Farmers say they're ready to cut the carbon in Canada's diet — but they need government help

The role of agriculture in climate change didn't get much attention at the COP26 summit — much to the chagrin of activists.

"The cow in the room is being ignored," one told the Guardian during the two-week gathering in Glasgow.

But the leaders of three Canadian agrifood groups told CBC's The House in a panel discussion airing this weekend that there's a growing appetite among Canadian farmers for working with Canadian governments to cut emissions and find ways to take carbon out of the environment.

"So there are a lot of farmers who for a long time have been experimenting with ways they can reduce emissions on their farm, thinking about ways that we can increase soil carbon — drawing carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in our agricultural soils," said Brent Preston, an Ontario vegetable farmer and director of a national organization called Farmers for Climate Solutions.

"But we've been largely unsupported in this work and we realize that we need public support, federal and provincial support, to scale these practices to make them widespread and to really have a significant impact on the emissions of our sector and also our ability to withstand the inevitable changes that we know are going to come in the climate."

The agricultural and food processing industries employ more than two million people in Canada and generate nearly $140 billion dollars in revenue each year. That represents just over 7 per cent of the Canadian economy.

But as important as farming and food are to Canadians, the sector is also a significant source of carbon dioxide emissions — generating nearly 73 megatonnes in 2019.

It's no surprise, then, that the country's agriculture ministers cited addressing climate change as one of the goals of a new five-year plan for the industry at their meeting this week in Guelph, Ontario.

Mary Robinson, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, was at that meeting. She told The House that the emphasis on reducing emissions can't come at the expense of farmers themselves.

"I think the message needs to be that we can't do this at the expense of producing food," she said. "We can't destabilize our food supply systems here, or our economy."

Farmers are on the front lines of climate change — coping with prolonged droughts in some parts of the country and flooding in others.

And then there are the economic factors. Production costs are rising — in some cases higher and faster than the prices paid to farmers.

Many farmers are doing what they can already to reduce emissions from their operations — leaving fields untilled to store carbon, or protecting stands of trees and wetlands.

Robinson, who operates a 2,000-acre farm on Prince Edward Island, said the ministers meeting in Guelph understood the importance of working with them to draft climate goals for the sector.