Environment & Climate Change
Living Labs
About
The NSFA has been selected to lead one of fourteen living labs throughout the country! The Agricultural Climate Solutions (ACS) – Living Labs program, funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, focuses on developing innovative technologies and on-farm management practices that can be adopted by farmers to tackle climate change through increased carbon sequestration and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The solutions developed by the living labs will also help protect biodiversity on farms, improve water and soil quality, and, through the efficient management of resources and increased resilience, strengthen farmers’ bottom lines.
Living Lab – Nova Scotia will focus on several Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs), described in detail below, over the five years of the project. Each BMP focuses on different techniques in a variety of farming systems that will increase carbon sequestration and reduce GHG emissions, along with other co-benefits unique to each activity. We will also be assessing the socio-economics of each BMP, looking at the cost and benefits of implementing these BMPs on farms as well as the other barriers that can prevent adoption.
Living Lab – Nova Scotia has 30 producers participating in the project across 25 farm sites.
What is a Living Lab?
The Living Lab approach brings together farmers, researchers, industry, and government together to collaborate on the co-development and testing of innovative on-farm practices. The goal is not only to understand the climate impacts these practices have on real working farms, but to also increase the adoption of these practices by overcoming the barriers – financial, social, or otherwise – that prevent farmers from trying these on their own farms.
The three core principles of a Living Lab are:
- Focusing on farmers’ needs: Farmers are the end user of these farming practices and are therefore key collaborators throughout the entire process. Farmers not only test the proposed innovations, they contribute knowledge and experience to their development and improvement at every step.
- Broad and diverse partnerships: Farmers, industry, researchers, and other collaborators contribute their expertise and resources to develop innovative farming practices and technologies.
- Testing in the real-life context: The practices and technologies are tested in the context and scale in which they will be adopted: on local farms under real agricultural production conditions.
Using these principles, Living Lab – Nova Scotia will move through the innovation cycle. At the start of our project, we brought together all the collaborators and worked together to; (1) co-develop our activities. We then implemented those activities on-farm to (2) test them. As we move through the project, we are constantly (3) evaluating how things are going and what challenges are arising. With our collaborators we then incorporate feedback into the activities, re-evaluate those changes, and do it all over again. The activities are constantly being refined to result in the best information and best chance of adoption by farmers.
Funders
