Program helps farmers adapt to consumer demand for efficient use of land, water and energy by sharing practices and data
Protecting and developing markets in a world concerned about environmental sustainability is a key objective for a program supported by Grain Farmers of Ontario.
“We’re developing a market-driven and science-based approach to examine key on-farm indicators to help tell the story about farming sustainability across Ontario and Canada,” said Mike Buttenham, the organization’s market development co-ordinator for sustainability and the environment.
He is involved with the Canadian Field Print Initiative, which was developed by the Edmonton agricultural consulting firm Serecon.
“It’s important to tell our story of how things in agriculture have changed and improved.”
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Markus Weber of Serecon said the program uses indicators to measure environmental gains stemming from improved agricultural practices.
Indicators include land use, soil loss, energy use and climate impact, but thought is being given to also including the effects of water, biodiversity and soil quality.
Weber is excited about the opportunity the program should provide to farmers.
“It’s interesting,” he said.
“We’re trying to find a niche where they can make a difference. There’s a real opportunity for farmers to look at their own operations with a new lens.”
Participating farmers can compare the sustainability outcomes on their own farms to regional averages and consider alternative practices for their farms.
Five pilot projects are underway: four on the Prairies and the GFO-led project, which is evaluating agronomic practices that are used to produce corn, soybeans and wheat.
The project initially used the American Farm to Market program as a model, but it is now Canadian.
Demand for the U.S. program was led by companies such as General Mills, which is committed to sustainably sourcing 100 percent of its 10 priority ingredients by 2020, according to Serecon literature.
Denis Trémorin, director of sustainability with Pulse Canada, said much of the data was drawn from Agriculture Canada and other Canadian sources.
“This facilitates the discussion to help everyone to either adapt or consider new practices,” he said.
“It’s about outcomes. It’s not about whether you’re using chemicals or you’re organic.… Everyone is concerned about being able to feed eight to nine billion people.”
Pulse Canada is a lead organization behind the project
Existing research was gathered to show how agricultural practices have improved over time from an environmental context and establish a base line that farmers can use to evaluate their progress.
“It’s a way to get a conversation started between producers,” Weber said. “For example, if there were 20 people in the room and one of them had extremely low greenhouse gas emissions for kilogram of crop grown, the others would be interested.”
Weber feels data quality will improve if the program expands to include more farmers.
The project was originally developed for Western Canada following a report that was released in 2011, which found overall gains for all indicators from 1986 to 2011.
“The results clearly indicate that Canadian producers have been successful in improving sustain-ability over the past two decades,” the report said.
“The analysis shows that there has been an improvement in efficiency, in every crop, for all indicators.”
For example, the amount of energy used to grow spring wheat declined by 32 percent per unit of output, land use efficiency in-creased by 38 percent, the climate impact was improved by 30 percent and the soil loss indicator improved by 62 percent.
Trémorin said soil loss reductions were especially impressive, which he attributed to the wide scale adoption of zero-till practices on the Prairies.
Weber said the project is now moving to field-scale analysis. Those participating in the pilot projects will be able to anonymously compare their results with those of other participants.
Buttenham said the Ontario project will collect data from farms and then conduct a debriefing process to evaluate the value of the data.
