Canada - Carbon Credit Evaluation Protocol Expected for Swine Producers by Seeding Time
Published:February 11, 2005
Source :Manitoba Pork Council
Canada's pork industry expects to have a protocol in place by spring seeding to help swine producers calculate the number of greenhouse gas reduction credits their farms could be eligible to trade.
A pork technical working group, chaired by Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, began developing a systems based greenhouse gas quantification protocol last April.
Canadian Pork Council Representative Cedric MacLeod says a framework is needed to determine the number of carbon credits a particular greenhouse gas reduction strategy might earn under a carbon credit trading system.
"There's two parts that are important to the greenhouse gas issue and that's what your farm is doing currently and that is what we would call a baseline and the second important part is, if you introduce a certain practice on your farm, what are the reductions that practice offers you?
The difference between what your baseline is and what your new practices allow you to capture for greenhouse gases or reduce emissions into the atmosphere is what you will be able to trade.
The protocol gives us a system to work through in which we determine both our baseline and our new reduction baseline for a certain practice or for a certain farm.
The system based approach basically takes us from cradle to grave so to speak in our production system. We start with products coming into the barn, which would be feed, so what can we do from a feeding standpoint to reduce our nitrogen and carbon bypass from the pig and into the manure storage.
The manure storage is a significant source of methane so we're looking at options that exist in that realm to capture methane or reduce its production in the storage.
Then finally, as the manure moves from the storage site and into our crop production systems, we have to evaluate what levels of greenhouse gas may be produced upon the application of manure to cropland."
MacLeod says the goal is to have the new protocol available sometime before this year's spring planting.
