Wall Street Regulators Heard Farmers Loud and Clear

Mar 14, 2024

The strength of Farm Bureau shines through when we speak with a united voice on behalf of our farms, ranches and rural communities. That strength was on full display in our engagement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the last two years as we called on them to revise their proposed climate disclosure rule to remove the Scope 3 reporting requirement. We made our voices heard from the grassroots up, and the SEC took notice and changed course.

Last week, the SEC announced their final climate disclosure rule, which completely removed the Scope 3 reporting requirement. Make no mistake. That would not have happened if Farm Bureau members had not stepped up and made their voices heard.

Scope 3 reporting would have required public companies to report the greenhouse gas emissions across their supply chain—all the way back to the farm. This would have placed a heavy burden on family farms, who don’t have teams of compliance officers just to handle SEC reporting requirements meant for Wall Street companies. With manufacturers forced to squeeze emissions data from their supply chain, many small farms would have been squeezed out of the market entirely.

The work is not quite done when it comes to Scope 3 reporting requirements, however. While the SEC was working on its rule, California rushed out with its own law requiring large companies doing business in the state to report on Scope 3 emissions. The American Farm Bureau, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others, has challenged the California law in court, and we are urging California to follow the SEC’s lead and exclude farmers from regulations intended for big corporations by withdrawing the Scope 3 requirement.

While Farm Bureau strongly opposes Scope 3 reporting requirements, that doesn’t mean we don’t see the value in on-farm data collection. You have heard me talk often about how farmers and ranchers have a great sustainability story to tell. A big part of telling that story is having the data to show the amazing strides we have made across agriculture.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”