Farm-Scape, Episode 1620

A new tool being developed for the Canadian swine industry will help producers determine where their operations fit when it comes to trading carbon credits for greenhouse gas mitigation.

Alberta Agriculture food and rural development in cooperation with the Canadian pork council, BIOCAP Canada and Climate Change Central has initiated the development of Canadian based protocols for calculating the ability of swine operations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Canadian Pork Council Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Program Coordinator Cedric MacLeod says the intent is to provide operators a tool to determine their farm's potential for trading carbon credits.

"Basically what we're doing is going through the entire hog production cycle and looking at all the sources of greenhouse gas and the potential management practices that can be employed at each particular stage to mitigate the production or the release of that gas to the atmosphere.

This protocol is being developed so that, once we start to trade carbon on a regular basis in agriculture, we have the science to back up our processes. That's the main driver to developing the protocol.

Once we have all those pieces put together we're going to try and put together a bit of a calculator so that, if a farmer wishes to do so, he will be able to calculate what his emissions are and, if he were to apply certain practices, what his emissions reductions might be.

The calculator that comes out will be accessible to farmers. It will be for information only but, when aggregators express interest in trading carbon from a specific farm, this could be a tool that they may use to quantify what sort of emissions trading could be coming from the farm to trade carbon."

MacLeod says the greenhouse gas emission reduction protocols are expected to be finalized by Christmas and the development of the calculator will begin after that.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.