At the end of November, I took the better part of a week to attend the Canadian Forage and Grassland (CFGA) annual conference at Harrison, B.C.
The theme of the conference this year was “Forage Resilience in a Changing Landscape.”
Why would my readers care about this matter? Simple: world leaders at the COP 28 climate conference are raising the priority of agriculture, food, and health in the climate talks and some critics of animal agriculture keep promoting the idea that if the world stopped eating meat and dairy products, we could stop the climate from warming dangerously.
I find that my political, or civic, efforts go to discovering and practicing agriculture methods that are climate-friendly. Further, these methods or practices must be proven and adapted to our local farming and ranching ventures.
Nothing has excited me more than the attendance at this conference. It has been virtual for the past few years and before COVID I could not free up the time or money to attend. But this year it was on our doorstep.
Several keynote addresses piqued my interest: Frank Mitloehner (University of California, Davis) on the subject of: Livestock’s Path to Climate Neutrality; Bart Lardner (University of Saskatchewan) Advancing pasture management to store carbon and reduce methane emissions; Dan Undersander (University of Wisconsin) Measuring and reporting positive impacts for Greenhouse Gases(GHGs); and our own local Lauch Fraser (Thompson Rivers University) Ongoing research in B.C. on Carbon and Nitrogen in forages.
Quite the lineup along with others.
There was much more on grasslands conservation, rotational grazing, and biodiversity and their measurement. One can’t manage what can’t be measured.
One of my goals is to keep on learning and doing in this field.
At a northern B.C. dairy meeting I sat beside a dairy farmer whose family’s main dairy was in Whiterock but they had bought a ranch south of Prince George to raise heifers as replacement dairy cows. The Lower Mainland dairy was extracting methane from manure and putting it into the natural gas pipeline system. This is not a fossil fuel, but a replacement for natural gas from ground sources.
Then at the CFGA conference I just attended, Dr. Frank Mitloehner spoke of the very large dairies in California covering the manure slurries and piping the methane off in a quest to be climate-warming neutral.
At a discussion with Paul and Susan Devick, I Iearned that they are hosting one of the mother sites for the Living Labs program managed by the BC Forage Council. This is essentially an applied research site looking at practices that can sequester more carbon in the soil. The Devick’s ranch recently launched a new abattoir on their ranch at Heffley Creek, North of Kamloops.
All this can be challenging to focus on, but it is critical to the future thriving of the grass-based ranching over the world. I will cover more on this topic in the weeks to come.
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