The Prairie Farmer and Rancher Forum eventually agreed — by consensus — on 36 policy recommendations it wants to see put forward. But that doesn’t mean that all the attendees of the forum agreed with each other at the outset. Instead, the forum worked hard to find areas of common interest and support to create its list of recommendations.
Ian McCreary, farmer from Bladworth, Sask., and co-lead of the forum, and Marcus Reidner, farmer from Didsbury, Alta., shared with RealAg Radio Tuesday host Lyndsey Smith their perspectives on how the forum was put together, the experience of attending events, and how the recommendations came to be.
Hosted by Farmers for Climate Solutions, McCreary said the forum was unique in how it invited members to it and that it had a goal of consensus on policy recommendations.
“The idea is that, if you just have a public meeting, you tend to get the loud voices,” McCreary says. “But if you invite people at random, it increases the chances of getting the thoughtful voices. And I think we were very successful in getting a lot of thoughtful voices to this process.”
The final report (found at www.prairie-ag-forum.ca), features recommendations on integrating crops and livestock, funding for soil research, and the need for measuring progress on soil health and carbon capture.
Reidner says that the data component of the recommendations resonates with him. “Our farm — because I come from the tech sector — our farm is really heavily data-oriented already. We do a lot of data tracking on various metrics:: soil health, carbon in the soil, animal health, finances, all those fun things. And so there were some recommendations in the measurements section, that would be policies to help our farm, produce better data and get that data into the hands of people doing modeling and research, and then get their data back to us,” he says.
Listen to the full discussion on the forum, the report, and the recommendations, here:
