Canadian farmers and ranchers are planning the future with less carbon – and making it work

Launcher John Cross is frank about what climate change predictions mean for his family. “My children can’t live a better life than I do.”

 

Cross owns the A7 Ranch, a 5,260-hectare office west of Nanton, Arta, at the foot of the Livingstone Mountains. AE Cross, one of Calgary’s famous “Big Four” cowherds who founded Calgary Stampede, his grandfather, started the ranch in 1886.

The Cross family has paid much attention to the weather over the years, but last year’s extreme situation introduced new terms such as “heat dome” and “atmospheric river” to local lexicons. Did. A second year of drought occurred in Alberta, leading to poor crop crops and high animal feed costs. The floods wiped out the Kokihara Highway in British Columbia.

Cross is currently training his family to take over the A7. He is changing the way he works because he wants to see them succeed.

 

 

“Meat needs an entire industrial zone to support it, while pasture cattle need a complex ecosystem that also provides environmental services to mitigate climate change“

He employs a method called regeneration. That is, agricultural and grazing practices that restore degraded soil and increase carbon recovery. He grazes cows and grazes them in a small pasture for about a day, then moves them to another pasture and restores the pasture area for several weeks. He uses an electric fence to keep the cow away from sensitive areas.

Cross’s approach reflects a business savvy. Whole Foods Market has named regenerative agriculture the number one food trend in 2020. According to a 2021 report from data company Spoonshot, business interest in regenerative agriculture has more than doubled in just two years, with companies such as General Mills, PepsiCo and Unilever investing millions of dollars. .. But Cross looks at the word sideways.

He employs a method called regeneration. That is, agricultural and grazing practices that restore degraded soil and increase carbon recovery. He grazes cows and grazes them in a small pasture for about a day, then moves them to another pasture and restores the pasture area for several weeks. He uses an electric fence to keep the cow away from sensitive areas.

Cross’s approach reflects a business savvy. Whole Foods Market has named regenerative agriculture the number one food trend in 2020. According to a 2021 report from data company Spoonshot, business interest in regenerative agriculture has more than doubled in just two years, with companies such as General Mills, PepsiCo and Unilever investing millions of dollars. .. But Cross looks at the word sideways.

photo credit: Eminetracanada.com

“It’s pretty geeky, but our soil samples make me dazzle,” he says. “The original goal when we hijacked the land was to get 10% organic matter by the time I was 65. That seemed like a positive but realistic goal. So to hit it in 5 years? Oh. “

He says their new goal is to push the organic matter to twice the depth. Most farmers only care about the top 10 centimeters, but he wants to make their rich soil layers thicker and sequester that much carbon.

“I have 20 years, give or take?”

So why doesn’t everyone farm like this? Reedner says money is one thing. He estimates that they have invested $ 1 million in shifting land from traditional crop farming. The other is a bad beef wrap. Increasingly environmentalists are advocating a plant-based diet as a climate change mitigation strategy. However, Reedner reads the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change each year and believes that raising certain cattle is actually part of the climate solution, at least in the Canadian prairie.

“Cow on the grass in the right ecosystem beats the cultured meat many times,” says Reedner. “But Meat needs an entire industrial zone to support it, while pasture cattle need a complex ecosystem that also provides environmental services to mitigate climate change.”

According to his napkin calculations, their farm extracted about 10,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Canada’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions are estimated to be about 15 metric tons per year. This is more than 600 man-years of carbon that Reedner believes has captured. In his mind, it’s enough to make an unborn grandson carbon-neutral.

The road to Rachel Herbert’s ranch was just as unusual.

 

She also grew up in Calgary, but spent the summer on her grandparents’ ranch, about a mile away from A7. Herbert, who was a vegetarian and studied literature at college, said she just “she fell in love and married a cowboy.” After her grandparents died and her family’s land was reorganized, she and Tyler bought a ranch and created Trails End Beef.

“I didn’t necessarily have a big environmental problem,” says Herbert. “I was a kid who really liked animals. The first meat I ate was from a steer I raised from a jar. Eating that meat was like a sacrament.”

photo credit: Eminetracanada.com

But what really persuaded her to raise cows and eat meat was when the cows stood to add to her land. Trail’s End produces only pasture-fed beef. That is, her cows eat only grass and hay from weaning to slaughter, and are usually fed grain to the cows, not just in feed lots for fattening. Grass and hay are perennial crops that fix more carbon in the soil than annual crops such as corn and wheat. Their fertilizer becomes fertilizer.

“Plant-based diets are not a regeneration model,” says Herbert. “You need to do something to restore fertility to the soil. In my opinion, eating grass-fed beef is what we can do to eat it regeneratively.”

Herbert says that during the 13 years they were on the ranch, soil improvements began to appear.

“There was a reason this land wasn’t cultivated when we bought it,” says Herbert. “The soil is essentially crushed sandstone. The natural color of the soil is the same as this concrete. However, in some places you can see the color of the soil changing. Has more rot. It’s a slow process and nothing happens overnight. “

photo credit: Eminetracanada.com

So is regenerative farming a new innovation in agriculture, or is it just spitting and polishing the traditional circular economy of family farms? Will you use everything you have, eliminate waste, and diversify?

Keith Curry, a grain and oilseed farmer near Collingwood, Ontario and the first vice president of the Canadian Agricultural Federation, said the problem of regenerative farming as a label is to stick to almost everything. It states.

He planted cover crops and used no-tillage seed drilling, which is the basis for maintaining carbon in soil and is two common methods of regeneration operations, Canadian crop farmers since the 1990s. It states that it is widespread in. But these practices now need to be assembled in a different way.

“The two biggest isolations of carbon are forestry and agriculture,” says Curry. We want to partner with the federal government to motivate us to work harder. In February, Ottawa announced $ 182.7 million to help farmers reduce emissions.

Curry is looking at government incentives, but Joan MacArthur is looking at the consumer side of things. As President of Newourish Food Marketing in Toronto, she agrees that it’s hard to figure out what rebirth means. Consumers are generally more interested in soil and climate health, and many are willing to pay for it.

“We can sell certain categories of organic foods with higher margins,” says MacArthur. “Farmers are great businessmen. They are good at adapting technology, but they need something for them.”

Perhaps as with organic food labels, consumers will one day see reclaimed labels in supermarkets. Savory, a Colorado-based non-governmental organization, has developed the “Ecological Outcome Verification” brand. Over 1,000 meat, dairy, wool, hemp, wine, cashmere and leather products manufactured according to land use protocols are listed.

Returning to southern Alberta, it may not be long before John Cross may be able to sell carbon offsets for his rotary grazing work.

Farmers Edge is Winnipeg’s “digital farming company”, which acts as a farmer’s carbon broker with the goal of adopting low-carbon cultivation methods and selling those credits in the open market. Founder and CEO Wade Barnes said in an initial public offering a year ago that he had a “one small slide” in his presentation and would create an offset for farmers two years later. Burns has seen a surge in interest from the beginning and expects to sell nearly 1 million tonnes of offset later this year. Large emitters can purchase these credits to show that they are in compliance with Canada’s goal of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

And the carbon market protocol for ranchers is coming, he says.

There are only a handful of companies in Canada that Burns does, but he laughed when asked if he expected to see more.

“As this market begins to develop, everyone and their dogs will come out. Honest Abe carbon credit locations will appear everywhere, you wait and see.”

This is perfect for CFA’s Keith Currie.

Monica Kidd is a writer, physician and fellow at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana Global Journalism Fellowship.