The Prairie Farmers and Ranchers Forum ultimately unanimously agreed on 36 policy recommendations for proposals. However, this does not mean that all Forum participants agreed from the start. Rather, the Forum worked hard to identify areas of common interest and support and develop a list of recommendations.
Ian McCreary, a farmer from Bloodworth, Saskatchewan, and co-leaders of the forum, and Marcus Leidner, a farmer from Didsbury, Alberta, spoke to Real Agriculture Radio Tuesday host Lindsay Smith about how the forum was organized, their experience attending the event and their perspective on how the recommendations came about.
McCleary said the forum, hosted by the Farmers Coalition for Climate Action, was unique in the way it invited its members, with the goal of building consensus on policy recommendations.
“The idea is that if you just have a public meeting, you tend to only get a loud voice,” McCleary said, “but if you invite people randomly, you increase the chances of getting thoughtful voice, and I think we’ve been very successful in getting a lot of thoughtful voice in this process.”
Final Report ( Prairie Agriculture Forum) features recommendations on crop and livestock integration, funding for soil research, and the need to measure progress on soil health and carbon capture.
Leidner says the data component of the recommendations suited him: “Our farm is already pretty data-oriented because I come from the tech industry. We track a lot of data across a variety of metrics: soil health, carbon in the soil, animal health, financials, etc. So in the measurement section there were some policy recommendations to help our farm generate better data, get that data in the hands of people doing modeling and research, and then get that data back to us,” he says.
You can listen to the full forum discussion, report and recommendations here:
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