Granted, if they had the forethought and storage capacity to buy fertilizer in the fall or top up their farm fuel reserves, they’re not taking mortal financial blows right before seeding — but with every new gas field struck, fertilizer plant shuttered or country shutting down fertilizer exports to protect their slice of the global pie, it seems less likely that supply chains will get back to status quo anytime soon.

According to an FCC web post, released in early March and recently cited by our reporter Miranda Leybourne, a 2022 study suggested about half of Prairie farmers have their fertilizer by late March. That’s more than in Eastern Canada (only 10 per cent of Ontario farmers had done the same), but it still leaves a lot of producers potentially eating big bills this spring.

Cycle of uncertainty for farmers

As our executive editor Laura Rance noted a few weeks ago, this kind of chaos has become all too familiar.

COVID-19 threw international supply chains into a blender. Inflation has ballooned far more for farmers than even other Canadians. Manitoba Agriculture staff puts the farm inflation rate in the last five years at up to 50 per cent. Canada picked another fight with China, and canola took the brunt. Then there’s the second era of Donald Trump, whose policies have helped throw more uncertainty and market volatility into the mix than the world has seen in decades.

Farmers have become unfortunately used to waking up one morning to find their market gone or input prices spiking due to events impossible to anticipate and which often have nothing to do with them.

A system can only take so much before people start looking for alternatives. If farmers are shopping for innovations though, they’re going to have to wrestle with the reality that many of those technologies have the word “sustainable” associated with them.

That’s the tone of society; and it’s often the buzzword that attracts either public or private investment enough to get those ag tech concepts over the finish line.

Many farmers resent the “green” mandates being imposed upon them by government and public pressure. The federal goal to reduce fertilizer emissions by 30 per cent under 2020 levels by the end of the decade is a prime example.

Farmers’ were first and foremost worried that it would turn into a hard limit on nitrogen fertilizer use. The federal government has always denied that, saying that it’s going to be more about encouraging efficiencies.

If urea futures are going to start spiking 30 per cent though (as they did within two days of the intensified conflict in Iran), maybe less natural gas derived fertilizer isn’t a bad thing.

A case for self-sufficiency

Most of the farms that I’ve seen who have bought into regenerative or “sustainable” practices have a financial reason, rather than just an ideological one. They want long-term viability and to be able to absorb shocks they’ve observed in the field or have suffered in the bank account.

Such was the case with R&L Acres near Sperling, home to Manitoba’s first on-farm green ammonia plant.

Yes, government and researchers had an environmental interest in the initiative. It uses hydro power and electrolysis to get hydrogen from water, rather than natural gas. Combined with nitrogen from the atmosphere, it becomes on-farm manufactured ammonia.

Researchers have even suggested that green ammonia could one day become an alternate fuel source for machinery.

Farm owner Curtis Hiebert, though, also talked about a desire for self-sufficiency, to decouple from the whims of the fertilizer market and save money, especially when regular ammonia prices were up. The numbers presented in 2024 put final cost of a 500 tonne per year system at $948 per tonne for the farmer.

That may not always offer huge savings, but it will be consistent, and that certainty is also worth something. At the time the system was being installed, the fertilizer market was in turmoil because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Today, there’s a whole new set of world affairs mucking things up.

One plant doesn’t mean green ammonia is about to roll over conventional ways of farming, nor is it clear how much our renewable energy infrastructure would be able to support. Manitoba Hydro has already warned about its looming capacity limits. The up-front cost of the system is also big: an estimated $4.5 million in 2024.

Green ammonia is, though, an example of the kind of farm-focused innovation that could offer legitimate solutions and resiliency in an increasingly uncertain world.

We shouldn’t get so caught on the word “green,” and any complicated feelings that word comes with, that we dismiss the equally real impacts for self-sufficiency, sovereignty, stability and, in the best of cases, cost savings.

The post OPINION: Global chaos raises stakes for green farm technology appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

While wetlands sequester carbon, they also naturally release greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere. That means the impact of wetland drainage on net GHG emissions was previously difficult to determine.

Our new study, however, has found that widespread wetland drainage on Prairie farmland releases 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂-eq) per year. That’s equal to more than five per cent of Prairie agricultural emissions from the industry as a whole. CO₂-eq is a metric used to to compare emissions from different greenhouse gases by converting amounts of those gases to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

Our research team included Darrin Qualman from the National Farmers Union, Sydney Jensen, a then-graduate student at the University of Regina, as well as Murray Hidlebaugh and Scott Beaton, independent farmers in the Canadian Prairies.

Some tout wetland drainage as providing numerous benefits to agriculture. In addition to increasing arable land area, proponents argue that “proper drainage management … reduces the carbon footprint by cutting down equipment operation time, fuel and emissions, reduces the impacts of extreme weather events, and decreases overland flooding and nutrient washouts.”

This assertion of the environmental benefits associated with wetland drainage is not supported by science. Our work highlights a large increase in the carbon footprint associated with wetland drainage rather than a reduction, while other work documents impacts on streamflows and nutrient export, and the loss of ducks and other birds.

The impacts of draining wetlands

To quantify the net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with wetland drainage, our approach was to quantify GHG sources when wetlands are intact, and compare them with sources after drainage takes place to understand the net effect of wetland removal on emissions. The annual rate of wetland loss from existing data (10,820 hectares per year) was used to quantify associated carbon emissions for the region.

Intact wetlands emit GHGs such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, so their removal eliminates these natural emissions from the landscape. The presence of wetlands in fields can also require repeated machinery passes and lead to double fertilization around wetland margins, both of which contribute to GHG emissions.

When wetlands are drained, carbon-rich sediments are exposed to the air, allowing rapid decomposition and the release of carbon dioxide. Drainage also expands cropland area, leading to additional GHG emissions from farming activities on the newly cultivated land. It often requires the removal of rings of willow trees surrounding wetlands, with the resulting debris typically burned or composted, producing further emissions.

Our results show that the amount of carbon dioxide released from exposed soil from drained wetlands far exceeded any other source. This was much larger than emissions when wetlands were intact, including natural wetland emissions and emissions from multiple passes with machinery. Additional emissions from farming the former wetland and the removal of vegetation also made a small contribution to the overall balance.

Overall, we estimate that wetland drainage contributes to an annual increase in emissions of at least 2.1 million tonnes CO₂-eq (recognizing that stored carbon will be released over a multi-year period). It is worth noting that this includes natural emissions from intact wetlands, but emissions that are not human-caused are not typically targeted in an effort to achieve GHG reductions.

For example, reducing methane emissions from livestock is a strategy to reduce agricultural GHG emissions, but emissions from wild animals are not considered or incorporated in the same way. Our estimate swells to 3.4 million tonnes of CO₂-eq per year when we exclude natural wetland GHG emissions; this represents an increase of approximately eight per cent above currently quantified GHG emissions from the agricultural industry in the Prairie provinces.

Canada’s GHG Inventory

Canada uses a National Inventory Report to quantify GHG emissions from different jurisdictions and industries, but emissions associated with wetland drainage are not currently included. Emissions of 3.4 million tonnes of CO₂-eq from a single year of wetland drainage are substantial and exceed several emission sources currently described in the report.

For example, emissions from wetland destruction are greater than agricultural emissions from gasoline combustion in trucks or from poultry and swine manure in the Prairie provinces. Including emissions from wetland drainage in the National Inventory Report would provide a more accurate accounting of total agricultural emissions and better position the country to meet its climate commitments.

Prairie farmers play a key stewardship role in this landscape — preserving wetlands on their land provides a public good. Retaining wetlands would create many additional benefits: maintaining wildlife habitats, groundwater recharge, nutrient retention, as well as drought and flood mitigation. These wetland services help address global and regional crises related to biodiversity loss, climate change, lake eutrophication and flooding.

Research shows there is public willingness to pay to restore wetlands in the Prairie provinces. There is additionally a need to reduce conflict and increase collaboration in conversations on agricultural water management in the Canadian Prairies and develop policies that incentivize and enable landowners to consider the environmental benefits of wetlands in their decision making. By better understanding the costs of GHG emissions resulting from wetland drainage, we can better preserve wetlands in the Canadian Prairies.

—Kerri Finlay is a professor in the University of Regina’s biology department, Colin Whitfiled is an associate professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability and Lauren Bortolotti is an adjust professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability.

The post OPINION: Draining wetlands produces substantial emissions in the Canadian Prairies appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The assessment by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, three years in the making and signed off by more than 150 governments, is expected to guide policymaking across multiple sectors.

WHY IT MATTERS: Construction, food, pharmaceuticals and infrastructure are among the sectors most exposed to biodiversity loss, research firm Zero Carbon Analytics said, though most companies face risks through their supply chains.

Written by 79 experts worldwide, the report pointed to “inadequate or perverse” incentives, weak institutional support and enforcement, and “significant” data gaps as key obstacles to progress.

It builds on a 2024 pledge by countries to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, followed last year by a plan to spend US$200 billion on the effort – still far short of the finance flowing into activities that damage nature.

‘Blind spot’

Despite the need for “transformative change,” US$7.3 trillion in public and private funds was going to nature-harming activities, the authors said, citing 2023 data.

“This Report draws on thousands of sources, bringing together years of research and practice into a single integrated framework that shows both the risks of nature loss to business, and the opportunities for business to help reverse this,” said Matt Jones (UK), one of three co-chairs of the assessment.

“Businesses and other key actors can either lead the way towards a more sustainable global economy or ultimately risk extinction … both of species in nature, but potentially also their own.”

The report said companies can act now by setting ambitious targets and embedding them in corporate strategy; strengthening auditing, monitoring and performance assessments; and innovating in products, processes and services.

Fewer than one per cent of public companies disclose biodiversity impacts, it added.

Construction, food, pharmaceuticals and infrastructure are among the sectors most exposed to biodiversity loss, research firm Zero Carbon Analytics said, though most companies face risks through their supply chains.

Paul Polman, the former boss of consumer goods company Unilever, said business strategy was about managing risk and building resilience, yet nature “has barely featured in that equation”.

“The IPBES assessment shows that this blind spot is now becoming one of the defining economic risks of our time.”

The post Biodiversity loss a risk to global economy, IPBES report says appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“We have an incredible agriculture and food sector in Canada,” said Amanda Richardson, executive director of the Centre for Agri-Food Benchmarking, when speaking about the 2025 National Index on Agri-Food Performance.

WHY IT MATTERS: The National Index on Agri-Food Performance shows how fragmented and outdated Canada’s farm sustainability data still is, and why measuring real progress remains tricky.

The index is part of a growing effort to give Canada one shared, trustworthy set of numbers on how the ag and food system is doing.

For years, farmers and companies have been implementing sustainable practices throughout the industry, but that hasn’t stopped them from being scrutinized.

“It’s a challenge to demonstrate progress and to measure sustainability overall,” Richardson said at a webinar hosted by the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute on Dec. 11.

That’s where the index comes in. It puts everyone’s data, from government, industry and researchers, into one framework. The resulting report is a “framework of indicators and metrics” that is built by a coalition of over 165 partners, she added.

Lots of good work, but hard to show it

The new index shows Canada holding steady or improving in areas like water quality, soil metrics, and greenhouse gas emissions. But some of the numbers used to prove that are old. Some are inconsistent. Others don’t exist at all.

The reports’ wildlife habitat capacity indicator, for instance, is stuck using data from 2015. By next year, it’ll only have advanced to using 2020 numbers.

“As we’re looking at making real time decisions and recommendations moving forward, that’s the challenge,” Richardson said.

Another issue is that every group in the sector measures things differently.

“We can collect data all day long,” she said. “But it’s collected in a way that’s fragmented.”

That makes it hard to compare, and even harder to explain to consumers, customers, or trading partners who want clear proof of sustainable practices.

Making sense of what’s out there

The first step isn’t making new data, it’s figuring out what already exists, said Michelle Edwards, director of Agri-Food Data Strategy at the University of Guelph.

“Right now we don’t know what we don’t know.”

And while there might be interesting data sets being collected in different regions in Canada, analysts don’t know they exist because people don’t seem to be sharing data.

Without documentation, including what was measured, how, and who did it, who did it, Edwards said even decent data becomes “questionable.”

Complicating things, it seems like everyone keeps trying to build their own systems instead of co-ordinating, Edwards believes.

“Everybody’s trying to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “Can we stop? Let’s sit down in the room together.”

Policy makers want data, but it has to line up

Jessica Norup, director of climate policy and partnerships at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, said the government needs better information just as much as farmers do.

“There are often misunderstandings about there always being trade offs between profitability and environmental action,” Norup said. “And I think the key to basically dispelling that myth is through data and evidence.”

But she said Canada’s fractured approach gets in the way. The federal emissions inventory, for example, can’t show most on-farm practice changes, because it’s built for a different purpose.

“Because it’s fractured, because we’re not talking to each other … no one knows whether you’re using the same methodologies and approaches,” Norup said.

The challenge is finding a way to bring everyone together and make sure they’re all on the same page.

Industry wants good metrics

The index is also working through tough questions around pesticides and plant breeding. In both areas, numbers can easily be misused or taken out of context.

It’s not just about putting data out there, said Brittany Lacasse of CropLife Canada.

“The important part is that we’re being thoughtful, and we have really good data to tell this really important story.”

Lacasse said the Index’s collaborative approach matters. Groups that rarely talk to each other are now sharing the same table.

Labour a part of sustainability

Labour shortages continue to weigh on food processors across the country, and Kevin Elder, a project manager of Food Processing Skills Canada, said data matters there as well.

“I think the labour force is critical to the discussion on sustainability. They’re the people that are going to carry out the work,” Elder said.

But just like environmental data, labour numbers get thin once you zoom in on specific regions or sectors.

“We just don’t have the numbers,” he added.

Younger workers increasingly want to be part of companies that take sustainability seriously, he said, something better data could help highlight.

What success looks like

For Richardson, the end goal is simple: Canada should be able to show real, measurable progress, not just talk about it.

In 10 years, she hopes the sector can look back and see clear improvements, and have the numbers to back them up. Until then, she says the priority is getting the data right.

Fiscal pressure can be a catalyst for clarity, Richardson added.

“It challenges us to be strategic about what matters most, to invest in the right data at the right time for the right purpose. And that’s what we’re trying to do with the National Index.”

The post Measuring sustainable ag in Canada appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

WHY IT MATTERS: There are numerous ways to precisely apply nutrients, but there’s still a gap in knowledge about when fertilizers don’t work.

“We had hoped to have this scenario where, okay, I know all the places within that pasture where nutrients aren’t going to work, surely I can get a maximized yield, reduced input and reduced environmental impacts. It just was not really possible,” says Andrew MacDougall, a professor in the department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph.

He was one of more than 40 authors who contributed to the study, published in April in the journal Scientific Reports. Oliver Carroll was the lead author while he was doing post-doctoral work for Food for Thought at the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute. The team of authors is affiliated with the global Nutrient Network.

The study added fertilizer to grasslands at 61 sites, and the biomass increase was measured to gauge the response to the fertilizer.

Study results

The researchers found that fertilization of the grasslands showed widely variable responses. Fertilization increased average yield by 43 per cent, but in 26 per cent of cases, there was no improvement in biomass.

All of the sites showed some response to fertilizer at least once, but only four of the 61 plots showed an increase in biomass in all years and all plots.

“The truth is, if you’re just interested in yield, it’s always safer just to add nutrients everywhere, because you just don’t know, wet years, dry years, there’s all sorts of variation that are really, really hard to predict, even if you’ve got pretty good information beforehand,” says MacDougall.

The researchers used grasslands for the study as they would not have had the fertilization history of cropland, so it made it easier to compare biomass results across plots in diverse ecosystems.

“We needed to work in grasslands versus cropland, because we didn’t want the contamination from previous nutrient additions and phosphorus in particular, of course, is quite sticky,” says MacDougall.

The sites were highly variable in environment and soil, including plots in Canada and the United States, but also reindeer grazing land in tundra in Finland, dry pastures in Africa and highly diverse species pastures in China.

Those results show that qualifying when to precisely apply fertilizer is a challenge, says MacDougall.

“There are always spots where the nutrients don’t work as well,” says MacDougall. “What if we could anticipate where we don’t have to add nutrients? How much money would we save? We show you could, in theory, save a lot. It’s just hard to predict.”

MacDougall worked on another study about 10 years ago that showed that 25 per cent of the time that nutrients were applied, they didn’t affect yield.

“When we look deeper, it’s clear that there are a lot of circumstances where nutrients are not the limiting factor, and typically it’s moisture,” he says.

There are other limiters, including acidity of the soil, but moisture is the largest influence.

“If you’ve got a drought in Australia or Africa or the Canadian west or Colorado, you can add all the nutrients you want. Plants are not going to get bigger.”

Better fertilizer plans

The question MacDougall wanted to answer with the larger study was whether they could pinpoint when not to apply nutrients — when they wouldn’t work — to save farmers money and lower the amount of nutrients added to the environment.

If they know that nutrients don’t work 25 per cent of the time, what are the factors that lead to that 25 per cent?

It turns out that’s pretty difficult, if you’re chasing top yield. However, MacDougall says that if you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of yield, there’s money to be saved and more profit for the farm.

Environmental impact could also be reduced.

Precision fertilizer application can still make sense, especially as the cost of fertilizer continues to rise and the limits of non-renewal fertilizers like nitrogen from fossil fuels, and phosphorus which is mined, get closer.

The continued development of tools such as microdosing of fertilizers and using tissue analysis to monitor crop needs are tools that will continue to help understand where fertilizer should be applied.

MacDougall says the results of the study show that these tools will be more important into the future.

“I thought for sure we’d see the golden path forward. But all it did was reinforce that this is hard to predict, and the safest thing is just add (fertilizer) everywhere. But as costs go up, we just clearly aren’t going to be able to keep doing that.”

The post Still hard to predict precise fertilizer payback appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Krawiec’s “grazing in the sweet spot” philosophy is a method that allowed him to scale from 40 cow-calf pairs on 373 acres in 2000 to grazing 5,000 yearlings on 5,500 acres by 2007 with minimal hired help.

“It was just myself and the summer students,” Krawiec said at the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association’s (MFGA) 2025 Regenerative Agriculture Conference in Brandon on Nov. 12-13.

WHY IT MATTERS: Grazing at the right moment in the plant’s growth cycle can dramatically increase forage production, animal performance, and profitability, an Alberta rancher says.

Krawiec’s “sweet spot” is a specific point in grass growth, just before plants enter the reproductive phase, when around 15 to 20 per cent of plants are in reproductive phase and the rest remain in late vegetative state.

“The other thing about grazing in the sweet spot that is really critical is that I only take 20 to 40 per cent (of forages) during the growing season,” he said.

Success with the system requires training livestock to move as a co-ordinated group, Krawiec stressed.

Feeding soil biology year-round

Krawiec’s approach feeds soil biology multiple times per year, rather than just once.

When plants enter reproductive phase, they redirect energy from root exudates, which feed soil microbes, into seed production, he told conference attendees. Root exudates are fluids emitted through the roots of the plant. They contain a complex cocktail of sugars, amino acids, organic acids and metabolites. They promote microbial activity, facilitate nutrient cycling in the soil, and foster overall soil health.

“The thing about letting plants go into reproductive phase is that that’s where they release the least amount of exudates,” Krawiec said. “Instead of releasing exudates into the soil, those exudates go into producing seed.”

Gaining livestock performance

The impact on his farm has been substantial.

Krawiec reported increasing daily gains on heifers from 1.5 pounds per day to 2.5 pounds per day after implementing his system. Cow-calf producers using his methods commonly see 60-80 pounds higher weaning weights, while sheep producers can achieve lambs weighing 100-15 pounds in four-and-a-half months, Krawiec said. Conception rates in the first breeding cycle consistently exceed 80 per cent, and have gone as high as 83 per cent.

Last November, Krawiec backgrounded calves on stockpiled pasture at a cost of 12 cents per day. A forage test from that period showed 24 per cent protein and 65 per cent total digestible nutrients (TDN). That paddock yielded 317 stock days per acre.

Krawiec described a “tipping point” at approximately 175 stock days per acre where the system becomes self-sustaining, requiring no inputs except management. This typically takes two to three years, he said.

Grazing system math

Krawiec’s approach centres on respecting both graze period and resting periods. He found livestock behaviour helped indicate when a paddock has been grazed too long.

“The first day they walked back to water, I gave them a strip (of forage). Second day, they had to walk back to water. Day three, same thing, they had to walk back a lot of the water. Day four, same thing … but as we’re coming back to graze, they stopped in the first strip, and that’s when I realized that was my grace period,” he said.

Krawiec thus put ideal graze period at his latitude (similar to Athabasca, Alta.) at three days. With that three-day graze period and a minimum of 13 paddocks, the math works out to 36 days of rest. Rest periods increase at more northern latitudes due to fewer daylight hours, Krawiec added.

He pointed to his grazing chart as an essential planning tool.

The chart allows Krawiec to adjust rotation based on growing conditions. In June 2021, when temperatures hit 38.5 C for weeks, he extended his second rotation to 55 rest days after his strip system suggested that grass growth had slowed. He later sped up his third rotation to 42 days, and was able to keep high-quality forage through November, plus stockpiling enough grass to calve 1,000 cows the following spring.

“The results were amazing, but what I did was not amazing. I just used my grazing (method), and I just adjusted to conditions,” he said.

The post Grazing ‘sweet spot’ boosts pasture performance appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

In 2021, the program started with 42 growers and 42,000 acres. By 2024, the program had grown to 146 growers and roughly 700,000 acres across western Canada.

WHY IT MATTERS: Farmers are increasingly being urged to be efficient with their fertilizer, both for their own bank accounts and due to sustainability pushes.

The Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes (SNO) program will pay qualifying farmers a minimum of $2 an acre. Carlos Rivera, senior sustainability manager at the Saskatoon-based fertilizer producer, said the firm was uniquely positioned to encourage stewardship throughout the nutrient supply chain.

“Nutrien is unique in the sense that we manufacture fertilizer, but we also sell a portion of that fertilizer directly to growers through our retail arm,” he said during a recent web presentation as part of Fertilizer Canada’s 4R Incentives program.

Nutrien is the largest producer of potash fertilizer and the largest global agricultural retailer, serving customers in seven countries, he noted.

While farmers never want to waste nutrients, they’re also applying them into a complex natural system that frequently does its best to strip them away. The SNO program hopes to encourage producers to look at new ways of preventing that from happening.

“We know that when farmers are applying nitrogen, a portion of that nitrogen is going to be lost as nitrous oxide emissions through the denitrification,” he said.

Qualifying

The program follows a validated protocol called the nitrous oxide emissions reduction protocol (NERP), which was developed by the Alberta government in 2015 for their offset system. Nutrien’s program makes that protocol eligible in a voluntary space, in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. To participate in the program, a grower must be a Nutrien customer and work with a Nutrien agronomist.

Nutrien leverages all those principles and frameworks at the field level, capturing information using a proprietary sustainability program called Agrible, which Nutrien has used since 2022.

“It allows us to capture everything at the field level to model, at the end of the day, the outcomes that growers are receiving based on the NERP principles. These outcomes obviously have a monetary value to growers and an environmental/corporate value to Nutrien,” said Rivera.

NERP is a tier approach that measures agricultural practices based on a combination of 4R practices.

Growers can be placed at the basic, intermediate or advanced level, yielding different emissions reductions per pound of nitrogen applied in the field. The basic level is 15 per cent, the intermediate level is 25 per cent and 35 per cent is the advanced level.

“You are the pre-basic level if you don’t have a 4R agriculture infrastructure plan crafted by a designated 4R agronomist,” he said, noting have one was a prerequisite to joining the program.

Growers must have a copy of a soil test or a nutrient balance to justify the target and rate selected for each season. From that baseline growers can begin tweaking their nitrogen management, incorporating things like variable rate prescriptions and enhanced efficiency fertilizers such as nitrification inhibitors, dual inhibitors or polymer coated urea.

“You can unlock higher tiers, and reach for the advanced program,” Rivera said.

Payments for the program are using $65 per tonne of carbon, but payments are equally site specific.

“It’s not going to be the same if you’re in Regina, or if you’re in a much wetter area, like Brandon, Manitoba,” he said.

“The wetter the area, the higher the payment, simply because of that nitrification potential being higher,” said Rivera.

According to Nutrien’s website, southern Alberta growers average incentives of $4.91 an acre for canola, $3.40 an acre for wheat and $2.61 an acre for barley, while northern Alberta growers average $2.78 an acre for canola and $2.57 an acre for wheat.

Bang for buck

Nitrogen-hungry annual crops are the lowest hanging fruit for the incentive program, as the payments will be higher with a higher target nitrogen rate, Rivera noted.

“The higher the pool of nitrogen that you have in the field, the higher the potential for these losses to happen. The mitigation potential for applying an international structure plan and all these practices in the field is going to be higher,” he said. “Keep in mind that the target nitrogen rate needs to be justified by a soil test or nutrient balance.”

Once the targeting rate has been defined with the help of an agronomist, growers can start seeing differences in payments as they jump from basic to intermediate to advanced. The program has four different steps: enrollment, in-system, harvest and processing.

“From enrollment to harvest, we work very closely with growers and our retail agronomist and then processing is internal to the sustainable ag team,” he said.

Enrollment starts mid-February and goes to early May. Enrollment is when growers and their Nutrien agronomists are crafting their 4R nitrogen stewardship plans.

Growers sign a contract to be involved in the program for a single year.

“If growers like the program, they can keep working with us. If they don’t like the program, they can walk away,” said Rivera.

The contract explains the terms and conditions, data privacy, data usage and all the data and evidence growers need to close the program in a season.

“In-season and harvest are basically the core of the program,” he said.

Everything is captured under NERP field data including application data, scouting reports, pictures of equipment, fertilizer receipts and so on. The firm uses it’s proprietary Echelon Ag Tool system to collect yield maps and application maps, for both fertilizer and crop protection applications.

At the end of the season, once all the data is gathered, the sustainability teams subjects the data to internal quality control measures.

“If no flags are detected, we will notify the grower they need to hit commit. This is basically an attestation, saying that everything that happened in the field is true,” said Rivera.

If issues come up, the sustainability team goes back to the grower or agronomist to rectify that data. After the grower hits commit, payment is issued in the form of a credit into the account.

Data delivered

On top of that, the grower will receive a sustainability report, providing the grower information around land use, nitrogen use and efficiency for that operation in a regional benchmark.

The Agrible platform gathers a wide range of data from each growing season.

Since Nutrien is pursuing verified carbon assets, they need to use external verification.

Carbon pricing was increased from $35 to $65 dollars a tonne.

“We increased it to mimic the federal pollution pricing that Ottawa was setting for the country,” he said.

Data for 2021 and 2022 has already been verified and 2023-2024 data are on their way.

“I should clarify that we pay growers after we have received a complete data set with all the data and the evidence. We don’t wait for verification to pay,” he said.

Last year, 72 per cent of acres in the program were at the basic level, and 28 per cent of acres were at the advanced level.

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At a panel titled Sustainability Disclosure in Canada: Overcoming the Headwinds, hosted by the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board (CSSB), speakers discussed the challenges and opportunities for Canadian businesses as international trading partners increasingly look for environmental, social and governance (ESG) transparency.

Eight out of Canada’s 10 biggest trading partners either have or will soon have mandatory disclosure rules — including those in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging market for Canada’s agri-food sector, said Canadian Sustainability Standards Board chair Wendy Berman.

She called Canadian Sustainability Standards the “ticket to play” in a global market which may also be moving toward sustainability disclosure practices.

Canadian standards in the global market

Companies do not need to be perfect, only rigorous, Berman said.

“If you communicate that rigour, and you put sunlight around the main assumptions, which our standards tell you to, then that is what you’re communicating to the market.”

Berman said the standards board is helping Canadian companies address the market’s needs by looking at global reporting baselines and adding changes to reflect the uniqueness of the Canadian market.

“What we also have is a Canadian version of proportionality mechanisms,” she said. “What we’re saying to the market is ‘It’s okay, build capacity on these items and continue to do that so that you’re ready to enter the global market’.”

Ontario Securities Commission CEO Grant Vingoe said Canada will need to follow a global baseline if it wishes to continue on the path of market diversification. He said he hears many investors express frustration at a lack of a consistent global framework, forcing them to rely on private sources.

Disclosure fatigue

Canada is in a “pivotal moment for sustainability in Canada,” one “full of complexity and uncertainty and also real possibility,” said Elizabeth Dove, executive director of the UN Global Compact Network Canada.

“Over the last few years, Canadian companies have stepped up,” Dove said. “They’ve adopted climate action strategies. They’ve incorporated ESG into governance and risk. They’ve built systems to measure, disclose and manage sustainability performance. But let’s be honest, it hasn’t been easy.”

There has been fatigue around disclosure, and some businesses are now asking if the measures are necessary — particularly if they seem to hamper the company’s ambitions.

“We cannot allow ambition to be the casualty of uncertainty,” Dove said.

“Climate change is not waiting for regulatory clarity.”

Adoption of ESG will likely increase as the means of measuring climate risks improve, said Peter Routledge, superintendent of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions.

“Guess what? As you measure the risk more effectively, boards of directors and senior management teams will make really smart decisions about how to invest to counteract that risk,” Routledge said.

“That’s the beauty of market capitalism at work.”

“It is not a regulatory burden for the sake of increasing costs to in pursuit of some abstract virtue,” Routledge said. “That’s the last thing we’re interested in. What we’re interested in is creating management and risk measurement discipline to elevate and improve and sustain shareholder value.”

The post Sustainability disclosure ‘ticket to play’ in emerging global market appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The technology isn’t quite there yet, but it’s close, and an app recently released by Dalhousie University researchers can help train farmers and workers on what’s actually in a moo.

WHY IT MATTERS: Artificial intelligence is helping to process large volumes of data, creating resources that farmers have never had access to before.

The MooLogue app is one of two apps recently released by professor Suresh Neethirajan and his Mooanalytica research team at Dalhousie University.

The other app, called DairyAir Canada, quickly allows a farmer to assess the methane production on their farm over the past 15 years.

Both apps give a sense of the powerful tools that can be developed due to the advanced processing capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Neethirajan said MooLogue can give someone who hasn’t worked in agriculture before, or who may have worked on a livestock farm such as swine or poultry and is interested in working with cows, an early understanding of what they’ll hear in a dairy barn.

Developing the data behind the MooLogue app involved old-school research, however, as students installed sensors and recording devices at about 13 farms, at eight or nine locations on the farms — from calving and milking areas, to stalls and dry cow areas.

They collected many hours of vocalizations, then used artificial intelligence to compare the audio and the video that went with it, to connect the sound to what was happening in the barn, said Neethirajan, who has a joint appointment in the faculty of computer science and the faculty of agriculture.

The researchers connected the frequency of the moo and duration with events in a cow’s day.

When a mother cow is bonding with her calf, she will moo at about 120 to 280 Hz, low-frequency murmurs that last up to 2.5 seconds.

When a cow is in distress, its calls will be more urgent, at 600 to 1,200 Hz and will exceed three seconds in duration.

The researchers can now tell when cows are about to be fed, and when the cows are greeting each other. They can also tell when they are in heat.

Most experienced farmers can also combine the auditory signals from cows with what they observe in the barn to come up with similar conclusions about the state of a cow. Indeed, the team validated the sounds and results with experienced farmers.

However, with increasing numbers of farm employees coming from off the farm, these sounds can be used for training, as the app is currently set up to do.

“They can play with the app to better understand,” said Neethirajan. “This is a hunger call. This is frustration. She is going through heat.

“If there is a veterinary student, if they want to handle the cow without going and touching them, handling that animal, they can play with the app as a preliminary step.”

Future products could include what Neethirajan referred to as a “black box” that could sit in the barn and record sounds, process those sounds and provide a report to the farmer remotely or when she is back in the barn.

One of his doctoral students is working on a cow translator, using natural language processing, figuring out how to turn a moo into something that accurately fits human languages.

When cow frustration was measured in 300 different contexts, “we were able to see patterns, specific letters and specific words started emerging, constantly coming in that particular context.”

Another step is to see what other breeds have to say. Holsteins were used as they account for most of the animals on Canadian dairy farms, but there’s some work being done on beef cattle. It’s more challenging however, because beef breeds and other cattle in other parts of the world aren’t housed indoors.

Monitoring methane

Methane released by cow burps after digestion and manure pits is one of the leading concerns around climate change related to livestock farming, but there have been few tools to measure and monitor individual farm methane output.

Neethirajan’s Mooanalytica lab has released the DairyAir Canada app, which can show each dairy farm in the country their methane release trends from Jan. 1, 2010, to Dec. 31, 2024. The methane is not tracked in real time.

The research team used data from three different satellites, including NASA’s Terra, Europe’s Sentinel-5P and Japan’s GOSAT. The data was then parsed and smoothed, so that each farm had a rating.

The app isn’t just a snapshot, it also allows farmers to compare their data to others within a 50 to 100 kilometre radius, their own provincial average and a national distribution of methane emissions. They can do analysis based on seasons and can download reports.

Across the country, the results could be different based on management, climate and building design.

Neethirajan said this creates a benchmark for farmers. They can then take action, depending on what they learn.

Overall, Neethirajan said methane emissions have continued to increase on dairy farms across the country over the past 15 years. Some years Ontario was the leader, but other years Quebec had the largest emissions.

The research for the apps was supported by Dairy Farmers of Canada and government funding programs for agriculture.

Both MooLogue and DairyAir Canada are available for Apple and, as of Oct. 14, for Google devices.

The post Moo translator and methane measures: There’s an app for that appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Farmers and industry leaders from Alberta and Saskatchewan shared their thoughts and experiences on a panel on the importance of innovation for agricultural resilience in the face of changing climates at the International Consortium on Applied Bioeconomy Research held at the beginning of July.

Rob Stone, who farms about 9,500 acres of canola, wheat and lentils and is experimenting with chickpeas at his farm near Davidson, Sask., spoke as part of the panel.

“Saskatchewan is like the heartland of innovation when it comes down to soil practices, and it’s driven by farmers. Think of all the tools over the last 50 or 100 years that have been manufactured and made of a need to reduce tillage, to increase crop production,” he said.

He began direct seeding in the mid ’90s. Before that, he grew wheat and fallowed in a rotation.

“We had tree rows all over the place to keep soil from blowing away. We have always employed practices with soil in mind,” he said.

Stone said when crop protection products started to come down in price, he realized this was the next step in being a more responsible farmer, conserving moisture and soil.

A lot of farmers started cobbling together their own equipment and their airseeders to conserve moisture and soil, he said. Equipment manufacturers followed suit and began making equipment to serve farmers’ needs.

“It’s the innovation that happens in Saskatchewan and Western Canada that is just amazing to me; how you take a need and are able to translate it into equipment that works so quickly and now we’re into the next frontier,” he said.

Paul Thiel, formerly of Bayer Crop Science research and development, is currently the New Thought Leader in Smart Agriculture with Olds College. He chairs a panel of growers who provide feedback to the college.

Thiel said when a new idea is brought to the farm, there’s often a breadth of ideas that become part of it.

He said innovations contribute to massive changes in agriculture. For example, no till seeding led to cooler and moister conditions at seeding levels.

“We had to adapt the whole breeding process to account for how things are changing on the farm,” he said.

Agriculture has evolved to include a new world of remote sensing and data collection, and that needs to be available and offer practical use for farmers, he said. Thiel said agriculture functions in a regulatory environment, but he gets frustrated with the pace of science outgrowing the ability of government to keep up.

“This is a real problem for growers, because growers see opportunities that they simply cannot realize,” he said.

Tracy Broughton, executive director of SaskOilseeds said when Polish canola was introduced to the Prairies, farmers were really interested in figuring out how to grow it over broad acres, and they got together and shared their stories.

As a result of farmer discussions with government, actual policy decisions led to the development of a crop levy for pulse crops, so farmer dollars were invested into creating new varieties.

Broughton said all the crop groups in Saskatchewan work closely together, and work for farmers. The crop organizations are all trying to invest in practical research to advance farming practices.

Shawna Mathieson, executive director with Prairie Oat Growers Association, said she and her husband have been doing no till for over 30 years, and revenue was the key factor there. However, using no till has resulted in big changes on their farm. They farm over 2,600 acres near Watson, Sask. She said that when she and her husband make decisions on the farm, economic sustainability comes first.

“No till lets you farm a little bit more because you’re doing fewer passes, so you have less need for hiring people,” she said.

Staffing requirements go down, which is good in Saskatchewan, where there is a huge labour shortage.

Western Canada is leading the world in low-emission, sustainable oat and barley production, said Mathieson.

Technological advances have had a huge impact on farming.

Stone said GMOs and the development of herbicide tolerant canola in the 1990s were life changing for the rotation on the farm at Davidson. When Roundup Ready canola was developed, it opened a diverse crop rotation and more economic opportunities for farmers.

Stone said hybrid systems and plant genetic improvements have been a gamechanger for farmers.

“We’ve benefitted by having products now that will yield maybe double what we would have expected from our canola crop in the late 1990s,” he said.

Stone said he supports technology, but there needs to be a reason for it, as well as an economic benefit for the farmer.

“Technology is great but also being able to evaluate and implement it responsibly and on your own terms, is really important as well,” he said.

Thiel spoke about the growing disconnect between food producers and consumers.

Broughton said SaskOilseeds invests heavily in consumer education and outreach to consumers.

“We are trying, as farm groups, to tell our good story. When we were talking enough earlier this morning, we were realizing that we don’t tell our good news story that often, and how much of a powerhouse Saskatchewan has been in terms of revolutionizing the seeding equipment industry,” she said.

Broughton said Saskatchewan has a network like the value chain or supply chain.

“We’re a small enough province that we have relationships between farmers and governments, farmers and academics, and we have a network of sites where there are demonstration sites in several different regions of the province, and each of those sites have researchers who are working on projects like basic research and applied research, and then that commercialization step,” she said. Broughton said Saskatchewan has a small enough population that it can work through the entire research continuum.

Farmers are largely involved on the boards of agricultural program sites, and farm groups have created a program called on-farm trials, which are directed by farmers involved in terms of what protocols or what products or practices are going to be executed on a farm scale research trial, she said. Jill McDonald, executive director of SaskBarley, also participated in the panel.

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