Despite holding diverse opinions on climate change, three dozen farmers and ranchers from Canada’s Prairies agreed at a forum this past winter on 36 ways to support sustainable practices in agriculture.
“What was unique about the forum is we had to find a language that was acceptable, and recommendations that were acceptable, to a vastly varying group of mindsets around the issue of climate change,” Gordon Bacon, CEO Emeritus of Pulse Canada and a co-leader of the forum, told The Energy Mix.
Bacon said the forum showed that farmers and ranchers who have confidence in climate science and those who don’t can “still come up with recommendations that fit what is important to them, and fits with the agenda of reducing the impact.”
The Prairie Farmer and Rancher Forum was initiated by Farmers for Climate Solutions. After a series of several forum meetings at the start of the year, an outcomes report was released in June.
“Opinions on the degree to which climate change is happening and is caused by human activity are more diverse on the Prairies than in any other part of Canada,” the report says. The forum’s success in spite of those divergent opinions not only highlights how climate change is a point of tension that has derailed progress toward sustainable agriculture policies. It also suggests that approaching those policies with respect for differing opinions can help move discussions forward.
Forum participants were selected through a lottery process that randomly contacted farmers and ranchers from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta, the three Prairie provinces where the bulk of the country’s agricultural production occurs. The 36 forum members were selected to recreate a representative sample of the region’s farming demographics, though some groups—such as Prairie First Nations, Indigenous, Métis, Inuit, racialized, or Black people—were not represented in the forum “due to lack of applicants.”
Both those coordinating the forum and those attending reported that the outcome was a success, as the group was able to agree—unanimously—on 36 recommendations “for a strong, sustainable, and prosperous Prairie agriculture sector.”
But that outcome was not reached without a deliberate, concerted effort to make it happen. For one thing, the forum used a citizen’s assembly model to measure consensus, in which attendants could vote in degrees of agreement for particular items.
The forum members also set some ground rules at the start of the second meeting that set the course of conversation. First among them was to note that the forum members had differing opinions on climate change, and that “the purpose of the forum is not to change each other’s minds about climate change or to determine who is right or wrong.”
They also agreed that farmers and ranchers can adopt practices that have positive environmental and economic outcomes, and that the forum’s goal was “to identify the practices and policies that maximize these positive environmental and economic outcomes, while recognizing that we don’t all place the same value on each outcome.”
Garry Richards, a forum participant who runs a cattle operation in Bangor, Saskatchewan, said it was amazing how a group of people with strong opinions were able to come together on key issues. He said it was important to recognize that it’s okay for people to disagree with one another, so long as they maintain respect and continue working together.
“Something that probably all of us came to realize (is) that if we’re going to build consensus, there’s going to have to be some give and take,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a line in the sand that we can’t cross, but a lot of times, I think the one thing we found is that there was a huge amount of common ground.”
Ultimately, the participants found consensus around principles of stewardship and soil health, through which they were able to reach common ground on various issues like soil health, livestock measurement, and energy.
The most important issues the forum discussed, Bacon emphasized, regarded measurement and metrics that make clear how farmers are improving their fields with sustainable practices like increasing soil organic matter or water infiltration.
“Metrics are the measurement of what we mean by sustainability, because that really is key for farmers who want to say we’re already doing a good job and here’s the measurement,” he said.
Metrics play a critical role in allowing farmers to gauge the impacts of practices for themselves, and they also help translate those outcomes through the different levels of the food system to other stakeholders, like processors and consumers.
Richards said he hoped the recommendations would be used by government and academia, where major policy decisions are often made without input from farmers. He added that the process used by the forum can be a useful tool for some other policy discussions where people of opposing views are “clashing.”
But ultimately, he said, the forum succeeded because all members—despite some differing opinions—shared core values, like caring for the land and maintaining it for future generations.
“We want to produce good food for people, and we take pride in that, and we take responsibility,” Richards said. “That’s a huge amount of common ground to lay down and realize—and then once you do that, well, then maybe our differences kind of fade away a little bit.”
