In spring 2021, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) announced funding to expand its Living Labs initiative to every province. Today, organizations tasked with connecting farmers, scientists, and other stakeholders to advance sustainable, environmentally friendly on-farm practices and technologies are starting to see preliminary results.
One such organization is Food Water Wellness Foundation in Alberta. Kim Cornish, the executive director of Food Water Wellness, says that while there have been challenges in the last three years, seeing the preliminary data coming out of the project is really cool.
Food Water Wellness is helping to lead the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab which includes mapping soil from 111 farms around Alberta for carbon and different soil health characteristics, explains Cornish. Once the soil has been mapped, management practices from each farm will be overlaid onto the soil map, giving an in-depth look at how different management practices are affecting the soil throughout the province.
In this interview with RealAgriculture’s Amber Bell at the Western Canada Conference on Soil Health and Grazing, Cornish details some of the preliminary results that they are beginning to see and she says that there are some interesting things that are jumping out at people. Some of those things are the ability of alfalfa to increase carbon in a cropping system, or how bale grazing and swath grazing appear to be putting carbon into soils that previously lacked it.
While this data is preliminary and the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab still needs to follow up and validate it, Cornish says that she hopes this will give the statistical data that is needed to impact management practices on farms in Alberta in the future.
“Almost every producer we’ve sat down with and been able to really look at the map, there’s been some sort of insight coming out of it. And that’s really what our hope was for,” she says.
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