Building On-Farm Resilience and Lowering Emissions Across Canada

Farmers for Climate Solutions started the Farm Resilience Mentorship (FaRM) Program in 2021 as a peer-to-peer, regionally adaptive, education and knowledge sharing program. The program is designed to support farmers and ranchers in adopting low emissions, high resilience Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs), specifically: improved nitrogen management, cover cropping, and rotational grazing. With partner organizations across the country, FaRM supports in-person and virtual learning events, with farmers and ranchers, agrologists, agronomists, Certified Crop Advisers and agricultural researchers as knowledge sharers. It also includes the FaRM Learning Hub where farmers, ranchers and agronomists can take online self-directed courses to build their knowledge on how to adapt BMPs to their farm or ranch. With an adaptive approach to knowledge mobilization and a desire to support behaviour change, FaRM has developed a rigorous monitoring, evaluation and learning framework that has allowed FaRM to pivot to serve the needs of regional communities while still achieving program objectives. Of the farmers and ranchers responding to the 2024 FaRM Impact Survey, 89% indicated that they had implemented, expanded, and/or enhanced a BMP to some extent as a result of participating in the FaRM Program, with an additional 11% of farmer/rancher respondents indicating that they had yet to undertake a BMP, but intended to. However, despite this strong uptake, cross-country sector consultations have noted that without local, regional data, producers and agronomists are hesitant to implement practices. In 2025, in response to this, and to build engagement with agronomists, FaRM launched Phase 2, which focuses in part on increasing regional support and knowledge transfer by engaging agricultural professionals, in partnership with farmers and ranchers, to run field trials to overcome regional barriers to BMP adoption and to troubleshooting BMP adoption through practical, hands-on experience.