Description
The Weston family has committed $10.5 million to expand farmer support and grow the Canadian Alliance for Net-Zero Agri-Food (CANZA) Marketplace.
CANZA says it is continuing with its Million Acre Challenge by leveraging some of these proceeds to add 36,000 additional acres and approximately 60 Ontario farms to the challenge in Phase 2.
In this interview with RealAgriculture's Lyndsey Smith, CANZA interim executive director Ashley Honsberger explains how the funding moves the Million Acre Challenge into its second phase. Founded in 2023 as a pre-competitive collaborative of farmers, advisors, and corporations, CANZA pairs cost-share funding and agronomic education with a marketplace platform that measures, reports, and verifies on-farm environmental outcomes for supply chain partners.
"If we're looking for improved environmental outcomes broadly across Canada, we're trying to break down that barrier or lessen the load for farmers to make sure the risk and the cost of those transitions are shared," says Honsberger.
Following a first cohort of 32 farms across 15,000 acres in southwestern Ontario, Phase 2 doubles the footprint to roughly 60 farms and 36,000 acres. The three-year commitment tracks baseline historical data, measures soil organic carbon at the start and end of the trial, and focuses initially on corn rotations to connect verified greenhouse gas reductions with corporate Scope 3 insetting goals.
“Putting a new practice into place can be quite the investment on a family farm,” says Lexi Soudant, livestock manager at Dave Gardiner Farms in Kirkton, Ont., and a CANZA Million Acre Challenge farmer. “It can cost a great deal of time and money and the setback, if it fails, can be quite damaging for a family farm such as ours. Being part of the Million Acre Challenge changed the level of risk our farm felt in trying no-till.
“Working together with CANZA to collect helpful information was a big factor in helping to reduce the risk we felt here on our farm," says Soudant.
Phase 2 will also expand the CANZA Marketplace. The Marketplace currently gives Ontario farmers a place to explore, save and compare more than 55 programs that support sustainable farming practices. In Phase 2, that directory will grow to at least 160 programs nationally, with AI-enabled tools designed to help farmers identify potentially relevant opportunities and better understand program requirements and stacking considerations.
“The first group of farmers gave us something incredibly valuable — the chance to see how this model works on real farms and where we need to make it better,” says Honsberger. “Phase 2 takes that experience and puts it to work. We’re supporting more farmers, but we’re also strengthening what sits around them — trusted advice, practical support and better measurement, so we can understand what it really takes to scale.”
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