The Weston Family Foundation — the philanthropic arm of the Weston business empire — has slated $10 million for those eight projects through the organization’s soil health initiative, it was announced Feb. 13.

The initiative is tagged under the foundation’s “environmental stewardship” stream — a category mandated towards biodiversity improvement, research and sustainable agriculture. Other projects in the stream have funded ecological renewal around the Great Lakes and promoted grasslands.

The new soil health initiative was launched in spring 2022. Successful projects would help spread practices like cover cropping, 4R nutrient management or diverse crop rotations to increase soil organic matter, according to the foundation’s website.

In total, 38 organizations made a bid for the funding, said Eliza Mitchell, chair of the foundation’s conservation committee. Of those, 16 were invited to make a full proposal, with the final lineup decided by a review panel.

“Several [reviewers] were active farmers, but they all had experience in soil health management, some were involved in conservation…and they were all in fair agreement of the outstanding eight,” Mitchell said.

Those standouts “had a really clear focus and a really clear way forward,” she said. “The projects that showed a defined and clear approach on how they would successfully help shift producers towards greater adoption were given more weight.”

The list of chosen projects includes digital soil mapping tools for better nitrogen management, a farmer-led peer network, a reverse auction model to incentivize small grain and cover crop acres, research into cover crop best practices, benchmarking soil in Ontario’s Greenbelt, soil health outreach, a registry to help underpin markets for ecosystem service credits and Indigenous-led education for managing First Nations farmland.

The project list spreads funds widely nationwide, although Mitchell said that was more happy accident than part of the selection criteria. First project assessments were largely blind in terms of location, she noted.

The final list also spans both industry and academic perspectives, she said, pointing to the split of producer groups and universities singled out for funding. Half of the awardees are post-secondary institutions.

“There’s a lot of complexity in soil health and in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil, so there’s lots of ways of going at it. But we wanted to find projects that would help promote beneficial management practices, not just to the individuals involved, but hopefully communicate it out into the wider farming community,” Mitchell said.

— Alexis Stockford reports for the Manitoba Co-operator from Brandon.

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The Weston Family Foundation on Tuesday pledged $33 million over six years for what it calls the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, a prize challenge pitting ideas against ideas with the goal of extending the growing year for Canadian produce.

Specifically, eligible teams are to be put through a series of funded phases to create, test and refine systems for growing berries — out of season and at scale.

Registration information for interested teams is expected to be available later this month, followed by informational webinars on March 9 and April 13. Details on the challenge are now available online.

Come 2028, the challenge process is expected to produce both an overall winner and a technology breakthrough winner, the foundation said, with the winning team receiving up to $8 million in funding.

“By catalyzing these solutions for berries, we anticipate the creation of systems relevant to a broad array of fruit and vegetable crops, helping to position Canada as a leader in this sector,” foundation chair Emma Adamo said in a release.

While greenhouse systems are already in place in Canada to grow food crops such as leafy greens, peppers and cucumbers out of season, it’s hoped the teams in this challenge can come up with sustainable technologies for crops such as strawberries and blueberries.

Beyond that, the foundation characterized the challenge as a step toward “future-proofing food production in Canada.”

Speaking at Tuesday’s announcement, Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, said the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed “long-standing issues” in Canadian food production and processing, such as labour availability and supply chains for inputs and equipment.

The need to create more resilient food systems in Canada also stems from climate change, he said. For example, it’s unlikely current major produce-growing areas such as California will be able to continue to supply huge volumes of crops such as strawberries and lettuce to Canadians indefinitely.

Tamara Rebanks, a director with the Weston foundation, said Tuesday the innovation challenge’s focus has been placed on berries for several reasons. For one, she said, berries are an “intrinsically Canadian” crop; for another, improving domestic berry production is a goal that’s “technically challenging, but not impossible.”

Third, she said, it’s likely that systems to improve berry production can be ramped up to apply to other crops as well.

“For instance, berries have similar requirements for pollination as tree crops but do not take as long to grow,” the foundation said. “By understanding how to extend berry pollination, there’s much that can be applied to other flowering plants, such as potatoes or melons.”

In both open-field and controlled-environment production, extending fruit growing seasons in Canada “requires solving a series of interconnected problems,” the foundation said.

“The range of these problems goes from the genetics of the plants to the analysis of pests and diseases, to finding the right levels of temperature and light required, to the need for efficient energy systems, and more.”

Putting up the funding in a challenge format gives competing teams a very specific time frame in which to develop their ideas and allows the work to be evaluated and judged all along the way, the foundation said.

“Rather than specifying what a solution must look like, challenge prizes set out a clearly defined goal, along with information on how success will be measured, and invite eligible innovators to propose how they think it could be solved,” the foundation said. “This approach allows for a wide range of solutions to be considered.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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