The Future is Circular - and Our Food Future helped show the path forward.
From 2020 - 2023, the County of Wellington and the City of Guelph worked together on the federally-funded Our Food Future circular economy project. With the dedication and cooperation of hundreds of local partners and community members, the project achieved its goals of reducing food waste, increasing access to nutritious food, and supporting new circular businesses.
At its simplest, a Circular Economy means that nothing is wasted: a byproduct from one process can be an input somewhere else, and we have a system which helps make those connections. This means we are not relying as heavily on newly extracted resources.
Inspired by the planet's natural cycles, a Circular Food Economy eliminates waste from the systems that feed us. Through collaboration and the use of new technologies, we can design the concept of waste out of our food system altogether, regenerate natural systems, strengthen our local economy, and increase access to nutritious food.
The Experimental Acres pilot began in 2022. 15 farmers across Wellington and Dufferin counties stepped up to trial regenerative farming practices in their operations. Trying a new practice often comes with high entry costs and delayed benefits, so we created Experimental Acres to address the learning curve. The goal of the pilot is to backstop any risk, develop a community of support, and assist in capturing the business case that can demonstrate what will be worth repeating.
To better understand how our food region can become circular, we needed know what producers and processors feel is working and not working right now. The Food Hub Feasibility Study helped us understand our foundation and envision the path forward. We partnered with Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGEN) to contract a report from Michael Keegan and Associates and Pollinate, who reviewed local food production, processing and distribution with a goal to understand how a food hub model could further strengthen our region.
Farmers have always cared about their soil health, and are in many ways already engaged in circular economy practices. Yet when you look at measures of environmental footprints, agriculture is pointed to as a large source of emissions. Animals used for meat and dairy have high embedded greenhouse gases, but we also know that animal fertilizers are a vital part of the lifecycle of healthy soil. So how do we begin to understand what counts?
Regenerative Agriculture Report
Farmers have always cared about their soil health, and are in many ways already engaged in circular economy practices. Yet when you look at measures of environmental footprints, agriculture is pointed to as a large source of emissions. Animals used for meat and dairy have high embedded greenhouse gases, but we also know that animal fertilizers are a vital part of the lifecycle of healthy soil. So how do we begin to understand what counts?
Looking at what land management practices are used is a critical piece of information, because the particular ways you build sustainable soil health can begin to mean the difference between farmland as an emitter of GHGs or farmland as a carbon sequestration tool. We also have to understand how to support farmers as they learn what works on their land.
In 2020, the Smart Cities Office worked with a group of six Masters of Environment and Sustainability(MES) students in the Centre for Environment and Sustainability(CES) programme at Western University. The student team surveyed our farmers about some of the climate friendly -- or regenerative -- farming practices in our County. The result is the Investigating Incentives for Regenerative Agriculture report:
