The three-day conference tackled a range of topics, with a strong Indigenous focus on day one, during which attendees learned about ongoing projects to steward and restore manomin (wild rice), community funding for Indigenous farming, and the integration of Indigenous knowledge into land restoration efforts.

Why it matters

Understanding Indigenous agriculture can contribute to the country’s reconciliation efforts.

The conference kicked off with a panel discussion entitled “Seed Rematriation Journey: Returning seeds to their homeland,” drawn from the May 2025 experiences of lead-off presenter, Denise Miller of the Cayuga Nation in Six Nations territory.

On 27 acres of land, where her grandfather once farmed, Miller now grows food and medicinal plants and is working to enhance ecological habitats and develop an “environmental hub” for learning and ceremonial purposes. Last year, she joined Braiding the Sacred, a North America-wide organization of Indigenous corn cultures, to return dozens of ears of heritage-variety corn — held for decades at the Illinois State Museum — to the Lakota Nation in South Dakota.

Records posted online by the State Museum’s board of directors report a “rematriation” ceremony held in the Springfield-based institution in December 2024, attended by members of Braiding the Sacred along with “a group of Indigenous seed growers and a contingent of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) people.” The document added, “the collection had been left at the Research and Collections Center by a researcher over 50 years ago but never accessioned by the Museum, so a deaccession request was not necessary.”

Taken and tagged

Miller first saw the corn, referred to by the museum as “a collection of over 350 ears of corn and seeds,” during a rendezvous between the westward-bound travellers and members of Braiding the Sacred at an Indigenous-run casino complex in Wisconsin. She showed photos of the seed pick-up and drop-off in Lakota territory, where more celebrations were held.

She likened the identification tags put on the seeds by the museum to the placement of Indigenous children in non-Indigenous residential schools, stressing that “the ceremonies that took place (when the corn was returned) haven’t really happened for over 200 years.” It occurred to her that the seeds in those boxes might have been handled by Sitting Bull’s daughter or granddaughter before they had been taken by the researcher.

Miller lamented that participation in the Lakota ceremonies was muted, highlighting how privileged she and her friends are as Haudenosaunee people, given the extensive work her community has done to build awareness of the value of ceremony and traditional foods.

The main point of the journey, organizers said, was “we are in service” to the seeds and plants and “we have to protect what we have left,” she concluded.

Three Sisters

Those sentiments were echoed by fellow panellist Nathan Martin of the Mohawk Nation, who recalled learning from his grandparents that “seeds, they have stories and they can talk to us … These foods, they see and they feel everything that’s around them. And they have a life.”

Martin told the story of the “three sisters” — corn, beans and squash — clinging to a man who had been called to heaven, saying they wanted to go with him because the plants weren’t being treated well by humans. But the man said no, they hadn’t yet been called. The plants said OK, but there must be a change in how the plants are being treated.

“One day, (the plants) are going to go back, and we’ll never have those foods again. But as long as we take care of it and we’re thankful for these seeds, they’ll be here,” he said.

Life’s work

Longtime Indigenous food activist James Whetung from Pigeon Lake-based Black Duck Wild Rice has spent decades fighting for better care of what’s known as “manomin.” For him it began in 1981 when he joined a blockade at the Algonquin Nation’s Ardoch reserve, seeking to stop a commercial rice-harvesting venture on the nearby Mississippi River. Police raided the reserve and arrested blockade participants, but the venture never proceeded.

The experience propelled Whetung into a life of protecting manomin and spreading word of the wetland plant’s importance both culturally and environmentally.

He told attendees at the “Manomin Matters” session that a Trent University analysis indicated the Anishinaabe (a group of nations including Ojibwe and Algonquin) have been using wild rice as a food for about 28,000 years. In Indigenous lore, meanwhile, there was a prophecy that, during a migration, “our people would find a plant growing in the water and it would provide food.”

Whetung said a 1923 treaty forbade the Anishinaabe from hunting or gathering their traditional foods. In defiance of this, he began canoeing to spots at the back of bays or behind rocks where the motorboats couldn’t go, often where his uncle said the wild rice grew, to tend and to harvest.

But due to the progressive incursions of the Trent Severn waterway beginning in 1835, opening the area to logging of all the hardwoods, followed by the introduction of hunting and fishing camps starting in the 1920s, and eventually the widespread development of cottages and permanent homes along all waterways, those patches of manomin have dwindled over the decades.

Given Whetung’s charismatic nature and the fact that he was inspired by the Ardoch blockade, this inevitably led to conflicts between Indigenous rights advocates and waterfront landowners.

Whetung’s cousin, award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, recounted those outcomes in “Cottagers and Indians” – a work that was soon transformed into a documentary film that aired on CBC.

There were strong feelings on either side, Whetung commented, and that continues to this day.

“But I’m not going to quit,” he told the EFAO audience. “I’ve had a lot of help from settlers and allies in the area.”

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During a recent Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario webinar, Jim Jones, a British ecologist and hedge laying expert, explained how a managed hedgerow can fulfil several roles within agriculture.

Why it matters: Managed North American hedgerows could provide a biodiversity and ecological boost to areas with diminished woodland coverage.

“Hedgerows can create a landscape with a sense of place. That gives you a relationship to the land you wouldn’t otherwise get,” said Jones, who now calls Ontario home.

North American shelterbelts and windbreaks utilize deciduous trees with conifers on the outside to reduce wind effect. However, U.K. hedgerows are managed fence lines that provide ecological benefits and hold cultural significance.

“North American hedgerows tend to be the strips of vegetation that have remained within field boundaries, usually because fieldstone has been scraped to create a boundary and the woody species have grown up there,” he said.

“They’re the great habitats for wildlife, but they’re not really any use in terms of as a field (boundary) or livestock boundary.”

A managed hedgerow can play a massive role in biodiversity, said Jones, especially in regions with diminished woodland coverage, like southwestern Ontario. They can provide multi-species habitat and a microclimate from the grass boundary inward.

“When you’re starting to think about a new hedge row — doing it from scratch — you’ve got to ask yourself what it’s for, especially if (you’ve) had no concept of what a planted, managed hedgerow is all about,” Jones said. “You’ve got to think about what kind of function your hedgerow is going to perform.”

Coniferous trees are not ideal for hedgerows because they don’t respond well to coppicing, which is the process of cutting the tree at its base to promote rapid new growth. That is fundamental in hedgerow management, said Jones.

The backbone structure of a new hedgerow consists of 50 per cent of one species, like Ontario’s hawthorn, Osage orange or black acacia.

Hedgerow propagation doesn’t require ground preparation, although conditioning soil using turf stripping, plowing, spraying and use of landscape fabric helps. Transplants can be slot- or notch-planted into existing conditions, Jones said.

He likes a dense one-metre planting structure with five plants, ideally one or two-year-old whips, in two staggered rows 38 centimetres apart with 45 cm between each plant. Rabbit and deer guards are recommended.

“(Staggering) provides more structure as the hedgerow starts to grow. People are often surprised at how dense a hedgerow is planted, but once you come around to managing it, you see how important that is.”

Fit for Ontario

Although the availability of wood and barbed wire allowed North American farmers to drift away from labour-intensive hedgerow fencing, there was a resurgence in the 1840s and again in the 1930s to combat soil erosion during the dustbowl, mostly using Osage orange.

The thorny tree, which grows in Caledon but is threatened by the proposed Highway 413, is said to be “horse high, bull strong and pig tight,” making it an excellent base for Ontario hedgerow systems, said Jones.

The challenge lies in creating a cohesive list of species ideal for North American-managed hedgerows because European options aren’t necessarily viable.

To date, Jones has used American hazelnut, gray dogwood, chokeberry, nannyberry, arrowwood, serviceberry, black chokeberry and fragrant sumac in pilot hedgerows on Mount Wolfe Farm in Albion Hills.

In addition, Topsy Farm on Amherst Island also used Alleghany serviceberry, nannyberry, red oak, ninebark, hackberry, meadowsweet, grey dogwood, maple, highbush cranberry and chokecherry for its hedgerow.

Hedgerows have a circular lifecycle of 50 to 100 years before they become derelict and die. In the first 50 years, the shoots will proliferate from below-cut stems and thicken yearly, densifying interlocked branches.

At some point the hedgerow requires rejuvenation from the bottom, where hedge laying comes into play, said Jones.

Using stakes and binders, a “living hinge” is cut about four-fifths of the way through the tree near the base and is laid at a 35-degree angle between the stakes as a single-brush or double-brush system. Traditionally, if livestock is on both sides, a double brush system is employed.

He said a generous number of stems within the border is essential before laying a hedgerow.

The Ontario Rural Skills Network provides hedge laying workshops, as does Jones’ business, Hedgerow Co., which propagates indigenous species for hedgerow development.

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Now, after three years of an on-farm research project through the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO), she’s starting to find answers.

“With veggie seed production, (isolation distance guidelines) are out there. It’s easy to get your hands on them,” said the owner of Hawthorn Farm Organic Seeds near Palmerston, during the recent EFAO annual conference. 

Delaney was one of several presenters during the On-Farm Research Symposium Nov. 29.

Why it matters: Interest in home gardening of food and flowers has skyrocketed during the pandemic and many new gardeners are looking for locally or regionally produced seed.

Hawthorn Farm has been producing certified organic herb, vegetable and flower seeds since 1996 but Delaney says the flower side of the business has always been a guessing game when it comes to isolation distance. The mainstream flower seed sector treats the information as proprietary, something she doesn’t experience when it comes to most of the herb or vegetable varieties her farm produces.

They’ve always used 800 feet in flower seed production but, with only about three acres of the 100-acre property under cultivation, that typically translates into growing two or three plots of a single flower to avoid cross-pollination.

Isolation distances prevent natural pollinators from creating crosses with seeds that won’t produce plants identical to the parent flowers. Delaney says consumers understand if they find one or two per cent of the flower seeds in a packet aren’t true to type. But if it’s more, the seed producer’s reputation will decline.

An additional challenge is that most flowers have been bred to attract pollinators. With dozens of beehives on-site and an array of flowering plants, Hawthorn Farm is typically abuzz with bees, butterflies and birds.

In 2019, through the EFAO’s on-farm research program, they began a journey to determine flower seed isolation standards.

Using a white variety and a pink variety of cosmos, a species attractive to pollinators, they established plots isolated from each other at 400 feet and 600 feet. Between the isolation plots, they planted bush beans and other plants unattractive to pollinators.

In 2020 there were problems with planting, mainly from rabbits and frost, so they redid it in 2021 with some original seeds from the 2019 planting.

At 400 feet of isolation, they found four off-types in one variety and three in the other. 

“One was very pretty, though,” says Delaney, with striping pink and white. They saved seed and hope to replicate that colouration.

However, she concluded that at 400 feet “it’s too much crossing to be selling seed commercially.”

At 600 feet, there were zero off-types in the pink variety and one off-type in the white variety. For flower varieties that are more difficult to pollinate than cosmos, she suspects 600 feet will suffice. 

Delaney says she will continue trialing the distances for a few more years before confidently stating 600 feet as an isolation distance. Next year, they plan to add other flowers to the trials, with zinnia most likely to be next.

EFAO farmer-led research program coordinator Sara Larsen described Delaney’s trials as “a lot of work, saving the seeds and setting up the trial, but with potentially a huge space-saving on the farm.”

Delaney agreed. 

“Instead of just being able to grow two or three different varieties on our farm, we figure we’ll be able to grow four or five” if the 600-foot isolation distance proves effective, “which will really make quite a difference on our farm.”

EFAO is a leader in on-farm research in Ontario, first establishing its program several years ago based on a long-standing model at the Practical Farmers of Iowa. Numerous on-farm studies have been ongoing for three or more years, with new topics added each year as new farmer-researchers take advantage of the program. 

Some of the studies are multi-farm; others are single location.

EFAO staff assist participants in planning research and help prepare year-end reports. The program provides financial support for supplies and time spent. Reports about the 2021 studies can be viewed at the EFAO website.

The funding application deadline for each year of the EFAO farmer-led research program is Jan. 31. A Research Advisory Committee decides which applications qualify, with successful farmers notified in late February or early March.

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The “Innovations in Small Grains” session featured Ontario farmers Greg Vermeersch, Brett Israel and Joe Wecker and was co-hosted by the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO) as part of its annual conference.

Israel is an EFAO member who raises organic crops and hogs near Wallenstein, Vermeersch is a member of the Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario (IFAO) who runs a cash crop farm near Tillsonburg, and Wecker recently relocated his farm from southern Saskatchewan to southwestern Ontario, where the family grows a range of crops.

Why it matters: Adding small grains to a crop rotation can pay dividends directly or indirectly and in both the short and long term, farmers suggest.

“The value of small grains is pretty incalculable,” said Israel, after describing his farm’s 2020-21 crop year in which fall-planted winter barley harvested July 1 was followed by double-cropped, minimum-tilled organic soybeans.

“We’re seeing improved genetics” in both winter barley and short-season soybeans, he said, and there are good varieties available in Manitoba. When he is offered $38 per bushel for organic soybeans for feed, it doesn’t take much yield in organics to attain profitability.

But conventional or organic, “as we continue to see the development of more adaptable beans in shorter season environments, we’ll be able to break those profitability thresholds,” said Israel.

Vermeersch said his farm has seen yield boosts in corn and soybeans following a small grains crop. Thanks to the sandy soil in his region, common rye is grown by numerous farms. Hybrid rye has higher yield potential, he noted, but can be more difficult to grow. Like Israel, he has turned more recently to winter barley.

Vermeersch said it’s tough to get away from the “poverty grass” label that some farmers attach to small grains because of the limited price potential. But winter barley and similar crops spread the farm’s workload across more of the growing season, which he likes. As well, he said there are noticeable soil health benefits.

The Weckers had a diverse crop rotation on their farm near Regina that included a few “ancient grains” — einkorn, kamut, spelt and golden flax.

One attraction to that array was the genetic base that hasn’t been adapted to rely on external inputs. With few or no options for off-farm livestock manure and high costs for synthetic fertilizer, fewer inputs translated into a healthier bottom line, said Wecker.

“We knew (the less common small grains) would yield as good with way less fertility.” 

After relocating to southwestern Ontario, the Weckers maintained their specialty crop buyers and continue growing a diverse mix. Soil types are similar to those on their farm in Saskatchewan, but the big difference is significantly more precipitation.

The “Innovations in Small Grains” session was the first in the Living Labs project’s Inter Conference Speaker Series. It is free (sign up at bit.ly/LivingLabOntario), and the next four sessions take place over the winter. As with the first session, each is part of a larger conference hosted by one of the partner organizations. 

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada weed ecologist Eric Page described the initiative, announced in March 2021, as “a new approach to federal research that is really centred around co-developed or user-developed innovations” with a focus on maintaining soil cover and reducing tillage.

Israel and Vermeersch are among the farmer collaborators, and the upcoming speaker series sessions feature others among that group.

Their efforts to include winter barley and double-cropped or relay-cropped soybeans in their rotations are being tracked by Living Labs. The Dec. 1 presentations included photos and explanations of their 2020-21 experiments.

Vermeersch planted 30-inch row beans on April 28 between growing twin-row winter barley. The beans were planted a bit deeper than usual to keep them in the ground long enough to get the barley off the field.

But lack of soil moisture is a risk on sandy land that is challenged to hold enough heat for frost protection. They got a heavy frost that killed 80 per cent of the relay-cropped beans.

“It was due to the lack of moisture, partly because of the barley being there and taking up that moisture,” said Vermeersch. The beans that survived did well. 

They didn’t buy any special equipment. For the combine, they put drainage tile on the cutter bar where it passed over the beans to protect them when the barley was combined. Where driven over, the soybeans popped back up after a couple of days.

Vermeersch also tried double-cropping, with the barley combined and beans planted around July 10. “I don’t think you could have gotten a better season for double-cropping.”

He is a conventional grower, as opposed to organic. Relay-cropped beans yielded 38 bushels to the acre and the double-cropped beans yielded 42. He believes the relay beans would have done better in a more normal year.

Israel is an organic farmer and the twin-row winter barley probably wouldn’t work due to weed control challenges. Double-cropping has potential when barley can be harvested July 1 as he did in 2021.

“It’s on Santa’s Christmas list to get a new no-till drill so hopefully the big guy is good to us,” he said. The family now uses a 20-year-old Case drill and often runs a high-speed disc over the barley stubble.

Page said he hopes the supports provided by the Living Labs project make it easier for farmers to try new things. 

“As farmers, you take a lot of risks. … You’re sometimes not just on the leading edge but also the bleeding edge. This just allows us to be innovative and share.” 

The next session on Jan. 21 is “Doing on-farm research” with representatives of The Soil Network research group. It is followed by “Grazing cover crops” as part of OSCIA’s conference on Feb. 8. “Full-time cover crops” with Woody van Arkel and Ken Laing will run on Feb. 17, and “Healthy soil, clean water” with Henry Denotter and conservation authority representatives is scheduled March 8.

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“We’re all in this together,” said High Mowing Seeds commercial grower representative Aaron Varadi, during one of five in-depth sessions held over the five days of the 2021 conference.

Why it matters: Many organic producers have a heightened concern about where and how their inputs are produced, so being able to trust other members of the seed supply chain is important.

Varadi, who also has a seed-production farm in Washington state, joined Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario seed program manager Rebecca Ivanoff as a panelist in a session entitled “Insights into Organic Vegetable Seed.”

Vermont-based High Mowing, well-known to organic vegetable growers across North America, sources its branded seeds from all over the continent and offers overseas-produced seeds through partnerships with European companies.

Ivanoff outlined efforts, both institutional and through not-for-profits such as Seeds of Diversity Canada, to preserve the global diversity of agricultural seeds.

She said the preparedness of humanity for the effects of climate change is threatened by a failure to adequately maintain a wide range of food and feed plant genetics.

In years past, she believed, increasing consolidation of control over seeds in private companies’ hands put too much focus on increased yield and ease of crop management. More recently, however, Ivanoff has become less concerned about big biotech’s influence. Today, more people talk about access to seeds and conserving agricultural biodiversity, she said.

“People are starting to ask some really important questions and getting excited about seeds.”

Varadi agreed.

An analysis he saw recently showed the COVID-19 pandemic had a slight negative economic impact on companies — typically larger-scale marketers and distributors — sending seeds into markets destined for farmers producing for the food-service or restaurant sectors. Seeds suppliers like High Mowing, meanwhile, saw massive upswings in demand.

In the spring of 2020, he reported, the company significantly increased staff and that has remained in place through 2021.

Leading into this spring, High Mowing has 50 per cent more seeds for sale than in past years. “And we’re selling it all.”

Current challenges in meeting that organic seed demand, Varadi said, include climate change impacts in traditional seed-growing regions, measuring demand in advance, pest and disease pressure and isolation space.

With pest and disease control, in some cases these crops are in the ground much longer than they typically would be if being harvested as food. Lettuce, for example, takes many more weeks to produce viable seed than simply being harvested for greens. “There’s just that much more time for things to go wrong.”

Isolation space, meanwhile, can be at a premium for certain varieties. The best seed-growing conditions for some organic varieties sometimes exist only in a limited geography, and when a soil-borne problem develops with pests or disease, “it’s hard to find ground that isn’t already contaminated.”

Varadi says High Mowing aims to mitigate these challenges by choosing varieties bred in and for organic conditions, having multiple contracts for each variety, having a multi-year supply, and having multiple varieties that could potentially fill the same slot in the seed catalogue.

Also working in the company’s favour, though, is that the organic seed sector is noticeably non-competitive. If an organic-focussed producer or supplier perceives an opportunity or sees success in breeding new varieties, others in the sector typically are informed through informal connections.

“It seems like we’re all passionate about seeds and genetic diversity,” he said. “We all want people to grow seed.”

He told the session there may potentially be some vegetable varieties where saving seeds is prohibited through “utility patents” by profit-focussed interests. But this is rare in the vegetable world.

And High Mowing, Varadi added, makes sure to pay back for this goodwill. Not all licensing fees the company pays are required under legislation. Examples include payments made to some indigenous North American “seed keeper” organizations that don’t exist as for-profit companies. High Mowing typically pays a fee equal to what would have been a licensing fee.

“Sometimes we’re pre-emptively paying royalties or licence fees because these people are doing good work,” he said.

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Sundance, who is mixed-race Black-identifying, saw a void in access to two things in her local farmer’s market – year-round fresh greens and diversity.

So she decided to fill them both.

Why it matters: Agriculture has not been a diverse sector, and there is interest in bringing more diversity into food production.

“I always say my farm is rooted in food justice because I do grow really great produce year-round but I also grow new farmers,” Sundance told attendees of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO) virtual annual conference in December.

In 2019 the 23-year-old launched Sundance Harvest, a small-scale garden business on one-third of an acre in North Toronto’s Downsview Park.

Using her two greenhouses and 10,000 square feet of outdoor plots, Sundance produces a steady flow of herbs, salad mix, kale, collards and chard year-round with more seasonal offerings throughout of tomatoes, mushrooms, sorrel, spinach, microgreens, zucchini, peppers cucumbers and cut flowers.

“These are very easy crops to grow in an intensive way,” she said, adding she grows year-round in the greenhouses, but starts production in the field in April and grows to the end of December.

“I find the most profitable thing for my urban farm is salad mix,” she said. “I sell easily 100 bags a week, 200 if I actually have the capacity to produce 200 bags.”

Sundance acknowledges if she farmed rurally it would cost less, likely involve greater land availability and easier infrastructure and crop expansion into items that require more space, such as squash and watermelon.

As an urban farmer, she said land is limited, costly and, because it’s rented, requires significant discussions before infrastructure expansion can take place if it’s even approved.

However, the greatest positive of urban farming is community engagement and being accessible to consumers by transit, which allows them to visit the farm, ask questions and engage with the process, said Sundance.

“For me, the upsides make it worth it,” she said, especially when it comes to establishing food justice and creating agriculture-based education opportunities for marginalized communities who often face higher rates of food insecurity, food injustice, social isolation and mental health crises.

A 2018 study from the University of Toronto’s PROOF Food Insecurity Policy Research indicated the highest rates of food insecurity in Canada occur in Indigenous or Black households at 28.2 per cent and 28.9 per cent respectively.

Sundance, who grew up with food insecurities, wanted to provide a space where Black, Indigenous, Persons of Colour (BIPOC), LGBTQ2S, gender non-conforming and youth with disabilities could learn everything about agriculture from seed saving to harvesting, distribution to retail and gain control over their food systems.

Leading by example, Sundance assessed a void in her local farmers’ market, developed a business plan, applied for and received a $5,000 grant to launch Sundance Harvest and within a year has created enough steady income through her  Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription box and Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market customers to provide herself with a salary and pay her staff a living wage.

“A lot of people in Toronto are very interested in urban agriculture and they want to support it in anyway possible,” she said. “I’ve only had one person drop out (of the CSA) and that was in the last few months because they moved.”

Her online farm store was part of the pandemic pivot many businesses made to stay afloat during the pandemic. Sundance’s online store includes unique maple products, wild-caught fish from Nunavut, herb salt, botanical tea and holistic snacks by BIPOC producers.

“Because there is such a lack of diversity in agriculture and a lack of opportunity for us I really wanted to centre our products in my store,” she said.

She tries to add a new producer to her site weekly.

Sundance Harvest has evolved so quickly she was able to launch Growing in the Margins, a free 12-week education program for low-income youth facing barriers within the food system.

It offered two streams, one in mentorship and the other a drop-in program, some of which has been suspended temporarily due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Sundance said the program is open to youth 18 to 25 who self-identify as low-income, BIPOC, LGBTQ2S, gender non-conforming or disabled who are interested in a career in agriculture or leading community food sovereignty movements, but lack hands-on farming education.

“I wanted to learn from someone who had a similar lived experience so they could mentor me, teach me and ensure that I wouldn’t have as much of a hard time getting started,” she said. “Growing in the Margins is the only place they (marginalized youth) feel safe to learn.”

Sundance said there is no labour exchange for their education. She provides a curriculum covering everything from seed saving to planting, irrigation to organic pest control and harvest to marketing to help smooth the path for others who have an interest in agriculture but no idea of how to start.

“The majority of the youth that finish the program actually start careers in agriculture,” she said.

Eventually, Sundance hopes Growing in the Margins will evolve into a closed-loop system where the community provides land resources for an urban farm. That farm feeds people and sells its produce at a farmers market creating financial support and jobs. The circle then begins again with potential urban farmers again being mentored and educated to the point they can start their own farms.

“I didn’t see myself represented in agriculture and I wanted to be a farmer,” she said. “It was really important to me… to have a farm that reflected something I didn’t see in agriculture.”

Each step she takes growing her business and Growing in the Margins brings her closer to her goal of eradicating systematic racism in the food system, shining a light on the profitability of urban farming and providing marginalized youth with an opportunity to see themselves reflected in the agricultural sector.

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“Soil organic matter (SOM) is intimately linked to soil health, to ecosystem health, to planetary health and it has influences on the physical, chemical and biological properties of the soil,” Sarah Hargreaves, Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario farmer-led research director, at the organization’s annual conference in December.

Why it matters: More is being uncovered relating to how cycles and microbes affect soil organic matter.

Within the old paradigm SOM has been understood as humification, which was an artifact of how the soil was handled and measured in the lab, which drastically changed the complexity and compounds of soil.

Imagine using Drano to get hair out of the drain and you study that clump as “hair” without acknowledging how much the toxic alkaline material had changed the complexity, compounds and structure of the hair.

The new paradigm incorporates the cycles, connections and relationships within an ecosystem and doesn’t just look at one asset saying that’s what the formation of the ecosystem depends on. That concept is a passion of Hargreaves.

She channelled that passion into the University of Toronto’s ecology program and was captivated by the intricate relationship of bio-geochemical cycles, which led her to the sub-Arctic near Churchill as field assistant where she ultimately did her master’s degree.

“It was here in the Arctic where it clicked for me that soil was the hub of the cycling that I love so much,” she said. “The recycling of nutrients on a global scale was happening in the soil but it was affecting the world.”

When she and her husband moved from the Arctic to Iowa, Hargreaves swapped her sub-Arctic ecologist hat for an agro-ecology one and studied plant-microbe interactions in perennial and annual cropping systems for her dissertation. The natural connections, relationships and cycles that existed in the Arctic were not reflected in the
Midwest soils; instead, she discovered a system that was “leaky.”

“Agriculture in many parts of the world is broken, it’s leaky,” she said. “There’s even leaking on a community level…they were de-incorporating. Towns didn’t want to be towns, the younger generation were fleeing the state.”

Reconnecting cycles

How can we reconnect the cycles and the relationships in an agro-ecosystem?, Hargreaves wondered. Shortly thereafter she and her family moved to a farm in Ontario and began raising food in a way that cycles and relationships remained intact, connected and held sacred.

Hargreaves, husband Drake Larsen and their daughter rotationally graze their small flock of sheep, a small herd of cattle and raise artisanal pasture-raised chickens and ducks and have had pasture-raised pigs in the past on their 50-acre farm, Three Ridges Ecological Farm.

“We use landscape design to guide the movement of animals on the land and the planting of perennials,” said Hargreaves.

The long-term vision for the farm is one that integrates the storage and capturing of water with the storage and building of soil.

“All of this soil organic matter is central to all aspects of ecosystem connection,” she said. “It signals when your ecosystem is healthy and when your ecosystem is sick.”

The new SOM paradigm embraces that connection by acknowledging the impact of diversity within the ecosystem, photosynthesis, plant residues and root exudates, microbial processing and microbial necromass – all play a part collectively and as individual components.

The importance of microbial necromass (dead microbes) and microbial-derived carbon has really changed the paradigm, said Hargreaves.

Research conducted by Dr. Cynthia Kallenbach, of McGill University, explored if microbes alone could make SOM. She took sterile clay with zero organic matter and added some simple sugars and microbes. After 15 months there was two per cent organic matter present.

The study provided clear evidence that dead microbes, or necromass, was stable and able to remain and accumulate in the soil as organic matter.

“Two per cent organic matter in 15 months under ideal conditions – that’s pretty remarkable,” said Hargreaves. “Here the microbes are teaching us their role is as important, if not more important, in death as it is in life.”

Diversity is an overarching theme for the new SOM paradigm whether it’s in crop rotation, integration of livestock, rotational grazing or the introduction of perennials with deep, large roots taping into the water and providing year-round food and habitat for microbes.

The creation and maintenance of SOM matters because it increases water retention, infiltration and increased storage, a chemical benefit as a buffer for nutrients and a source for more SOM due to the biology it attracts.

The basic tenants of SOM are simple — keep the soil covered at all time either through plants or mulch; maximize diversity; minimize soil disturbance; keep live roots in the ground; use organic inputs and it sinks and stores
water.

The more plant diversity on top of the ground the more of a diverse microbe community you’ll be supporting within the soil, she said.

Adding organic matter

“Organic inputs feed the soil, balance out the microbes and it helps maintain a diverse microbial community,” Hargreaves said.

In order to facilitate that on your farm there are a number of options; conservation tillage, crop rotations, cover crops, composting and compost utilization, livestock integration, adaptive multi-paddock grazing, water capture and the four “Rs” of fertilizer use.

Hargreaves said as farmers it’s generally difficult to hit all these targets but incorporating a few of them into the process will help build SOM and stability.

New research into SOM stabilization within the new paradigm will look at microbial necromass recycling as an important precursor for soil carbon stabilization, said Hargreaves.

As we know, decomposition also leads to carbon in the atmosphere, she said. “It’s a balance between how much are we wanting the microbes to die, decompose and release nutrients because that makes SOM but . . . we don’t want them to be processing more than they’re dying because that will lead to a net carbon in the atmosphere potentially.”

Hargreaves hopes ongoing and future research will be practical enough for farmers to use in plotting cropping and management systems to maximize efficient carbon use.

“This is the place where research is happening,” she said.

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Svein Tore Holsether said agriculture is responsible for one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“On the one hand, that is a big challenge, but it is also a very big opportunity,” he told analysts during a webinar on the fertilizer manufacturer’s fourth quarter 2019 financial results.

That is because half of those emissions are due to converting the world’s forests into farmland.

“This means that efficient crop nutrition solutions have a major role to play in solving some of the planet’s biggest challenges,” said Holsether.

By making more efficient use of existing farmland some of those acres can be converted back into forest.

He noted that the average corn yield of 59 bushels per acre in Mexico pales in comparison to the average yield of 175 bushels per acre in the United States.

There are huge gains to be realized if some of the world’s least efficient farms are shifted toward the best-in-class yields by using the latest fertilizer products.

Holsether was in India recently where he met with a couple who grow 10 acres of potatoes. They have increased their yields by 15 percent using the right crop nutrition program.

“Now this is only one example, but if you multiply this with tens of millions of farmers, we’re talking incremental changes with a world-changing impact,” he said.

Brent Preston, president of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, one of the lead groups in a coalition that recently launched Farmers for Climate Solutions, dismissed the notion that the fertilizer industry has a major role to play in saving the planet.

“It is a well-established fact that the manufacture and use of fertilizers, especially nitrogen fertilizer, results in very large greenhouse gas emissions,” he said in an email.

“Many of our coalition members have used practices such as planting leguminous cover crops and improving soil health on their farms to substantially reduce or eliminate their need for synthetic fertilizers, while at the same time increasing their profitability. This is the path we need to take.”

Holsether noted that the Food and Land Use Coalition recently produced a lengthy report that concluded it is possible to reduce agriculture and pastureland by one-third and turn that land back to nature.

The group believes that goal could be achieved by eating healthier diets, reducing food loss and waste, producing food with greater resource efficiency and avoiding “perverse incentives” for land expansion such as biofuel mandates.

The fertilizer industry believes it can contribute to that objective through precision farming and by improving nutrient use efficiency. That will reduce the amount of farmland required to feed the world and allow for reforestation of large tracts of farmland.

“As (former U.S.) vice-president Al Gore once said, the best technology for carbon capture is already invented,” said Holsether.

“It’s called a tree and when you put several of them together, it’s called a forest.”

One analyst said the European Union clearly sees the fertilizer industry as a big emitter of carbon dioxide, not the saviour of the planet.

Holsether’s chart showed that the industry is responsible for two per cent of global emissions.

While he acknowledged that the industry uses a lot of natural gas, it is working hard to reduce its environmental footprint. Yara has decreased emissions by 50 per cent compared to 2004 levels and has targeted a further 10 per cent reduction by 2025.

“Yes, there are emissions from producing fertilizer but the impact on more efficient agriculture means more land available for nature, so the net of this is positive,” said Holsether.

A recent report by the National Farmers Union had a different take on the fertilizer industry’s contribution to the greenhouse gas problem.

“Roughly 28 per cent of all Canadian agricultural emissions come from the manufacture and application of nitrogen and as we double and redouble its use, agricultural emissions rise,” stated the report.

This article was originally published at The Western Producer.

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The group, called, Farmers for Climate Solutions is currently made up of organic and environment-focused groups across the country, but aims to include more larger farm organizations, says Brent Preston, president of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.

“We hope many farmers will join with us. There’s strength in numbers. We want this to be a mainstream movement,” he said.

Why it matters: Farmers sequester carbon when they grow plants and increase organic matter, but they rarely get credit for it.

Preston says that there’s “a real sense among our members that they individually want to be active in the fight against climate change, and they want their organizations to be active in that fight. Our partners in the coalition are getting the same message from their members.”

The federal government has also set a goal of Canada being carbon neutral by 2050 and Preston says that goal will not be reached without farmers being involved.

“We think there’s a lot of times farmers are seen as passive victims, or the bad guys causing it, causing emissions or damaging to the environment. We really want to change that narrative and be part of solutions,” says Preston, who farms near Creemore.

Increasing soil health by accumulating more organic matter in soils. Growing cover crops to keep soil in place and more efficiently use nutrients. These are practices that Preston said were “pretty fringe” when he started farming 15 years ago, but now are the focus of the mainstream.

The new organization hasn’t yet created policies, as Preston says they want more people involved, before they are created. He says “the idea we value and pay farmers for environmental services is something that absolutely makes sense.

“The benefits (of climate services) don’t just accrue to farmers. Society benefits, so there needs to be societal commitment to make this stuff happen.”

A recent report from the National Farmers Union (NFU) says that the agriculture sector contributes 12 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, but it also is a major sequesterer of that carbon, and the organization sees farmers as a critical partner in lowering carbon in the atmosphere.

The NFU is one of the founding members of Farmers for Climate Solutions, along with the EFAO, Equiterre, Canadian Organic Growers, SeedChange, Rural Routes to Climate Solutions and Farm Folk City Folk. The organization launched on Feb. 11, Canadian Agriculture Day.

Preston says he sees some of the old animosities that divide production systems breaking down and he hopes farmers across the sector sign onto the movement.

“Organic or not, no-till or traditional tillage methods, all of us can improve. None of us is doing everything perfectly. We can learn from each other and be moving in same direction.”

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This “nutritional wisdom” has been a career-long research focus for University of Utah professor emeritus Fred Provenza. It was also a focus during three sessions he delivered at the recent sixth annual education conference of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO).

Originally from Colorado, Provenza earned an undergraduate degree in wildlife biology while also working on a ranch in his home state, before moving north to further his research into animal behaviour. Previous books have explored wildlife foraging and shepherding, but he gained prominence in human nutritional circles with the publication in 2018 of “Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom.”

Why it matters: The easy access to highly processed food, both for farm animals and humans could have decreased our ability to find the food we need.

Nobody has to tell wild animals what to eat, how much, or how to self-medicate by altering their diet to include rarely eaten foods. Why?

“Because they’re still in an environment,” Provenza suggested. “They’ve been successful. They know how to do that.”

Even laboratory rats, through a study offering diabetic rats a range of foods that may or may not improve their condition, have been shown to instinctually self-medicate. Yet many modern livestock animals, and humans, appear to lack these instincts.

“Do we lack the ability?” Provenza asked. “Or has that been hijacked? I would argue it has been hijacked.”

Citing the book “The Dorito Effect” by Canadian Mark Schatzker, he suggested the “phytochemical richness” of commercially available fruits and vegetables has declined over the past 50 years. For this, he blamed the widespread practices of delivering nutrients through irrigation, of restricting livestock indoors, a regimen of prepared feeds, and picking and shipping produce while it is still green.

Provenza’s earliest studies about how animals choose what to eat involved wildlife. “The mother links the offspring to the ancestors and the landscape,” he explained, adding that the taste system in a human fetus is fully functional in the last trimester of pregnancy. After birth in mammals, the tastes get transferred in the mother’s milk. And when the mother starts foraging, the offspring follow.

If a unique environmental condition occurs early in an animal’s life, and the mother selects a rarely eaten food to fend off disease or starvation, the offspring will return to that food years later if presented with that same environmental condition.

It wasn’t long, though, before it occurred to Provenza that domesticated livestock might share these abilities clearly exhibited in wildlife. He showed a video from a trial he ran with lambs that were mildly deficient in some nutrients. Straw isn’t a food lambs are particularly attracted to, though they would eat it more if it was flavoured with maple or apple. But when he drenched some of the straw with the nutrients the lambs were lacking, the video showed one group of lambs enthusiastically eating, while another group in the next paddock sniffed the same straw without nutrients, and walked away.

He has since researched energy in feeds, energy/protein ratios, minerals, vitamins, and many “secondary compounds” such as phenolics, alkaloids and various nutrients — what he describes as “a lot of work that showed that (farm) animals can self-medicate.” In particular, he said, it has been clearly shown that when you supplement one type of nutrient or compound in the livestock barn, it changes the selection by the animals when they go out to pasture.

Then, in researching and writing “Nourishment,” Provenza again broadened his exploration of nutritional wisdom — to include humans.

“There’s not a huge amount of literature on the topic.” But there is evidence from the historical and anthropological records that self-medicating does happen. Examples include the use of cod liver oil to prevent rickets, craving for salt, and the craving for fruits and vegetables to prevent scurvy.

The lamb study with straw, he suggested, could be likened to humans eating processed foods. It’s a relatively poor nutritional choice, but food manufacturers have come to recognize that positive feedback can be created by injecting a blast of flavour and/or energy in a processed food.

“And then you target kids with your marketing,” he said, adding this leads to early adoption of unhealthy eating.

What’s instead needed for our society to return to healthy eating, Provenza argues, is for the system of food production to return to practices that promote richness of flavour and density of nutrients. Nutritional science, meanwhile, should move away from analyzing the effects of singular compounds on the so-called “average” person, and instead recognize that each person’s body reacts uniquely to the combination of nutrients, minerals, and other compounds contained within their diet.

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