WINNIPEG, MANITOBA, CANADA — The Trusted Advisor Partnership (TAP), a soil health up-skilling program for crop advisers, is expanding into Manitoba and Saskatchewan, providing resources for rapidly scaling sustainable agriculture to enhance farm resilience and protect ecosystems threatened by erosion, weather extremes, and disease and pest pressures.
The Canadian Prairies TAP will launch its first cohort at the start of 2025 as a counterpart to the North Dakota Trusted Advisor Partnership, which formed in 2022 to provide Certified Crop Advisors (CCAs) with practical soil health training.
TAP aims to fill the continued gap in technical assistance for science-driven soil health management in the Canadian Prairies by providing agronomists with the next-generation skills, technological know-how, and professional networks to expand their consulting footprint to thousands of additional acres that are home to major crops such as wheat, oats and canola.
The Canadian Prairies TAP is supported by General Mills, PepsiCo, Bimbo Canada, Nature United, and South East Research Farm, and will offer a masterclass in soil health agronomy, water management, and diversified cropping systems, covering established and emerging stewardship practices in topics such as residue management, zone mapping, variable rate technology, and tillage reduction.
The initial cohort will open to CCAs in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the program is poised to expand to other provinces. Brandon, Manitoba-based Assiniboine College — recognized for its leadership in agriculture extension, e-learning, and its career accelerator for pork technicians — will host the TAP curriculum and coordinate the issuance of Continuing Education Units (CEUs).
“The TAP program is an obvious fit for our current set of programs, and our long-term priorities as a learning hub in the Prairies,” said Tim Hore, dean of Ag & Environment at Assiniboine. “Assiniboine is a national leader in flexible, adaptive, distance learning, and TAP provides the practical information and peer networking that crop advisers require to make sustainability a core part of their business, now and in the future.”
In the Northern Great Plains and Prairie Pothole regions, areas of the United States and Canada where rich ecosystems are threatened by erosion, weather extremes, and disease and pest pressures, TAP is accelerating the transition of hundreds of thousands of acres to sustainable management in the coming years by empowering trusted advisers and their farmer clients.
In the United States, the North Dakota TAP offers a three-month online training curriculum, in-person workshops, and financial incentives to participating farm advisers and producers. More than 30 independent CCAs have graduated from the unique curriculum, which focuses not only on the principles of soil health, but the crucial logistical considerations, labor needs, and site-specific constraints that pose common barriers to adoption of sustainable agriculture.
In the next five years, the Canadian Prairies TAP aims to train more than 225 agronomists in soil-centric land management, potentially bringing cutting-edge conservation agriculture to well over 500 farmers by 2029.
“Advisers are an integral part of the support system for farmers, and bring logistics-based decision support to soil health implementation,” said Elizabeth Reaves, senior program director of Agriculture & Environment at Sustainable Food Lab, a global non-governmental organization that is a founding partner of the North Dakota TAP and backbone organization of the Canadian Prairies TAP. “With more boots on the ground to help producers mitigate the risks of conservation and maximize its significant upside, we believe that farmers who have been on the fence will come on board. We’re already starting to see this play out in North Dakota TAP, and expect the same in Canada with a made-in-the-Prairies program.”
