Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you about this potential game-changing initiative for Canadian farmers and ranchers.
I'm the Director of Food Water Wellness Foundation; and we're based in Olds, Alberta.
Canada's 159 million acres of agricultural land represents a powerful, yet largely underutilized, tool in the fight against climate change. The same soil that produces our food has an ability, through photosynthesis and biological systems, to draw carbon dioxide, or CO2, from the atmosphere and lock it in the ground in a process called sequestration. Once in the soil, the CO2 is converted to soil organic carbon, or SOC, a crucial element for soil fertility and health.
However, Canadian agricultural producers who prioritize the building of the soil organic carbon receive little recognition and support for the carbon offset they provide. Current agricultural offsets such as the Alberta system are based on conventional cropping practices that are rigidly defined. Producers who are seeking to improve their land and sequester carbon are excluded if they do not comply with the practices outlined in the protocols. Also, all 70 million acres of pasture land in Canada are excluded from the protocols, greatly limiting the offsets available for sustainable development of Canadian industry.
The federal government can play a critical role in establishing a carbon offsets framework to incentivize all producers to sequester carbon on their land. This would be a game-changer for Canada's agricultural producers currently facing narrowing profit margins, and a win-win for all Canadians. As Dr. Singh mentioned, carbon-rich soil can absorb and hold more water, mitigating extreme weather events like droughts, floods, and wildfires; and rebuilding SOC restores degraded soil and increases food security as healthy soil improves crop yields and reduces the need for high-emitting, high-cost agricultural inputs.
Unfortunately, many of our agricultural practices conventionally do not promote the carbon sequestration because they're antagonistic to the biological systems that are critical to the process. Regenerative and organic practices that support the biology in the soil, like those mentioned by Dr. Singh, as well as carefully planned grazing, conservation cropping, and cover cropping increase the soil's natural ability to sequester carbon. Using these practices and numerous others have the potential to increase soil organic carbon by as much as three billion tonnes per year globally.
Climate stability could be achieved if enough land, including the massive tracts in Canada, was sequestering carbon. We could see atmospheric CO2 reduced by 50 parts per million to 350 parts per million by 2100. We are asking that you consider supporting biodiversity monitoring in concert with broad-scale, in situ soil research. Such research would measure soil carbon in all types of agricultural land under a broad spectrum of management and would remeasure to see the amount of CO2 sequestered in the soil.
The research would capture innovation that is happening on the ground by producers to create data-driven management tools and enable farmer-to-farmer knowledge transfer, hopefully resulting in all 159 million acres actively sequestering carbon.
For this reason, I would ask you to support the provinces and territories in expanding their agricultural carbon offset programs to include this learning, and to develop performance protocols based on soil carbon sequestration. Action is critical at this time to help farmers to improve their soil and generate revenue through carbon offsets to help them deal with planned increases in carbon pricing and tight margins. As well, creating offsets will help industry comply with the emissions targets Canada's agreed to as part of the Paris agreement. Taking action would be a win-win-win for the planet, industry, and agricultural producers.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you today.