No, funding is provided to us by the Canadian Agricultural Partnership to serve all producers.

For your family and workers:

Ensure their health and safety by identifying and addressing environmental risks on the farm.

For your business:

Prepare for the future viability of your business.

A growing number of your customers want to know that their food is being produced in an environmentally sensitive manner.

Reducing environmental risks can reduce the costs of production, increasing your farm’s productivity.

It costs less to prevent environmental problems than to correct them.

With an Environmental Farm Plan, you eligible for federal and provincial funding and technical assistance to help you address risks and/or increase benefits from the environment.

For your industry

Show the public that environment matters in agriculture and that you are actively involved in adopting environmentally sustainable practices.

The EFP process was initiated by the Ontario farm community in the early 1990s. New Brunswick farmers have been participating in environmental farm planning since 1996. The program has been adopted across Canada and is now funded under the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal-provincial-territorial agreement on agriculture and agri-food policy. The Agricultural Alliance of NB is responsible for delivering the program in New Brunswick.

Your EFP belongs to you and you will decide who, if anyone, sees it. Developing an EFP is a voluntary, confidential process and several measures are in place to ensure that your plan remains private.

Trained coordinators, employed by the Agricultural Alliance of NB, facilitate workshops and individual sessions to provide assistance to help you complete your plan. They do not keep copies of finished plans.

You are encouraged to have a third-party review of your plan. This step is optional, but necessary to obtain a certificate. To qualify for financial assistance, you must have a certificate and the actions to be implemented must be identified in your plan. In New Brunswick, third party reviews are carried out by the Collège Communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick INNOV division (CCNB-INNOV).

The coordinator can forward the plan to CCNB-INNOV for you. Once a technical review is completed by a professional agrologist and validated, the EFP is returned to you with a certificate and action plan summary report. In some cases, the plan may be returned with a letter requesting more information.

This stage of the process usually takes about two weeks.

If you apply for financial assistance under the Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture (ESA) component of the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, the government administrator asks CCNB-INNOV’s EFP coordinator to confirm that you have a valid action plan and that the project is part of that plan. This is the only instance where individual information is provided to government representatives.

When your plan is received at CCNB-INNOV, the information is entered into a database and a client number is assigned to the file. Only two people have access to the password protected database. Copies of your farm information sheet, EFP certificate and action plan are filed only by client number.

CCNB-INNOV may compile anonymous aggregate information to assist agro-environmental program evaluation and development.

CCNB-INNOV is an applied research center with a division specialized in agriculture, bioprocesses, beverages, and environment. This division provides services to the industry to answer applied research questions, to validate concepts, to optimize processes or to develop new products. Manager of this division, Josée Landry, can be reached by email (josee.landry@ccnb.ca) or by phone (506 733-0233). CCNB-INNOV is a division of the College Communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick (CCNB).

CCNB-INNOV is the third-party independent reviewer for the environmental farm plans (EFP). Its role is to ensure there are valid analysis and solutions being applied to mitigate environmental risks on New Brunswick farms. The review process is initiated at the discretion of the producers. They are responsible for forwarding their new or updated EFPs to the CCNB-INNOV team for technical review and validation. EFPs can be sent by mail at: 160 Reservoir Street, Grand Falls, NB, E3Y 3W3 or they can soon be completed online.

The action plan should be reviewed yearly to see what actions you had planned. Any new actions that you decide upon can be added to your action plan (and sent to CCNB if planning to apply for funding). Every five years, you should completely update your evaluation and actions.