The country feeds nearly 20% of the global population, but must do so with less than 9% of its arable land and only 6% of its water resources, according to Reuters. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall and more frequent droughts and floods are battering Chinese agriculture, jeopardizing decades of food self-sufficiency policy. Wheat, rice and maize – the cornerstones of the country’s food system – are increasingly exposed to climate shocks.

“Climate change poses a severe threat to China’s food security,” former agriculture minister Tang Renjian said in early 2024, noting that extreme weather events have already reduced yields in several major grain-producing provinces. In the same year, the Ministry of Agriculture warned that “unusual changes in temperature and rainfall can slow down the growth of food crops, resulting in a drop in the average yield of grains.”

China’s agricultural sector is uniquely sensitive to climate change. The northern plains, home to a majority of China’s wheat production, are becoming hotter and drier. The southern provinces, which grow much of the country’s rice, are increasingly prone to flooding. According to the China Meteorological Administration, average national temperatures have risen faster than the global average, climbing more than 1.6°C since the 1950s.

The country has managed to preserve about 95% self-sufficiency in wheat for nearly two decades. But climate stress is forcing new strategies to the fore, both in agricultural practices and in international trade.

To address growing risks, the Chinese government has embedded climate adaptation directly into its agricultural-reform agenda. The country’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021 to 2025) prioritizes investments in water-saving irrigation, climate-resilient seeds, precision farming technologies and early-warning systems for extreme weather.

In addition to bolstering domestic yields, China is hedging its food security by deepening trade relations along its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) network, especially with countries in the Global South, to secure grain from a broader base of suppliers.

China seeks to limit agricultural imports

Wheat has historical and cultural roots that run deep in China, and the stakes for maintaining supply stability are high. The country consumes more than 130 million tonnes of wheat annually, largely to produce staples like noodles, dumplings and steamed buns. While the bulk of demand is met by domestic harvests, higher-end processed foods increasingly rely on imported wheat with specific quality characteristics – particularly from countries like Canada, France, Australia and the United States.

But as Trump’s universal tariffs strategy demonstrates, trade relations are anything but predictable.

In 2019, Canada was China’s leading supplier of imported wheat. By mid-2020, that changed dramatically. The diplomatic row over the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou led to a sharp drop in Canadian wheat purchases, down from more than 50% of imports in 2019 to just 15% by mid-2020. The influential online Chinese media portal Sohu blamed “wrong decisions” made by Canada for the souring of trade ties.

Australia, once a beneficiary of Canada’s fall from favour, has seen its own wheat exports face heightened inspections in China. While this hasn’t triggered a formal ban, it’s a sign that bilateral tensions can quickly spill into food trade.

These shifting trade patterns highlight a deeper strategic calculus. China wants to limit its dependence on Western suppliers for food staples, just as it has for semiconductors and energy. Expanding partnerships with emerging economies such as Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Brazil are a cornerstone of this plan.

Challenges for China’s agricultural productivity

Meanwhile, internal agricultural productivity is under stress. In a 2022 report, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences estimated that climate-related yield reductions could amount to 5% to 10% by 2030 under current warming trends. One study estimated that China’s key cereal crops could lose around 2.6% yield per degree Celsius of warming, with more vulnerable regions facing up to 12.7% loss per degree across wheat, rice and maize. Another study with different crop modelling – in this case without carbon dioxide fertilization – projected up to 37% yield decline within decades if warming continues unchecked.

For a country where 1.4 billion people depend on food-system stability, even small disruptions can cascade.

China isn’t short on ambition to use technology to solve big problems. It leads the world in the development of hybrid rice varieties and is rapidly digitizing its farm sector with satellite monitoring, AI-driven pest prediction and big-data analytics for yield forecasting. Other innovations come from its “Smart Agriculture” program, which integrates advanced tools such as sensors, drones and blockchain technology into the food supply chain.

Historical memory still shapes China’s focus on food security, especially the famine of 1958 to 1962 that led to the deaths of an estimated 15 to 55 million people – one of the deadliest disasters of the 20th century. While today’s threats are different, the possibility of disruption carries echoes of the past. The Chinese government’s commitment to self-reliance now finds new motivation in the science of climate change.

Gordon Feller is a writer based in San Francisco.

The post Climate change is battering China’s agriculture sector. Here’s how it is responding. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“We’re doubling” says Vandenhurk, speaking with Corporate Knights. “We’ll double over last year, and then we’re on a path where we can see ourselves doubling again next year.”

Three Farmers has been scaling up business and production since settling into a new facility last year, and in January, the company successfully closed a new round of equity financing. Vandenhurk, who runs Three Farmers with her sister, Elysia, says she’s “raised probably five rounds of capital” since the company launched 16 years ago. Every round has looked different, she says. Yet one thing hasn’t changed: “Raising money is always really hard.”

With continued success, the Three Farmers brand could become a flag-bearer for this country’s pulse-based protein sector. And it’s part of bigger trend: a surge in innovators and entrepreneurs seeking opportunities in Canada’s food-industry value chain, from small-scale farmers to globally minded biotech ingredient makers. And like Vandenhurk, they are also chasing investment capital or project financing, though not always with as much success.

We’re waving the flag about the incredible opportunity in agriculture and food to attract other investors.

– Graeme Millen, vice president of strategic finance and business development at Farm Credit Canada

“Raising capital in the food- and agri-tech sector remains challenging. We hear from many peers that they are facing pushback on valuations and investor hesitancy due to economic uncertainty,” says Quinn Cavanagh, the Halifax-based president and founder of RFINE Biomass Solutions.

RFINE is pilot testing a technology to sustainably upcycle used coffee grounds into flavouring and other food-grade ingredients. “Capital access has not been a hurdle for us,” Cavanagh says, crediting his company’s “diversified” business model and relationship building with stakeholders. “[But] from what we learn in industry discussions, our experience is not typical.”

Converging trends boost domestic food production

The headwinds haven’t slowed the rush of new companies looking for funding. Federal crown corporation Farm Credit Canada has long been one of the country’s largest for-profit lenders to the agriculture and agribusiness sectors. Graeme Millen, FCC’s vice president of strategic finance and business development, says FCC’s tracking of new market entrants in food and agribusiness has shown a 10% to 15% increase in recent years compared to pre-COVID.

“Food supply, access to food, production of food, connection between food as medicine, health, food security: all of these themes are core to the public narrative,” Millen says. “And I think that’s embodying itself in entrepreneurs being increasingly interested in the sector.”

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But over this same span, FCC also recognized that they face a growing struggle to raise funds. “There haven’t been established pools of capital to support entrepreneurs [in this space],” Millen says. Last year, it officially stepped into the breach, launching FCC Capital to provide companies with high-risk debt, equity and strategic value investments while also investing in larger ag-oriented funds. In its first year, it closed nine direct investment deals totalling $170 million, including joining Three Farmers’ latest financing as a strategic partner.

In May, FCC Capital staked out its grand ambitions, announcing a commitment to invest $2 billion by 2030. “We’re making it easier and more compelling for entrepreneurs to participate in this market,” Millen says. “And, really importantly, we’re waving the flag about the incredible opportunity in agriculture and food to attract other investors.”

A real lack of scaling capital

To put $2 billion in new, dedicated funding over five years in perspective, it’s roughly double the amount ($972 million) the entire venture capital industry invested in Canada’s agribusiness sector from 2020 through 2024.

Canada has many obvious strengths competing against other countries in agribusiness and food- and agritech, including geography, research and development, sector expertise and established markets. But the comparative strength of our venture-capital support structure isn’t one of them.

According to a first-ever report on Canada’s food-tech ecosystem, published in February by the Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN), based in Guelph, Ontario, venture capital has backed only 40% of food-tech rounds in Canada in the last four years, compared to 60% in the United States and the United Kingdom.

From a financing request standpoint, this is probably the most demand that we’ve seen in the history of the fund.

– Jusin Abbiss, executive director of Fair Finance Fund

Dana McCauley, CEO of CFIN, says a further breakdown of the data reveals a critical weak spot. “The research that we did shows that at the seed and Series A level [financings], we’re pretty competitive and pretty much on par with the U.S. and U.K. But once . . . you need to grow these companies, ag tech and food tech are just like, whoosh, way down against those other countries. So we have a real lack of scaling capital.”

CFIN’s mission is to showcase Canada’s potential as a creator of food-tech solutions and to improve our overall food sector through food-tech adoption. A national industry association, established in 2021, it funds collaborative projects, not companies. Supporting RFINE’s pilot with coffee retailers is one such example. “We fund a project between a technology adopter – a needful party – and the food-tech innovator,” McCauley says. “Those two, they get the first benefit. But the idea is that it will be transferable to other companies.”

Big demand for small-scale producers

Demand for capital isn’t restricted to those aspiring to build national or global competitors, however. Small-scale growers and food producers, many linked to growing interest in locally grown food and food security, are also fuelling the trend. And a mounting number are knocking on Justin Abbiss’s door.

Abbiss is executive director of Fair Finance Fund, an Ontario-based, non-profit social finance lender that supports small-scale producers who also have environmental and social initiatives built into their business plans. Much of its capital is raised through the sale of community bonds. “Big banks will support medium- to large-size operations,” he says. “But it’s really hard for newcomer populations to get financing, and then even harder when it comes to small-scale food producers.”

Since the fund launched in 2019, it has helped more than 70 clients. Approximately half of its portfolio is small-scale farms, including some on urban allotments; the rest is a combination of food producers, wineries, breweries, cafés and coffee roasters. “We have a really strong demand right now,” Abbiss says. “From a financing request standpoint, this is probably the most demand that we’ve seen in the history of the fund.”

According to Abbiss, all levels of government must offer more grant funding and other concessionary capital to meet the growing demand, particularly in light of tensions in Canada’s trade relationship with the United States. “Food entrepreneurs are seeking support for made-in-Canada solutions, to either expand their business to meet customer demands or launch new product lines.”

While shortfalls persist, he says the current trends are encouraging. “I’m optimistic. I’m seeing growing demand for supporting Canadian-grown or -produced food.”

Identifying demand is the easy part. The true test will be matching it with enough capital.

Brian Banks is a writer and editor whose work focuses mainly on science and nature, conservation, climate and sustainability.

The post Canadian food start-ups are surging and funders are racing to keep up appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“There’s no longer any question that this works,” says Ivey Business School professor Joshua Pearce, who is also the founder of the not-for-profit Agrivoltaics Canada. The portmanteau reflects the desire to unite two constituencies – farmers and solar panel companies – whose interests often pit them against one another.

Farming sunshine is like farming wheat, corn or barley: it’s easiest on flat expanses of treeless land with easy access to roads and infrastructure. For this reason, solar developers eyeing farmland have met with resistance. Ontario, for example, passed legislation in 2024 prohibiting prime agricultural tracts from being planted over with solar panels.

Agrivoltaics, however, is moving past proof-of-concept and into established practice. In 2024, Global Market Insights valued the industry worldwide at US$6.3 billion, with a growth forecast of 5.8% over the next eight years. Although solar power remains a small proportion of the world’s electricity production (just 4% globally, and about 5% in the United States), agrivoltaic farms now account for about 1% of the solar power generated in the country.

The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory lists 599 agrivoltaic sites totalling 65,756 acres from coast to coast, generating a total of 10,473 megawatts of energy (enough to power two million households). For context, grazing land takes up about 659 million acres in the United States. Studies suggest that devoting even 1% of current farmland to agrivoltaics could provide 20% of the energy needs of the United States.

Big energy companies are getting into the game. Oak Run, a giant 6,000-acre project of which 2,000 will be agrivoltaic (and rising to 4,000 within eight years), was recently approved for development in Ohio’s Madison County and is one of the first to try agrivoltaics at utility scale. The developer, Savion, is a subsidiary of Shell. One of the company’s neighbouring projects, Madison Fields Solar Project, has been operational since 2023, and Amazon buys all 180 megawatts the farm produces.

Both Madison Fields and Oak Run will graze sheep, and Oak Run will also grow hay. Livestock and crops cohabiting with solar panels require less water, because of the shade and moisture retention the arrays provide.

While agrivoltaics have been shown to be cost effective and scaleable for sheep grazing and beekeeping, researchers have also been experimenting with every other crop under the sun. A key finding is that crop yields or quality can go up when photovoltaic arrays are used as companion “planting.”

Promising results in wine country have emerged with La Svolta, a vintner in Italy’s Puglia region producing both primitivo, a red grape characteristic of southern Italy, and goldtraminer, a white grape usually only viable in cooler mountainside regions. Grapes are prone to sunburn; the shade of solar panels protects the delicate fruits from damage, and, depending how much sun exposure is desirable, an array can be tilted at different angles like the bill of a baseball cap.

La Svolta’s wine has even been reported to taste better. In 2024, the Puglia region experienced scorching temperatures, and the solar panels slowed ripening and produced grapes with a more balanced sugar content compared with those from nearby vineyards that were fully exposed to the beating sun.

While it can still be more profitable for farmers to simply lease their land to solar developers, not all farmers are sanguine about the possible effects on soil, or the hazardous waste cleanup that may mark the end of the lease.

“What message do you have for another farmer who might be considering leasing their land in this situation?” a reporter from the Ohio newspaper The Columbus Dispatch asked in a video taken with a farmer who had gone into business with a solar company. “Don’t do it,” Tom Ebenhack responded. “The money is not bad at all, but what’s going to happen to the land? I seriously worry that it’ll never be the same.”

One of the promises of agrivoltaics is guarding against the loss of soil quality on solar farms. Solar alone sometimes means stripping topsoil, but combining solar with crops can maintain and even enhance the presence of elements like nitrogen, crucial for microbial health. China is the global leader in solar, and the Junma Solar Power Station in the Kubuqi Desert (winner of the 2019 Guinness World Record for largest solar panel installation in the shape of a horse) seems to be having an anti-desertification effect. By reducing evaporation and slowing ground winds, solar arrays can protect vegetation or restore it to vulnerable soil.

And in a warming climate, we will need all the help we can get in protecting soil and food systems from heat exhaustion. “This is kind of a long-term food-security issue,” Pearce says. “Not just energy. It’s actually more about food and agriculture.”

The post Farmers and solar panels are finally uniting appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“It damages their teeth, and eventually the cows or goats die,” Kitol says. The thickets also provide cover for predators like wild dogs and hyenas. “They hide there because it is so thick that you can’t see them. At night, when the goats or sheep walk around, they are attacked and killed.”

Last year, experts with Penn State’s PlantVillage project, which helps smallholder farmers adapt to climate change, arrived to train Kitol and others in the area on a clever way to turn mathenge from a problem into an asset. Workers gather up those troublesome weeds – biomass – and convert them into biochar, concentrated carbon that they “charge” with nutrients by mixing it with manure. Farmers then apply the mixture to their fields, sometimes planting grass that provides fodder for livestock. Kitol says that the biochar helps his soils retain water and improves their fertility, leading to higher yields.

Well beyond Kenya, biochar is having a moment: the worldwide market was worth $600 million last year and could rise to more than $3 billion next year. Anywhere people are producing waste biomass – corn stalks, weeds, dead trees – they’re also producing a powerful tool for sequestering carbon and improving soils. And if farmers can prove how much biomass they’re turning into biochar, they can prove how much carbon they’re putting back into the ground. Through a group like PlantVillage, a company can then pay those farmers to offset its carbon emissions. (Biochar in general accounts for more than 90% of durable carbon credits that have already been delivered worldwide.)

So with biochar, farmers are getting a new source of income and a way to better retain rainwater and boost yields. They’re helping mitigate climate change while adapting to its ravages. “Helping to solve an invasive species and land degradation problem, and produce biochar at the same time, is amazing,” says James Gerber, a data scientist who studies agriculture at the non-profit climate group Project Drawdown. “Anything that gets money into the hands of smallholder farmers in Africa is probably just a good thing. But if it’s part of a functional, verifiable carbon-credit program, even better.”

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The trick to making biochar is pyrolysis. As people have known for millennia, if you expose biomass to very high temperatures but in a low-oxygen environment, it doesn’t combust into all-consuming flames; it turns into a kind of charcoal. Companies can do this with big industrial chambers, producing the biochar you can buy for your garden. Smallholder farmers can do it by digging a pit and adding biomass in layers, which restricts oxygen to the smouldering fire at the bottom. A simple kind of metal kiln does the same.

Whatever the method, the plant material isn’t fully combusting and billowing smoke. With biochar, you end up with concentrated, solid carbon. “It’s essentially coal,” says David Hughes, the founder of PlantVillage. “It goes into the ground and it doesn’t break down, and this is because of the temperature you’ve exposed it to.”

Because biochar is so spongy, it helps the soil retain more water – an especially welcome trait given the worsening droughts in Africa and elsewhere. But that sponginess also demands special care when applying to a field. “If you just put biochar into the soil, it will suck up all the nutrients in there, and your plants will do worse,” Hughes says. “So you have to charge it with nutrients. You can do that with compost or NPK – nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium – blends.”

Traditionally, a farmer might burn piles of waste like corn stalks, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. If different farms across a landscape are doing this after a harvest, air quality plummets and imperils human health.

So for a group like Biochar Life, which provides carbon-removal offsets for biochar, the first step is to get a farmer to stop processing their waste biomass the old way. “We need to prove that the farmer didn’t burn it or just leave it there and let the biomass decompose and create methane,” says Aom Kwanpiromtara Suksri, the co-founder and global head of development and compliance at Biochar Life, which has offices in Asia and Africa and has formed a partnership with PlantVillage.

To be sure, carbon offset systems have been plagued with problems. One is a perverse incentive to deforest an area and plant trees again, selling those credits to companies. Where there’s been deforestation from logging or agriculture, planting a bunch of a single species of tree doesn’t create a proper ecosystem. There’s no boost to biodiversity, and tree plantations don’t sequester nearly as much carbon as a real forest.

By contrast, Biochar Life says that its offset system is easier to quantify and that it’s so far distributed more than $300,000 to farmers, and $265,000 to local teams that verify the credits. “We can’t generate a credit until we’ve proven that we’ve generated biochar, and that biochar has been charged and put back into the ground,” says Matt Rickard, Biochar Life’s chief operating officer.

Then there’s an issue of permanence: if farmers plant a bunch of trees and a drought strikes, and those trees all wilt or catch on fire, their carbon is going right back into the atmosphere. Scientists are still working out how long biochar can last in different kinds of soils and climates, but indications are that it can last thousands or possibly millions of years. And compared to waiting for a tree to grow and capture carbon, adding biochar to soil sequesters the carbon in the ground immediately.

“Biochar, it’s kind of chemically locked in – it’d be very difficult to reverse that,” Gerber says. “For me, that is the most important reason that biochar has greater potential for carbon credits.”

And unlike planting a new forest and walking away, farmers can keep producing biomass, charging it with nutrients, and adding it to the soil year after year. At the very least, a smallholder farmer like Kitol is getting a better handle on an invasive species while boosting yields and preparing his soils for the drier times ahead. “I see the future of biochar as promising,” he says. “Biochar will be widely used as more people recognize its benefits.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org. 

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In 2015, the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a “Probable Human Carcinogen.” This link to cancer was reinforced in January 2024 when a jury in the United States concluded Roundup caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and ordered chemical company Bayer — which purchased Roundup producer Monsanto in 2018 — to pay US$2.5 billion in damages. Bayer has announced it intends to appeal the verdict.

Scientists have also raised concerns about the environmental harms of long-term glyphosate application. To name just a few, glyphosate threatens honey bee populations and has been found to kill birds, fish and soil microorganisms, all of which are crucial for ecosystem health.

In the face of these concerns, some governments have restricted or even banned glyphosate application, though no such ban is in place in Canada.

Banning glyphosate is an essential step in protecting the health of humans and our ecosystems. Until a full ban is achieved, however, the pioneering work of farmers in Mexico shows how agroecological techniques can replace these chemical interventions.

Toxic exports

In April 2024, Mexico was set to become the largest jurisdiction to enact a total ban on glyphosate. However, just before the ban came into effect the government announced a pause.

Officials cited concerns about a lack of viable substitutes, but critics believe the waffling has more to do with intense lobbying by agro-industry, including heavy pressure from the U.S. – the main exporter of glyphosate to Mexico.

Monsanto, the producer of glyphosate which was purchased by Bayer in 2018, has been shown to have influenced academic research to downplay the health risks of its valuable product.

In the northern region of Mexico’s Veracruz State, we are working with small-scale citrus farmers to help them transition away from glyphosate (and other agrochemicals) by supporting adoption of agroecological farming methods.

Our research shows that agroecological farming is a viable alternative and, with a little bit of support, large numbers of farmers are keen to make change.

Scaling up agroecology

The farmers we work with are abandoning glyphosate one hectare at a time. With funding from Mexico’s National Research Council, we have built a team of 38 agroecology technicians and community leaders who are helping farmers develop the knowledge and skills they need to replace chemicals with other practices.

Our team supports farmers to plant legume cover crops to crowd out weeds, and we have provided thousands of weed whackers to make manual weed control quicker and easier. We are also teaching farmers to make their own products from inexpensive local materials, like agua de vidrio — a solution of ash and lime — that provides nutrients to plants and helps control pests and diseases.

Part of what makes this work successful is that we are leading by example, using the Gómez family citrus farm as a living classroom. That farm used to produce conventional oranges. Then, in 2004, the family transitioned one hectare to organic production as an experiment. By 2012, the entire 16-hectare farm had transitioned away from agrochemical use and was certified as organic.

Since then, the Gómez’s have implemented a wide range of agroecological practices on the farm. They also created an outdoor classroom space and an area dedicated to producing compost and other ecological inputs.

In 2018 almost 1,000 people visited the farm — dubbed Huerta Madre, or Mother Farm by locals — to learn about agroecological methods. Thanks to government funding, in 2023 the number of visitors jumped to more than 2,500. The funding also enabled researchers and technicians to connect with more than 10,000 farmers across the region, sharing information about the potential dangers of glyphosate and the viability of agroecological alternatives.

Of those 10,000 farmers, 3,600 are now actively working with our team to stop using glyphosate and implement agroecological alternatives.

Reaching this number of farmers has been possible in part because the current Mexican government has made it clear that agroecology is a priority. While agroecological farming has long been championed by “peasant organizations” and social movements, political support of the kind happening in Mexico today has been harder to come by (although there are some notable exceptions).

Presidential decree

A cornerstone of Mexico’s pro-agroecology policy was a 2020 decree by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that the country would eliminate glyphosate use by January 2024. The decree was immediately criticized by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). It was also contested — including via legal challenges — by Mexican agri-business interests, primarily in the country’s north where large-scale conventional farming dominates the landscape.

In February 2023, Obrador postponed the date of the ban to April 1, 2024. Then, just days before it was to come into effect, the government announced the ban would be paused. Advocates of the ban reacted with formal protest letters, media interviews and social media posts. They highlighted how research and practice has demonstrated the viability of an array of glyphosate alternatives, including the scaling up of agroecology amongst citrus farmers in Veracruz.

To date, the ban remains on hold, and it is unclear what incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum will do about it.

Will we ever see a glyphosate ban?

Mexico is not the first country to waver on a glyphosate ban. Sri Lanka imposed a ban in 2015 but lifted it by 2022. In the European Union, several member states have been vocal in their desire for a ban, but glyphosate was re-authorized for a ten-year period in December 2023.

While the reasons may be complex, it is clear that stemming the tide of glyphosate is challenging, even when there is significant political will. This is likely at least in part due to the significant lobbying power of companies like Bayer.

Even if a formal ban remains out of reach, Obrador’s decree created an important opening for agroecology in Mexico. While some initiatives have existed for decades, especially in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, government support has sparked development of many more.

The presidential decree also enabled unusually high levels of investment into agroecological research and development. Coupled with other pro-agroecology policies, the decree has created momentum for scaling up agroecology across the country. The thousands of citrus farmers who are finding success without glyphosate in Veracruz can attest to that.

Erin Nelson is associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology, University of Guelph, Laura Gomez Tovar is researcher on agroecology, organic agriculture and local markets, University of Chapingo, and Manuel Ángel Gómez Cruz is professor of agricultural policy, agroecology and agricultural economics, University of Chapingo.

The authors’ research was conducted with the support of research assistant Luis Enrique Ortiz-Martínez.

This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original story here. 

The post What we can learn from Mexico’s struggle to ban a potent pesticide appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“The majority of them sent me emails to say, ‘Can I pay you maybe 50 bucks this week and 50 bucks that week because I can’t afford it, but there’s no other place I can learn these skills,’” Sundance says. She started feeling uncomfortable about charging for the program. “A lot of these people grew up in the same lifestyles as me where you didn’t have a lot of money laying around,” she says. Sundance, 27, didn’t come from a farming background but experienced food insecurity firsthand growing up in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. She fell into the agriculture industry after doing some farm work on her travels through Cuba, where she learned about the concept of food justice. Still, finding an entry point into the industry proved difficult initially as many available training or educational programs were either unpaid internships or expensive farm schools. 

Now Sundance Commons, the non-profit arm of her for-profit Sundance Harvest farm, has a new-farmer training program to teach young people, at no charge, practical skills about farming and how to start their own farms.

Sundance and her partner Jon Gagnon founded the non-profit in 2019 and originally called it Growing in the Margins. They have offered free support for new farmers in the past through their incubation program and workshops while also providing tools and resources. However, the new-farmer training is the first comprehensive educational program at Sundance Commons, providing participants a wide array of tactile skills and knowledge over 15 weeks. 

Thanks to new grants that Sundance Commons secured, the non-profit is able to have two cohorts of 20 participants each year for 2024 and 2025. So far, the applications are all from people 29 and younger, more than 50% are Black, and 95% are women or femme-identifying people.

Sundance Commons began as an 800-square-foot plot of land at Downsview Park and now operates out of four farm locations all within an hour of Toronto. The Rexdale property, located in a diverse, low-income neighbourhood, is where the majority of the new-farmer training program happens, since, unlike most farms, it’s on Toronto’s transit line. “When I started farming, I didn’t drive, and having a TTC-accessible location that has a working greenhouse, that has all the bells and whistles, that has a market garden, allows these amazing youth to really see how things work and to actually see it close by,” Sundance says. 

Participants learn how to operate tractors, prepare beds, compost, keep bees, raise poultry, operate irrigation systems, and grow a variety of vegetables and cover crops. The program also provides mentoring and checking in about participants’ future goals in the agriculture industry, giving them the technical skills needed to either get jobs in the industry or start their own farm businesses. 

When I started farming, I didn’t drive, and having a TTC-accessible location that has a working greenhouse, that has all the bells and whistles, that has a market garden, allows these amazing youth to really see how things work and to actually see it close by.

-Cheyenne Sundance

A critical element of the new-farmer training is that at the end of the program, participants can potentially gain access to land to kick-start their own operations. “That’s part of seeing it in a multi-year phase because farming is not like other kinds of industries – you kind of need time,” says Gagnon, land access coordinator at Sundance Commons. “It might take even more than a season to get a business set up; it might take three to five years.” 

Sundance and Gagnon explain that the barriers to entry are high for young people interested in farming in Ontario. The options to learn are limited to expensive farm-school courses that could cost thousands of dollars or unpaid internships on farms. 

Traditionally, farmland and knowledge has been passed down over generations. All that has changed. Today, many young people interested in farming don’t have that access to generational knowledge of farming or family land. And as a result, there are very few pathways to crack into that world and find a network of people who can help. 

According to a 2023 RBC report, 40% of Canadian farmers plan to retire in the next 10 years, and more than half of them have no plan for their land post-retirement. That means farms will face a dire labour shortage in the next decade without a younger generation of farmers ready to flow into the industry. Today, only 4.1% of Canada’s farm operators identify as racialized or Indigenous. The inaccessibility of the agricultural industry poses a huge gap for its future. “So we kind of build the connections [for young farmers] to basically try to fix that gap that has kept it inaccessible for so many,” Gagnon says. That’s a big part of why the training program “works so symbiotically with the land access,” he adds.

For Selina-Rachel Mendez, access to a support network at Sundance Commons was the real game-changer to build her beekeeping and honey business, The Drip. When she decided to pursue beekeeping, Mendez found that many workshops were dedicated to people who were just curious about it or wanted to keep bees as a hobby, and so touched only on surface-level knowledge.

 “I needed someone to really sit me down and be like, ‘Hey, here is how you need to move within a hive, here is what you need to look for to make sure that your hive is healthy, here is what you need to do throughout the course of the season to make sure that you are being sustainable and ethical with your beekeeping,” she says. 

Through Sundance, Mendez was also able to get free land access for her hives in exchange for a portion of the honey she produced.

 “When you have those connections and you have that network and that support system, it really helps you stay afloat,” she says. She now also teaches beekeeping workshops and will be doing sessions for the new-farmer training program at Sundance Commons. 

For Gagnon, training marginalized youth interested in agriculture is part of a bigger picture of ensuring that young farm workers have equity and agency, he explains. “They are the most important part of the food system.”

Neha Chollangi is a freelance journalist based in Montreal, where she covers grassroots social movements and environmental activism. 

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Forests

Livestock farming is responsible for almost 40% of global deforestation, mostly in the vital rainforests of the Amazon.

Risks

Increased climate-related natural disasters could lower the profits of the 40 largest livestock companies by almost US$24 billion in 2030 from 2020 levels.

Subsidies

Governments spend billions per year in subsidies for animal agriculture to help keep the cost of meat low: $38 billion in the U.S. and $1.7 billion in Canada.

Climate change and pollution

Animal farming is responsible for 12% to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions (including methane), making it a major contributor to the climate crisis. Factory farms and feedlots emit almost 170 different air-polluting gases. In the U.S., these facilities collectively produce up to 1.37 billion tons of manure each year, which often runs off into waterways.

Animal lives

Around 202 million chickens, 3.8 million pigs and 900,000 cows are slaughtered every day around the world for food.

Antiobiotic resistance and disease

An estimated 66% of the world’s antibiotics are used on livestock. This is contributing to the global rise of antibiotic resistance, which could kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

Meat-heavy diets are also linked to higher rates of cancer and heart disease. If upper-middle-income countries reduced their consumption of red and processed meat by 14%, it could prevent 65,000 deaths per year.

Sources: UNEP, FAO, FAIRR, AIER, Business for Nature, Our World in Data, As You Sow, WHO, Sierra Club, ASPCA.

This story is part of our Spring 2024 Plant Power package.

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Specifically, there is a real concern among some in the party and the general public that industrial solar will displace farming and raise food prices as well as create end-of-life problems with potentially abandoned equipment.

Luckily, we can have our cake and eat it too, with a new concept of agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is the simultaneous placement of food crops and solar photovoltaic systems that produce electricity directly from sunlight — while also producing a beneficial micro climate. Covering crops with solar panels may not seem intuitive, however, dozens of studies from all over the world have shown that many crop yields increase when they are partially shaded from solar panels.

This is good news for everyone, but especially for Alberta’s ruling Conservatives, as it provides a seemingly simple solution to a potentially complicated land-use debate between agriculture and energy generation within the province.

Alberta and energy

Alberta’s energy portfolio is changing rapidly. Low-cost solar energy is now growing so fast as to be a “gold rush” in Alberta.

In fact, much to Ontario’s shame, Alberta has taken on the leadership role in solar development in Canada, generating millions of solar dollars and creating thousands of solar jobs for Alberta’s energy workers.

Solar companies have grown so fast precisely because there is profit in offsetting costly fossil-fuel electricity. However, many in Alberta are worried that this new boom will lead to higher food costs, scarred landscapes and a repeat of costs from cleaning up after the oil and gas industry.

This particular land-use conflict between solar and agriculture has been a concern for solar researchers like myself for some time. However, our research in the United States has shown that agrivoltaics provide higher economic productivity, energy and food yields. So much so that the U.S. Department of Energy is now investing millions of dollars to ensure America’s dominance in the field.

One of the studies in the U.S., for example, observed pepper production shoot up by more than 200 per cent while other crops like wheat in Germany were more reserved with a few per cent increase — but they still produced more wheat.

Not surprisingly, agrivoltaics is slated to grow to a $9.3 billion market by 2031.

Agrivoltaics in Canada

Agrivoltaics is happening right here in Canada already (mostly with sheep grazing between panels on marginal land). Last year, we held the first agrivoltaics conference anywhere in North America at the Ivey Business School.

The trade group made up of farmers and solar companies called Agrivoltaics Canada has formed because agrivoltaic farming can help meet Canada’s food and energy needs all the while getting rid of our fossil fuel reliance and greenhouse gas emissions (and the associated emissions liabilities).

Agrivoltaics will allow Alberta’s farmers to keep farming, make more money, drop energy costs, and help protect the environment for all of our children. To take advantage of all the profit that agrivoltaics represents for the province, our team completed a study that showed the changes to Alberta’s regulations would actually need to be relatively modest.

The simple trick is to install solar systems that enable conventional farming, so farmers do not need to change anything. By spacing solar rows out far enough that combines/tractors can drive between them using vertical racks or tracker systems, agrivoltaics are out of the way when the farmer needs to farm. We did a study that looked specifically at Alberta’s agrivoltaic potential, which was second only to Saskatchewan in Canada.

Moving forward together

Agrivoltaics really has broad appeal. Farmers love it as it increases yields and provides steady incomes and so do solar developers and environmentalists. Even most Americans support solar development when agrivoltaics protects farm jobs. It is thus not surprising that agrivoltaics is exploding on the world market.

Eighty-nine per cent of Alberta’s electricity came from fossil fuels, yet we published an article this year that showed that agrivoltaics on just one per cent of the current agricultural land would eliminate the carbon emissions entirely. Less than one per cent of Alberta’s farm land dedicated to agrivoltaics, cuts all harmful emissions from Alberta’s electricity sector while making more food.

This is a win-win for the farmers, and consumers alike. As Alberta’s Conservatives are now able to lift the renewable energy ban knowing that the environment and the food system will be protected, they should ensure that large-scale solar in the province is encouraged to be agrivoltaic. Then all of us, regardless of party, can enjoy the conserved beauty of nature, lower-cost electricity and more food produced per acre. Whether or not this will result in lower costs at the grocery store checkout is a question yet to be answered — but we can hope.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and Professor, Western University.

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If it weren’t for the plastic tags in the cows’ ears and the overhead drone of occasional passenger planes, we could be 600 years ago. That’s about the last time storks nested wild in England, Isabella Tree told me. A writer, farmer and owner of the Knepp Estate, Tree strides across this magnificently disheveled landscape crafted by herself and her husband, Charles Burrell.

Rewind 23 years and this place was a debt-ridden, subsidy-dependent farm, its already poor soil made worse by intensive agricultural practices. There were certainly no storks.
Old English longhorns resting under an oak tree at Knepp.
Old English longhorns resting under an oak tree at Knepp. Disturbance from large herbivores has restored this landscape by reactivating natural processes that foster healthy ecology. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

But Tree and Burrell have helped nature reestablish its course at Knepp since then, in a process known as rewilding. Reintroducing white storks (Ciconia ciconia) is merely the icing on the cake. Fencing has been ripped down, large mammals introduced, drains smashed, even a river rewiggled. Reintroduced beavers have masterminded a whole new wetland.

Now the place is thriving. Harvest mice (Micromys minutus), hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) and hobby falcons (Falco subbuteo), dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius), dung beetles and dingy skipper butterflies (Erynnis tages), among many others, have established themselves here. Surveys have found an astounding 1,800 invertebrates species (almost 10% of the U.K.’s known vertebrates).

Humans have increased too: When a stork couple at Knepp became the first since 1416 to naturally breed in the U.K. during one of the 2020 lockdowns, the BBC show Springwatch featured it. The day lockdown was lifted, more than a thousand people rushed to see this marvel, Tree told me.

“Storks are this kind of symbol of hope and rebirth and regeneration. And I think rewilding is giving a lot of people hope, and the storks are such an amazing emblem for that,” lead ecologist at Knepp, Penny Green, told Mongabay.

“Every day I feel like what we’re learning here is actually making a huge difference. It really does you know, we get land owners, whether smallholders or large landowners coming here on workshops learning about how they can make a difference on their land — whether it’s regenerative farming, nature friendly farming or rewilding – whatever you can take away from this that might suit what your doing.” Penny Green, Lead Ecologist and Safari Manager at Knepp told Mongabay. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

Rewilding Knepp

Tree and Burrell inherited the Knepp estate in 1987. They spent 13 years battling the farm’s heavy clay landscape, which they said is “like concrete in summer and the rest of the year unfathomable porridge.”

They made money, dependent on subsidies, just twice in all that time. Something had to give.

In 2000, they sold off their dairy herds and machinery to offset huge debts and contracted out their arable land. But that was also the year Grazing Ecology and Forest History, by Dutch conservationist Frans Vera, was translated into English. The book so inspired Burrell and Tree that they went to see Vera and the landscape he stewarded in Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands.

The following year, armed with a Countryside Stewardship government grant, they withdrew their first fields from intensive agriculture.

“We weren’t brave enough just to say, ‘let’s rewild the whole thing,’” Tree said. It took six years to bring it all out of production, worst first.

By 2022, a green paper from the U.K. government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was hailing Knepp as a “huge success,” showing how restoring natural dynamics can quickly lead to nature recovery.

The estate’s income stream now includes renting out converted farm buildings as offices and event spaces, ecotourism safaris and accommodation, organic meat and their ongoing Countryside Stewardship grant.

“[The grant] is important to us and we hope that it will continue,” Tree said. “But if it doesn’t, we feel that we are actually now a self-sufficient business, which we never would have been if we’d have had subsidies removed from us when we were farming.”

On top of all the nature-hungry tourists, the farm now provides jobs to more than 50 workers.

The depths of success

The success of Knepp runs deep, quite literally. Today, the soil alone is storing carbon at least as fast as models predict 25-year-old broadleaf woodlands do, according to research using new technology from the soil sampling company Agricarbon.

The U.K. government-funded research found that the rewilded soil absorbed up to 4.8 tons more carbon dioxide per hectare per year than soils in a conventional farm close by.

These data are “absolutely crucial for underpinning any kind of incentive or investment in the restoration of carbon to the soil,” Annie Leeson, the CEO of Agricarbon, said. “You can’t go to investors and say, ‘I want you to invest in 0.2% increase in soil carbon.’ You have to say, ‘I want you to invest in something that’s going to deliver 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000 tons of carbon removal.’”

Knepp’s soil data is the first to show that rewilding a farm can lead to statistically robust carbon sequestration in soils.

“It’s wonderful to have projects like Knepp producing the credible evidence that can help to convince policymakers that this is a viable way forward,” Global Rewilding Alliance director Alister Scott said. “In order for rewilding to grow rapidly and scale globally, we clearly need to enable the flow of finance into a myriad of rewilding projects.”

Tree hopes the research will help secure a seat for rewilding at the carbon market table, as so far there are no investment products or market mechanisms that support rewilding.

“If you don’t have the [carbon] measurements you just cannot build any of that structure,” Leeson said. But Agricarbon’s technology and new findings unlock “a level of integrity that allows soil carbon to become part of carbon accounting.”

Buying carbon credits allows companies to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions. But researchers have found the true quantity of carbon saved through regulated carbon credits is questionable. Carbon credit investment is going through an “ethical shakedown,” said Ivan de Klee, the head of natural capital at the U.K.-based nature recovery investment company Nattergal. There is a “cry for integrity” for real data, rather than modeling-based carbon offset options, de Klee added.

Nattergal is using Agricarbon’s analysis of how much carbon is stored in Knepp’s soil, together with field analysis of how much carbon is stored in the scrubland’s woody biomass, to develop a more comprehensive, nature restoration investment tool.

“It’s a set of guidelines for people to use to make sure that what they’re selling is real, and that they’re maximizing the potential of rewilding systems,” de Klee said.

Birds and butterflies

One of Knepp’s achievements is its sheer diversity of life. Biodiversity, put simply, can clean our water, protect us from flooding and drought, increase how much food we grow and regulate our climate.

To rewild depleted areas, you have to “add stimulus to get the dynamism happening,” Tree said. Following Vera’s recommendations, Tree and Burrell introduced “stimulus” in the form of old English longhorn cattle, red (Cervus elaphus) and fallow deer (Dama dama), Tamworth pigs and Exmoor ponies. These animals act as proxies for their ancient cousins, aurochs, elk, wild boar and wild horses — former architects of English landscapes in bygone eras.

“Almost everything they do is contributing in a domino effect to a more functioning system that’s sequestering carbon,” Tree said.

This gradual tango between animal disturbance and plant growth is crucial to Knepp’s success. Tree explained that it’s the “constant competition” between vegetation and large herbivores — including their use of hooves and antlers as well as their eating habits — that creates homes for so many creatures.

“We cannot understand how these things reach us; it is extraordinary! I mean, we have a dung beetle, the violet dor beetle (Geotrupes mutator) that hasn’t been seen in Sussex for 50 years. And it’s proliferating here!” she said, poking a cowpat with the toe of one of her navy ASICS.

Last year the large tortoiseshell butterfly (Nymphalis polychloros), thought to be extinct in the U.K., formed a breeding colony at Knepp. The estate is also home to all of the U.K.’s five owl species, 13 of its 17 bat species and breeding populations of a dozen birds on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Conservation Concern Red List.

Landscape management shake-up

Since leaving the EU, the U.K. is pivoting to a new environmental land management framework, in the most significant agricultural policy and spending reform in a generation.

Conventional agriculture practices erode topsoil, leaving it open to being washed away into the water system or blown away as dust, research has found. “We’re losing the foundation of all of our food production,” Leeson said.

The world loses 24 billion tons of topsoil every year, reducing net economic output by up to 8%, according to a 2019 address by U.N. Director General António Guterres.

“With some extra investments, some incentives for farmers, you can restore soil carbon,” Leeson said.

Restoring organic carbon improves soil structure, allowing it to hold water, meaning more drought and flood resilience.

“So, all of these things that we’re experiencing that are problematic as a result of climate change … are reduced if you can restore carbon to the soil,” Leeson said.

In the U.K., conventional farm subsidies that incentivize growing arable crops “irrespective of the damage it caused” according to Tree, are being removed and replaced with payments that incentivize biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.

A government commitment of 2.4 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) in annual incentives for land management practices that restore soil health, peatland and forests is part of the first revisions to the U.K.’s environmental improvement plan in 25 years. There is still a likely shortfall of up to 6.9 billion pounds ($8.8 billion) per year that will have to come from private investment, according to an Environment Bank white paper.

“If we can generate a market whereby enhancements lead to sustainable revenue generation, then this enables investment from the private sector to bridge the funding gap,” Andy Slaney, a future funding specialist from the government-backed Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF), said.

NEIRF is currently funding 86 projects, with up to 100,000 pounds ($127,650) each, to help build viable private sector investments for more ecosystem-centric land management. Their projects include both Agricarbon’s research and Nattergal’s investment tool.

Still, rewilding has its critics.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) prioritizes conventional food production and promotes the status quo. A press officer told Mongabay that NFU was interested in “maintaining the high levels of environmental protection we currently enjoy,” adding that rewilding is not a preferred staple land management option. The NFU considers it a threat to “treasured cultural landscapes” according to a consultation document submitted to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee.

“NFU think that we’re the devil,” Tree said. “They’re kicking back as much as they possibly can but there’s a lot of farmers out there who see the sense.”

Rewilding goes “hand in glove” with farming, she said. Rewilding spills over even into conventionally farmed land in terms of better pollination, natural pest control and better soil activity, which all lead to better yields and increased sustainability. It also buffers against increasingly extreme weather events, protecting land from drought, flooding and wind.

“It’s the life support system that’s gonna actually hold agriculture and keep it sustainable,” Tree said. “If we don’t do this, we literally have only got a few decades of soil left, of anything that is going to produce food.”

Hope for the future

Rewilding has the potential to address both the climate and biodiversity crises, according to Scott with Global Rewilding Alliance. What’s needed, Scott said, is more awareness of its credibility and to establish viable investment mechanisms. Countries would never have signed the Paris Agreement without the belief that cutting emissions could be economically viable.

“It feels like a similar process is now happening with rewilding,” Scott said.

The cool shady depths of the massive beaver pen back at Knepp, impervious to the heat of the day and surrounded by an herb-rich pasture a-flit with butterflies, affords a flash of promise for a better future.

“That’s the real value of Knepp, isn’t it? It’s the hope, you know?” Tree said. “You’ve got climate change and biodiversity loss and it’s huge and you think, how can I ever do anything that’s going to make a difference? And then people come to Knepp and they see that miracles can happen in a very short space of time.”

This article was first published by Mongabay.

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A Canadian company called QScale is developing a $1-billion 130-acre data centre campus in Lévis, Quebec, and will use the warmth that emanates from its servers to grow more than 80,000 tonnes of produce in adjacent greenhouses every year.

Indoor farming, which is often hailed as the future of food production, is also very energy-intensive. So being able to recycle some of the heat from data centres could be a big win for both.

“Data centres consume something on the order [of] 4% of the planet’s energy. So if we could use that as a heat source, we could . . . kill two birds with one stone,” said QScale’s co-founder and head of strategy, Vincent Thibault, in an interview with Sustainable Biz Canada.

The size of data centres varies, but the largest have thousands of servers running 24 hours a day, sucking up a huge amount of electricity and giving off a lot of heat. The United States is home to the most data centres, with more than 2,600 (as of 2022). Canada has the seventh-largest number (behind the U.S., the U.K., Germany, China, the Netherlands and Australia), and those server farms use 1% of Canada’s annual electricity consumed. Just a handful of companies are behind most of the global energy used by data centres – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Facebook and Apple are all among the top users (although many of these companies are trying to curb their carbon footprints by tapping into renewable energy).

Some companies and governments have taken action to make data centres less energy intensive, so that less stress is put on the electricity grids that power them. The European Commission unveiled regulations in 2019 that set up technical standards to lessen the centres’ environmental impacts. And data centres must become carbon neutral by 20230 under the European Green Deal. The U.S. Energy Act (enacted in 2021) included several initiatives aimed at making data centres more energy efficient.

QScale, for its part, says it’s trying to make data centres more sustainable. It’s trumpeted the fact that its campus in Lévis will run on 99.5% renewable sources (thanks to Quebec’s hydro-heavy grid), and its waste-heat-recovery system will help make its energy use more circular. The company will also be able to grow a decent amount of veggies. QScale says that the greenhouses on its Lévis campus will be able to produce 2,800 tonnes of small fruit a  nd 80,000 tonnes of tomatoes per year.

Farming isn’t the only innovative solution to recycle all the heat waste that data centres generate. Last year, Microsoft announced that two of its data centres in Finland would heat homes and businesses in Helsinki. A Swiss IT company called GIB-Services is heating a public swimming pool in Zurich from a data centre that was built in an old military bunker.

QScale expects its heat recovery system to be up and running at its Lévis campus in early 2024. The company says part of its mission is to set an example for the industry so that other firms will follow.

“I think by giving the example that it can be done, we can force the Google[s], Amazon[s] [and] Microsofts of the world to put some effort into actually reusing all the heat that’s generated by those facilities,” said Thibault.

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