U.S. versus Canadian farmland prices

The average price for Canadian cultivated farmland was $6,900 per acre in 2025 compared to $8,150 (all figures Cdn$) per acre in the U.S. However, comparing value is a complex calculation, FCC economist Justin Shepherd wrote in an April 15 report.

 WHY IT MATTERS: Historically an advantage for Canadian crop producers, your land ownership costs per acre may not be the competitive edge they used to be.

For example, some U.S. farmland sits in zones with warmer climates and much longer cropping seasons, whereas some Canadian farmland stays snow-covered late into spring.

There are also variations in how Canadian farmland values are calculated.

To address this, Shepherd said, FCC calculated farmland value based on crop acres only and compared it to the equivalent U.S. value.

While U.S. cultivated farmland is more expensive, on average, than Canadian, the dollar per acre gap between the two countries has largely stayed similar since 2000.

Canadian land values have seen fairly consistent growth, averaging 8.7 per cent over the past decade, Shepherd said. U.S. growth rates have seen sharp spikes, such as between 2010 and 2015, followed by flat growth (2015 to 2020). The average growth rate for U.S. farmland was 5.6 per cent.

Since 2020, Canadian farmland values have risen faster than those in the U.S.

Canadian versus U.S. farmer revenue

Despite higher average land prices, U.S. farmers had a slight advantage over Canadians in ability to generate revenue from their land.

Using both countries’ agricultural balance sheets, Shepherd said FCC calculated the average farm is making mortgage payments on roughly 15 per cent of their farm’s real estate value.

Using the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture’s formula for land investment cost, in 2025 newly-purchased Canadian farmland averaged a cost of $367 per acre. Owned land cost $143 per acre.

Using U.S. interest rates, newly-purchased U.S. farmland costs producers $381 per acre and owned land cost $127.

Last year, cultivated farmland payments accounted for 39 per cent of Canadian farmers’ grain and oilseed cash receipts.

“Meaning for every dollar earned, 39 cents went toward land payments,” Shepherd wrote.

The U.S. average was 33 cents per dollar of revenue.

“Although this calculation doesn’t include income from livestock or other sectors, it demonstrates that land costs as a percentage of grain revenues are comparable between Canadian and U.S. farmers,” Shepherd said.

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Developed by ALCES for the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute (CAPI), the Agriculture Web Mapping Application Tool offers maps and datasets about land use, management practices and agri-environmental indicators.

Census, crop production and land use data can be viewed individually or overlaid.

Why it matters: The tool aims to give farmers better data to make decisions about their land.

Tyler McCann, CAPI’s managing director, said people want to better understand what’s happening and how to connect the different interests of governments, producers and broader society.

“The more that we’ve done work on land use, I think the more that you understand how connected land use policy is to most policy decisions, most policy debates that happen in agriculture and food,” he said in an interview.

People see activity in their own regions but need a broader perspective. The tool is intended to foster wider discussion and lead to better decision-making, he said.

It can help forecast land conversion based on what’s already occurred.

“That may be of particular interest to farmers as they’re making their own expansion plans or looking at restoration for nature-based solutions,” said McCann. “It could be of interest to farmers that are looking at, ‘am I farming in an area that is of potential interest (for conversion)?’”

The tool can compare fertilizer use in different regions or the adoption of no-till, for example.

Its unveiling kicked off a recent CAPI webinar on land use, highlighting how agricultural land is asked to do more while it’s under pressure from urban expansion and climate change.

Susie Miller, executive director of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Crops, said some markets have strict requirements regarding land conversion.

“To participate in some of the markets, such as biofuels in the EU, a farmer has to certify that the land on which the canola is grown, for example, was not forest land after 2005,” she said.

In one situation, some EU clients were not going to purchase canola because their data showed it had come from land deforested for agriculture. Miller was able to provide data to the contrary.

She said farmers could use better data to make individual decisions about their land. There is a lot of information available about biodiversity and how it benefits the public but not as much on how it benefits farms.

“Farmers have been basically intensifying the use of their land and sometimes that intensification means the removal of land which is natural or semi-natural habitat and sometimes it means also changing from pasture or native grasslands into crop lands,” she said.

Programs available from conservation organizations tend to appeal to those who were going to preserve land anyway, and “certainly are not at a value level to counteract the intensive market pressures.”

Ontario consultant Bronwynne Wilton said some landowners who take advantage of different programs run the risk that the work will all be undone when their land is converted for urban use.

Nature United senior conservation scientist Ronnie Drever said he sees tension between short- and long-term goals.

“We want our farms and ag lands to deliver toward our long-term goals of nature conservation, climate change mitigation, but farmers are under short term pressure to deliver on huge bank loans and all these other things,” he said.

“Long-term outcomes are typically more in the public good space. Can we develop tools or approaches or bridging mechanisms that allow the right behaviour in the short term that will translate into those long-term goals?”

McCann said agriculture will run into more pressure. Registered users of the CAPI tool will be able to add new datasets and the organization is still looking at how to update it beyond five-year census terms.

– Karen Briere is a reporter with The Western Producer.

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Over the years the First Nation, just north of Meadow Lake, Sask., has been converting the alfalfa field into a potato field and expanding the vegetable garden. This year, it planted 18 tonnes of seed potatoes and harvested about 90. They expected to harvest about 120 tonnes, but they didn’t beat the frost, says Jason Cardinal.

Cardinal has a background in data science and mechanics, and he brings that high-tech lens to Flying Dusts’s agricultural ventures. Speaking at the 10th annual Indigenous Ag Summit, held during Canadian Western Agribition in Regina, Cardinal explained how they survey the land base with drones, using the images and maps for land use planning, elevation mapping, tree canopy counts, calculating flood risk and checking crops and bison.

That tech also attracts students and young people to the market garden.

“We do a lot of drones and that seems to really entice them because the technology is something they’re really interested in. It enables them to make videos, TikTok videos and things like that. Get cool footage. We’ve got a lot of bison running and things like that.”

Summer students are put to work doing everything from building a chicken coop to growing and selling produce. A community elder mentors the students, teaching them how to manage the greenhouse, as well as about traditional foods and medicines. This year, they also planted about 200 fruit trees, creating a “food forest.”

Students can also earn their green certification at the market garden over two years through the University of Saskatchewan.

The market garden produces a range of vegetables, including three types of potatoes, cabbage, carrots, peas, lettuce, squash, peppers, tomatoes and more. Right now vegetables are grown on five acres, but there are 20-25 acres available for vegetables.

Along with chickens and bison, the First Nation also has over 150 beehives, which is a relatively new venture for its members. Workers have been taking courses on bees and learning from a beekeeper, who hails from the Philippines, hired by the reserve.

The market garden has a temperature-controlled potato storage facility and commercial kitchen, Flying Dust’s website notes. Supervisors run the market garden, which also has a board of directors.

Cardinal says the biggest challenge right now is distributing the produce, as they are a bit short on transportation-related infrastructure. However, Flying Dust plans to purchase a new truck to help distribute produce in the community, which should alleviate some distribution pain.

The Riverside Market Garden aims to provide fresh produce to the community, as well as other communities within a 100-mile radius, says Cardinal. They’re also building a community meat shop to process meat from bison and cattle.

The market garden sells into the Co-op and the Meadow Lake Farmers’ Market. It also has sales agreements with Sobeys and Thomas Fresh (which sells to Costco and Walmart). Cardinal says they’re looking for more customers, as currently, the market garden is producing more than the people in their community consume.

This year, they did a lot of food preservation, such as freeze-drying and canning, and involved students. “We did pickles and peppers and beets and stuff like that. So it was a really nice experience, getting to see that firsthand.”

— Lisa Guenther is editor of Canadian Cattlemen.

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Bloyce Thompson, MLA for the district of Stanhope-Marshfield since 2019 and ag minister from 2019 until last summer, was again appointed April 14 as King’s minister of agriculture, justice and public safety and attorney general.

King’s shuffle also decouples what was until now the ministry of agriculture and land. The latter file now goes to a “realigned” department of housing, land and communities, to be led by Rob Lantz, the rookie Progressive Conservative MLA for Charlottetown-Brighton.

The new housing, land and communities department is expected to be “working closely with municipalities on developing a provincewide land-use plan” for Prince Edward Island, the government said in a release.

Thompson, a third-generation dairy farmer and former board member with Dairy Farmers of P.E.I., was first named ag minister as a rookie MLA following the April 2019 provincial election, in which he unseated incumbent premier Wade MacLauchlan.

King last July had shuffled Thompson over to the economic growth, tourism and culture portfolios, and replaced him on the agriculture and land, justice and public safety files with then-finance minister Darlene Compton.

Compton, who’d been the province’s first female ag minister, has been shuffled out of cabinet in King’s April 14 announcement. Thompson also becomes deputy premier, a role Compton had held since 2019.

“This team is a mix of experience and new perspectives, geographically represents our island, and has a record number of women serving as members of executive council,” King said in his release.

Both Thompson and Compton easily won their ridings in the April 3 provincial election. Thompson held his constituency of Stanhope-Marshfield with 2209 votes, a spread of 1,643 votes over his lone challenger, NDP candidate Marian White.

New deputy

Separately on April 14, King also announced changes to the senior civil service, including the formal appointment of Brian Matheson as deputy minister of agriculture, effective April 17.

Having already served as acting deputy minister of agriculture and land since 2019, Matheson has been with the provincial ag department for about three decades, most recently as director of policy and agriculture resources since 2015.

Matheson has taken part in national policy and regulatory discussions and negotiations at the federal/provincial/territorial table over the past five years as part of his policy and regulatory responsibilities, the province noted.

As the province’s seniormost ag bureaucrat, Matheson replaces Laurie Loane, who left the deputy minister post in 2019 to return to her previous job as executive director of the P.E.I. Agriculture Sector Council. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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But more farmers are diversifying land use and businesses on their farms, whether related to agriculture or not – such as a winery, wedding venue or winter retreat – to generate additional revenue and support primary production.

What are the rules for creating diversified uses on farms? Many farmers may be unsure how to approach their municipality to start such a venture.

And what about protection of agricultural land? How are on-farm diversified uses supported without introducing a new form of urban sprawl?

Why it matters: Diversifying the use of agricultural land can create a profit stream for some farms while protecting the land.

An OMAFRA-funded research project led by Wayne Caldwell, Pam Duesling (University of Guelph PhD candidate and general manager of development services in Brant County) and Emily Sousa (Masters student and land use policy analyst with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture) explores the land use policy framework for on-farm diversification with the joint goals of protecting farmland and contributing to agricultural livelihoods.

Two main provincial documents permit farm diversification: the 2020 Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) and the 2016 OMAFRA Guidelines on Permitted Uses in Ontario’s Prime Agricultural Areas.

The PPS documents indicate prime agricultural areas are to be protected for long-term use for agriculture, and allowed uses include agricultural, agriculture-related and on-farm diversified uses.

The latter can include value-added uses, home occupations, industries, agri-tourism, retail, restaurants and more. They must meet five criteria under the guidelines:

• Must be located on a farm;
• Must be secondary to the principal use of the property;
• Must be limited in size and scale to two per cent of the farm to a maximum of one hectare;
• Can include but is not limited to home occupations, home industries, agri-tourism uses and uses that produce value added-agricultural products; and
• Shall be compatible with and not hinder surrounding agricultural operations.

The guidelines inform farmers and municipalities about implementing on-farm diversified uses in Ontario and ensure they support agricultural areas.

The University of Guelph’s province-wide research received information from more than 150 farmers, 40 municipalities and three provincial agencies. It showed that municipal plans and zoning bylaws across Ontario are inconsistent in how they permit diversified farm uses to balance farmland protection and economic opportunity.

Where policies do exist, the research found that ensuring the process isn’t too cost- or time-intensive for farmers is critical to incentivizing them to undertake new ventures.

For example, in addition to the cost and time required to secure a zoning bylaw amendment, one farmer said that attending public meetings and being open to public scrutiny was “excruciatingly difficult” and that they “wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy.”

In contrast, some municipalities turn “red tape” into “green tape” policies. A participating farmer in the research shared how as-of-right zoning was beneficial for their agri-tourism and value-added enterprise.

“Because the whole farm is zoned as that ‘agricultural plus’ designation, we’re able to run events without having to get any specific permits. That designation allows us to go forward without too much hassle,” they said.

The research also showed examples of diversified farm ventures and the successes and challenges farmers faced.

The Pfisterer Farm was created in 2019 by first-generation Wellington County farmers Jessica and Ryan Pfisterer to provide local sustainably raised pastured meats, eggs and other seasonal products through farmgate sales. A positive relationship with the local township and existing provisions within the zoning bylaw enabled Pfisterer Farm to diversify and offer a successful bed-and-breakfast glamping experience.

Despite this relationship, expansion plans for a farm market have halted due to outdated municipal zoning that would otherwise require the Pfisterers to secure a costly bylaw amendment. As Pfisterer notes, “on-farm diversification is new and the municipality isn’t there yet. We farmers and business owners looking to these diversified uses are steps ahead of policy.”

Aside from encouraging municipalities to catch up with the provincial guidelines and update their zoning, Pfisterer encourages other farmers to recognize that “there are caveats to diversification” and plan accordingly.

The Pfisterers had to account for moving farm equipment, electric fences and biosecurity when inviting the public to their operation and they worked with a lawyer on a comprehensive liability waiver.

In Norfolk County, Charlotteville Brewing Company, run by Tim Wilson and Melanie Doerkson, opened the doors to their diversification enterprise in 2018 when they converted two turn-of-the-century barns into a farm brewery.

Today, the company brews and serves craft beer but also features artisanal food, offers live music, produces 60 per cent of its ingredients and employs six people.

They said the provincial guidelines assisted them in designing a business balanced in size and scale that reused buildings no longer needed for agriculture.

While the guidelines encourage the reuse of existing farm buildings, Wilson said farmers interested in following a similar path should be forewarned. Insurance, high costs for engineered drawings, mixed uses in the Ontario Building Code, and a potential “immense jump in [property] taxes” are expenses that should be accounted for in a business plan.

The research found the guidelines are a helpful tool but they are underutilized by municipal counterparts. Further actions to address challenges, such as ensuring a new venture doesn’t impede normal farm practices, or use too much agricultural land, are needed.

Parking is one example. The research found that parking will quickly overtake the footprint of land a farmer can use to for the new venture, risking impact on production.

Advice from farmers interviewed is to “not waste precious real estate on parking.” Strategies on other agritourism operations include use of a ticketed timed reservation system or providing shared transportation to the site.

The research encouraged farmers to ask their municipality for a pre-submission consultation, with all municipal departments present, to discuss their business idea and learn what applications, approvals, fees and timelines would be required to establish their on-farm diversification venture.

Grants or assistance from municipal economic development or tourism departments may be available. Municipalities are encouraged to design “farmer-friendly” processes and fees that are simple, streamlined and scaled to recognize the complexity of required approvals.

These include zoning bylaw amendments, site plan control, studies, engineered drawings, tax changes, development charges, building code requirements and permits and licences.

The research indicated the value of positive neighbourly relations to ensure successful outcomes.

The project’s final report is expected to be released this summer. Researchers are creating a ‘compatibility’ tool intended to be used by municipalities and farmers or their agents when discussing a proposed on-farm diversified use.

More information about the research can be found on Caldwell’s website.

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The Environmental Protection Agency decides on the amount of biofuels that oil refiners must blend into their fuel each year, per the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard. The United States started the program to help farmers and boost the country’s energy independence.

Corn-based ethanol’s effect on carbon dioxide emissions depends on how the biofuel is made and whether indirect impacts on land use are considered, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The court found that the EPA violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service before ruling on biofuel blending obligations for 2019.

The court also found that the EPA’s approach to determine the effect of the obligations on the environment was contrary to record evidence and thus arbitrary and capricious.

Based on the findings, the court ordered the EPA to reassess the 2019 renewable volume obligation decision.

Organizations including the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club petitioned the court to review the 2019 obligations after the EPA issued them in December 2018.

“This decision states clearly what the National Wildlife Federation and others have been saying for years: that EPA and proponents within the biofuel industry have been ignoring the scientific record and even basic logic in continuing to claim that the Renewable Fuel Standard has had no effect on land use or wildlife habitat,” said David DeGennaro, policy specialist for climate and biofuels at the National Wildlife Federation.

In the same decision, the court ruled against biofuel groups and oil refining groups who argued the 2019 blending obligations were too low and too high, respectively.

The National Wildlife Federation said that it had not filed legal challenges to the volume mandates prior to this but had repeatedly registered its concerns through public comments during the annual obligation-setting process.

— Stephanie Kelly reports on the U.S. energy and renewable fuels sectors for Reuters from New York.

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The province on Thursday announced amendments to the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) Act — having received royal assent last spring — now come into force.

The ALR, which today includes 46,159 square km of B.C. land preserved for agricultural use, was set up in 1973 to stem the loss of “thousands of hectares” annually to development.

The new rules are expected to tighten the process by which any farmland can be permanently removed from the ALR, by allowing only local governments, First Nations and “other prescribed bodies” to make applications directly to the ALC to have land excluded.

The change “empower(s) local governments to ensure ALC decisions align with the land-use plans in their own communities,” the province said in a release.

Under the amended act, private landowners can still put in requests to have land removed from the ALR — but only if their local government agrees and makes the application to the ALC.

However, the province said Thursday, local governments indicated during recent public consultations that “they need sufficient transition time to implement these changes.”

Thus, that specific rule will go into effect Sept. 30, the province said.

Other amendments now in effect give the ALC the “flexibility” to create decision-making panels which can “better consider local and regional circumstances for land” within the ALR.

With that capability in hand, the province said, the ALC can cut the wait times for landowners seeking decisions — and can “make better use of the commissioners, drawing on their expertise in a related technical field or land-use issue.”

The new amendments are also expected to bring “more rigour” to the reconsideration process, by “clarifying the circumstances under which reconsiderations will proceed.”

They also add new criteria prioritizing “the protection of the size, integrity and continuity of the land base” that the ALC must consider in decision-making.

‘Land use pressure’

The amendments follow review and consultations by a ministerial committee starting in 2018, with the stated goals of preserving the ALR’s “productive capacity,” encouraging farming in the ALR for “uses related to agriculture and food production,” and strengthening the governance of both the ALR and ALC.

“During the past 45 years, the ALR boundary has been refined through early boundary reviews, local government land use planning exercises and over 48,000 individual applications,” the advisory committee said in a discussion document at the time.

The ALR boundary, the committee said, “is often viewed as temporary and adjustable” and. the idea that the ALR is available for urban uses “perpetuates land use pressure on farmland.”

That sort of speculation, the committee said, “results in a focus on applications made by individual landowners to modify the ALR and detracts from proactive work” such as regional-level land use planning, analyzing permitted uses and preserving and encouraging the ALR’s farm use. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The provincial government announced Tuesday it will introduce legislation “in the coming weeks” to replace the Ontario Municipal Board with the new tribunal, “mandated to give greater weight to the decisions of local communities.”

The new system, the province said, is also meant to “ensure people have access to faster, fairer and more affordable hearings.”

The new process would eliminate “de novo” hearings for most planning appeals, the province said, describing the hearing process as “lengthy and costly.”

“De novo” describes the OMB’s process of dealing with appeals of municipal land use planning decisions “by considering the same issue that was before the municipality as though no previous decision had been made.”

In “complex” land use planning appeals, the new tribunal would only be able to overturn a municipal decision if it doesn’t follow provincial policies or municipal plans, the province said.

By comparison, the OMB until now has been allowed to overturn municipal decisions whenever it finds that the municipality did not reach the “best” planning decision, the province said.

Instead, the new tribunal would be required to return the matter to the municipality with written reasons when it overturns a decision, instead of replacing the municipality’s decision with its own.

The municipality would then get 90 days to make a new decision on an application. The tribunal could then only make a final decision on such matters if the municipality’s new decision is found to fail to follow provincial policies or municipal plans on a second appeal.

The legislation would also set up the Local Planning Appeal Support Centre, a new agency to offer free information and support as well as representation at the tribunal for citizens who want to participate in the appeal process, the province said.

The legislation would also exempt a “broader range” of major land use planning decisions from appeal, including new Official Plans, major Official Plan updates and detailed plans meant to support growth in major transit areas.

It would also require a case conference for complex hearings to encourage early settlements, to help reduce the time and cost of appeals and create a “less adversarial” system.

“Our proposals would empower communities and municipalities to better determine how their neighbourhoods develop in the future,” Municipal Affairs Minister Bill Mauro said in the province’s release. — AGCanada.com Network

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The study, led by research scientist Tim McAllister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge, with staff from AAFC, Environment Canada and the University of Manitoba, logs a “significant reduction in GHG intensity” when comparing 2011 figures with those from 1981.

The first results from the five-year (2013-18) study, published Dec. 23 in the journal Animal Production Science, credit “continual improvements in production and feed efficiencies, crop yields and management strategies.”

GHG emissions have long been a contentious issue for the livestock sector. According to the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB) in a release Monday, Canada’s beef industry today accounts for 3.6 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas production and 0.072 per cent of global greenhouse gas production.

At the same time, lands that grow grasses and legumes for cattle sequester carbon, thereby reducing GHGs, the group said.

GHG emissions in the study were estimated using life-cycle assessments (cradle to farm gate) based mainly on Holos, a Canadian whole-farm emissions model, the researchers wrote in their paper.

Compared with 1981, in 2011 the same amount of slaughter weight was produced, with a 14 per cent decline in methane emissions, 15 per cent decline in nitrous dioxide emissions and a 12 per cent decline in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use.

Enteric methane production — that is, from the animals’ digestive systems — accounted for 73 per cent of total GHG emissions in both years.

In all, the study found, the estimated intensity of GHG emissions per kilogram of live weight that left the farm was 14 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents for 1981, but 12 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents for 2011, down 14 per cent.

Past that, the study found that in 2011, beef production in Canada required only 71 per cent of the breeding herd (such as cows, bulls, calves and replacement heifers) and 76 per cent of the land needed to produce the same amount of live weight for slaughter as in 1981.

“We’re working to get a more accurate assessment of the Canadian beef industry’s environmental footprint and these results indicate that the footprint per kilogram of beef produced is getting smaller,” McAllister said in Monday’s release from the CRSB and Beef Cattle Research Council (BCRC).

The needed production and feed efficiencies, crop yields and improved management practices “wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for investments in research and development, and the industry’s ability to adopt those technologies,” he said.

Those investments led to increased average daily gain and slaughter weight, improved reproductive efficiency, reduced time to slaughter, increased crop yields and a shift towards high-grain diets that enabled cattle to be marketed at an earlier age, the researchers said in their paper.

However, in terms of the industry’s overall sustainability, they wrote, “future studies are necessary to examine the impact of beef production on other sustainability metrics, including water use, air quality, biodiversity and provision of ecosystems services.”

“Perceived” concerns about the beef sector’s environmental impacts “often overshadow the beneficial impacts of the beef industry,” BCRC chair Tim Oleksyn, a cow-calf producer from Shellbrook in northern Saskatchewan, said in Monday’s release.

Beef producers, he said, are “inherently motivated to be more efficient, which most often has social, economic and environmental benefits. Now that we have resource use and GHG emission benchmarks, we can move forward as an industry and more strategically target our efforts to improve.”

The CRSB’s sustainability assessment is expected to benchmark the industry’s social, economic and environmental impact, using 2013 as the baseline, and to be revisited and evaluated every five years.

Results from the remaining phases of the industry environmental footprint study are expected in 2018, the CRSB said. — AGCanada.com Network

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The investigation, to be conducted by the Inspector General for EPA, will examine whether the agency has complied with reporting requirements and is using recent research on the full environmental impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), according to a letter dated Oct. 15 on the EPA’s website.

Both oil industry and environmental groups have questioned whether the EPA properly evaluated the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of corn ethanol to calculate its global warming potential. They say land-use change associated with its production outweighs the environmental benefits of replacing gasoline.

The review was self-initiated and “discretionary,” said Jeffrey Lagda, a spokesman for the Inspector General’s office. He said it would be “premature” to give a timeline.

The EPA, which is tasked with implementing the program, has faced mounting criticism for years-long delays in releasing of annual targets for biofuels use. The agency in late May proposed long-awaited requirements for 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Just four months ago, EPA official Janet McCabe was grilled by a U.S. Senate panel for the agency’s handling of the program and EPA has been sued over the delays in regulating the program. Both the oil and corn industries — which battle in Washington over the program — have said those delays have hurt their industries.

The investigation will likely bring heightened attention to the much-debated program ahead of Nov. 30, both the deadline to finalize EPA’s May proposal and the start of United Nations climate change discussions in Paris.

The review will “ensure public health and the environment are protected,” the letter said. RFS was created in 2005 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cut reliance on foreign petroleum-based fuels, and boost rural economies.

A review of RFS and corn ethanol will show environmental benefits, said Geoff Cooper, senior vice-president with the Renewable Fuel Association, which represents biofuels products.

But development of the advanced fuel sector has not met the targets, as the economic downturn and political uncertainty hit investment.

“The original intent of RFS was to stimulate fuels other than corn ethanol. Corn ethanol was supposed to be the bridge. But it’s not happening,” said Emily Cassidy of the Environmental Working Group, a critic of the program.

— Chris Prentice reports on the biofuels sector for Reuters from Chicago. Additional reporting for Reuters by Valerie Volcovici in Washington, D.C.

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