Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to start off by thanking the committee for taking the time to hear me.
I'd like to acknowledge that I am on the traditional territory of the Songhees Nation here in Victoria, B.C. on a beautiful rainy day today, and that I am the son of a Sto:lo Nation father, Robert Coulter. My mother is Thelma Chalifoux, a Métis from Alberta.
Getting that out of the way, I'd like to start, first of all, by saying that the mission, as I understand it from the pan-Canadian framework, is to increase stored carbon and identify and enhance carbon sinks.
Of course I've had many experiences since 2000. I was initially working with first nations and Métis groups in northern Alberta as we identified different intensive livestock operations. It was there that I was first introduced to the idea of composting as a soil amendment and also as another revenue stream for potential livestock operations. That got me into this whole field of climate change, especially into carbon sequestration and the different methodologies we could use as we strive to develop a market-based approach to carbon sequestration in particular.
Having said that, I'd like to start off by defining what a carbon sink is. I am going back because there are many different interpretations of carbon sinks that I've run across. I have 10-plus years of experience of dealing with this issue, both on the Prairies and out here in B.C. as I went around negotiating with all the first nations on clean energy developments, especially around tidal energy.
A carbon sink is a natural or man-made reservoir that accumulates and stores carbon dioxide, like the ocean and of course the earth.
When I was meeting with farmers, I often told them that although we know carbon is absorbed from the air by the land anyway, by using best practices we can enhance that absorption even more. That is measurable, and we could measure that absorption and take that difference to the marketplace as a compliance offset. That was our strategy at the time as we were developing a market-based aggregation process with the farmers of Alberta.
That was our definition, and of course we also moved into the landfill area and land use change, talking to various landowners in both the forestry sector and the agricultural sector.
As an aggregator, in the company I founded and operated, we had about 1,100 farmers enrolled in our program. We were encouraging them to use best practices—no-till farming in particular—to effect a more meaningful change.
That was just a small portion of what we were doing, because we know that in Alberta in particular there were about 52 million acres, and I think in western Canada as a whole we had about 55 million hectares, or about 137 million acres of agricultural land. That land had the potential to become about 30% of the solution, as opposed to being measured at about 10% of the problem of CO2 emissions.
We also looked at methane capture on some of the intensive livestock operations, because of course methane is about 21 times more intense than carbon dioxide emissions.
Of course, there was the old issue of arable land, especially summer fallow, in particular, with nitrogen emissions about 210 times more intense than one tonne of carbon. There was a lot of incentive for us to look at agricultural emissions in particular, and to try to mitigate them by using enhanced practices.
I've put together a slide presentation, which apparently you'll be getting later on in the week once it has been translated.
I wanted to talk about one of the things that we really tried to encourage farmers to do, which was to maintain their crop residue and keep that on the land without touching it. Even though it could be used for feed, fuel, fibre or construction material, we wanted to encourage them to maintain it because the more organic matter that you have left on the field, the better water retention you have. More than that, we wanted to encourage them to do these best practices because they increase the coefficient of the land to absorb more carbon.
Of course, in our market-based approach, the coefficient was the money number. The higher your coefficient, the more dollars you generated from your land by aggregating the carbon offsets from it. This slide show you're going to get later talks about how conservation tillage increases the coefficient by 0.01 to 0.4.
There was a winter cover crop. We encouraged them to do a winter cover crop and increase their coefficient from 0.05 to 0.20. Soil fertility management, eliminating summer fallow, forage-based rotations, organic amendments and water table management all increased their coefficient, which meant there were more dollars in their pockets. We really tried to show the farmers that it was a win-win. As they incorporated these practices into their farming operations, it would increase their soil organic carbon and they would also have better water retention. We could also show that because of increased yields, they would have a better profit. Not only that, but they could add an additional revenue stream by selling their offsets to the large final emitters in Alberta under the rules of Ed Stelmach in 2007.
That was our main business model. They would make the assertion that they were following these practices. As aggregators, we would take on the role of validating and verifying their assertions, so that we could convert those raw offsets, as we call them—farm offsets—into a compliance offset suitable for sale to the large final emitters in Alberta under the Alberta system.
That was our methodology. Of course, it included the verification process using an agronomist. We had to make sure that they actually had the one-pass conservation system, they had the proper equipment and they had complied with all the elements of the contract we had with them.
Once we did that, we then had to serialize them under the CSA at first. Eventually we convinced the Alberta system to develop a serialization process to ensure that we had an accurate way of tracking the compliance offsets, particularly to ensure there was no gaming or double counting.
It was quite an eventful time between 2007 and 2009, in particular, as we developed that market-based approach to ensure that land use and land use change was documented, verified and converted to a compliance offset. Then, of course, we were able to sell them to some of the large final emitters on behalf of the farmers.
That was our methodology at the time as we worked through this. The value of soil carbon to the farmer is that the soil quality is enhanced. The value of soil carbon to society is that we reduce erosion and sedimentation of water bodies, and there's an improvement in water quality, biodegradation of pollutants and mitigation of climate change.
The common denominator between both forests and agriculture is that we maintain our precious resources.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I conclude these remarks.