Was it a missed farm income opportunity or a prudent decision by Saskatchewan farmers to take a pass?
Three years ago, a group of Saskatchewan farmers and soil conservation activists turned down a proposal from a consortium of energy companies that they make a deal to be compensated for the carbon dioxide their land takes from the atmosphere.
It would have been an early version of the “carbon sinks” compensation and credit plan that is at the heart of Canada’s policy on how it will achieve reductions in greenhouse gases.
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The Kyoto protocol on climate change will allow countries to count the ability of their forests and farmland to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as credits toward their promise to reduce greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Gas-emitting companies will be able to buy or rent credits from farmers to count against their need to reduce emissions.
For Paul Vickers, director of sustainable development for Calgary-based TransAlta Utilities, the failure of Saskatchewan farmers to make a deal meant they lost income.
“They did not want to do a deal and that may be understandable because they had other things on their mind,” Vickers said in an interview from Calgary. “But that didn’t help us. We had spent money and time to get the science on this and we wanted to go to the next step.”
TransAlta has contracted with several thousand Iowa farmers to buy their carbon credits.
“I think it is the way of the future,” said Vickers. “For farmers, it will not be a huge benefit, but it will bring some value-added income to the farm.”
Turning down the deal was not a mistake, says Biggar-area farmer John Bennett, president of the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association and one of the producers who worked with TransAlta.
As the only farmer in a federally appointed group that studied the carbon sinks issue, Bennett is a believer in the concept.
But he said is too early for farmers to lock themselves into contracts with energy companies or other polluters looking for a way to reduce their need to cut emissions.
“There is a risk to farmers getting into a deal before all the rules are in place,” he said. “A bad deal could hurt farmers. I think we were right to reject moving too quickly three years ago.”
Bennett said the exchange of carbon sink credits and obligations will become a part of the private market economy but the federal government must devise the regulations to govern it.
And farmers must be careful not to sign contracts that could come back to haunt them.
“In essence, if you sign a deal which pays you a certain amount per year to store carbon and then in 10 years, you have to change your management practices and you start to send some of that stored carbon back into the atmosphere, it is logical you will be charged a penalty for that,” he said.
“What if the value of carbon then is much higher than you were being paid? Suddenly, you are liable for a huge cost.”
Still, Bennett said he is committed to seeing agricultural lands as part of the solution to the greenhouse gas problem.
But there is an understanding in soil conservation associations from the Prairies to Ontario that farmers need to know more about how it will work before they sign on.
