How Canadian Farmers Get Paid to Produce Nature

What We Need to Grow, Episode 020: Farmers Producing Nature. A Founder Talk conversation with Bryan Gilvesy, Chief Strategy Officer of ALUS. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: All right, so here we go. We're recording. Bryan here with us. So Bryan, from what I understand, almost 20 years, I think you were the third farmer in the ALUS program, and you ran it as CEO. You recently have moved to Chief of Strategy. You also have your own farm in, where is it, Norfolk, Ontario, called Y U Ranch, grass-fed beef. So I am so excited to hear a little bit more from you about the local food system, hear about this organization. It sounds like it's doing incredible work. So if you want to share a little bit about your background, and then let's dive in.

Bryan Gilvesy: Sure. So the short story is this. We were given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves on our farm. I've been here for 46 years, but like everybody in this area, we grew tobacco, and that came to an end. And so of the up to three thousand farmers that grew tobacco in this region, everybody had the chance to sort of reinvent themselves, and it occurred in different sorts of ways.

Our objective was to claim back our independence by doing something that was unique, tailored to a specific marketplace. Definitely not a commodity. And so we based our new enterprise on something that didn't exist at the time, which was grass-fed beef. At the time, beef was beef, as you might recall. And so we headed off down that path.

We really wanted to root what we did in our stewardship ethic. So basically we looked at our farm, which is an important, integral part of Carolinian Canada, so very biodiverse here, and asked the cattle to fit inside that envelope. And we didn't want to do anything other than grow grass. So really, our farm operation, we don't really grow grass, we don't really grow beef. We harvest the energy of the sun, carbon from the atmosphere, in our grasses. And the cattle are the harvesting machines that happen to be self-propelled and automated and duplicate themselves every year.

It made a lot of sense to me to carve out a niche inside a marketplace that was just so commodified at the time. That allowed us to declare our own independence, to make our own brand, and to speak to consumers directly.

Along the way a really important thing happened to me, as I was approached through a Christmas dinner, actually, to think about the ALUS program, which at the time was just a conceptual thing. And I joined as a third participant farmer, and as you have illuminated, I went on to play a significant role in the growth and development of ALUS.

ALUS is a principle-based not-for-profit organization that's delivered through communities across Canada. But what you need to understand about ALUS is the frame that we're painting for farmers, and that is that the farm can be productive of food, fibre, energy, and ecosystem services that support human life on the planet.

Now, you can think about simple things like water filtration, where a farmer can filter water upstream instead of filtering it downstream using an industrial water filtration plant. You can think about sequestering carbon, if that interests you. Another ecosystem service would be creating more biodiversity. Biodiversity is closely linked, in some people's minds, to human wellness and health. So that fit our eye really, really well, that we were productive of these things. We weren't the people that were protecting nature. We were the ones that were making more.

Now, that in itself illuminates a little bit of the thinking around ALUS, which was that it was a market-based idea. And that is that ecosystem services have value. I mean, we pay water filtration plant people, and concrete, and plants, to filter water. The analog is we can do that on the farm using our plants, right, the plants that we grow. So that's a really good analog to get you into the space, that ecosystem services had an emerging market space in front of them. There was a lot of theory and talk about it at the time.

I think we at ALUS created an organization that not only engaged farmers to produce more nature on their lands and enhance the ecosystem services, but we created a marketing platform that placed those ecosystem services into an emerging marketplace, that is really coming to fruition now in the growth of ALUS.

So that's sort of the short course. Valuing nature, valuing humans that can produce more nature. Getting more out of farms, understanding that farms are much more complex than a simple commodity place, and that farmers are more sophisticated and able to do more for society than they currently are asked to do. So to me, it's farmers standing up on their hind legs and saying, there's a role for us to play that's greater than the role you used to think we played.

Caleb: I'm relatively new. I think 2016 was when my wife Sarah and I and our company started helping some local farmers, and really, I look back and I realize there was so much that I was ignorant to with the local food system. And I don't mean that in a weird or rude kind of way, I just had no idea. I had never really thoughtfully considered different aspects of it. And when it was presented, it was like, once you see some of these things or hear some of these things, you can't unsee them.

Even for example, the idea when cash crop farming was explained to me, I'd never thought of it. We're surrounded by tons of farms in our area. And when it was explained to me, I immediately saw similarities in our field. With our company doing marketing work, you could see in the business space there's this idea of niching down. Quite often experts will suggest you strip everything away except for this one thing that you do, and you optimize for it, for your KPIs, your key performance indicators, for financial return. So yield overall, the amount of customers you serve, your profit.

And I'm looking at these fields and I'm like, wow, they've optimized with monocultures. They've optimized the land to a point where, down to the seed, genetically, with machinery, to a point where you have these massive, sophisticated machines that are just really brilliant the way they're built. And quite often they're serving one primary purpose. The land is prepared for one purpose. And when you look at the KPIs, the amount of yield is astronomical, the amount of profit is astronomical.

And then I would start to hear these voices saying, hey, actually, when you optimize for a monoculture, there are other indicators. The KPIs aren't just money and yield. What about health? What about soil? What about the ecosystem? What is now no longer happening, or what is now happening? So you have all these other aspects. And I realized that the microbial complexity, all the way up to the complexity of an ecosystem, factors far more into the equation than most people realize.

I don't understand regenerative agriculture like people in the industry do. But I looked at it from a business standpoint and I thought, sometimes you see entrepreneurs, founders, others that are so optimized for their key outputs that all of these other indicators of the complexity in their life suffer. Their health suffers, their marriage may suffer, their time with their kids or absence thereof, quite often addictive behaviours come into the picture. You have all these second and third order consequences that have come out of people optimizing for one or two outputs. So the agricultural lens of things is almost a mirror of what's happening philosophically in the way we do business. The idea of actually seeing more of the complexity returning to the equation, like you said, with farmers realizing there's a lot more of the picture they can be contributing to, I think is really fascinating.

Bryan: You make a good point, but I'm going to point at a moment in time. I've been around agriculture long enough to know that agriculture used to revolve around the government extension office. There was a government employee who was highly knowledgeable about things at the centre of our community, in every community. And there was also a mirror image, a stewardship coordinator, in our communities as well. So we had a government paid employee in our communities for either the stewardship aspect of farming, or the agronomic aspects, or the business aspects. Both of those things have been removed from our lives.

I remember still that when I had a problem with a root in a plant in my field, I identified something, and I would go to our extension officer, who was named Norm Shido. He was so part of our community, he got invited to everybody's wedding. You'd go to Norm's office to say, I've got this root problem, and you'd see fifteen other farmers in the parking lot with the same thing in their hand. But we shared community around that, and we shared stories and we told tales, and together with his expertise we sort of resolved our own problems. There was some expertise at community level that was harnessed through that.

When those extension offices were removed, the default actor providing extension was the salespeople from the fertilizer and chemical companies. And they have a job to do, and as you say, to optimize things. Not to say that that's incorrect, that's the way it went. But for me, what it left wanting is value. I think as a community we're leaving value on the table. And through ALUS, and through our work through local food, and through Y U Ranch, we believe that harnessing that value for rural Canada is a really important thing.

And like I said, declaring that we have a greater role to play and a greater relevance to society, that lets us step outside the commodification scheme and create more relevance and more humanness and more community, more economic activity, quite frankly. Value comes with more dollars. So that's how I see the big picture. But there was a moment in time, and I still feel like it was a mistake to remove government extension across North America. I hear the same story from our American friends.

Caleb: Another picture that comes to mind is seeing some people that have done natural swimming pools, where they dig them out and, I've never built one, but you kind of line it, you prepare it, you plant certain plants and you cycle the water in a certain way, and you're able to have this ecosystem and keep the balance in a way where you could swim in it and not have it overrun with anything.

I'm looking at that and I see almost an oscillating wave in trends that happen. You see it everywhere. It oscillates so far to a point of just, chlorinated pools are the best, concrete, at some point in society, to a point where now you see people going, I'm not sure I really want to get into a chlorinated pool. And you see them instead looking and saying, I have this desire, in the sunshine, to get into some water. What is the more natural version of this?

It's made me wonder what the pictures will be, or could be, of more of a commonplace ecosystem that we would see. Like you're talking about, farmers restoring wetlands or native grasslands with ALUS. It's made me wonder if there's maybe a step down of some of that, that might be seeing a reinvention, a reimagination, of what backyards might be like, or community ecosystems, where you see more of an integration of either permaculture or food being grown in a decentralized way, where a natural ecosystem is more commonplace than at some kind of sanctuary.

Bryan: Yeah. And I've never been fond of the regenerative word, because it sort of assumes that we've been degenerative. And I don't think any farmer intentionally sets out to be that, nor a backyard person at all. I think a better word might be, and it just came to me, maybe re-entry. Reconnection with where we came from.

Stewardship was a big, big part of what we did as farmers, and that sort of has drifted away a little bit, partly because we feel like we're getting our fingers pointed at us from environmental folks. But by reclaiming this space and saying that we have an important role to play, it opens up another avenue for knowledge that can flow to farmers. Now, ALUS is delivered at community level, so the advice or knowledge that gets transferred to you by working with nature is from your peers, and from some experts within your community. And you get to do something that's right for your community first.

But what it does is it opens a portal, the same way it opened a portal in my mind, to understanding some of these other natural cycles that we have sort of not been talking about as much. Now the conversation's ramping up. A really great example is on our tallgrass prairie restoration sites here on our place. The micro fungi populations are restored, they're off the charts now. And micro fungi, broadly speaking, are almost eradicated from our agricultural landscapes, but they're an important precursor for how soils work, and in particular a key element for taking carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil.

So down to that level of micro fungi that are beneficial to us in agriculture, I don't gain that knowledge without having some exposure back to nature and to ALUS. Even understanding the microbiology that exists within our soil, and the ability of our plants to capture nutrient, gives us tools to allow our creative juices to flow a little bit. But it's important that we understand these cycles and these systems a little bit more, and bringing that knowledge back in an accessible community basis, where we like to think that you can look after your own community first, your own backyard first. Don't worry about global problems. We'll worry about that. It's a really cool way to get people re-engaged and reconnected with the nature that we farm within.

So this is not to knock down any of the modern agriculture or technology. What it is to say is, we need all the tools in the toolbox. And there are a couple of tools that maybe we've left laying by the side of the road twenty or thirty years ago that we can pick up again.

Caleb: Is there, and maybe this is an oversimplification, but if it was like a pie chart, is there a percentage you'd look at and say, twenty percent of the pie really should be at the residential level? The common people should be doing a little bit more in their backyard, their half acre, their five acres. Twenty percent of the equation maybe should be that, or maybe this is what ALUS is doing in part of its materials or content or message, trying to send a signal out to say, if we can decentralize more of the responsibility there, but eighty percent is what we're really trying to send signals to farmers about, to say, if each of you could be rewilding, or whatever the term would be, five acres of your property every couple of years or whatever. Is there some sort of picture that you see as the right steps in the right direction?

Bryan: Well, for us it's always been around a simple thing. We allow farmers to identify pieces of land that are marginal or uneconomic to them. Those are pieces of land that they're not getting good yield on, for whatever reason. Maybe it's high and dry, maybe it's low and wet, but there's nutrient and chemical and pesticides and diesel fuel being spent on those sites. And that's the opportunity for us to say, listen, grow another type of crop, grow nature, and we'll help you market that crop into the world.

I think what's cool about that, as far as your marketing mind, I want you to think about this. When we work with nature's farmers, we're able to communicate it. Not every farmer should do an ALUS project, because maybe they've got fence row to fence row perfect land. There's not an opportunity there. That land should be for growing food. But where there is opportunity, it builds a level of trust inside agriculture that emanates out into our urban communities.

And then don't get me started on lawn grass, turning our attention to what goes on in urban centres. I read somewhere, I don't know what the correct language was, somewhere once, a presentation or somebody said, that it's the greatest unregulated space for fertilizers and pesticides, lawn grass across North America. And there's a lot of product going on lawns that's unregulated. It's not well managed. It's really not anything, it's just being done. And that's something that, if we're concerned about nutrient in our waterways and things like that, maybe we should be concerned about that a little bit too, and bring some education to bear there.

Caleb: I don't know if this would work or not. I have this picture. We've done a fair amount in our backyard. I'm in a bunkie in the backyard right now, we're on slightly under an acre. We've built up a number of beds, we've got irrigation set up on a timer, some greenhouse cover for different parts of it, some raised beds, flagstone around a fire pit. It's really neat. But I want to add an outdoor sauna. And I have this picture in my mind, probably a cold plunge, or pipe out some way to get cold and rinse off after. But I have this picture in my mind of coming out of it and standing on clover, lush green grass that's clover.

And it made me wonder, I know there's different kinds of clover from the bit of research I did, but it made me wonder what transitioning a lawn to clover would be like, and whether you have to pull it all up. But that's one of the pictures I've had, because I see the bees, different times, seem to be interested in it. It feels great to walk on. And it seems, depending on the kind that you get, if it's low to the ground, from a lawn care standpoint it seems like it'd be more self-managing than every week or two running the lawnmower.

Bryan: It's a great idea, and I know exactly the type of clover. However, again, back to the typical urban landscape, that landowner, that person in their backyard, might see clover as the enemy rather than their friend. Because the clover of course would put nitrogen fertilizer down that would support the greenness of the grass, and create a little bit of habitat for pollinators and others, because it's a little bit more diverse. So that'd be a nice educational piece right there, to make people understand that clover is not your enemy, it's your friend in that lawn. It helps keep it green, it helps some of the beneficial insects that live there. But that's sort of a basic first step, isn't it?

Caleb: Yeah. I think it was Italy, somewhere in Europe, where they had, I don't know if it was a township or an area, but they had mandated, I think, that a certain number of houses needed to have this one kind of brick in it that is made for a swallow. So built into these houses are these homes that are nested right into it. Around here, of course, we see the osprey platforms that are put up. And it's interesting when you see these insights where someone might look and say, actually, this population is in need of this kind of habitat, if we were to do this, which seems very doable. But I've wondered if there could be a version of that for bees, if there's something simple at the back of properties that could help with that. Simple ways that you could make it easier for people who probably are interested, but really have little bandwidth in their busy life beyond saying yes to something and being able to set it up and have it almost look after itself.

Bryan: Well, one of the things that's really helped turn people on to the work that we do is we create pollinator habitats. Most times we use floral resources in our plantings across Canada. But we're not concerned about honey bees necessarily. Honey bees are commercial animals. We're concerned about the roughly 850 species of native bees that exist in Canada. And those bees serve nature well. Often the bee coexists with a particular plant, or a suite of plants. So if you lose the bee, you lose the plant.

So having habitat for native pollinators is really an easy thing to do in your backyard, but you have to educate people to enjoy the fact that there are whole suites of bees coming to your yard to forage, and maybe to live in the undisturbed earth there, and that they're beneficial to all of us. We just have to broaden the mind around honey bees. We all think honey bees are wonderful, but when the settlers first came to North America, there were no honey bees here. There are 850 species of bees, and that's the way the world worked. We didn't need honey bees to farm back then, because there were enough native bees around to pollinate your crops.

At ALUS we've got some interesting feedback from some farmers that have done significant pollinator habitats on their lands and stopped renting honey bees, and are getting wonderful pollination services on their field crops, on pollination-dependent crops, which is really kind of a mind-blowing thing. We think we have to rent honey bees or pollination services, when it exists in nature if we foster it. The same story can be told for backyard people. They can get a tremendous reward from being the ones that can talk fluently about how important these species are to us.

Caleb: So I'm curious, with ALUS, and from what I understand with an aging demographic of farmers, let's say there are younger interested farmers that want to potentially get into it, but there's the capital deterrent of being able to purchase land or property to get into it. It feels like step one on the staircase is five steps high. Is there any aspect of either ALUS's program or adjacent efforts that are somehow looking to help address that?

Bryan: Farm succession is a huge problem in Canada, mostly because of the capital required to take over a farm. It's almost to the point that if your father's not a farmer, you'll never farm. I remember going to some agroecological classes at Fleming College in Lindsay, near you, and seeing some kids that came from non-farms but were interested in farming. And I sort of thought that they were like maybe the Wayne Gretzkys of farming, to some extent. These kids had such an innate feel for it, but they had no vehicle. They had no opportunity to buy land, because land is so expensive.

I think there's opportunity to discuss some different sorts of startup models for farms. We've talked to different folks about a condo-ization of farms, where you could participate and have five acres, as a way to get your startup going, things like that. But we're a long way from having any success on breaking into the mould.

And these days capital for a farmer to retire is even easier to access, because there's a lot of money coming into farming from the investment side. There are large companies and big pension funds that are buying up agricultural land as an investment. So it's pretty turnkey if you want to retire, to flip that switch and get your cheque. But no, at ALUS we don't do a lot about that. It's too big a question, and our mandate is more around restoring nature on the landscape.

Caleb: And then what would be the concise message to a farmer who has land, who maybe hasn't heard about the program, or maybe they have but they're curious? What would be the simple value proposition to them? It's exactly what you had said earlier, which is, if you have an under-monetized, problematic, too high, too dry or too wet part of the property, we can help you restore that. You did say to monetize it, and I'm curious to know, is that monetized by carbon offsets, some program that has recurring revenue connected to it?

Bryan: Yeah. What ALUS promises is that the farmer will receive a cheque annually, as long as that project's in the ground. That puts a big burden on our organization to find marketplace revenues to support those projects over time. But that's coming. We just inked a deal, in about the last month, with a company that's representative of the big data centre companies. What they're bringing money to our door for is to flow through to farmers, to create water filtration and water replenishment. Those big data centres are trying to address the issues their impacts are having on water, and doing work to make sure that farmers, in our circumstance, are providing the replenishment and the filtration of water to offset their work. Now, a lot of people don't like the term offsetting, but this is the way the world works now. And there is revenue for that, and we flow that through to farmers.

We create the conditions, but there's no single metric. We simply call it a new acre. That's the transactional piece. It's new, it's additional, it's nature, and it's managed and maintained by farmers.

So for farmers the message is kind of simple. If you've got hard-to-farm corners, or highly erodible pieces, or something that's marginal or uneconomic to you, scratch your stewardship itch and tap into an emerging marketplace to support your work. One of the reasons you probably started farming in the first place was to do stuff like this. To be a steward. So it's not a hard sell, believe me.

Caleb: And is there some kind of, I'm thinking B Corp certified, is there some verification or third party authentication for these data centres or others, that they would receive for a certain amount of offsetting through ALUS?

Bryan: Yeah. We have our own internal system, which is modelled off sort of the highest level carbon trading systems in the world, that provide third party verification and reliable results, great database backing and great metrics to support it. So that's something we've done in the background here. In other words, to help the farmer monetize that work, we've done a lot of work on quantifying it, on proving our work and then verifying it.

Now the trick in that is we've done it in a way that protects the landowner's privacy, and we don't put anything on title. Those are the conditions for farmers to come into this space, and we've been able to navigate that because of the way we systematically built this thing, to protect the privacy interests while yet providing the ultimate in credibility to the marketplace. It's not a trick, but it's neat that we've been able to navigate that in a very sophisticated way.

ALUS now exists in 42 communities across Canada and growing. There are well over 45 funding partners at the top end of our pile at any one time. That includes a lot of household name companies. That includes a lot of municipalities, for instance. And that to me was one of the most undervalued things that people didn't see in this space, the relationship between what happens on that farm and how that municipality downstream can save money. It's a clear one now. It's clearly identified. We have 21 municipalities in Alberta that are full partners with ALUS.

So there's a lot of beneficial interest in our work. It's not carbon, it's not biodiversity, it's a blend of all these things, and addressing the landscape impacts that these people have, whether it's a government representing society. And at the same time it allows us, because we're bringing money in from several different directions, to have a truly landscape impact in our communities. So we've got a lot going on emanating from that ALUS hub that's beneficial to that community in a number of ways, which is kind of where it begins.

Caleb: So a year from now, five years from now, you've mentioned it's not a hard sell. Basically once farmers hear about it, participating in that seems like they probably self-select for it. It seems like more companies are becoming conscious of this and wanting to be doing their part, or feeling pressure to do their part. Where do you see it a year out, or is there any aspect of strategy moving forward that you're wanting to move the needle on that maybe you're still working to figure out between the next year and five years?

Bryan: Well, in the last year it's become quite clear in our minds that an ALUS chapter, or community, can exist in every agricultural community across Canada. And what I'm thinking is, we have Lions Club, we have Kiwanis Club. They do good works in their communities. They're supported by a national organization, but first and foremost they look after doing the good works in their communities. We think an adoption of an ALUS model in every agricultural community across Canada, there's potential for that.

And it does different things than the Lions or Kiwanis Club. It does a very broad-minded community health and environment activity as part of the economy equation. But we've seen it in some of our leading communities, where this has become a fundamental piece of how those communities work, and who they are, and how they identify, and how they live better lives. So, a chicken in every pot and an ALUS chapter in every community. Does that sort of make sense?

Caleb: Excellent. Well, this has been very insightful, and it sounds like the work that's being done is really impactful, not just immediately, but has multiple order consequences after, a positive ripple effect, for potentially generations to come. I always think it's exciting to meet other people that are working to solve meaningful problems. It's such a question of where to spend your time, invest your resources. So Bryan, thank you very much for sharing what you have.

And then for anyone that's wanting more information, would the website be the best place?

Bryan: Yeah. ALUS.ca.

Caleb: And that's A L U S dot C A. Awesome. Well Bryan, thank you so much.

Bryan: Thank you, Caleb.