Researchers heading to N.B. farms to quantify how sustainable practices can pay off | CBC News

He learned about cover cropping while he was in college. Essentially, a farmer grows a second, different crop after harvesting a main crop in an effort to improve the health of the soil.

After he harvests his corn crop at the end of September, Kalverboer plants fall rye — ideal because it’ll grow in low temperatures.

The growing season in New Brunswick is too short, he said, to harvest the fall rye for animal feed, so he’s using the cover crop solely for soil health.

“I definitely can’t say that we’re getting larger yields and better yields and better growth because we’re doing the fall rye. I’m hoping in the long run it makes sense,” he said.

Agriculture accounts for 10 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and practices like cover cropping are climate solutions that can capture carbon and improve soil resilience to extreme weather events. 

But climate solutions cost time and money. Whle Kalverboer said he’s really interested in sustainable farming practices, they have to make sense economically, because a failed crop could be disastrous for a farm just getting on its feet. 

Still, he intends to keep going with the cover crop, and he wants to find a way to make it more successful. That could mean using a seeder to drill the fall rye seeds into the ground, but that’s more expensive than using a fertilizer spreader to sow them on top of the soil.

He said it’d be nice to have an example of how sustainable farming practices actually work — a pilot farm, or somewhere he could visit, that has records showing year after year that they work. 

“The biggest thing that I would want to see, which I think would really help stuff move ahead, is we need to have an example. We need to have a clear way of ‘This is how it works, this is how it works well, and this is what the cost is and this is how you go forward’,” he said.

Researchers on the field

The Agricultural Alliance says it’s helping producers like Kalverboer create environmental farm plans, looking at things such as where to place wells and how to prioritize infrastructure upgrades.

The alliance is hoping a project, called Living Labs, will send researchers out into New Brunswick field this year to collect data about how sustainable farming practices like cover cropping are actually helping farmers. 

That data can then be shared with farmers across the province, according to John Russell and Likhita Potluri, who both work with producers to complete their environmental farm plans.

“It’s researchers on the field, in the farm, not just in the research station or on small plots, but working with farmers and conversation between them, so the researchers know what the farmer needs and the farmer is telling the researcher what’s practical for them,” Russell said.

The alliance has about 900 members. Russell said there are about 2,000 farms in New Brunswick.

Over the past few years, he said, there’s been growing awareness of how the climate crisis is affecting farmers.

“It’s not something to come, but it’s here now. Farmers are more cognizant that they’ve got to have a stockpile of forages, for example, from the year before,” Russell said. “They can’t deplete their supply because they don’t know how the next season is going to be.”

Potential risks for New Brunswick farmers include longer growing seasons, less rain, and challenges keeping that water on the farm.

Rising temperatures could also force some producers to rely more heavily on refrigeration for storing their crops, meaning more electricity use.

Living Labs is still in its early stages, but researchers will come from schools across New Brunswick, Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada, and organizations with an interest in the subject.

“It needs to be done. To me, it should have been done 30 years ago, but we’re at that point now where it’s really important.”