Farm-Scape, Episode 2162

The Chair of the Pork Technical Working Group says, to ensure pork producers have the best possible access to international markets for greenhouse gas offset credits, it will be necessary to show they meet international standards.

As part of the effort to bring Canadians into the international carbon market, the pork technical working group has developed a protocol for quantifying the amount of carbon offset credits that can be generated by changing swine production practices.

The calculations, which are now close to being finalized, will be incorporated into a computer based calculator that will allow farmers to determine the value of implementing specific practices and the goal is to begin testing the tool on Canadian farms this coming fall.

Working group chair Karen Haugen-Kozyra says, over the past year, the focus has been harmonizing the package with standards established by the International Organization for Standardization.

"You know The ISO 14064 standard is pretty rigorous. You require a life cycle assessment of the entire pork operation and then the upstream and down stream activities that are off site of a pork operation.

It requires a very thorough analysis and it's important, I think, for our pork producers to have that rigor to know it's been applied because it will ensure that credits being generated off pork operations in Canada meet a gold standard internationally and so, whatever the current government policy will be, access to international market places I think would provide pork producers in Canada with more options in terms of finding a good price for their offset credits."

Haugen-Kozyra notes, when third party verifiers come in everything has to be in order so producers have to have good data sets that won't need to be questioned.

She suggests, if we're going to have some kind of avenue for pork producers to sell their offset credits where ever they would like, then we must ensure that they stand up internationally.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.