McCain Foods’ environmental promises could change potato farming in AB

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French fry giant McCain Foods has made a sweeping series of environmental and climate change commitments that could change the way southern Alberta potato farmers grow their crops.

McCain, the largest manufacturer of frozen potatoes and french fries in the world, announced earlier this week that by 2030, it will only source potatoes from farms that practice “regenerative agriculture.”

The term “regenerative agriculture” was not invented by McCain, but is an industry term used to describe farming practices that actively seek to improve and revitalize soil health and quality. Practitioners of regenerative agriculture incorporate practices such as zero-till, cover crops, crop rotation and composting in an effort to get more nutrients into the soil. Advocates say the benefits of such methods include improved yields, healthier crops, better water efficiency and even the natural sequestration of significant amounts of harmful carbon emissions.

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“It’s a big step, because it requires a lot of change compared to the practices that most farmers are engaged in at this point,” said McCain Foods president and CEO Max Koeune.

In addition to the commitments around regenerative agriculture, McCain Foods made a number of other environmental pledges this week all aimed at helping the company reduce its overall carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030. The environmental commitments announced include sending zero waste to landfills by 2025; making 100 per cent of packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025; and moving to 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030.

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Koeune said for McCain, climate change is not a futuristic concern — it is a present-day business threat.

“I’ve been with the company for eight years, and what I’ve experienced is that every year, somewhere in the world, we have a major crop disruption because of a weather event. A weather event that might have been called a once-in-50-year occurrence or once-in-100-year occurrence, suddenly starts to happen two years in a row,” Koeune said. “And that is clearly the impact of climate change, and we can only see that accelerating and becoming more and more extreme.”

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McCain Foods currently contracts with 3,600 potato growers, both large and small, in 16 countries around the world. In Alberta, local farmers grow 12,200 acres of potatoes for the company — the vast majority in the Lethbridge region where McCain operates a french fry processing plant with 230 employees. (The Lethbridge/Coaldale/Taber area is the heart of southern Alberta’s value-added agriculture sector, and is also home to a Cavendish Farms potato processing plant, a Lamb Weston potato plant and a PepsiCo Frito-Lay plant.)

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Among the McCain growers in the area are brothers Chris and Harold Perry, who run a 5,000-acre farm near Coaldale. The Perry family is one of only a handful of potato farmers worldwide who has already implemented regenerative agriculture on their farm. In fact, they have been using some of the principles — such as planting cover crops and spreading manure to improve soil health — for more than 20 years. The family is so keen on environmental stewardship that they even have a bio-gas facility on their farm that uses manure and organic waste to produce electricity for the grid.

“Lots of it we’re just doing because we think it’s the right thing to do. And as long as we can do it within our means and still pay our bills and pay the employees, then we’ll keep doing it,” Harold Perry said in an interview.

McCain is not the first major agri-food company to announce bold environmental targets in recent years, said Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University. PepsiCo, Nestle and General Mills are just some of the companies that have committed to specific initiatives like McCain’s.

The companies are being driven both by public pressure and by the UN’s stated climate goal of holding global warming to 1.5 C. While Charlebois said he believes these companies genuinely want to do the right thing, many who make public commitments fall short.

“The Retail Council of Canada backed away from its promise on cage-free eggs by 2025 and the phasing out of gestation stalls for pregnant pigs by 2022. It argued this could not be done, even though a promise was made a few years ago,” Charlebois said. “Other companies like Starbucks have also failed to deliver on environmentally focused objectives in recent years.”

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While there may be some “collective cynicism” about the ability of large companies to follow through with their environmental promises, Charlebois said there is no doubt that McCain’s regenerative agriculture pledge is a significant step that could have major implications for potato farmers who could be facing increased costs and reduced yields as they adjust to an entirely new production system.

“McCain’s is preparing its ecosystem for some changes in years to come,” Charlebois said. “This is a call for its network to sit down and talk about what this means for everyone.”

astephenson@postmedia.com

Twitter: @AmandaMsteph