GrainsWest Summer 2018

The Food Issue 2018 grainswest.com 45 including land productivity, farm profitability and financial resil- ience. Similarly, Canada’s worker protections, minimum wage standards and rights to land tenure score high on the social targets. The environmental targets serve as both an opportuni- ty to celebrate some of the progressive practices now in place in agriculture, and a reminder that there is still work to be done. She points to four sets of environmental indicators: soil quality, water use, water quality and biodiversity. “When we look at how we are doing on our soil quality indi- cators, we are improving due to innovations like conservation tillage, biotechnology, seed drills and stewardship of our soils. One of the reasons that we do so well on soil erosion is that we dealt with it in the 1930s,” she said. “If we can galvanize on some of the other issues—stewardship of nitrogen, improving irriga- tion technology to minimize water use, or better use of crop rota- tions, intercropping or [protection of] riparian zones to increase biodiversity—Canadian farmers are very good at adapting.” Tracking practices and performance on these indicators helps form a picture of how Canadian farmers measure up. At the national level, the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Crops (CRSC) has just completed a two-and-a-half-year project to collect information from government and industry sources to assess strengths and gaps. “There are a lot of sustainability initiatives being undertaken by the agriculture industry. We wanted a broader picture of ag- ricultural sustainability, particularly on the Prairies,” said Susie Miller, executive director of the CRSC. The CRSC compiled the data from two studies it commis- sioned, including a survey of 1,600 farmers. Also incorporating information from government sources, it produced a series of 12 sustainability reports now available online (sustainable crops.ca/metrics-platform) . While the reports are intended for international grain buyers, they’re also of interest to consumers. Miller is impressed by how quickly farmers are adopting new practices to improve sustainability. “The driving force in a busi- ness is always the bottom line, but the bottom line and doing the right thing are mutually exclusive,” she said. “Change starts with a few people and grows from there.” Organizations at the provincial level are gathering data on sustainable farm practices and making it available to farmers. In March, the Alberta Farm Sustainability Extension Working Group launched farmsustainability.ca , a website designed to help farmers align their practices with the various sustainability schemes and purchasing guidelines that are being developed by major crop buyers such as Unilever and General Mills. “Our commissions are farmer driven and they recognize the need to respond to the changes on the horizon,” said Alberta Barley market development and policy manager Shannon Sereda, who led the development of the site. “We know that farmers are using sustainable practices, we just haven’t been measuring it.” The website leads farmers through a series of questions about their farm practices in all three major areas of sustainabili- ty, directing them to resources that can help them find oppor- tunities for improvement. “Farm practices have improved so much over the decades,” Sereda said. “When you talk about climate change mitigation and adaptation, farmers are already addressing it by voluntar- ily taking up new technology at their own expense. They are entrepreneurs who want to do better, and they do.” Like many Alberta farmers, Carmangay area grain and oilseed farmer Kevin Auch has been quick to adopt new practices that support agricultural sustainability.