Spring has arrived across Canada, and with it, the familiar rhythm of the planting season. Seeds go in, the season begins, and farmers make dozens of decisions that will shape their yields and their bottom line for the next several months.
New practices and products enter the market every year, often promising transformative results. However, farmers have learned to be skeptical, often through experience. Agriculture leaves little room for ideas that look good on paper but fail in the field.
That’s why some of the most promising carbon removal technologies entering agriculture today are attracting attention for a simple reason: they fit into practices farmers already know and, increasingly, they can improve the bottom line.
Learned Wisdom, Healthy Skepticism
Farming is a profession built on hard-won knowledge passed down across generations. A practice that works gets repeated. One that fails can mean a bad season, a bad year, or worse. When margins are tight and the weather is unpredictable, an unproven input is a gamble that many farmers cannot afford to take. But it’s also true that farmers can be amongst the first to feel the impact of climate change with extreme weather events, and as a result have been integrating regenerative farming practices into their work for decades.
However, farmers have seen plenty of ideas arrive from researchers, government programs, or environmental advocates that looked good on paper and performed poorly in the field. If something increases costs or creates uncertainty, it rarely lasts.
There is also the question of complexity. Farming operations are already managing an enormous number of variables: soil conditions, weather, input costs, commodity prices, equipment, and labour. Adding a new practice means adding new decisions, new suppliers, new monitoring requirements, and new paperwork, often with uncertain payoff timelines.
The Case for Biochar
Biochar is a charcoal-like material produced from biomass that, when applied to agricultural soil, improves water retention and boosts overall soil health. It has been used for thousands of years, most notably by Indigenous communities in the Amazon Basin, where soils amended with biochar remain unusually fertile centuries later.
For Canadian farmers, the appeal is straightforward. Better water retention means crops are more resilient during dry stretches, which have become an increasingly common feature of prairie summers. Healthier soil biology means more efficient nutrient uptake. Both translate into yield improvements that show up at harvest.
The carbon removal dimension creates an additional revenue opportunity. Biochar locks carbon into the soil for hundreds of years, which qualifies it for carbon credits. Carbon Removal Canada’s Carbon Console currently tracks 25 biochar companies operating in Canada, with three operational projects totalling over 20,000 tonnes of annual removal capacity. Globally, biochar is the most widely purchased durable carbon removal method, meaning the market for these credits is real and growing.
The Case for Enhanced Rock Weathering
Enhanced rock weathering involves spreading crushed silicate rock across agricultural land. As the rock weathers, it reacts with rainwater and carbon dioxide to form stable minerals while releasing nutrients and raising soil pH. The net effect is similar to applying agricultural lime, which farmers across Canada already use routinely to address acidic soils.
Farmers who switch from conventional lime to silicate rock amendments can help generate carbon credits with the project developers who supply and monitor the rock, effectively turning a standard operational cost into a diversified revenue source, or reducing that cost altogether.
What Farmers Near Kingston are Already Doing
Increasingly, the evidence farmers trust most is not coming from reports or conference presentations, but from neighbouring operations trying these approaches under real-world conditions.
In Kingston, Ontario, farmers have access to affordable wollastonite, a calcium silicate mineral well suited to enhanced rock weathering, through two overlapping programs: the Kingston Wollastonite Trucking Rebate and the Canadian Wollastonite and UNDO Farmer Program.
Through the UNDO and Canadian Wollastonite Farmer Program, the crushed rock is supplied and spread at no charge to the farmer. The only cost farmers are responsible for is trucking. For farms within the City of Kingston municipal boundary, even those trucking costs are fully subsidized for the 2026 season. UNDO handles the soil sampling, logistics, spreading, and the measurement and verification work required to generate carbon credits on the back end. The farmer gets an improved soil amendment at a fraction of the cost of conventional lime, and a carbon credit revenue stream they did not have before.
- Anecdotally, one farmer reported nearly doubling their hay yield within just over a year of applying wollastonite at four metric tonnes per acre.
- Another, who has been applying wollastonite for eight years, reports less crop lodging, higher grades, and yields that have improved across a wide range of crops, from sod to corn. That farmer also notes their crops handle weather extremes better than they used to. The farmer-reported outcomes are backed by independent research.
- A peer-reviewed study by researchers from UNDO and Newcastle University found that enhanced rock weathering increased crop yields by 9.3–20.5%, with researchers suggesting it may help improve resilience under future climate stress conditions.
A 10–20% yield increase on major crops can represent thousands of dollars in additional revenue over a season.
The Best Change Fits Into What You Already Do
For producers, that future likely will not be built through climate arguments alone. It will be built field by field, season by season, through visible results and conversations between farmers.
Planting season is ultimately about investing in outcomes that will only become visible months later, which may be one of the most apt analogies to the carbon removal sector possible. The most successful climate technologies in agriculture may not be the ones asking farmers to reinvent their operations. They may be the ones that fit seamlessly into decisions producers are already making every spring.
