KAP is calling for a national carbon pricing structure that recognizes the contributions of agriculture to greenhouse gas reduction and provides incentives to encourage the adoption of additional technologies.
The federal government has announced plans to move forward on its election campaign commitment to introduce a Pan Canada Benchmark for Carbon Pricing.
Last week Keystone Agricultural Producers held a webinar to outline the latest developments and to gather input on the issue.
Sean Goertzen, KAP’s Climate Project Coordinator, says farmers want a carbon price that works for their businesses so that means making sure there are no sudden price shocks.
Farms already sequester a great deal of carbon just by their nature. Crop and forage lands trap carbon in the soil so that actually takes greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere, traps it in the soil as carbon as well as nitrogen. Farms already do this so they’re already part of the solution.
Certain practices enhance how much carbon and nitrogen that soils can store. A lot of these practices are also beneficial for farmers in other ways, for example rotational grazing. There’s a potential for farmers to actually get paid to implement best management practices, something they already do. There’s a potential for them to get paid to do more of that in order to help address climate change.
We’re very interested to see if carbon pricing in Canada and in Manitoba can incorporate some elements of that. It’s called an offset market system. Can we do it in a way that doesn’t add a ton of paperwork for farmers, can we do it in a way that’s straight forward for farmers so that it’s worthwhile for them to take this on?
~ Sean Goertzen, Keystone Agricultural Producers
Goertzen stresses no farmer wants to see cost increases but, if they do come, they need to be manageable and there needs to be a way to adopt greenhouse gas reduction strategies that will result in net savings over time.
