Farmscape for April 22, 2005  (Episode 1786)

The Canadian pork industry hopes to be in a position to begin trading carbon credits on behalf of Canadian swine producers by the spring of next year.

Last week the federal government announced the creation of a one billion dollar climate fund as part of its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto accord.

Canadian Pork Council Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Program Coordinator Cedric MacLeod says there's been a lot of interest in trading carbon credits and, while time lines are far from firm, the announcement puts money on the table for the purchase of carbon credits.

Clip-Cedric MacLeod-Canadian Pork Council 

In order to trade this carbon you're going to have to verification and quantification on your farm of the things that you're doing, the management practices you're putting in place, to establish these carbon credits on your farm and to actually have the emissions reductions seen as being real.

Science is going to be very involved in the process.

It's going to be very important to have the science behind all of the claims you're having of actually reducing emissions on the farm.

We have been working with other partners in the climate change arena to develop protocols that will allow farmers to indeed apply the science to their farms and to their management practices in a fairly efficient process.

Again, there's a lot of details that need to be worked out.

Registries need to be developed and the credits will have to be verified but there's probably a good chance that by spring 2006 we're going to be looking very hard at packaging up some credits and getting them sold.

MacLeod says this is a significant opportunity for farmers to gain value out of the good management practices they've been working on for years.

He says, in a lot of cases, farmers are looking at technologies that aren't just quite economically feasible but, if you toss carbon credits into the mix, it could change the light on many of these technologies.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council