Environment, Farming, Policy

Seeding climate action on Canada’s farms

Low-input sustainable agriculture is helping farmers store carbon underfoot Like everybody else, farmers talk a lot about the weather without doing much of anything about it – likely because there’s not much they can do. But after a decade of wild swings in weather patterns, crop prices and farm debt levels, some Canadian farmers are starting to look at ways…

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Environment, Farming, Politics

Open Pit Gravel Mine Tells Farmers to “Eat My Dust”

Although the Ontario election is still six months away, the surprise candidate for most polarizing issue likely to turn the political contest into an emotional cliffhanger has already come to the fore. A 6 billion tonne gravel “mega quarry” – second-largest in North America – has been proposed in what is now quiet farm and cottage country some 100 kilometers…

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Environment, Farming, Food, Local Food

Northwest Territories Gardeners and Farmers Work Together For Local Food

Yellowknife and Hay River “We’re so far behind up here that we’re ahead,” Evellyn Coleman told me, explaining why her Territorial Farmers Association, the first in North America to consider accepting backyard and community gardeners as full members, was inviting me up to speak in the Northwest Territories. Just south of the Arctic tundra, where lichen and moss are the…

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Environment, Farming, Food, Policy

Stimulate This! Whole New Field of Vision for Farm Environmental Services

A newly-formed Ontario-wide coalition will work to convince governments to pay farmers for environmental services. That’s a promising sign a whole new environmental economy may be in birth, based on giving back to nature so it can lay more golden eggs. If the people concocting infrastructure investments that governments can sink taxpayers’ money into gave a thought to the enduring…

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