Farm-Scape is sponsored by Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork Play Audio Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork.

Farm-Scape, Episode 1373

The Canadian Pork Council has issued the call for 2004-2005 proposals under the federal Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Program for Canadian Agriculture.

The five year 21 million dollar program encourages farmers to adopt best management practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and offer agronomic and economic benefits.

It's being delivered on behalf of Agriculture and Agrifood Canada by various agricultural industry partners.

Canadian Pork Council Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Coordinator Cedric MacLeod says the pork industry has completed a successful first year of demonstration projects and is now focusing on follow-up.

"We were able to establish ten fairly comprehensive projects this year dealing from basic barn management and how to manage the water coming in and out and climate control systems to manure storage covers and dealing with manure storage issues and then right out into the field and dealing with manure management options to mitigate greenhouse gases.

We're hoping, by having kind of a long term goal or a three year timeline for a lot of these projects, that in the subsequent years after this initial year we're going to be able to identify holes that we've left in our program and fill those with specific projects that are designed to address them.

We're probably going to be looking more at communication type activities for the second and third year to try to disseminate some of the information being collected off the existing program".

MacLeod says the scientific community and extension have been incredibly supportive and there seems to be a lot of interest in participating in this demonstration and communication program.

The deadline for submitting 2004-2005 proposals is December 1st.