research “which have propelled the sector to new heights,” according to Simon’s office.

He was a farmer and veterinarian in Saskatchewan before entering provincial politics during premier Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservative governments, where he served in several portfolios until 1991.

After his political career, Hepworth moved to Ontario and began working with the Crop Protection Institute and Canadian Agra Group of Companies. He was instrumental in the formation of CropLife Canada and retired as its chief executive officer and president in 2014 after 17 years. He was appointed to the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame that year.

Hepworth has also served as chair of Genome Canada and the Global Institute for Food Security at the University of Saskatchewan. The list of his involvement with other institutions includes the Canadian Council of Academies Expert Panel on Sustainable Management of water in agricultural landscapes, the Scientific Advisory and Governance Committees of the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund, the advisory board of the National Research Council of Canada’s Plant Biotechnology Institute, the Canadian Agri-Food Research Council and the federal pest management and national biotechnology advisory committees.

He was on the board of Input Capital Corp. and a director and chair of Canterra Farmland Holdings LP.

He received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2020.

—Karen Briere is a reporter for the Western Producer. She writes from Saskatchewan.

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CFIA officials, however, reject the NFU’s allegation that the metadata attached to the proposal document in question may suggest plant science industry lobbyists are “effectively directing” the CFIA.

The NFU, in an Oct. 17 release, cited a report last month by Radio Canada examining a embargoed Microsoft Word document it obtained on the topic of environmental release of seed.

Under “author,” the document’s metadata names Jennifer Hubert, the same name as the executive director for plant biotechnology at plant science trade organization CropLife Canada.

The NFU on Oct. 17 called the Radio Canada report “alarming evidence of inappropriate collaboration between our public regulator and the private corporations whose products it regulates, to the point that it appears CropLife is effectively directing the CFIA.”

MORE TO READ: Seeding the future

The NFU said the document “puts forward a system that would benefit the multinational seed corporations by allowing them to release many new gene-edited seed varieties without independent government safety assessments or other government oversight, and without disclosing they are gene-edited to government or the public.”

NFU president Katie Ward, in the same release, said the regulatory guidance as proposed would “weaken public trust in our food regulatory system by preventing independent scientific evaluation by government regulators before these products are sold.”

In the NFU’s letter to Ag Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, Ward said the biotechnology companies represented by CropLife and like-minded groups “will be the main beneficiaries of regulatory guidance that excludes gene-edited plants from government safety assessments and public disclosure.”

In the guidance, “neither the concerns of farmers, nor the broader public interest have been properly addressed,” Ward wrote in the letter.

NFU’s former president Terry Boehm, in its Oct. 17 release, said CFIA is “formally committed to maintain regulatory independence from all external stakeholders” — thus the agency’s head Dr. Siddika Mithani should be replaced with “a new president who we can count on to put this value into practice at all times.”

‘Never’

Responding Thursday via email, CFIA representatives called out “inaccuracies” in the NFU’s release, emphasizing the CFIA remains “an independent, scientific and evidence-based federal regulatory agency committed to ethical transparency and accountability” and “always authors its own independent guidance and policies.”

The document, CFIA said, was developed in the wake of four months’ consultations in 2021 with the public, plant breeders, ag industry and not-for-profits.

Later consultations, CFIA said, were held with “seed and grain industry associations” including CropLife as well as plant breeders, researchers, organic industry associations and “non-government organizations” — including the NFU, Canadian Biotechnology Action Network and Vigilance OGM, all of which signed onto the NFU’s letter to Bibeau.

“After considering and then incorporating some of the stakeholder feedback on the draft guidance, the CFIA updated all its working documents within one of the returned copies,” the agency said, and the revised document then went out to stakeholders for further comment.

“For this reason, the metadata erroneously identifies the ‘author’ of this document as someone other than a CFIA employee,” CFIA said, but “in fact, the entire draft guidance document, including the proposed key directions, was written by the CFIA, incorporating some of the feedback from multiple stakeholders.”

External parties, including industry associations, “are never the authors of CFIA documents,” the agency said.

CropLife’s Hubert, for her part, is quoted in the Radio Canada report as saying she is not the author of the document but did provide “suggestions and recommendations.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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But when asked about the technology, one phrase pops up: genetically modified organisms.

Last summer, CropLife Canada hired a polling firm to gauge public knowledge and perceptions about gene-edited crops.

Why it matters: How gene-edited crops are regulated around the world will have major implications for market acceptance of gene-edited products. Regulations in Canada remain unsettled.

One of the questions was: what words do you associate with gene-edited crops?

About 40 per cent of Canadians said GMOs.

“That was the top connected term. When you asked Canadians about gene editing, GMOs… was the top linkage,” said Erin O’Hara, vice-president of communications with CropLife Canada.

The connection to GMOs is a problem, for a couple of reasons.

For one, public polling consistently shows that 35 to 40 per cent of Canadians believe that GM foods are unsafe to eat — despite scientific evidence showing otherwise.

In 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the United States published a report on genetically modified crops. A panel of 20 scientists found “no substantiated evidence of a difference in risks to human health between current commercially available genetically engineered crops and conventionally bred crops.”

Reason No. 2 is that a gene-edited crop is different from a GMO.

A GM crop is often achieved with transgenic technology, where genes from a different organism (bacteria, for example) are inserted into a crop to achieve a desired trait, like herbicide tolerance.

Gene editing involves changing the genetic code of a plant with technology like CRISPR-Cas9 — a tool used to cut sections of DNA. Scientists from California and France won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of CRISPR.

The changes to a gene-edited crop are comparable to the changes from conventional plant breeding, except it’s more precise and faster.

To correct misperceptions about gene-edited crops and provide information about their benefits, CropLife Canada, along with the Canadian Seed Trade Association and the Canada Grains Council, have launched a new website at naturenurtured.ca.

The website provides facts on gene-edited crops and the crop innovations happening because of gene editing, such as the development of high fibre wheat and soybeans with healthier oil.

Why create a gene editing website?

Data from the CropLife survey shows that 61 per cent of Canadians are unfamiliar with gene-edited crops. As well, a large percentage of people don’t have an opinion about the technology.

After people were given a definition of gene editing, changes occurred:

• Thirty-two per cent strongly supported or somewhat supported the technology.
• Twenty-five per cent strongly opposed or somewhat opposed the technology.
• The remainder (43 per cent) weren’t sure or didn’t have a definite position.

“For us, (that) highlights a (large) group that is open to hearing more and learning more,” O’Hara said from her home in Ottawa. “This isn’t top of mind for Canadians, yet. We’ve got an opportunity as an industry to help shape the story and tell a story that resonates with consumers.”

Public acceptance of gene-edited crops could be crucial, over the next decade, as more plant breeders are beginning to use the technology. That could lead to new varieties of gene-edited corn, soybeans or canola, with improved disease resistance, healthier oils and more nutritious crops.

But if the public associates gene editing with GMOs, market acceptance is less likely.

“We want to make the distinction: these are two different technologies,” O’Hara said, explaining one of the website’s goals. “But not at the cost of disparaging GMOs. Both technologies have important value.”

The naturenutured.ca website comes at a time when Health Canada is reviewing its policy on plant-breeding techniques. The department is expected to release its position on gene editing and modern plant-breeding methods this winter.

CropLife hopes Canada will follow the example of the U.S. There, regulators have decided that gene-edited crops will be treated similar to conventional plant breeding and will largely be exempt from regulation.

This article was originally published at The Western Producer.

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The ministry says use has dropped only 22 per cent whereas industry estimates put the decline generally at over 30 per cent and higher in some areas.

Why it matters: The province has set a goal of reducing neonic use by 80 per cent and has introduced regulations to discourage their use. Data that shows that the reduction in use of neonics is moving slowly could lead to more regulation.

Deb Campbell, owner of Agronomy Advantage, said that use of neonics in corn in her area in central Ontario declined by about 30 per cent in 2017 and in 2018 only about 30 per cent of corn acres will see neonics used.

Those numbers are close to the what the Canadian Seed Trade Association and CropLife Canada are saying. They wrote a letter to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change seeking to clarify the neonic acreage numbers.

The organizations say there has been a decrease of 38 per cent in the corn acres treated with neonics from 2014 (when almost all corn was treated with neonics) to 2017. The decrease from 2016 to 2017 was only four per cent, from 72 per cent of acres to 68 per cent of acres.

Soybeans have seen a greater drop, according to the organizations, to 44 per cent of acres in 2017 from 51 per cent in 2016.

The province’s report shows soybean acres with treated seed down by 27 per cent in 2017 versus 2014, compared to 22 per cent reduction in the same period for corn. There are some other questionable numbers in the provincial report, including a more than doubling of the use of clothianidin, or Poncho, in corn.

There have been timely approvals of new seed treatments for corn, which has allowed for a relatively easy shift for corn farmers to the Group 28 diamide seed treatments. They are sold as Lumivia by Corteva Agriscience, and Fortenza, by Sygenta. The new treatments don’t cover exactly the same insects.

Soybean numbers are trickier, as there haven’t been alternative seed treatments available. However, Corteva Agriscience announced the registration of Lumiderm, on April 19. It’s also a Group 28 insecticide and delivers broad-spectrum, early-season protection against bean leaf beetle and soybean aphid. It won’t be available until the 2019 planting season.

That reflects what Clare Kinlin, crop inputs sales leader with MacEwan Agricentre in eastern Ontario has seen with growers in that area.

Soybean growers, especially, appreciate insecticide seed treatments as they push lower seeding rates and earlier planting, so he estimates about 60 per cent still use neonic seed treatments.

In corn, however, he could see neonic use go to almost zero with the use of the new seed treatment products.

Dale Cowan, senior agronomist with AGRIS Co-operative, however, said the provincial neonic reduction number is reasonable.

“I would say their numbers, 22 per cent decline, fit within the range of error in the calculation, so I could see that making sense.”

In the AGRIS territory neonic use in corn was 89 per cent in 2016 and in 2017 81 per cent. He expects it to be about 60 per cent in 2018. In soybeans in 2016, neonic use was 59 per cent, last year 49 per cent and he expects this year about 40 per cent. Farmers will go through the documentation process in order to still use neonics to control wireworms in soybeans, he said, as neonics remain the best control for the pest.

Working through the paperwork

Farmers are still allowed to grow crops using neonic seed treatment if they can show insect pressure warrants the use of the seed treatment. They also have to receive training and as of this season, in certain regions of the province, will have to have their scouting results confirmed by a Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) in order to use the insecticide next year. Other areas of the province will have the CCA requirement phased in.

“Lots of folks, because of the headache involved in evaluating the need for neonics have moved onto the newer options,” said Campbell.

Kinlin said growers who need the neonic treatment, especially for wireworm, have learned to manage the paperwork, after wading through it the first year. Alternative treatments have made the numbers move much more than dealing with the paperwork, he said.

She says the province needs to audit the process it uses to get the data for its neonic numbers if they are going to be published.

“They can’t be that wrong and have any confidence in the process they are using.”

Kinlin said that there are problems with how neonic seed treatments are counted based on the system that’s used, so the numbers are skewed.

The alternative seed treatments now are all from Group 28, which creates concern about eventual insect resistance. Kinlin laments that neonics were restricted before a combination of the new seed treatments, with a lower rate of neonic were able to be used which would have reduced resistance risk and the environmental load of neonics.

Groups concerned about the use of neonics have highlighted the “low” decline of the use of neonics, including a letter from the Ontario Bee Association to the provincial ministers involved calling for more restrictions on the insecticides.

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The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on Monday released its classification of “possibly carcinogenic to humans” for 2,4-D herbicide, along with new classifications for now-defunct insecticides DDT and lindane.

Lindane, previously used in canola seed treatments under brand names such as Vitavax RS, Cloak, Foundation and Premiere, was fully phased out of use in Canada by the end of 2004. The IARC on Monday classified it as “carcinogenic to humans” with “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity.”

DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which was phased out of most uses by the mid-1970s, completely off the market by the end of 1990 and since prohibited from sale or use in Canada, was classified Monday as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

2,4-D, registered in Canada since 1946, has been evaluated for cancer risks in population-based case-control studies and in cohort studies of workers manufacturing and applying pesticides, the IARC said Monday.

Occupational exposures to 2,4-D come through manufacturing and application, while the “general population” can be exposed through food, water, dust and during spraying. In humans, the IARC said, 2,4-D is “eliminated largely unchanged in the urine.”

Studies involving exposure to mixed herbicides, or to herbicides containing dioxin, were “regarded as uninformative about the carcinogenicity of 2,4-D,” the IARC working group said in its report, published online in The Lancet.

A “historical cohort study” of workers at 2,4-D manufacturing plants in the U.S. showed “some indication of increased risk in the highest categories of estimated exposure,” while population-based case-control studies of 2,4-D exposure looking at lymphoma and leukemia found “mixed” results.

The IARC working group’s consensus “was that there is inadequate evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of 2,4-D, although a substantial minority considered that the evidence was limited.”

The IARC also cited a study of female mice that showed increased incidence of reticulum-cell sarcoma from “single subcutaneous injections” of the isooctyl ester of 2,4-D, and a study of male rats in which 2,4-D in the diet “induced a positive trend in the incidence of rare brain astrocytomas.”

In all, the IARC working group said it found “limited evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of 2,4-D, due to methodological concerns regarding the positive studies, although a substantial minority judged the evidence to be sufficient.”

“Mechanistic” studies — that is, studies of the product’s physical processes — showed “strong evidence” that 2,4-D induces oxidative stress that can operate in humans, plus “moderate evidence” that 2,4-D causes immunosuppression.

Putting 2,4-D in its Group 2B (“possibly carcinogenic”), the IARC said the classification was made “considering all the relevant scientific data.”

The agency has previously said its Group 2A (“probably carcinogenic”) and Group 2B (“possibly carcinogenic”) classifications have no “quantitative significance,” but added that by definition, “probably” signifies a “higher level of evidence” than “possibly.”

Dow AgroSciences, which along with Nufarm and Agro-Gor Corp. holds technical registrations on 2,4-D, retorted Monday that the IARC classification is “inconsistent with government findings” from countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Brazil and China, “which have for decades affirmed the safety of 2,4-D when used according to approved labeling.”

By comparison, Dow said in a release, an IARC working group “reviews an incomplete set of information to focus solely on whether a substance or activity could be a carcinogen, not whether it is a carcinogen when used under real-world circumstances.”

The IARC classification, Dow said, “should not be mischaracterized in ways that are misleading and harmful to farmers and consumers.”

John Cuffe, Dow Agro’s leader for regulatory affairs, said the IARC’s findings on 2,4-D “are not the last word even within the WHO, whose JMPR (Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues) does not consider the handling and use of approved 2,4-D herbicides to pose a cancer risk.”

“No regulatory agency in the world considers 2,4-D to be a carcinogen,” epidemiologist and toxicologist Julie Goodman, a consultant to the 2,4-D Research Task Force, said in a release from the manufacturers’ group after acting as an observer at the recent IARC meeting. “This ranking does not mean that 2,4-D causes or is even likely to cause cancer in people.”

CropLife Canada, a crop chemical industry group, added in a separate statement that the IARC “ranks things based on their potential hazard, not the actual risk that something will cause cancer.”

“No other herbicide in the world has been more thoroughly studied than 2,4-D,” CropLife Canada president Ted Menzies, a former farmer and Alberta MP, said in the same release. “Every health and safety regulator in the world, including Health Canada, has concluded that 2,4-D does not pose an unacceptable risk to human health.”

Health Canada, which last re-evaluated 2,4-D in 2009, has said the herbicide “can be used safely when used according to label directions, with some uses requiring additional protective measures.”

The federal re-evaluation led to aquatic uses of 2,4-D being phased out, and “label improvements” to reduce users’ and applicators’ exposure to the product.

The IARC working group on DDT, lindane and 2,4-D was chaired by Manolis Kogevinas of the Barcelona-based Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), and included Thomas Sanderson of the Laval, Que.-based INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier Research Centre as its lone Canadian member.

The next IARC monograph on evaluation of carcinogenic risks to humans will be a review of red meat and processed meat.

The agency is accepting relevant studies until Sept. 11, ahead of its working group’s meeting on the topic, scheduled for Oct. 6-13 in Lyon, France. — AGCanada.com Network

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