By Becky Zimmer

Farmers missing from emission reduction conversation

Sep 13, 2022 | 5:45 PM

It is a confusing time for Canadian farmers as government and industry mandates are being introduced in an attempt to promote the reduction of climate emissions.

For Joy Agnew, associate vice-president of Applied Research at Olds College, there are some missing pieces of the emission reduction discussion that are not working in favour of the producers across Canada.

According to the Government of Canada, the current 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan outlines an emission reduction target of 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

These broad goals are not necessarily possible or fair for Canadian producers, Agnew told farmnewsNOW, not because it is a difficult target to hit but because the majority of Canadian producers already have practices in place in an effort to reduce their emissions.

The challenge now is proving it to policymakers who want those emissions reduced even further when many operations have as small a carbon footprint as they can, she said.

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“Those solutions in terms of the verification and data collection, to quantify and verify that some of these things are being done, that, to me in my opinion, from what I’m seeing doesn’t exist yet. And that’s, again, frustrating for farmers, because they’ve been doing these for so long already, now what?”

From a cropping perspective, the lack of data collection needed to verify that producers have these practices in place has been a problem. Livestock management data has been easier to collect, she said, but grain farmers are years away from this being common practice.

Agnew’s own focus is nutrient stewardship, especially in fertilizer management. Many tools already in place not only help producers offset their emissions but also make financial sense to reduce cost inputs. The narrative also has to change, said Agnew.

“There needs to be a shift in the way that farmers and farm advocacy tell the story of farming and the fact that farmers are incredible stewards of the land they have to be because their livelihood depends on it.”

There is no one “silver bullet” approach, said Agnew, and farmers can only do what is best for their operation.

Research in climate solutions, especially in the agriculture sector, is being shared from around the world, said Agnew, with every country dealing with similar problems with different factors creating different challenges.

Looking at a worldwide leader in emissions reduction, Maria Stein Knudsen at Danish Agriculture and Food Council in Denmark told farmnewsNOW that Denmark is one of the most climate efficient countries in the world but they are still looking to reduce as many emissions in the next eight years than they have in the last 32. But there are no easy solutions, she said.

“We don’t know how to get all the way to net zero. We don’t know that today, we didn’t know that in 2019. But we do know some of the way. We may not know how to get there, but if we don’t set up that vision on going there, we are never going to get there.”

No matter what the solutions governments or agriculture departments implement, Knudsen said that it needs to be voluntary for farmers and they need to be fully compensated. One example of this was the council partnering with a nature conservation organization to put land back into peat bogs for carbon sequestration.

However, climate solutions should not come at the expense of people not being able to pay their bills, she said.

Agnew sees many potential solutions as not being plausible in Canada because there are no ready-made alternatives to some of the practices in place. One example is grain drying. Canadian farmers have no choice but to use energy-intensive dryers, which is why advocacy groups worked to get grain drying exempt from the carbon tax.

The bill came before parliament in February 2022.

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becky.zimmer@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @bex_zim