MacDougall’s team demonstrated that transforming less productive farmland into natural ecosystems increases helpful insect diversity, improves soil health through better carbon and nitrogen cycling, and strengthens long-term farm sustainability. His findings show how restoring natural areas can benefit both the environment and farm economics when supported by long-term, science-based programs.
Farming systems face ongoing tension between maximizing food production and maintaining essential ecosystem functions and biodiversity. As farming costs increase, particularly due to rising input prices for materials like fertilizers and pesticides, farmers often must either intensify production on existing lands or expand into marginal areas that serve important ecological roles. While programs exist to encourage farmers to maintain or restore natural areas on their land, these programs often struggle to compete with the economic pressures of crop production and lack strong scientific evidence of their effectiveness, leading farmers to eventually convert these areas back to agriculture. For these programs to succeed long-term, they need sustainable financial mechanisms that make conservation economically viable for farmers, such as systems that promote investment in on-farm “natural capital”.
Dr. Andrew MacDougall’s Food from Thought project builds on years of research into how ecosystems provide benefits to agriculture, focusing on converting unsuitable farmland into natural ecosystems. His team examined how ecological processes and management practices drive nature-based services and biodiversity on farms, combining knowledge from international grassland studies with extensive on-farm data collected through ALUS Canada. This research helped measure biodiversity and ecosystem services while testing factors that influence these outcomes.
These empirical findings support ALUS Canada’s New Acre Project, which creates a scientifically validated platform for natural-capital investment. This platform allows corporations and citizens to support farmers’ sustainability initiatives, generating income for producers. The program uses cutting-edge research to understand how ecosystem services work at different scales, enhancing natural capital value while demonstrating the positive impact of ALUS’s collaboration with landowners.
Studies by MacDougall’s team provided important scientific evidence about the effects of converting marginal farmland to restored natural ecosystems. The team showed that this conversion enhances local arthropod biodiversity (insects and related species), which is often overlooked despite these beneficial insects’ crucial role in agricultural ecosystems for pollination and pest control. The research also showed that building soil carbon typically takes 6 to 10 years, highlighting how marginal land conversion gradually increases natural soil carbon levels over several years. Additionally, land restoration affected natural soil nitrogen cycling and microbial communities (beneficial soil organisms), which influence the quality and quantity of plant growth on these lands. These findings helped quantify multiple ecosystem benefits and trade-offs of marginal land restoration on farms while showing that results can vary based on local environmental conditions and timelines.
Understanding how ecosystem services work is essential for identifying and valuing these benefits. While practices like marginal land conversion and wetland restoration may seem obviously beneficial, they often lack sufficient financial incentives for landowners operating under economic constraints. MacDougall team promotes restoration by demonstrating its benefits to soil health and biodiversity, helping increase adoption of these practices with reliable, evidence-based information. Understanding the scale and importance of these processes can help assign appropriate financial value, translating scientific knowledge into economic terms. This understanding not only guides land management techniques for farmers but also informs innovative financial programs like ALUS Canada’s Natural Capital Program.
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Dr. Kari Dunfield, Dr. Genevieve Ali, Dr. Asim Biswas, Dr. Neil Rooney , Dr. Andrew Young, Dr. Ryan Prosser, Dr. Kevin McCann, Dr. John Fryxell, Dr. Hafiz Maherali, Dr. Amy Newman, Dr. Bob Hanner, Dr. Joey Bernhardt, Dr. Jana Levison, Dr. Dirk Steinke, Dr. Jeremy DeWaard, Dr. Hugh Earl, Dr. John Sulik, Dr. Brian Husband
Ally Dolezal, Matt Pavusa, Lake Ellsworth, Annika Wilcox, Dan Noble, Kevin McColl, Mica Tosi, Chloe Chang, Bryce Van Zant, John Semple, Andrew Gavloski, Ijeoma Nwafor, Svietlana Uzhova, Dr. Ollie Carroll, Dr. Mark Nessel
ALUS Canada, Danone Canada, University of Minnesota, IIMYC Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras, Environment Climate Change Canada, TD Bank, Bruce Power, Cargill, NRCan, Indian Institute of Science, Umeå University, Federal University of Agriculture
