Christopher Bonasia
The Advocate

Canada released its 2025 National Inventory Report in March detailing the country’s emissions across all economic sectors, including agriculture.

The report is released annually as part of Canada’s obligations under the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. It reflects the state of efforts to reduce emissions shown in analyzed data. The information in this most recent report covers emissions in 2023. While the country’s emissions overall were lower than any year since 1995 — except 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic — emissions from the agriculture sector have remained mostly steady since 2005.

Focusing singularly on emissions is the wrong way to address agriculture’s role in climate change. Measuring the amount of carbon released from farming obscures the environmental trade-offs of growing food, not to mention the pressures of selling that food at a price affordable to consumers and still maintaining yields to ensure sufficient food supply. But the emissions data revealed in the inventory report is a driving force of national policy, and so is important to examine.

Overall, emissions have dropped

Canada produced 694 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MT CO2eq) across all sectors in 2023. That number is 0.9-per-cent lower than the year before and shows an 8.5-per-cent decrease since 2005, excluding emissions from the Land-Use and Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector. Agriculture contributed 55 MT CO2eq, or 7.9 per cent of the total amount.

Canada’s agriculture emissions are 30-per-cent higher today than they were in 1990, though they have remained remarkably constant since reaching a peak in 2005, dropping only 2 per cent since then. Livestock populations — and their associated emissions — have stayed about the same during that time. And while emissions from fertilizer use has gone up, the area of perennial cropland has gone down. The sector’s share of national emissions stayed at about 7 per cent from 1990 to 2020, but has since increased to almost 8 per cent due to reductions across the rest of the economy.

Beef largest emitter in ag sector

Almost half of the agriculture sector’s total emissions came from enteric methane (26 MT CO2eq), almost all of which was produced by beef cattle (21 MT CO2eq, which include dairy heifers). Manure management, which is counted in a separate category, produced 7.7 MT CO2eq.

The second-largest source of agriculture emissions was 18 MT CO2eq from nitrogen dioxide released from soils, which has increased 76 per cent since 1990. These emissions are released from inorganic and organic fertilizers and from decomposing crop residues. In 2023, 9.3 MT CO2eq of soil emissions was from inorganic fertilizers, while 2.2 MT CO2eq of soil emissions were moved by conservation tillage practices.

Croplands typically show an overall net removal except during some extreme drought scenarios, like in 2002, 2003 and 2022. Those net removals have on average increased because of “improved soil management practices, including conservation tillage and an overall gradual increase in crop productivity resulting from improved and more intensive practices, like the reduced use of summer fallow.”

However, net removals have declined since 2005 because of decreasing perennial land cover that “has largely offset removals resulting from increasing yields.”

Canada’s government has committed to reducing the country’s emissions by 40 to 45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. Current policies include agriculture among the sectors that will provide some of these reductions, but so far farm emissions have shown little change in the last couple decades.

Meanwhile, electricity generation has led the country’s downward trend in emissions because of the phase-out of coal and the expansion of renewable energy capacity. Most sectors have cut emissions by some amount; the main exceptions are emissions increases in the oil and gas sector, which are “attributed mainly to continued production growth in Canada’s oil sands operations,” the report states,  and from light-duty gasoline trucks.