Farm-Scape, Episode 2154

The Canadian Pork Council reports a three year greenhouse gas mitigation program undertaken by the Canadian pork industry to increase the agricultural community’s awareness of the economic and environmental benefits of greenhouse gas reduction has been a tremendous success.

From the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2006, Canada's pork industry coordinated a series of one, two and three year demonstration projects designed to show how equipment, procedures and management can be used to benefit the environment, increase profitability and potentially capture greenhouse gas reduction credits.

CPC environmental programs coordinator Cedric MacLeod says approximately 25 projects were dispersed broadly across the country.

The types of demonstrations ranged from manure injection techniques to barn modifications for improving feed conversion efficiency and some capital infrastructure on or around the manure storage structures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ammonia emissions and also achieve some good odor reductions so lots of projects and spread pretty evenly across the country.

On a whole, the major focus of the program was to increase awareness and I think we were very successful in doing that. Producers are aware that greenhouse gases do exist.

The emissions are coming from the industry but I think also the key messages that we tried to push was that it was all about production efficiency and reductions in carbon represented an opportunity for the industry to actually add value to advances in environmental management on the farm and, both environmentally and through production efficiencies, we found some real value I think for the pork sector moving forward.

McLeod notes a final report on the three year program, which will summaries each of the demonstration projects, is now being drafted and will be made public soon.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.