Alberta’s newest cash crop requires no seeding, weeding or harvesting – only paperwork.
The first cheques were mailed in May to Alberta farmers who sold their carbon credits to Agri-Trend Aggregation Inc.
Payments ranged from $3,000 to $65,000 for farmers from Lethbridge to the Peace River region, said Agri-Trend Aggregation president Bill Dorgan.
“It’s a brand new revenue stream with no direct costs involved,” said Dorgan.
“It’s there regardless of weather or commodity price.”
Farmers received $8.75 a tonne after Agri-Trend deducted its portion of the money for aggregating, verifying and selling the credits.
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Farmers receive carbon credits by following agricultural practices like minimum tillage that lower greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil.
Companies like Agri-Trend Aggregation, buy carbon credits from farmers, group them together and then sell them to companies required to buy carbon credit offsets.
Alberta created the carbon credit market when it passed the Climate Change Act in 2007 designed to encourage companies to reduce their baseline greenhouse gases 12 percent a year annually until 2014. Companies that can’t meet the reduction must pay a fee into the greenhouse gas technology fund, or buy offset credits from agriculture or forestry companies.
The payments to farmers were for accumulated credits from 2002 to 2007, said Rob Saik, chief executive officer of the Agri-Trend Group of Companies, which includes Agri-Trend Aggregation.
Saik said their company has worked for seven years to see the first cheques mailed to farmers.
What is key to carbon credit sales in Alberta is that credits are based on tillage activities in the past and there are no restrictions placed on what farmers do with the land in the future.
