The digital farming frontier

Data farming is here. Visit any ag operation from Penticton to Prince Edward Island, and you’ll find as much software as fertilizer. A generation of precision agriculture has helped farmers boost yields and exports. Now it’s helping fight climate change, too. In a fractured world, digitally-enabled farming can help Canada produce more food with fewer emissions, which is the ambition of the Canadian Alliance for Net Zero Agri-food (CANZA). The alliance was launched this week by some of Canada’s biggest companies and farmers to help cut emissions from animals, food waste, soil disturbance and machinery. Agri-food accounts for 20% of emissions, but the sector can also be a carbon sink—if we reward farmers for sustainable land and animal management. The sector has already cut its emissions intensity by 50% over the past two decades, and could eliminate 150 million tonnes of carbon over the next two decades—equivalent to Canada’s car fleet—with climate-smart agriculture.

Created by RBC, Maple Leaf Foods, McCain Foods, Loblaw and Nutrien, CANZA believes emissions cuts won’t come through technology alone. Enter systems change. The alliance launched its first pilot project, in Saskatchewan, to demonstrate how farmers can capture and store greenhouse gas emissions in soil. They’ll then be able to make money by selling carbon credits to food processors and retailers, and eventually investors, but first Canada needs an accepted approach to measurement, reporting and verification of the results. The RBC Climate Action Institute estimates that with a proper MRV framework, at least $2 billion could be generated for Canadian farmers. To unlock that value, governments will need to support farmers as they develop new growing methods. Transparent and accountable markets will be needed. And consumers will need to be more discerning. The connective tissue: trust. As every farmer knows, data without trust is like soil without rain.