Farmers should be obsessing about how to cut their crops’ nitrous oxide emissions.
Every kilogram emitted represents much super-expensive fertilizer just farting away into the air, rather than feeding a money-making bushel.
Instead, the divisive and caustic politics of climate change have so poisoned our ability to talk about carbon emissions that most seem to see the situation as one of irreconcilable choices: It’s either produce the biggest and most profitable crops and emit a lot of nitrous oxide, or reduce emissions, lose bushels and lose money. No farmer is going to be keen about the second choice. Nobody should expect them to be, or to voluntarily suffer crippling costs in order to save the planet.
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When farmers hear that the federal government wants to reduce overall emissions from agriculture by 30 percent, most think that means using less fertilizer and therefore producing smaller crops and losing money. It is a direct threat, they think, to their ability to be profitable and survive in farming.
Yet cutting emissions is in every farmer’s interest, not just for the benefit of humanity and the rest of Planet Earth, but because also because nitrous oxide emissions represent a major loss of paid-for fertilizer that should be going into producing crops. Emissions are an expensive inefficiency and should be looked at that way. Yet when farmers look at the issue, most don’t realize that’s the case. The people who preach about emissions reductions speak a foreign language to farmers, who speak the language of profitability and efficiency.
That’s something the team at Manitoba Agriculture’s farm management unit are hoping to help change with the fertilizer efficiency calculator they’ve just unveiled and introduced online. They want farmers to be able to see how their fertilizer application choices affect the amount of fertilizer they waste, and how to get their target yield while using less fertilizer. For instance, certain fall applications of fertilizer can lead to over 20 percent losses through emissions, while spring side-banded fertilizer loses little. For the farm management folks, the focus is on boosting crop profitability. Every dollar saved on fertilizer while achieving the same yield is a dollar that goes directly to the bottom line.
But every kilogram of fertilizer cut from crop production also helps reduce farming’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. For the same amount of crop, farmers can save fertilizer and the environment benefits from fewer emissions. What those fighting climate change want can be partially achieved by farmers simply applying fertilizers more efficiently. There’s no reason farmers can’t save on fertilizer costs, produce optimal crops and reduce emissions all at once, but they need to understand that this is possible.
The Manitoba fertilizer calculator, with its efficiency and profitability focus, offers farmers a way to understand how their fertilizer choices affect their operating efficiency and profitability. This is the way farmers look at what they do. This is the language they speak. Those who want farmers to care about their greenhouse gas emissions need to talk to them in a language that makes sense to them.
Climate warriors have hurt their cause by making farmers feel threatened and maligned. Many feel anxious and defensive whenever fertilizer emissions are brought up. This calculator, and I hope more developments like it, should help provide farmers with a way to look at the issue in terms that make sense in farming. Farmers should be keen to talk about reducing fertilizer emissions, not forced to spend their time defending themselves for trying remain viable for simply using fertilizer.
That’s not likely to happen until people talk with farmers, not talk at them, and for that people will need to speak in farmer-language, of which this calculator is a perfect example.
