Sustainable Crop Production Mitigates Impacts
Sustainable crop production mitigates impacts of climate change, regenerates, preserves natural systems, and sequesters carbon.
Topics:
- Mitigating Climate Change
- Regenerate & Preserve Natural Systems
- Best Management Tools
- Sequester Carbon
- Plant-based crops for Healthy & Climate-Friendly Diets
- Microbial Treated Seeds
- Microbial Nitrogen
Mitigating Climate Change
Helping agricultural operations achieve near zero greenhouse gas emissions from crop production, increase use of renewable energy sources, and enhance energy efficiency.
Key initiatives include:
- Alternative methods of nutrient application to reduce nitrous oxide emissions
- Alternate methods, including newer feeds, to reduce methane emissions from livestock operations.
- Implementing circular economy principles across the agri-food chain has the potential to further reduce greenhouse emissions.
For more information refer to Education.
Regenerate & Preserve Natural Systems:
The 4 main areas of Regenerative Agriculture include:
- Adopting no-till
- Applying fertilizer at variable rates
- Growing cover crops
- Planting green cover crops
These practices help to sequester carbon in the soil and improve soil health.
Best Management Practices - Tools
Various apps and tools are available to assist the agriculture community develop sustainable operations.
One example is the Resilient Fields tool (in development, scheduled release Fall 2021) from the Canadian Agriculture Partnership, Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), and the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario (CFFO)…
Resilient Fields is based on Best Management Practices (BMPs).
The online tool evaluates best practices for:
- Soil Management
- Nutrient Management
- Growing Season Management
- Water Management
In addition, there are numerous mobile apps to assist in measuring and monitoring sustainability initiatives.
Sequester Carbon
Soil carbon sequestration is a key component.
In addition to practicing regenerative agriculture practices, monitoring, and tracking the addition of the carbon component in soils may result in financial gains for farmers.
Helping farmers initiate carbon sequestration initiatives to offset global greenhouse gas emissions.
Plant-based Crops for Healthy and Climate-Friendly Diets
Growing crops for plant-based diets helps to mitigate climate change, and for the consumer produces healthier diets.
Plant-based diets refers to food comes from plants and not meat, dairy
Examples of plant-based diets include fruits, vegetables, tubers, whole grains, and legumes.
An example of a newer climate-friendly crop is Kernza.
Kernza is a wheat crop that is part of a group of plants known as wheatgrasses. The seed heads or ears are similar to common wheat. It is environment-friendly because it is a perennial and does not need to be planted every year. Annual planting requires more energy, material, and labour inputs. In addition, Kernza has deep roots thereby potentially allowing soil carbon levels to increase.
Microbial Treated Seeds
Seeds treated with newer microbial technologies are reported to improve crop health, yield potential, protect against environmental stresses, reduce the need for fertilizers and increase farm revenue.
Microbial Nitrogen
In leguminous plants and crops such as green peas, soybeans and other pulses, rhizobium bacteria found in soils carry out a symbolic relationship with plant roots and in that process deliver atmospheric nitrogen to the plant as ammonia – a nutrient.
For non-leguminous crops such as corn, wheat and other cereal crops, farmers have applied synthetic fertilizer to attain productive yields.
The manufacture and application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer results in multiple environmental impacts.
Microbial nitrogen is a more sustainable and environmentally friendly technology to supply nutrients to non-leguminous crops.
Microbes in the soil can be modified to fix nitrogen for delivery to the plant roots and carry out the work that naturally occurring rhizobium bacteria continue do for leguminous plants.
Delivering microbial nitrogen to plant roots can potentially increase yields, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce contamination by water-borne nitrates.
Replacing environmentally unfriendly synthetic fertilizers with environmentally friendly and sustainable microbial nitrogen is another example of a disruptive technology.
- Last Modified: May 17, 2024