Grant: Alliance Grants

Striving for a net zero pathways in Canadian agriculture is essential for environmental stewardship, economic competitiveness, food security, resource efficiency, and fostering innovation. Our proposal brings farmers, agricultural industries, Indigenous partners, nature organizations and researchers together to retool Prairie agriculture for climate resilience. Our research will be conducted by five interacting teams studying farms, including on First Nations, across a large area of the Eastern Prairies. We will compare nearby commercial fields employing low, medium, and high levels of biodiversity. We will capture and explore the invaluable lived experience of settler and Indigenous farmers and First Nations land managers on these same farms and farmlands. This will ensure that participants are a key part of the research process, identifying and describing what is important to them and fitting the research design to their understanding of the world. We will identify First Nations' agricultural initiatives already underway and co-develop a research and adoption framework that First Nations can adapt and apply for designing self-determined farming systems. This project will advance profitable, net zero agriculture in a participatory, dynamic and democratic manner. The project will yield crucial information to policy makers and business leaders and prepare Canada for the uncertainty of climate change.