This is how regenerative agriculture on the Prairies can help in the climate change fight

This story is part of the Prairies Climate Change Project, a joint initiative between CBC Edmonton and CBC Saskatchewan that focuses on weather and our changing climate.

An Alberta farm northwest of Edmonton is incorporating regenerative agricultural practices to mitigate the impacts of climate change. 

Midmore Farms in Sturgeon County is taking part in the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab, which brings together farmers and scientists to address agricultural and environmental issues, including adapting to climate change, protecting soil and water quality, and boosting biodiversity.

But what exactly is regenerative agriculture and how does it work?

Five key principles 

For Midmore Farms owners Ward and Joanne Middleton, regenerative agriculture involves five key principles that are either supporting soil health or augmenting soil health. 

Those principles include: not disturbing the soil, keeping the soil covered, growing a variety of crops, keeping living roots in the soil, and allowing animals to graze the lands. 

Experts say modern industrial agricultural practices degrade the quality of soil, whereas regenerative farming captures more nutrients in the soil.

The practice will become increasingly important with climate change leading to more intense weather events like droughts and floods. 

Ward Middleton says the first thing they consider on the 850-acre farm is what crops they plant. He says his farm uses intercropping, the practice of planting different crops nearby each other. 

Typically in agriculture, monocropping – the practice of planting the same crop every year – has become the norm. Experts say that limits crop diversity, puts fields at higher risk of disease, and degrades soil quality over time. 

Middleton says every year, his farm chooses from a variety of crops, including wheat, rye, barley, oat, peas, lentils, flax seed, or canola.

They also plant forage crops like alfalfa and sweet clover as both a cover crop over the winter months, and is used as green manure. 

"Sweet clover is biennial, so it's going to stay in the soil living [and] feeding the microbial culture through the winter and into the spring," said Middleton. 

The forage crops also help with another regenerative practice Middleton uses, cattle grazing, which reduces the need to till the fields. 

"We now use cattle to terminate that green manure crop, to get the symbiotic relationship from the gut flora of the animal onto the soil," said Middleton.

"They also save us at least one tillage pass, so we're not disturbing the soil as much … it's not that we've thoroughly eliminated tillage, just we're trying to use the livestock as a way to reduce the tillage."

A more green approach to farming 

Experts say that regenerative agricultural practices can be used to fight climate change, since they capture more carbon in the soil, and also use less oil and gas in production. 

"Regenerative agriculture is something that people often don't think about as being a means of fighting climate change, as a means of cleaning up the environment," said Brian Lanoil, professor of microbiology at the University of Alberta.

"It would be beneficial to Canadian society as a whole to start thinking about farms not just as ways of producing food, but also as ways of helping us to fight climate change." 

That fight starts with the race to sequester as much carbon in the soil as possible. 

"Organic carbon in soil is about twice the amount that we have in the atmosphere … there's still a lot of room for storing more carbon in soil, especially in places like grassland systems," said Lanoil. 

"The more carbon that's stored in the soil, the healthier the soil tends to be because carbon plays a lot of roles in soil and helps to maintain that functionality." 

Lanoil says that regenerative practices typically require less heavy machinery, meaning they don't use as much oil and gas, meaning they produce fewer greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. 

The benefits of regenerative agriculture is that, over time, it can yield better crops. 

"The farmers that we work with tell us that when they start practicing regenerative agriculture that they see big changes, they see benefits in terms of their yield," said Lanoil. 

"They see increases in retention of soil, so less soil erosion. They see increases in crop yield or at least maintenance of crop yield, and they see that their soils are improving over time, so they'll be able to keep using that soil well into the future."

Early stages of research

In 2021, the federal government invested $185-million to develop living labs across the country, to bring together farmers and scientists to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in the agricultural industry. 

The program was expanded in 2022, with nine additional labs brought into the fold, including the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab. 

"We're working with 115 producers across Alberta and we are doing extensive soil mapping of carbon stock and soil health," said Kimberly Cornish, project manager of the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab.

"[We're] looking at how that's impacting their soil carbon and their soil health and also working with producers … all along the paradigm of adoption of regenerative agriculture." 

Cornish says that the lab will look at the successes and pitfalls of using regenerative agriculture, examining several metrics including how much crops yield, the quality of soil, how financially beneficial it is for farmers, and how much carbon is sequestered. 

Lanoil says this research is necessary to determine if the transition to regenerative practices is financially viable on a larger scale.

"The practices that they have to do in order to carry out regenerative agriculture are more complex, and so there's costs that are associated with developing the regenerative practices and implementing those practices," said Lanoil. 

"These kinds of practices require extra work on the part of the farmer, which costs extra money for them."