Industry has less than 10 years to make major technological changes as it attempts to meet emission reduction targets
Although it’s theoretically possible to turn Canadian agriculture into a net carbon sink for emissions as early as 2030, producers would have to overcome numerous challenges in just a few years, says a researcher.
“We’re at the edge of a cliff,” said Joy Agnew, associate vice-president of applied research at Olds College in Alberta.
“We need to drop off (emissions) and it’s an accelerated timeline, so we need to figure out a way to support this disruptive change.”
The Canadian Western Agribition farm show recently named Agnew one of the top 50 most influential people in Canadian agriculture.
As a speaker at the Aug. 10 AgSmart expo at Olds College, she outlined the situation producers face.
Canadian agriculture has an estimated carbon footprint of about 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, she said. Modelling shows about a 30 percent cut in emissions, or 26 million tonnes, could potentially be achieved by 2030 by adopting a wide range of farming practices, such as precision nitrogen application and livestock feed additives, she said.
A further 62 million tonnes could potentially be removed through new or stepped-up carbon sequestration practices, such as conservation tillage and polycropping, for a total reduction of 88 million tonnes of CO2 per year, said Agnew.
“Yeah, so theoretically, we could be a carbon sink by 2030, and that’s if all the projections are accurate and everything else, which is a great news story for ag,” she said during an interview. Certain sectors within agriculture “might actually already be a carbon sink, and we probably aren’t getting that message out well enough.”
She told the audience at AgSmart that Canada’s CO2 emissions per pound of food produced are among the lowest in the world. However, agriculture is “an incredibly complex system … and realistically, it took 100-plus years for the ag industry to evolve to the state that it is currently at,” she said.
“We have to shift things in less than 10 years in order to have a hope of meeting our emission reduction targets, which is paradigm shifting, and smart farms and technology development have a critical role to play in that paradigm shift.”
Her presentation came a day after a report Aug. 9 by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It warned the world is close to runaway global warming, boosting the severity of things such as extreme heatwaves and drought.
Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions currently total about 740 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year from all sectors, which range from agriculture to industries such as energy and transportation. Federal targets aim to cut that amount to 400 million tonnes per year by 2030, with a further reduction to net zero by 2050.
Although Agnew said in the interview the targets are “definitely ambitious,” she added “if COVID has taught us anything, when mandates and policies and decision-making at the highest levels all come together to achieve one thing, we can do some pretty amazing things. But is it realistic? Is it achievable? I honestly don’t know.”
If Canadian agriculture managed to sequester or avoid 88 million tonnes of CO2 per year above current practices, it could theoretically earn almost $4.4 billion per year in offset revenue based on $50 per tonne, Agnew told the audience at AgSmart.
However, she likened the complexity of carbon offset systems for farmers during the interview to “a big rabbit hole, and honestly, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get an offset system in place for agriculture under the current way offset structures are set up with that requirement for verification and permanency, and all of the due diligence and the record keeping and all that stuff that’s required.”
One of the problems facing producers is the varying estimates of agriculture’s current share of greenhouse gas emissions, she told the audience at AgSmart. For example, Environment and Climate Change Canada has described it as eight percent, while the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory report has listed it as 11 percent, she said.
Although such estimates are relatively close, they illustrate how “we don’t fully understand where we’re at because it really depends on how you draw the envelope and how you calculate it, and it’s extremely difficult to manage and control what you can’t consistently measure or calculate….”
Farmers are also faced with the dilemma of cutting emissions while continuing to provide enough food for a growing world population, said Agnew during the interview.
“I don’t think there’s ever going to be an all or nothing solution. It’s not going to be like we can all become vegetarians, or we all need a transition to organic farming…. It’s going to be we adopt the right practices, the right behaviours, the right technologies for the right situation in order to reduce the overall footprint.”
