Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for inviting me.
It is important that I tell you who I am, about the company I represent and what we do.
I am the founder, owner and vice-president, Agronomy, of Logiag, which has been providing agri-environmental services since 1999. We develop our own technologies, our own software. About 6,000 farmers are now using our agri-environmental services. Most of them are in Quebec, but there are 500 or 600 farmers in the Maritimes and another 150 or 200 in the United States.
My presentation is different from the ones I heard this morning. We are practitioners of climate transition. We started looking at it in 2019. We developed laser technology to do soil testing and we won the Indigo Carbon Challenge from Indigo Ag in 2021, which was last year. We have demonstrated our ability to measure the organic carbon or organic carbon stocks that are in soils. In addition, we have started to set up a climate transition support service.
I'd like to describe it to you in the following way.
We work with farmers, for whom we make the reference scenario, that is, the current emissions and carbon stocks that are currently in their soil. We guide them and present them with climate transition scenarios, such as adopting certain practices and transforming their business to decrease emissions and increase carbon stocks.
At the other extreme, the tonnes of carbon generated by farmers need to be valued by a potential buyer. So I've been looking at agri-food processors. I believe that the carbon reductions from the farm should stay within the agri-food system. We have one of the largest food processors in North America right now that is interested in the reduction that our farmers are making. They're looking at it with the goal of using it to offset their entire agri-food chain.
In between, we have developed an accounting methodology and a carbon accounting system that facilitates data collection, calculations made from scientific models, and tracking changes in soil carbon emissions and stocks.
Let me give you a very concrete example, as I only have two minutes left. On a typical dairy farm, half of the emissions come from the animals, while the other half comes from the fields.
In the field, there are two main sources of emissions: nitrogen and the use of fossil fuels for tillage—propane used to dry grain, for example. In the barn, there is methane, which is generated from the digestion of fibre by animals.
On the field side, to reduce emissions and increase carbon, you need to increase the stocks of organic matter in the soil. This is the crux of the matter; a 1% increase in organic carbon over 30 centimetres will remove 150 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.
On the animal side, it essentially boils down to promoting their health and increasing their longevity, which almost automatically translates into lower greenhouse gas emissions.
This concludes my presentation.