By Rick Callahan

No-till farming, in which farmers don’t plow under their fields between crops, releases far smaller amounts of a potent greenhouse gas into the air than conventional farming, according to a new study that suggests no-till may help combat global warming.

Researchers said the findings also could help farmers make more efficient use of the costly nitrogen-based fertilizers used to spur plant growth by showing them how to keep more of it in the soil.

The three-year, federally funded Purdue University study looked at the amount of nitrous oxide released by no-till fields compared to plowed fields. No-till farmers aim to disrupt the soil surface as little as possible, although they do cut into it to plant seeds and inject fertilizers.

The study found no-till fields released 57 percent less nitrous oxide than chisel tilling, in which plants are plowed back into the soil after harvest, said Purdue agronomist Tony Vyn, who led the research. They also produced 40 percent less gas than fields tilled with moldboard plows, which turn the dirt over onto itself.

Those numbers are averages, he said. Researchers looked at fields where corn and soybeans were alternated from year to year and others that were planted each year from corn. Emissions in fields where crops were rotated were lower than in those where they weren’t, he said.

Vyn said he was stunned by the large amounts of nitrous oxide his team detected in the air above the plowed fields compared with those that had long been farmed using the erosion-fighting no-till approach.

The results are particularly disconcerting in light of the fact that nitrous oxide packs 310 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas largely blamed for climate change, he said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that nitrous oxide can remain in the atmosphere for 120 years, adding to its global warming impact.

“Because it’s so long lived, we need to do everything we can in terms of farming practices to reduce these releases,” Vyn said. “Once it’s released, it’s going to be in the air for a long time — longer than anyone’s lifetime.”

His team’s research results appear in the January-February issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal.

Robert Horton, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University who was not involved in the study, called the results exciting and said they highlight another potential benefit of no-till farming, which has already been shown to reduce erosion and improve soil quality.

“Now we can add an air quality advantage of no-till rotations to the list,” he said.

Vyn’s team conducted its research in fields Purdue maintains near the West Lafayette campus in rich soils that once were tall grass prairie. The university has farmed those fields for three decades using either no-till or one of the common plowing practices. The differences seen in the nitrous oxide emissions are likely due to variations in microbial life and soil chemistry created by the different farming practices, Vyn said.

Rodney Venterea, a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research arm, said the Purdue study supports his research, which also found that scaling back on field plowing reduces nitrous oxide emissions.

But he said the release of the gas is complex and not simply a matter of one farming practice versus another. For example, he’s found no-till fields release more nitrous oxide than plowed land when fertilizer is applied to the soil surface rather than injected into the dirt. The Purdue researchers injected the liquid nitrogen fertilizer a few inches into the soil.

Venterea said it’s important to note those different outcomes because some no-till farmers still use the surface-application approach, instead of injecting fertilizer below the surface, where plant matter accumulates and bacteria and fungi are active and can break down chemicals.

“So if you can get your nitrogen fertilizer down below that active zone then that’s the best scenario,” he said. “The more nitrogen fertilizer that stays in the soil, the more that’s available for the plants and there’s less that can be released as (nitrous oxide) and other forms that have other environmental effects.”

Sixty-eight percent of the nitrous oxide emissions in the U.S. in 2008 came from farmland, according to an EPA report leased last year. It said U.S. emissions of the gas grew about 6 percent between 1990 and 2008.

Although the study looked at conventional farming techniques and industrial fertilizers, Vyn said manure used as fertilizer by some farmers, including organic farmers, can also release nitrous oxide if it is applied in large amounts.

By Carey Gillam

BOSTON (Reuters) – Africa as has long been a target for wealthy philanthropists who donate money in a fight against the continent’s poverty, disease epidemics and food shortages.

Now, taking a cue from the nonprofit world, profit-hungry investors are eyeing Africa in a new way, putting a charitable spin on their pursuit of double-digit returns.

Whether it’s making loans for refrigeration trucks serving a fishery in Sierra Leone, or financing an organic cotton undertaking in Uganda, more investment groups are following in the footsteps of grant-making philanthropists as they put their money to work on projects in some of the world’s poorest countries.

“It is the decade of agriculture in Africa. Food security will become the next tradable commodity,” said Soros Economic Development Fund President Stewart Paperin. “You don’t have to swoop in and say I’m going to take all of your crops.

“You can operate in a responsible way and still make money,” he said. “This is just basic blocking and tackling – how you build an economy.”

A number of charitable foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,

have targeted the continent for years with programs to help improve food production through agricultural upgrades.

As profit-seeking investors grow more interested in Africa, the two sides are starting to team up.

One of the newest such efforts is the “TransFarm Africa Transformation Fund (TFA Fund),” a private equity investment vehicle aiming for 15 percent returns by investing in “growth-oriented, mid-scale commercial farms and agri-businesses whose business models incorporate small farmers and small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises.”

The fund, managed by Lion’s Head Global Partners, a London investment bank, was the brainchild of the Menlo Park, California-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The foundation has $6.7 billion in assets and a long history of funding anti-poverty programs around the world.

“Basically, millions of small holder farmers have to go through a transformation from being subsistence to commercial producers,,, and by doing so, help maintain Africa’s march toward economic growth,” said TransFarm Africa Director Kurt Hoffman in an interview from Johannesburg where he was meeting with investors.

Hoffman said the TFA investment fund has commitments of nearly $20 million so far. It is focused on aiding mid-sized commercial farmers and agribusinesses in processing and distribution that include small farmers in their operations. One of the first such investments was made in southern Tanzania.

The investments are generally seen having a life of seven to 10 years, ranging in equity stakes from $2 million to $5 million.

In addition to the fund, TransFarm backers have established a public policy program working with African governments and regional economic officials to promote more investments.

Smita Singh, the Hewlett Foundation’s global development program director, said she hoped TransFarm Africa would demonstrate to investors around the world that money could be made outside the large-scale plantations that attract the most capital.

Some investors as well as foreign government entities have been criticized for “land grabbing” — buying up large swaths of African farmland. Critics say this practice does little to alleviate poverty or empower farmers, and sometimes creates strife as Africans lose control of key resources.

“With the land grabs, the motivation is to push people off the land. What we’re talking about is how you incorporate small holder farms into the commercial food chain,” Singh said.

“The challenge has been to demonstrate to capital markets that this is worth the risk. We’re hoping to demonstrate there is both social impact as well as commercial viability.”

IMPACT INVESTING TAKES ROOT

TransFarm is only one example of many “impact investing” groups targeting Africa now. The new breed hopes to avoid the stigma and opposition associated with land grabbing by partnering with local business development groups. The aim is to boost production and trade for Africans while producing profits for investors.

“There is an increased recognition that good governance, respect for indigenous/worker rights, education, social services, environment, etc., are good business sense… providing the foundation for high rates of return,” said Diana Glassman, a partner in EBG Capital, an advisory spinoff of Credit Suisse.

African agriculture has long been plagued by low productivity and poor market access for small, subsistence farmers, a failure of commercial agriculture to find a critical mass that meets domestic needs, poor infrastructure, trade barriers and a lack of supportive government policies.

But with world population rising substantially and incomes in Asia and elsewhere also up, demand has grown for food, especially more sophisticated and higher-priced food products.

Investors say Africa offers an expanse of low-cost agricultural land with the potential for big gains in production and profitability. These can be achieved through use of new agricultural practices, including improved seeds, fertilizers, and modern machinery.

Among some recent deals, investors led by Boston-based Root Capital recently approved a $700,000 loan to back the launch of organic cotton production operations in Uganda’s northern district of Gulu, a center of such violence less than a decade ago that many farmers are only now back from refugee camps.

Also, in Burkina Faso, $300,000 in trade finance funds from Root helped prop up a mango exporting group that represents more than 1,800 African farmers.

For Soros Economic Development Funds, investments include refrigerated transportation that supports local fisheries, milling operations, and investments in projects that support rice production and improved use of soil nutrients to increase crop production.

AN “EMERGING PRIORITY”

Ann Tutwiler, coordinator for global food security at the United States Department of Agriculture, calls Africa an “emerging priority,” and said the U.S. government wants to encourage private investment into food and agriculture projects there.

The U.S. government and wealthy foundations have numerous programs underway to help African farmers, boost food production and trade, and improve infrastructure. Still, Tutwiler said, private investors are critical.

“Even with the amount of money the U.S. government and the other donors are putting in… it is small potatoes compared to the level of investment we need,” she said.

“That investment has to come from the private sector.”

John Horowitz
Robert Ebel
Kohei Ueda

Widespread adoption of less intensive tillage practices could enable U.S. agriculture to sequester substantial amounts of carbon and contribute to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Less intensive tillage would also reduce water sedimentation and chemical pollution as well as atmospheric dust and haze.

Tillage—turning the soil to control for weeds and pests and to prepare for seeding—has long been part of crop farming. However, intensive soil tillage can increase the likelihood of soil erosion, nutrient runoff into nearby waterways, and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A reduction in how often or how intensively cropland is tilled enables the soil to retain more organic matter, which helps store, or “sequester,” carbon and leaves the soil less susceptible to wind and water erosion.

ERS researchers compiled data on U.S. tillage practices using USDA’s Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) and the National Resources Inventory (NRI). ARMS, which provides some of the most reliable nationwide information on farming production practices, suggests that no-till operations accounted for an estimated 35 percent of the cropland planted to eight major crops in the U.S. in 2009. The crops—barley, corn, cotton, oats, rice, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat—constituted 94 percent of total U.S. planted acreage in 2009. Furthermore, the use of no-till increased over time for corn, cotton, soybeans, and rice, the crops for which the ARMS data were sufficient to calculate a trend.

No-till adoption varied substantially across crops, however, even for those that have generally similar production practices. For example, land planted to barley had roughly twice the percentage of no-till (27 percent in 2003) as land planted to oats (14 percent in 2005).

Greenhouse gas benefits are largest when no-till is practiced over a prolonged period. NRI’s Conservation Effects Assessment Project Cropland Survey collected data on farming practices during 2003-06. In the Upper Mississippi River Basin, one of the Nation’s major growing areas, 13 percent of cropped acres were in no-till for 3 consecutive years during the relevant survey period.

Together, ARMS and NRI data indicate that efforts to increase the adoption of less intensive tillage practices by U.S. farmers could be an important component of policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help protect the environment.

Hans Hoogeveen may not have gotten everything he wanted, but he’s off to a good start.

A Professor of Practice in Natural Resource Policy, Hoogeveen also serves on the advisory board of Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends and is the man “responsible for International and European Affairs, Agrochain, Trade, Fisheries and implementation of European Union policies” in the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture.  In that capacity, he spearheaded an Investment Fair which runs through Thursday as part of the International Conference on Agriculture, Food Security, and Climate Change in the Hague.

“We need concrete results, and not just pretty words,” he said at the start of the fair.  “We need new money flowing into real projects that are delivering verifiable results, and not just recycling the same government pledges for the third and fourth time.”

It’s now three days into the fair, and three deals have already been inked.  Together, they put roughly $2 million into five projects that are helping poor farmers work their land in a sustainable way.  More importantly for the long-term viability of the projects, they do so by harnessing carbon finance to reward farmers for adopting sustainable practices that capture carbon in the ground.

The Deals

The first deal was signed on Monday, and it’s more of a grant that promotes investment than it is an actual investment.  Under it, the Rockefeller Foundation is putting $1.5 million dollars into three projects:

• the African Agricultural Climate Finance Facility (ACFF), a project of Forest Trends which is developing new transaction models to support greater investment in smallholder, farmer-driven agricultural mitigation and adaptation projects;
• the Rainforest Alliance, which is developing criteria that help small farmers adopt practices that decrease their carbon footprint and increase their climate resilience; and
• the Nature Conservation Research Centre of Ghana, which is helping small-holder cocoa farmers produce shade-grown cocoa, which supports greater long-term productivity, sequesters more carbon, and should also fetch a higher price.

The second deal was inked on Tuesday, and more closely resembles the kind of payment for ecosystem services that can bring the value of nature into the production stream.  Under it, the Dutch minister for Agriculture and Foreign Trade, Henk Bleker, signed a financial commitment with the investment fund Food 4 All, which invests in smaller companies and cooperatives in East and West Africa.

The third deal was inked on Wednesday, and is a the first soil-carbon project approved in Africa.  Under it, the World Bank is purchasing carbon credits from Vi Agroforestry, an NGO that has been active in Eastern Africa since 1983.  The credits will be sold to the BioCarbon Fund, and the project makes it possible for small-holder farmers in Kenya to access the carbon market and receive carbon revenues through the adoption of productivity enhancing practices and technologies.

 

16 August 2010 – The United Nations today unveiled a decade-long push to raise awareness and mobilize action to fight desertification, which threatens the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in 100 countries.

Desertification is defined as the degradation of drylands, which comprise more than 40 per cent of the world’s land surface and are home to 2.1 billion people – one in every three people worldwide.

One third of all crops cultivated today have their origins in drylands, which also support half of all livestock.

“Continued land degradation – whether from climate change, unsustainable agriculture or poor management of water resources – is a threat to food security, leading to starvation among the most acutely affected communities and robbing the world of productive land,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message to the launch of the Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification in Fortaleza, Brazil.

The General Assembly designated 2010-2020 as the Decade in 2007 to heighten public awareness of the threat posed by desertification, land degradation and drought to sustainable development.

As the 10-year scheme gets under way, Mr. Ban said, “let us pledge to intensify our efforts to nurture the land we need for achieving the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] and guaranteeing human well-being.”

Agreed upon by world leaders, the MDGs are eight anti-poverty targets with a 2015 deadline.

The Secretary-General pointed out that there are growing social costs resulting from land degradation, with increased competition for resources spurring conflict, while the forced migration of millions of people also heightens the risk of social breakdown.

“These are formidable challenges,” he said. “But they are not intractable.”

Around the world, efforts to rehabilitate drylands are bearing fruit, Mr. Ban noted. Continued help for local communities can lead to the preservation or recovery of millions of hectares of land, alleviate vulnerability to climate change and reduce hunger and poverty.

Some 12 million hectares of land – an area the size of Benin and which could produce 20 million tons of grain annually – are lost every year to degradation, resulting in an annual loss of $42 billion.

Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), stressed in Fortaleza today that “the path of business-as-usual will worsen the speed of degradation with devastating impacts on livelihoods families and communities, and will further cause more extinction of life and jeopardize the future of humanity.”

He underlined the need for an alternative route that “will embrace and undertake the formidable challenges of sustainability implying that we choose to channel our collective action towards it.”

Nearly all of the inhabitants of drylands are in developing countries, and the official issued a call for international cooperation on financial assistance, capacity building and technology transfer.

The Decade, he emphasized, must fight lingering misperceptions of drylands as being wastelands, marginal areas or liabilities, as well as the idea that desertification is only a local – not global – concern.

“Let us not be the generation that jeopardizes the heritage of future generations by degrading any land,” Mr. Gnacadja said today.

Along with the UNCCD, four other UN agencies – the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the UN Department of Public Information (DPI) – have been mandated by the General Assembly to spearhead activities related to the Decade.

Through its work during the last three decades, IFAD said that “it has become clear that to eliminate rural poverty we must also address the issue of how land and natural resources are managed.”

The agency pointed to the experience of Bedouin communities in the Badia rangelands, 10 million hectares in central and eastern Syria, known for its poor soils and low rainfall.

After years of severe drought and intensive grazing, the Badia has become badly degraded, but vegetation has been restored in one third of the area, with Bedouin herders working with project experts to draft and implement management plans to determine how many animals should graze in a given area at a given time.

That scheme, just one of numerous success stories, took a three-pronged approach to rehabilitation: resting, re-seeding and planting.

“When governments, UN agencies and other partners work together, we can ensure that experiences like those of the Bedouin communities in the Badia rangelands become the rule – and not the exception,” IFAD said.

Vesco Agricultural Technologies Developing Nations Initiative

“We at Vesco also recognize the need to combat desertification and feel confident that our developing nations technology will play a meaningful role”. 

Developing Nations farmers face a wide variety of agronomic and economic conditions. No single solution has been identified and made available to, useable by or affordable to farmers in all regions and circumstances.

However, the scalable range of options made possible by the Vesco  Terra-Glide™ technology has allowed the development of a range of machine sizes that bridges these problems. 

Within the Terra-Glide™ family of technologies there is a combination that will provide the seeding solution to the needs of most farmers in developing nations. Our goal is to work with government agencies, NGOs and the UN to establish a framework that supplies this technology to the poorest nations of the world at no cost to the farmers by establishing the Terra-Glide™ technology in a verified offset project for no-till carbon credits sold and traded under the Chicago Climate Exchange and others as Soil Carbon Management Offsets through the newly established carbon offset credit programs.

Vesco Agricultural Technologies Inc is at present in the process of being acquired by Clean Seed Capital Group a Canadian company that is predicated on identifying solution-driven, sustainable, environmentally responsible, agricultural based companies that need a strategic partner to facilitate progress. As a value added group, Clean Seed Capital Group provides strategic capital, business advisory services, and marketing strategies that yield both positive impact and significant investor returns from this rapidly growing sector.

For more information Visit www.vescocanada.com and www.cleanseedcapital.com

 Delegates from more than 80 nations have endorsed an action plan designed to ratchet up schemes that promote promote “Climate-Safe” agriculture, which employs no-till farming, mulching, and other labor-intensive but climate-friendly practices to capture carbon in soil rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.  Up to 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide currently come from agriculture, with an additional 17% coming from deforestation – which is often caused by farmers moving into forests after depleting their soil.

The Hague Action Plan, which was cobbled together over the past week at the International Conference on Agriculture, Food Security, and Climate Change in the Hague, Netherlands, aims to promote climate-friendly agriculture through education, knowledge-sharing and research – as well as by investing in climate-friendly agricultural projects and techniques and improving trade.

An Investment Fair on the sidelines of the Hague meeting funneled roughly $2 million into climate-smart agriculture in Africa, and the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, Henk Bleker, says he will present the week’s outcomes at year-end climate-change talks in Cancun, Mexico.
 
“I will make sure that climate smart agriculture that can feed more people and is better for the environment will stay on the agenda,” he says. “I will present the ‘The Hague Action Plan’ myself at the climate conference in Cancun, Mexico.”

The Action Plan also contains a list of actions that countries and organizations should take to stimulate this new and climate smart agriculture so more people can be fed and less carbon is emitted. The countries have spoken out their commitment towards these actions.

Worldwide there are about 2.2 billion farmers, and current projections say they will have to feed nine billion people in 2050. The lack of attention for agriculture has lead to lower yields, lack of knowledge and fewer investments. Poverty is common for smallholder farms in many developing countries.

| THE HAGUE | Netherlands | Small-holder farmers in Kenya are changing their farming practices and earning carbon credits. This is a result of the first soil carbon project approved in Africa, which seeks to improve food security, help address climate change, and improve the lives and livelihoods of rural dwellers who today live in poverty. The agreement to purchase the carbon credits which the project generates, the Emission Reductions Purchase Agreement (ERPA), was signed today in a ceremony held at the Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change in The Hague.  Representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture in Kenya, Vi Agroforestry and the World Bank presented the project to the media and delegates at the Investment Fair of the conference.

The agreement adds the benefits of carbon finance to a sustainable agricultural land management project based on changes in the practices of farmers in Kenya which not only increase productivity but also sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The project, developed with the support of the Africa Region of the World Bank, generates carbon credits which are sold to the BioCarbon Fund. It allows small-holder farmers in Kenya to access the carbon market and receive carbon revenues through the adoption of productivity enhancing practices and technologies.

Not only is this the first project that sells soil carbon credits in Africa, but it is also paving the way for a new approach to carbon accounting methodologies, which do not yet exist for this nascent area. As Kenya ramps up its participation in carbon markets, this project illustrates concretely how carbon finance can support both the environment and generate revenues for local communities. Although the value of the ERPA exceeds this, the direct benefit to communities is over $350,000 with an initial payment of $80,000 to be made in the first year, 2011, based on project performance with payments for the sequestered carbon.

The Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project, implemented by the Swedish non-governmental organization Vi Agroforestry, is located on 45,000 hectares in the Nyanza Province and Western Province of Kenya. There, small-holder farmers and small-scale business entrepreneurs are trained in diverse cropland management techniques such as covering crops, crop rotation, compost management and agroforestry.  These practices increase the yield of the land and generate additional sources of income for the farmers through the payment for environmental services in the form of carbon credits.

“We are proud to be part of the development of this ground-breaking project. The development of a new methodology for carbon sequestration in agriculture has great direct benefits for the farmers in Kenya and tremendous potential for scaling up. Without the support of the World Bank and the Kenyan Government, this project would not have been possible”, says Henrik Brundin of Vi Agroforestry.

The project is an example of a triple win strategy: implementing policies and programs that will, first, increase farm productivity and incomes; second, make agriculture more resilient to variations in climate, and thus promote stability and security; and, third, help make the agriculture sector part of the solution to the climate change problem rather than part of the problem.

“The approval of this first soil carbon project in Africa is an important step in extending carbon finance to include agriculture. The potential for carbon sequestration in the soil is estimated at 5.5 gigatons annually with good land management practices, equivalent to 13% of current emissions from all sectors. So soil carbon has a huge contribution to make to addressing the climate change challenge”, says Dr. Andrew Steer, Special Envoy for Climate Change, World Bank.

The BioCarbon Fund is an initiative with public and private contributions, administered by the World Bank.  It purchases emission reductions from afforestation and reforestation projects under the CDM, as well as from land-use sector projects outside the CDM, such as projects that reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and increase carbon sequestration in soils through improved agriculture practices. In addition, the BioCarbon Fund, which was created to help open the carbon market, develops methodologies and tools that are in the public domain.

The Rockefeller Foundation announced several commitments this week totaling over $1.5 million dollars to support the development of climate-smart agriculture. The commitment was announced at the Global Conference on Food Security, Agriculture, and Climate Change at The Hague, The Netherlands.
 
The agricultural sector has a pivotal role to play in addressing, mitigating, and helping to adapt to climate change. Despite this, the opportunities for engaging this sector in climate change mitigation have been the subject of extensive debate. There are several reasons for this debate, largely stemming from the underlying importance of agriculture to climate mitigation and the challenge of integrating it into policy approaches.

Agriculture is a significant contributor to global GHG emissions, and consequently has an important role to play in addressing climate change. Agriculture, forestry, and other land uses contribute 30% or more to global greenhouse gas emissions.

More important, agriculture has the potential to reduce GHG emissions through long-term storage of carbon in soils and perennial biomass and through reductions of nitrous oxide and methane emissions. In other words, agriculture has a critical role to play in addressing climate change.
 
First, the Rockefeller Foundation is contributing initial funding to Forest Trends in support of the African Agricultural Climate Finance Facility (ACFF). This facility will innovate, develop, and test new transaction models to support greater investment in smallholder, farmer-driven agricultural mitigation and adaptation projects.
 
In addition, the Rockefeller Center is supporting the Rainforest Alliance with a grant to develop criteria for low-carbon farming techniques for incorporating into their sustainable agricultural standards. These criteria will help drive farmers to adopt practices that decrease their carbon footprint and increase their climate resilience, while supporting environmental services and receiving a premium price for climate-friendly commodity production.
 
Finally, we are proud to be supporting the Nature Conservation Research Centre of Ghana in their on-going work with small holder cocoa farmers to produce shade-grown cocoa, which supports greater long-term productivity, sequesters more carbon, and should also fetch a higher price.

What might Canada’s next great growth industry be? Smart phones, oil sands technology, aerospace, alternative energy, nuclear power, biotech? Each of those industries has a “been there, done that” feel about them, even if a couple of them could keep thriving for years to come. Agriculture is the one industry you might not even consider putting on the list.

Most Canadians live in cities and don’t think about agriculture. They think food comes from supermarkets. The connection back to the farm, to the export terminals, to the commodity futures markets, to the R&D labs, where seeds are engineered, and to the farm equipment assembly plants is often not made. Yet Canada has all the ingredients needed to become the world’s premier farm-to-fork economy.

A new report by Australia’s Macquarie Agricultural Funds Management concludes that heroic efforts will be needed to feed a global population that will expand by 40 per cent by 2050. Some countries will struggle to feed their citizens; food riots broke out in dozens of poor countries at the height of the food crisis in 2008.

But others might thrive. Macquarie notes that “those countries with a robust agricultural sector, sustainable farming practices, modern infrastructure, reliable water access and safer political structures will increasingly become the global agricultural powerhouses.”