“The improvement we were seeing in water infiltration, soil structure, all these fantastic things happening (were) to the soil,” he said. The farm’s bottom line improved as he diversified his crops and started planting them strategically to minimize fertilizer use. Those techniques, he later learned, sit at the heart of regenerative agriculture, a suite of farming techniques that mimics natural ecosystems to maximize soil health and sequester carbon. The approach has seen a surge in popularity in recent years, with proponents saying it is a key solution to the climate crisis. About eight per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions came from agriculture in 2018, according to a 2020 report by Environment and Climate Change Canada.Soil accounted for roughly half of those emissions, largely because of nitrogen fertilizers used in industrial agriculture. When applied to fields in excess, they’re broken down by microbes into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas about 300 times
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Fifteen years ago, Brooks White had no bison and his farm was struggling with floods and threadbare soil. Hoping to improve the situation, the fifth-generation Manitoba farmer took a chance, putting bison on his land to fertilize the soil and planting cover crops in flood-prone fields to feed them.
The effort paid off.
“The improvement we were seeing in water infiltration, soil structure, all these fantastic things happening (were) to the soil,” he said. The farm’s bottom line improved as he diversified his crops and started planting them strategically to minimize fertilizer use.
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