Sustainable Farming, Climate Change, and Innovation
Manure, phosphorus, and water
Manure is an excellent source of fertilizer for the soil, but nutrients that it contains — like phosphorus — can contaminate water if they’re not applied and managed properly. Farmers have to follow a lot of rules when it comes to managing nutrients from fertilizers, such as manure on their farms. That diligence includes picking the right location for constructing new farm buildings away from neighbours, water, and wetlands. It’s also important to have enough storage space to store manure safely over the winter months; manure shouldn’t be spread when the ground is frozen, because it’s more likely to be washed away by rain and melting snow, instead of going into the soil.
Banking on seeds
To ensure that future generations of people will still have enough to eat, even if the climate continues to change, the Global Seed Vault was established on a remote island in northern Norway. The vault is home to more than 1.1 million samples of food crop seeds from almost every country in the world, so that plant life can be preserved through crises like war and climate change72. It’s a bit like storing your photos in the cloud, or on a backup hard drive, so you’ll still have them if you lose your phone!
Did you know...
Canada’s seed vault is called the National Seed Centre of Canada. Located in Fredericton, New Brunswick, it holds millions of Canadian seeds. The Centre has launched a program to work with Canadian Indigenous communities to identify and collect seeds from species that are culturally important to them73.