In the last few years, the push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) across several sectors has increased. In 2022, the Government of Canada released their 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan. While this plan includes many different industries — transportation and oil and gas, to name a few, agriculture is also on the list.
One of the major challenges in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the science of measuring current emissions and the impact of a change in practice is only just coming online. It’s very difficult for a producer to make informed decisions for the future of their farm in regards to emissions without first knowing what their baseline is. Not only that, but practice changes can be expensive to implement and might not always work out the way that the farmer envisions, or achieve the reductions required to meet targets.
A team of people led by Dr. Roland Kroebel with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, have created software called Holos that aims to help producers answer questions regarding the GHG emissions and changes in soil carbon that stem from different farm practices.
As Kroebel says in this interview with RealAgriculture’s Amber Bell, the model is free to use, publicly available, and, in the words of his mentor, it is not necessarily there to say what is, but rather to ask, “what if?”
The Holos model calculates the GHG emissions on the farm, but also gives producers the opportunity to input different values in order to see what the potential outcomes would be were they to make those practice changes.
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