In East Africa, a quieter crisis is unfolding – one that reveals how deeply global food systems are interconnected. In Kenya, the price of a tray of 30 eggs has nearly doubled since early 2023.

For families where eggs are a primary, affordable source of nutrition, this isn’t just economic turbulence. It’s a direct blow to food security.

Let’s follow the trail.

Unlike Canada, where a regulated poultry supply management system has helped keep prices relatively stable for both farmers and consumers, East Africa operates in a far more volatile environment. Poultry feed in the region is deeply tied to global commodity markets, especially for maize and soy – crops that have been battered by drought in southern Africa, conflict in Ukraine and fluctuating international demand.

In Kenya, feed costs account for up to 80% of total poultry production expenses. Between January 2023 and early 2024, the price of soybean meal rose from 86 to 113 shillings per kilogram – a jump of more than 31%. Yellow maize, another critical feed component, surged from 40 to 60 shillings per kilo in the same period. For smallholder farmers, these price swings are not just inconvenient; they are existential threats.

Part of the problem lies in how East Africa has been integrated into global supply chains under the banner of food security. Kenya imports around 90% of its soybean needs, much of it from the United States. This dependence isn’t accidental: it reflects decades of donor-driven policy choices. U.S. foreign assistance, particularly through the U.S. Agency for International Development, has historically prioritized food aid in the form of surplus U.S. grain and oilseed exports, reinforcing global trade flows rather than investing in local production ecosystems that could reduce such dependencies.

In 2022 alone, USAID (whose funding has been gutted under President Donald Trump) and partners provided nearly $2 billion in emergency food aid to sub-Saharan Africa – much of it as imported commodities. While crucial in humanitarian crises, these flows have had an unintended side effect: crowding out investment in regional feed production, processing infrastructure and local supply chain development. The result is a chronic dependence on volatile global markets that leave farmers vulnerable to external shocks.

The consequences are visible across the region. As feed prices climbed, many commercial poultry farmers were forced to reduce flock sizes, creating a supply shortfall that drove egg prices even higher. Consumers, especially in lower-income households where eggs are often the most accessible source of protein, have borne the brunt of these price surges.

Yet, amid this volatility, something remarkable is happening.

The collective economy steps in

Across East Africa, women-led poultry cooperatives are demonstrating an alternative. Far from being passive victims of global market failures, these co-ops are building local resilience – one egg at a time.

Take the Kuku Women’s Poultry Cooperative in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Confronted with skyrocketing feed prices, the members of Kuku shifted to sourcing alternative local ingredients such as sunflower seedcake and cassava peels, reducing dependence on expensive imports. By pooling their resources, they negotiated bulk purchases of essential feed components and invested in small-scale feed mills owned by the co-op itself. “We couldn’t wait for traders or donors to rescue us,” co-op leader Ruth Wanjiku says. “We had to create our own safety net.”

In Tanzania, the Building a Better Tomorrow for Livestock and Fisheries (BBT-LIFE) program has been instrumental in empowering women and youth in the poultry sector. Launched by the Tanzanian government in 2023, this initiative aims to modernize the poultry industry by providing training, resources and support to small-scale farmers. The program has facilitated the formation of cooperatives and encouraged the adoption of innovative practices to enhance productivity and sustainability. Women have established mini feed-production systems, sourcing maize locally and experimenting with protein-rich moringa leaves and black soldier fly larvae as feed supplements.

We couldn’t wait for traders or donors to rescue us. We had to create our own safety net.

—Ruth Wanjiku, Kuku Women’s Poultry Cooperative

Building a Better Tomorrow has garnered significant attention from international organizations. Notably, the African Development Bank approved a US$129.71-million loan to support the program, covering more than half of its total budget. The Tanzanian government contributes the remaining funds, demonstrating a strong public–private partnership model.

These stories aren’t outliers; they reflect a broader shift. Across Africa, women account for 60% to 80% of food producers, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and poultry farming remains one of the most accessible economic activities for women in rural areas because of its low capital and land requirements.

Lessons from the Global South

This pattern echoes globally. During Argentina’s economic collapse in the early 2000s, smallholder farmers in the Federación Agraria banded together to pool resources, secure better prices and access international markets. Spain’s Mondragon Corporation – a federation of worker cooperatives – navigated the 2008 global financial crisis without mass layoffs, sustaining both employment and community stability. Even in the United States, the Organic Valley cooperative kept its supply chains steady during COVID-19 disruptions, while many industrial agribusinesses struggled.

There’s a deeper reckoning underway in global food systems. For decades, factory farming in the Global North has obscured the real cost of food production, propped up by government subsidies for feed crops like corn and soy, lax environmental regulations, and low-wage, precarious labour. According to FoodPrint, a food awareness project, these subsidies artificially depress the price of key inputs, masking the environmental damage and labour exploitation embedded in industrial agriculture.

In the United States, egg prices surged from an average of $1.49 per dozen in 2021 to more than $4.25 in 2023, largely driven by avian flu outbreaks and supply chain disruptions. Yet, sustainable production models – those that ensure fair labour, animal welfare and environmental stewardship – suggest that the true cost of a dozen eggs could range from $8 to $10, aligning with the prices seen for pasture-raised or certified humane eggs. This disparity highlights how deeply externalized costs have been embedded in the industrial food system, leaving consumers disconnected from the actual price of ethical, sustainable food.

As global prices inch closer to reflecting these real costs, East Africa’s co-ops offer a powerful lesson: resilience is local, cooperative and community-driven.

A global wake-up call

This is not going unnoticed. According to a 2023 report from the FAIRR Initiative, a coalition of investors that monitors risks and opportunities in the livestock sector, 84% of institutional investors now see intensive animal agriculture as a material financial risk, and 78% consider sustainable proteins critical to their environmental, social and governance strategies. Funds like AgDevCo and RSF Social Finance are beginning to direct capital toward African co-ops, recognizing the value of shorter, more resilient supply chains.

However, investment alone won’t be enough. Agribusiness giants still dominate, spending more than US$793 million between 2019 and 2023 on lobbying to entrench their market positions. For collective economies to scale, policy support is essential. Governments can level the playing field with tax incentives for cooperative formation, grants for feed innovation and public procurement policies that prioritize community-based producers.

Donor agencies like USAID, in whatever form it continues, also have a role to play. Moving from a reactive model of food aid to proactive investment in local production ecosystems would build long-term resilience. Supporting regional feed production, farmer training and agroecological research can unlock the full potential of local supply chains.

Because when the next crisis strikes – and it will – it won’t be multinational corporations that keep food on our tables. It will be local producers, neighbours and communities bound by trust and mutual obligation.

Shilpa Tiwari is the founder of No Women No Spice and Isenzo Group. She is based in Canada and Tanzania.

The post As egg prices soar, African women lead solutions appeared first on Corporate Knights.

She’s hoping more Canadian farmers will convert their own farms to more sustainable operations – and she’s been asking the federal government to give them a financial helping hand. Bakker is part of a farmer-led coalition called Farmers for Climate Solutions (FCS) that has been pushing the federal government to boost the amount of funding it has committed to paying farmers to adopt greenhouse-gas-cutting methods, such as planting cover crops and using less synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. On Friday, the group had mixed success, as federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau announced half a billion dollars in new funding “to support the sector’s sustainability and competitiveness.” 

These kinds of solutions can be important in two ways: by developing healthy, resilient soil in the face of the climate crisis, and by reducing the industry’s significant emissions, which will be vital for the country to achieve its emissions-reducing goals. Crop and livestock farming contributed 10% of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.  

“More is less. The more of these practices we can put in place, the less it’s going to cost us down the line and the less greenhouse gas emissions we’re going to produce as well,” says Bakker. 

The federal government wrapped up a third day of talks Friday in Saskatoon with territorial and provincial counterparts to develop what’s known as the Agricultural Policy Framework – a document that will be a road map for government funding for food and farming over the next five years. Part of the discussion was about how governments can help the agriculture industry reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and become more climate resilient. FCS wanted to see the government spend $2.1 billion over the next five years to help the agriculture industry make this transition.  

The more of these practices we can put in place, the less it’s going to cost us down the line.

–Sarah Bakker, Field Sparrow Farms

However, the agreement, which is now called the Sustainable Canadian Agriculture Partnership, does not seem to reach that level of funding. It did include a new $250-million cost-shared “Resilient Agriculture Landscape Program” the government says will “recognize ecological goods and services provided by farmers and ranchers.” Bibeau also announced a year-long review of business-risk-management programs to “explore opportunities to further integrate climate risk to identify incentives and conduct a pilot for producers who adopt environmental practices that also reduce production risks.” In a statement, FCS said it saw “many positive outcomes” in the agreement, but “the measures announced by the ministers fall short of the broad, systemic change that is necessary to tackle the climate crisis and make Canadian farms more reslient in the long term.”

FCS had assembled a group of agricultural experts and farmers to put forward recommendations they wanted to see included in the framework. The proposals included $341 million in per-acre payments that would go to farmers who use cover crops and better soil management that would help sequester more carbon in the ground and help limit the use of nitrogen fertilizer (nitrogen fertilizers emit the very potent nitrous oxide). The government has committed to reducing the emissions from nitrogen fertilizers by 30% by 2030, and FCS says its proposals would mean a 33% reduction. All combined, the recommendations could mitigate 16.2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents by 2028, FCS says. The new agreement committed to a reduction target of only three to five megatonnes.  

“Climate change is going to cost us something, whether it’s up front or down the road,” says Bakker. “If we don’t address it, we’re going to continue to pay out those costs.” Failing to act in a meaningful way will also mean ruin for the country’s food security, she adds.   

While something is better than nothing, Bakker said before Bibeau’s announcement that she would be disappointed if the federal government didn’t adopt FCS’s recommendations, considering the urgency of the problem.   

“We’re at a tipping point. We need to take action,” she says.  

The post Feds, provinces reach agreement to boost funding for regenerative agriculture appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Regenerative agriculture springs from a global Indigenous view of agriculture. It’s not tied to a European/Western way of framing the issues, as was inevitably the case with organic agriculture. It does not settle for sustainability; rather it aims for something truly regenerative. “Dream no small dreams,” as Tommy Douglas used to say.

Regenerative agriculture is rooted in leaving the soil as nature intended, and basing food production on crops that can be grown without the violence of plowing, which upturns the earth and undermines the earth’s metabolism and gut.

The beauty of regenerative agriculture is that it can work on many scales. Its methods are appropriate to various scales of food-growing, from backyard gardens (North America has more land in lawns than in food production), green roofs and community gardens to small, medium and large farms – permitting universal access to food and land.

I’m delighted that regenerative agriculture is being supported by both small and big food enterprises, which is important in the successful delivery of viable efforts to improve the environment. It avoids the problem of turning the perfect into the enemy of the very good, which has been the bane of social-change movements for a century. I love the open-endedness of regenerative agriculture, its lack of clear, binding and dogmatic definitions, its openness to what good people can do as they try to accomplish what’s possible. That, of course, creates a vulnerability to greenwashing. But the answer to greenwashing is not dogmatism, but real action on the ground.

Regenerative agriculture also avoids sterile debates around anti-meat climate change policies. Pasture-raised animals can become the basis for both humane agriculture and a protected climate.

Carbon is not the problem; the problem is that the carbon is in the air, not the soil. We seem to have to turn everything into enemies, but nature is made for us to partner with if we just open our eyes.

On the future of food

I would like to see a food future that identifies three streams of food thinking, each a power in its own right:

1. Bringing food from farm to table in as humane and generous a way as possible.

2. Ensuring that the food that makes it to our table matches our love for delicious food as well as our need for nutritious food, and that this can be accessible to all.

3. And finally, what I hope will be my legacy is what I call “people-centred food policy” – thinking about food in terms of how it promotes personal empowerment, how it overcomes loneliness, how it brings people together and how it makes a celebration of joy a part of everyday life. People-centred food policy needs to become as powerful as farm-to-table and nutrition models of food.

The post The beauty of regenerative agriculture and the future of food appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“When we are facing climate chaos and these big storms come through, we can suck it in,” says Flies, referring to her soil’s ability to miraculously absorb inches of rain that turn neighbouring fields into a mud bath. A decade into working the land organically, she and her husband, like millions of farmers around the globe, were facing hotter summers, more violent storms and more erratic harvests. The former international election observers–turned farmers were looking for solutions to make their property – The New Farm – more resilient to the impacts of the changing climate. That’s when they came across a farming philosophy that turned them into soil evangelists.

The New York Times has called it the yoga of farming. The phrase “regenerative agriculture” was coined in the 1980s but has its roots in Indigenous and small-scale farming traditions around the world. Instead of tilled rows of monoculture crops on depleted soil, regenerative farms follow a few basic tenets: disturb the earth as little as possible (that means putting down tillers and minimizing synthetic pesticides and fertilizers), never leave the soil bare (farmers plant cover crops like clover and legumes between rows) and embrace biodiversity, both aboveground and below. Proponents say that diverse crops and, optionally, carefully rotated grazing livestock help fuel microscopic soil biodiversity, which, combined synergistically with other regenerative practices, increases soil’s water and carbon absorption power. That makes farmsteads like The New Farm notably more flood- and drought-resistant, and potentially more greenhouse gas–absorbent, too.

Now the concepts are spreading like wildfire. You’ll see the term “regenerative agriculture” cropping up in news feeds, on the back of cereal boxes and in celebrity-studded Netflix docs. Big Food players like General Mills, Danone, Unilever and Nestlé are ramping up regenerative pilots around the globe. Apparel brands like Patagonia, Gucci and Timberland are preaching the powers of regenerative farm-to-closet fashion. This past Earth Day, PepsiCo announced it would be implementing regenerative practices across its entire ecological footprint. The new Pepsi challenge? Convert all seven million acres of its ingredient supply by 2030, starting with 500,000 acres by year’s end. The move, it said, would eliminate three million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade. “Today, we’re accelerating our Positive Agriculture agenda, because we know we have to do even more to create truly systemic change,” said Jim Andrew, PepsiCo’s Chief Sustainability Officer.

Whether you buy the sincerity of their press releases or don’t, there’s no denying climate change is threatening the world’s food supply. Illycaffè’s chair, Andrea Illy, has been vocal about the looming reality that by 2050, “about three-fourths of the land used to grow Arabica coffee will not be suitable.” Similar stats threaten a number of global commodities. Food companies are betting on regenerative practices as a win-win to help them future-proof the food sector: the climate-resilient crops stabilize long-term swings in food supplies while helping companies meet net-zero emissions pledges and keep climate-risk-averse investors happy. And farmers – big and small, organic and conventional – who try regenerative on for size say they’re boosting yields and increasing profits, all while healing the planet.

LEAVE NO SOIL UNTURNED

Until she happened upon France’s Ministry of Agriculture initiative on the role of soil in combatting climate change, Flies had no idea she had unwittingly been wrecking her soil’s natural structure through an age-old practice. It turns out tilling the land destroys complex fungal and microbial networks that make up the earth’s life-sustaining microbiome – all while releasing valuable moisture into the air and quietly unleashing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Flies ended up doing farmer-led research trials on their tilled versus untilled fields with the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario. “What we were finding was we could get on untilled fields a month earlier, [our salad greens] would germinate almost a week faster, [untilled fields] would retain more water in the soil, and our yield was higher,” she says. “We couldn’t believe it.”

Tilling is just one of a number of farming methods that have diminished the soil’s capacity to lock in carbon. Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University, estimates that agricultural practices have released 135 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Age – emissions that remain there to this day.

The infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s transformed the American and Canadian Great Plains into “black blizzards” of eroded topsoil after settlers plowed under millions of acres of native grasslands (grasslands that are now one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet) to plant water-intensive cash crops. After years of drought and over-plowing, farm dreams turned to dust and accelerated farming’s great carbon release.

While Prairie farmers of the era were eventually encouraged to plant “a great wall of trees” and set up irrigation systems to restore their soil and put an end to the Dust Bowl, destructive farming practices persist. In the last 30 years alone, one-third of the world’s usable land has been severely degraded, according to the United Nations. Another 75 billion tons of fertile topsoil is lost every year.

An Oxford University–led study published in the journal Science last fall noted that “even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target.”

As the researchers concluded, “major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

FEDS INVEST IN CLIMATE-SMART FARMING

Federal estimates reckon that Canada’s crop and livestock farms are responsible for 10% to 12% of Canada’s overall carbon footprint. Part of that comes from fossil-fuel-run farm equipment; another chunk comes from methane produced by cows and liquid manure (used on intensive livestock farms); a large portion comes from petrochemical-based inputs, especially nitrogen fertilizer, which releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that’s 300 times more potent than Co2.

The task at hand is to turn those farm fields back into carbon sinks. A coalition of 20,000 conventional and organic farmers asked the feds to invest $300 million in the 2021 budget to help farmers embrace climate-friendly practices, such as planting cover crops, reducing nitrogen fertilizer and rotating grazing. “We calculated that with a 15% uptake of these practices on farms across Canada we could mitigate 10 million tonnes of carbon,” says Flies, one of the co-founders of the Farmers for Climate Solutions (FCS) coalition. “All of us recognize that for farmers’ sakes, we need more profitable and resilient farms, and for the climate’s sake, we need to reduce our emissions and be part of the solution.”

“All of us recognize that for farmers’ sakes, we need more profitable and resilient farms, and for the climate’s sake, we need to reduce our emissions and be part of the solution.”

–Gillian Flies, Farmers for Climate Solutions

In the spring, Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, signalled that the ministry was on board, announcing that Canada would plow $185 million over the next decade into a new Agricultural Climate Solutions program.

In March, the Trudeau government unveiled draft regulations for its Greenhouse Gas Offset System, specifying that “farmers who reduce or remove GHG emissions through regenerative agriculture practices … may be able to generate offset credits which can then be sold, providing a financial incentive.”

It’s all part of Canada’s $350-million investment over 10 years to help the country’s agri-food sector “meet our emission targets and capture new opportunities in the green economy,” including $165 million in the Agricultural Clean Technology Program, $10 million to get farmers off diesel, and $60 million to protect existing trees and wetlands on farms in the latest federal budget. There’s also a proposed national – albeit so-far voluntary – target to reduce synthetic fertilizer use by 30% below 2020 levels.

All these moves should incentivize more farmers to implement regenerative practices, says Gabrielle Bastien, founder of Quebec-based Regeneration Canada: “The federal budget announcement is great news for the regenerative movement.”

Canada isn’t alone. France has taken a leadership role in using soil to combat climate change since hosting COP21 in Paris in 2015. Recently, the Biden administration signalled its support for regenerative agriculture as part of its response to the climate crisis. Across the pond, Prince Charles backed the movement in an op-ed for The Guardian in May, saying, “We must ensure that Britain’s family farmers have the tools and the confidence to meet the rapid transition to regenerative farming systems that our planet demands.

GROWING REGENERATIVE IN THE WILD WEST OF CARBON CREDITS

There’s no hard data on exactly how many regenerative farms exist in Canada or globally, but what’s certain is that there currently aren’t enough of them to meet corporate pledges. Companies like Wrangler, Kering and others are posting global call-outs to farmers, issuing grants to those who want to participate in regenerative pilot programs. PepsiCo says it’s investing US$10 for every acre that farmers convert to regenerative.

The challenge now is getting everyone to agree on what qualifies as regenerative, particularly in the wild west of carbon credits and net-zero pledges. At this point, there’s no universal standard for regenerative agriculture, though food policy guru Wayne Roberts told Corporate Knights before he died earlier this year that’s part of what he appreciated about regenerative agriculture: its “open-endedness, its lack of clear, binding and dogmatic definitions, its openness to what good people can do as they try to accomplish what’s possible.” He added, “It avoids the problem of turning the perfect into the enemy of the very good, which has been the bane of social change movements for a century.”

A wide array of farm movements currently unite under regenerative agriculture’s banner – including tree-hugger favourites like permaculture and moon-cycle-aligned biodynamic farms that are free of chemical inputs, and, increasingly, large conventional farms experimenting with “regen” basics like no-till and cover crops.

More than a third of U.S. cropland is now considered no-till, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, with a small but growing number of farmers trying their hands at planting cover crops, which keep carbon from escaping from bare soil while pulling atmospheric nitrogen into the earth, where it acts as a natural fertilizer.

Trey Hill, a third-generation corn and soy farmer on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, thought it was all a bunch of “environmental BS” but decided to take up the state of Maryland’s offer to pay farmers to plant cover crops on bare fields two decades ago.

“I thought it was greenwashing,” he said during a webinar on soil carbon sequestration, organized by the U.S.-based Business Climate Leaders, in May. Until he saw a dramatic difference between two fields. That spring, his business-as-usual fields were unplantable, while the ones green with cover crops left him stunned – they were ready for planting far earlier. “We realized everything we had been taught … was having to be rethought.”

“We realized everything we had been taught … was having to be rethought.”

–Trey Hill, a third-generation corn and soy farmer

Hill now grows a variety of clover, rye, lentils, radishes and turnips in his cornfields as sequestration and regeneration agents. Fast forward to early 2020, when Hill became the first American farmer to participate in a national carbon credit system set up by a Seattle start-up called Nori. Last year, Hill was paid US$115,000 for practices that had sequestered more than 8,000 tons of carbon in the soil over five years. If he can demonstrate that his 10,000 acres are able to store an additional ton of carbon per acre each year, he could pocket another $150,000 annually. Nori’s not alone. Another agri-tech start-up, Indigo Ag, has stated that it hopes to pay regenerative farmers to capture a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the air, selling offsets to companies like Maple Leaf Foods.

Questions remain about the efficacy of carbon offsets in the climate fight. Can regenerative farms legitimately sequester trillions of tons of carbon dioxide? Are carbon markets for farmers worth the gold rush – both for farmers and investors? Or will buying farm offsets essentially provide cover for heavy-emitting companies to keep polluting? There’s a great deal of scientific debate – and ongoing research in field labs – around just how much carbon soil can sequester, with a growing number of scientists cautioning that regenerative advocates may be overselling soil’s ability to absorb the world’s carbon pollution and effectively reverse climate change.

Sitting on his old family farm half an hour south of Saskatoon one morning in May, Darrin Qualman, director of climate crisis policy at the National Farmers Union (NFU), emphasizes that regenerative farming is “fantastic” at revitalizing soil health and increasing biodiversity and notes that “if we farm better, including regenerative, we can put most of that carbon that farming has released since we plowed the Prairies back in the soil.” That said, he adds, “some suggest you could use soils to suck all of the CO2 from industry, transport, coal and oil out of the atmosphere in decades, and that’s fanciful at best.” It’s a miscalculation that he calls “a potential civilizational error.

DITCHING THE CHEMICAL TREADMILL

Beyond the carbon debate, internal discussions remain over whether chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers should be permitted by regenerative farmers. On his Maryland farm, Hill, like many conventional regenerative farmers, uses chemical herbicides to “terminate cover crops” before planting, but he tells the webinar audience that he’s managed to lower his herbicide rates. One poll found that 92% of no-till farmers planned to use the chemical herbicide glyphosate to keep weeds in check and tamp down cover crops without uprooting them. Which helps explain why agrochemical giants like Bayer (owner of Monsanto) and Syngenta are chatting up the benefits of climate-smart regenerative techniques. Bayer says that while it’s paying U.S. farmers to try no-till and cover crops to sequester carbon, farmers aren’t required to purchase Bayer’s “industry leading crop protection” products to participate in the Bayer Carbon Program. Nonetheless, no-till is undeniably good for business.

“Some suggest you could use soils to suck all of the CO2 from industry, transport, coal and oil out of the atmosphere in decades, and that’s fanciful at best.  [It’s] a potential civilizational error.”

–Darrin Qualman, director of climate crisis policy at the National Farmers Union

Regenerative practitioners, however, say that if farmers continue to incorporate a wide variety of regenerative techniques, they should be able to cut back naturally on their chemical inputs. That’s one reason why regenerative agriculture is said to save farmers money. One study published in 2018 looked at 20 corn farmers and found that nearly a third of conventional farmers’ gross income went toward external inputs, compared to 12% in regenerative fields.

The NFU and FCS, as well as the feds and others, seem to agree that the most critical factor is getting farmers to reduce their nitrogen use. “The big piece that’s driving up farm emissions is not farm fuel use or cattle or anything else. It’s nitrogen,” says Qualman, pointing out that the energy needed to create, transport and apply one tonne of natural-gas-derived nitrogen fertilizer is nearly equal to two tonnes of gasoline. Canadian farms have tripled its use since 1980. Qualman’s 2019 climate report for NFU outlines how farmers have been pushed to adopt a maximum-output, maximum-input production model contingent on pumping degraded soils full of increasingly pricy fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers and pesticides. “Two things happen when farmers become overdependent on purchased inputs: emissions go up and net incomes go down.”

Qualman says he’ll gauge just how serious companies are about both their regenerative and climate commitments by whether they’re driving absolute reductions in nitrogen use

IT’S A HONEY OF AN O

In March 2019, General Mills launched its first regenerative agriculture pilot as part of a pioneering pledge to make one million acres (or 20% to 25% of its ingredient sourcing supply) regenerative by decade’s end. It’s now in its third summer of a three-year pilot consisting of 45 conventional and organic oat growers in the Northern Plains of North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

“We’re doing baseline soil measurements in those fields, sampling organic matter in the soil, as well as measurements around insect and bird diversity and water infiltration [in addition to] soil measurements for carbon sequestration,” says Tom Rabaey, a senior agronomist overseeing the pilots for General Mills. They’re also working with researchers at the University of Manitoba and Saskatchewan who are measuring the GHG-sequestering potential of cover crops.

Rabaey explains how General Mills had been focused largely on carbon footprint analysis and efficiency gains until it started talking to The Nature Conservancy and the Soil Health Institute about the importance of soil health in building resilience in the face of climate change. “Regenerative agriculture is really the lever to help us meet our GHG goal, but [it’s] also a way for us to maintain our supply chain resiliency where we buy our ingredients,” including oats from the Canadian Prairies that go into products like Cheerios, Nature Valley, Annie’s and Cascadian Farm Organic.

“Times were really tough, and farmers were throwing all their income on more inputs, more fertilizer, more pesticides, more efficiency gains, more output per acre.”

–Tom Rabaey, a senior agronomist, regenerative agriculture pilots, General Mills

“Times were really tough, and farmers were throwing all their income on more inputs, more fertilizer, more pesticides, more efficiency gains, more output per acre. We were hearing that,” Rabaey says.

General Mills isn’t point-blank asking farmers to reduce nitrogen and pesticide use, but Rabaey says many farmers in the pilot are doing so on their own. “Usually after the second, third or fourth year, we’re finding that growers start to make those cuts themselves.”

Whether their approach will get nitrogen use down by 30% in line with proposed federal targets is still up in the air. The official figures will be released after this season of data collecting.

BEYOND ORGANIC

While researchers across the continent refine their soil carbon measurement techniques, a handful of certifications have cropped up offering verifiable standards for regenerative farmers. The Soil Carbon Initiative (SCI) cites Danone and Ben & Jerry’s as partners. On the organic side, Dr. Bronner’s, the Rodale Institute, Nature’s Path Organic and Patagonia helped launch a regenerative organic certification (ROC) last fall. The ROC seal takes organic as a baseline but adds clear standards for a living wage and grazing livestock welfare in addition to a whole host of soil-building requirements.

Among their first products on shelves: certified organic regenerative oatmeal by B.C.-headquartered Nature’s Path. “As demand increases, our plan is to transition more products to ROC certification,” says Samantha Falk, director of communications for the cereal company.

Back in Creemore, Flies is working on making The New Farm the first certified regenerative organic vegetable farm in Canada. After that? “We want to train 10,000 farmers as leaders.”

“My dream is we can support farmers to be a part of the solution to climate change,” Flies says. “We have a huge opportunity here to improve livelihoods of our farmers, improve the quality of our food and sequester carbon all at once, if we do it right.”

COMPANIES COMMITTING TO GOING REGENERATIVE

Patagonia: The green pioneers have been spearheading a certified Regenerative Organic seal with the Regenerative Organic Alliance and using certified ingredients to make cotton T-shirts and the like.

Timberland, Vans and NorthFace (VF Corp. companies): All main materials are to be recycled, regenerative or renewable by 2025. Timberland is currently piloting a regenerative rubber supply.

PepsiCo: The company says all seven million acres of PepsiCo’s farm footprint will be regenerative by 2030, more than 500,000 acres in 2021.

General Mills: In 2019, General Mills announced its goal of having one million acres be regenerative by 2030.

Kering: Gucci’s parent company is funding the transition of one million hectares of land to regenerative practices with Conservation International, as well as one million in protected habitat “outside of its direct supply chain.”

Nestlé: The Swiss giant that purchases 1% of the world’s agricultural output expects to source more than 14 million tons of its ingredients through regenerative agriculture by 2030.

Danone: Its North American regenerative soil health pilot, now in its third year, has 82,000 acres enrolled, with a goal of reaching 100,000 acres by 2022.

Wrangler: The clothing manufacturer is launching a Retro Premium “Regenerative Jean.” It has invited farmers from around the world to submit documented evidence of improved soil health to be considered for inclusion in the special collection.

Cargill: The food giant is supporting farmer-led efforts to adopt regenerative practices on 10 million acres of cropland in North America.

Illycaffè: The Italian company is transitioning its entire network of coffee farmers to “virtuous” regenerative agriculture by 2033, its 100th anniversary.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and the bestselling author of the Ecoholic book series.

The post Can climate-smart regenerative farming save the earth? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But after a decade of wild swings in weather patterns, crop prices and farm debt levels, some Canadian farmers are starting to look at ways they can do something about the climate while improving their farm business.

On February 11, Agriculture Day, a group of these farmers, backed by the National Farmers Union, Canadian Organic Growers and several food-related environmental groups, announced the formation of Farmers for Climate Solutions.

They own up to the fact that agriculture is a significant cause of global warming. They also insist farming can help solve the problem. “Canada can’t get to net-zero without farmers pitching in,” says Gillian Flies. She co-owns The New Farm in Creemore, Ontario, and represents Canadian Organic Growers on the new climate action group.

“Canada can’t grow enough trees to store enough carbon to get to net-zero by 2050,” Flies says. “We also need farmers who can store carbon in the soil, where it will create healthier crops and more resilience in case of drought or storms.”

As well as rebuilding their soil, some members of the new coalition say they can cut their on-farm fossil fuel use in half by 2050. The combination of energy conservation and carbon storage could make farmers a major contingent in the green business community of 2050.

Though the new coalition is anything but cash-rich, Flies is looking for help from the federal government’s Canadian Agricultural Partnership, which has a $3 billion budget to partner with farmers and communities to boost agricultural competitiveness, prosperity and sustainability.

Supporting Flies’s optimism is none other than the UN’s normally gloomy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published a report called Climate Change and Land in August.

Agriculture on its own is commonly held responsible for 13% of all emissions – mostly from methane gas and nitrous oxides from overuse of nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure stored in lagoons by factory farms. On a more upbeat note, the IPCC identifies sustainable land management as a positive force that can lock carbon in plants and soil, not the atmosphere. Farmers can plant more tree crops, reduce their tillage, keep their lands covered instead of bare during the winter, and feed livestock on wild and perennial deeply rooted grasses, the IPCC notes.

If such practices were applied to degraded or eroded soil – about half the food-producing lands on the planet – the IPCC suggests that farmers might store or sequester almost as much carbon in the soil as they release to the atmosphere.

“Canada can’t get to net-zero without farmers pitching in.” 

– Gillian Flies, Farmers for Climate Solutions

The optimism that buoys Flies and Farmers for Climate Solutions also draws on a November 2019 report for the National Farmers Union (NFU) by energy and agriculture expert Darrin Qualman, author of Civilization Critical: Energy, Food, Nature, and the Future.

A Saskatchewan farmboy who’s a former researcher for the NFU, Qualman was asked to present a think piece to the NFU conference in November. The report, Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis, has not been officially adopted by the NFU, traditionally Canada’s scrappiest voice for farmers, but is presented by NFU leaders as “the beginning of a conversation on the links between the farm crisis and the climate crisis,” Qualman says.

He says we shouldn’t blame agriculture for increased emissions; instead, blame what he calls “petro-industrial inputs.”

In the NFU report, Qualman links both crises to the push for farm exports that the federal government has put on steroids since 1990. To gird themselves for mass exports, Canadian farmers upped their intake of fertilizers and loaded up on debt to buy heavy machinery. As inputs went up, emissions went up in lockstep, Qualman argues.

Use of nitrogen fertilizers (made primarily from natural gas) doubled, leading to a major rise in nitrous oxides, some 300 times more powerful in their global warming impact than carbon dioxide. Overall global warming emissions from agriculture went up 20% in that time period. All the while, farm debt load grew, doubling since the turn of the century and reaching $106 billion in 2018.

On the positive side, Qualman also believes that farmers can protect both the climate and their family farms by moving away from high-petrol inputs. By cutting back on inputs, they will dramatically cut down their costs and keep more of the money that people spend on food. At present, farmers keep only five cents of every dollar of food sales. They need to adopt a more-from-less approach – higher margins on less volume.

The NFU report contains a catalogue of “on-farm measures and government policies that can, as a package, reduce GHG emissions from Canadian farms by approximately 30% by 2030 and perhaps by 50% by 2050.” It lays out three ways farmers can cut costs and global warming emissions:

First, farmers can reduce their emissions from energy use through changes such as switching to electric cars and tractors and increasing their use of solar and wind power.

Second, farmers can reduce their use of nitrogen fertilizers by using “green manure” (cover crops rich in nitrogen), rotating perennial crops and implementing other sustainable techniques.

Third, farmers and ranchers can mitigate the global warming impacts of livestock through various methods. They can reduce the absolute number of cattle and dairy cows they raise, although Qualman cautions that there are important carbon-storing benefits to raising cows and steers mainly on pasture and leaving their manure on the land, where it adds soil fertility – particularly in areas that are too rocky to support crops. The global warming impact of ruminant emissions could be offset or countered by solar panels and trees dispersed through the fields and by carbon stored in the soil covered by pasture. Such strategies are commonly called low-input sustainable agriculture.

All three energy conservation strategies are a bold departure for protest groups, which normally protest governments’ failures to take action. Here they are calling for farmers and ranchers to act, and for governments to support and enable that grassroots action.

This is where the story circles back to organic farmer Gillian Flies’s hopes for the Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP).

Flies hopes CAP will give a hearing to farmers keen on making their farms more sustainable. She worries that too many of the grants require the farmers to pay 50%, which is often not an option, given that the great majority of farmers are losing money.

Flies also worries that the CAP program is too tied to boosting exports and isn’t looking for the multiple benefits that climate-friendly agriculture can bring. When farmers plant more trees on their land, those trees provide shade for animals, raise nutrients from deep in the ground, protect soil from erosion during heavy rain and strong wind, and also store carbon in their trunks and branches.

All such benefits are public goods that can create as much value for Canadians as the sale of hogs to China. “The government is missing an opportunity to work with us to solve multiple problems,” says Flies.

Whatever the government decides in the near future, University of Toronto geographer Bryan Dale thinks the NFU report and the Farmers for Climate Solutions initiative are “a positive and deliberate provocation to get a new conversation going.”

Dale, who completed his PhD on farming and global warming in Canada in 2019, likes the way both groups talk about all the benefits that good farming can produce, from more nutritious food to safer habitats for pollinators, to cleaner water, to reduction of greenhouse gases. In these “post-political times,” Dale worries, too many discussions zero in on one bad factor, such as carbon, that can lead to a quick technical fix. “We need to open up a broader discussion,” he says, “maybe even talk about a Green New Deal for food and agriculture,” as is being discussed south of the border.

Qualman hopes his report “will start a heck of a conversation. Farmers are paying attention because they know that either they come up with good solutions or someone else will impose solutions on them. If farmers don’t lead, bureaucrats will.”

Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer and former manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council.

The post Seeding climate action on Canada’s farms appeared first on Corporate Knights.