The Prairie Farmer & Rancher Forum

The Prairie Farmer & Rancher Forum was a groundbreaking initiative that brought together producers with diverse viewpoints and opinions. Together, we developed recommendations that help position Prairie agriculture for a sustainable and prosperous future.

The efforts needed to meet the challenges of climate change and enhance sustainability are considerable. To succeed, we need strong farmer and rancher leadership. The Prairie Farmer & Rancher Forum was created to develop recommendations to ensure a thriving future for farmers and ranchers on the Prairies.

With over 80% of Canada’s total farm area in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, there is a significant opportunity and responsibility to enhance sustainability in the region. The Forum’s recommendations will help chart a path for improving resiliency, sustainability, and profitability in Prairie agriculture.

Meet the forum members

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“Together, we discovered that among the diversity of the Forum members there is a unifying sense of pride and responsibility for the land we manage. No matter how big or small the acres, old or young the farmer or rancher, or the myriad of methods each individual employs in their context—we are doing the work of land stewardship.

We want our land to be productive, healthy, resilient, and viable for the future. We want to use technology and science to increase productivity without sacrificing profitability, we want to be profitable without having to stress the capacity of our labor or ecosystem into illness and disease, we want to feed the global world without jeopardizing our local world, we want to see our communities thriving and successful instead of deserted and dying. We do want the best for our industry and we have made outstanding progress already...

We know our context, we know our challenges, we are willing to learn and adapt to a changing world—we will continue to lead from the ground up.”

All quotes on this page and in the report are from Forum members.

Representing the diversity of Prairie agriculture

A shared commitment to long-term land stewardship brought together 36 randomly selected producers to develop an ambitious set of recommendations and a shared vision for the future of Prairie agriculture.

In an era of increasing polarization, the Prairie Farmer & Rancher Forum is an example of how a collaborative, honest, and open process of deliberation and dialogue can lead to consensus on substantial recommendations. It is also a testament to the wisdom, knowledge, and experience of Prairie producers.

Participating farmers and ranchers represented a diversity of voices, backgrounds, and operations from across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Over the course of three multi-day meetings held in January, February, and March, Forum members engaged in round-table discussions, deliberated the merits of different proposals, and worked together to reach consensus on a vision for the future of agriculture on the Prairies that they could all get behind. To inform their efforts, members received presentations from industry and academic experts on various issues.

Regardless of each member’s views on climate change, their shared commitment to stewardship created a foundation upon which they could listen, learn, and work together to find common ground.

Sectors

23 oilseed & grain
19 cattle ranching & farming
7 other sectors

Provinces

8 Alberta
9 Manitoba
19 Saskatchewan

Ages

3 are under 35
13 are 35–54
20 are 55+

Gender

8 women
28 men

Meet the forum members

“It is amazing how the organizers…recruited young members to participate in this Forum when they are so busy with children, community activities, and farm responsibilities. These are a diverse bunch not barking up the same tree and eager to challenge anyone. They are the greatest asset Canada has going into the future!”

“The Forum brought together a range of perspectives from Prairie farmers and ranchers to deliberate on challenging issues that face the agricultural industry. As participants we were confronted with a host of information from experts and the scientific literature related to the causes and implications of a changing climate and the impact on Prairie agriculture.”

The principles and recommendations

The Forum’s recommendations are practical, achievable, and rooted in the experience of Forum members.

The Forum came to a strong consensus on a set of guiding principles and 36 recommendations. The recommendations span everything from on-farm practices, to research, to funding support for Prairie farming and ranching. They consider measurement, livestock management, soil health, natural habitat, nitrogen management, and energy. Together, the recommendations offer the sector a starting point for improving sustainability and profitability in Prairie agriculture.

“The 36 farmers and ranchers discussed diverse and complex views relevant to most Prairie farmers and ranchers. Those discussions are the basis of the recommendations that all agreed were relevant ranging from short to long term.”

Guiding Principles

26 expert presenters

36 Forum members

Approximately 70 hours spent learning and deliberating during three separate multi‑day in‑person meetings and four virtual sessions.

36 recommendations

Farmer and rancher led
Prairie producers are best placed to chart a path to greater sustainability. Farmer and rancher leadership should be recognized, supported, and enhanced.

Sustainability focused
Sustainability includes environmental, financial, and social sustainability. The most important opportunities lie in systems and practices that increase both environmental performance and profitability.

Prairie context
Prairie agriculture is unique in Canada and the world, with distinct opportunities and challenges. The distinctive contexts of Prairie farming must always be front of mind.

Innovation
Farmers and ranchers have made great strides in increasing the efficiency and sustainability of their operations. These innovations should be recognized, celebrated, and spread.

Continuous improvement
Farmers and ranchers are constantly learning, and must strive to continuously improve stewardship on their operations.

Collaboration
We will be successful by working together with our fellow farmers and ranchers, governments, food companies, consumers, communities, and other stakeholders.

Recommendations

1. Establish baseline measurements for each priority category (Soil health, Natural habitat, Livestock management, Nitrogen management, Measurement, Energy) to assess future performance.
2. Encourage public funding of regional research centres and organizations.
3. Expand and continue to support producer-to-producer networks.
4. Increase public funding to support farmer and rancher-directed research.
5. Ensure transparency in academic funding.
6. Ensure that funders do not influence curriculum at universities and colleges.
7. Create a farmer and rancher organization (or support an existing farm and ranch organization) to ensure good communication with all stakeholders and ensure farmers and ranchers are included in sustainability discussions.
8. Adapt and develop modelling systems that better reflect the differences in regions and practices, and that accurately measure the impact of changes in practices on sustainability metrics at the farm and ranch level.
9. Encourage farmers and ranchers to develop goals and measure quality of life in addition to other measurements.
10. Recognize the value and benefits of grazing animals and look at the entire production system when considering methane emissions in order to better clarify and understand the benefits.
11. Encourage the integration of crop and livestock production by fostering collaboration between grain farmers and ranchers.
12. Support grazing management that improves ecosystem health and producer profitability.
13. Improve and expand Business Risk Management (BRM) programs for livestock producers and explore opportunities to use these programs to incentivize Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs).
14. Support farmer and rancher efforts to increase enduring organic carbon in their soils. Recognize the expanding research on more stable, long-term forms of soil organic carbon and the carbon cycle as important indicators of soil sustainability and health.
15. Identify soil tests that will act as the standard metrics for measuring soil health that include soil organic matter, soil organic carbon, microbiology, and mycorrhizal fungi, in addition to existing testing protocols.
16. Make available standardized sampling methods for soil testing, and train the agricultural community on proper sampling techniques.
17. Research existing and new agricultural products on the market—such as fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides—and their impacts on soil, water, human, and ecosystem health.
18. Research the effect of fertilizers and pesticides on crop mycorrhizal relationships and root growth inhibition, soil biology, and nutrient cycling.
19. Ensure that any mechanisms or products that come to market are properly tested and validated, ideally through regional field trials, ensuring they can deliver the outcomes they claim. Limitations of products should be clearly labelled.
20. Improve incentives to establish perennials to help address soil health and improve marginal lands, and to prevent the eutrophication of water bodies and rivers caused by excess runoff.
21. Support research regarding, and expand the use of, intercropping, cover cropping, polycropping, relay cropping, and animal integration.
22. Require traceability and composition of fertilizers from source to on-farm and on-ranch, and ensure farmers and ranchers have access to that information.
23. Develop programs to incentivize soil health improvements.
24. Encourage and assist retention, building, and restoration of habitat, including wetlands, riparian areas, native grass, forest, and shelter belts.
25. Ensure all levels of government enforce existing regulations and legislation in place to protect natural habitat.
26. Advocate for relevant entities to implement terminology changes by renaming “wasteland” to new categories, for example “natural habitat” and “yard site.”
27. Explore opportunities to generate revenue from wildlife habitat to incentivize preserving natural habitat.
28. Encourage municipalities (both rural and urban) to capitalize on opportunities to enhance natural habitat.
29. Develop programs to incentivize naturalization of marginal lands.
30. Promote greater adoption of 4R Nutrient Management.
31. Conduct more research on how and where intercropping and cover cropping can lead to reduced fertilizer use.
32. Advance research on pulse crop diseases and pulse crop adaptation to allow more and continued integration of legumes into crop rotations.
33. Require all major urban centres to process their sewage and industrial waste in a manner that makes the nutrients safe and available for agriculture to complete the nutrient cycle.
34. Support farmers and ranchers to transition to lower emissions energy sources.
35. Expand research into on-farm fuel production using renewable energy (e.g. biodiesel, ammonia, hydrogen, etc.)
36. Remove barriers and provide incentives for on-farm and on-ranch renewable energy production.

“Somehow we have a boatload of recommendations and nobody died or went to jail!”

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To succeed, solutions in agriculture need to be built from the ground up.

Farmers and ranchers have been making significant strides to steward the sector toward a sustainable future, and they have the ability and appetite to continue building on this while producing the food and feed that Canada, and the world, needs.

“(Our Forum) was a collaboration of producers from varying backgrounds (operations, locations) who came with very diverse viewpoints and opinions. Diversity became our strength. We were able to find common ground in our concerns and our understandings. As we stopped to truly listen to others, we became more open to learning and researching the issues before us. The outside experts we were fortunate to hear from also informed our understanding to a large degree.

I hope that we have accomplished a greater common voice after our meetings than what we would have had before we began. I believe this experience really underscores the need for agriculture producers to do better to work together toward a common goal of sustainability for our sector.”