Saskatchewan farmers will soon be able to trade carbon offset credits in a regulated market, but exactly when remains uncertain.

In a regulated market, large greenhouse gas emitters have to cut carbon emissions by a set percentage. If they can't do that through infrastructure or efficiency improvements, then they have to buy carbon offset credits from someone else who can make those cuts on the company's behalf.

If farmers can make cuts to emissions or trap extra carbon from the atmosphere -- by implementing zero tillage on their farm, as an example -- they can generate credits to sell to these large emitters. Alberta has the only regulated carbon market in North America.

Laura Reiter, past-president of Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association and farmer from Radisson, Sask., spoke about regulated carbon trade at Crop Week in Saskatoon Monday. "Saskatchewan's draft documents are supposed to be quite similar to the program already in place in Alberta," she says.

Reiter has been following this topic ever since she joined SSCA almost six years ago. Her six-year term is up in February and she doesn't expect to see a Saskatchewan program in place before she leaves.

Laura Reiter, past-president of the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association, gave an update on carbon credit trading in Saskatchewan. The province has draft proposals for a regulated carbon market, similar to Alberta's, but nothing has been passed yet. -- Jay Whetter photo

National programs in the U.S. and Canada took a step back with the failure of Copenhagen talks to provide multilateral consensus, but Reiter says "Copenhagen shouldn't slow up Saskatchewan's plans."

Reiter says growers could sell credits right now on Chicago's exchange, but the price has dropped so low it's not worth it. If Reiter were to sell credits for zero tillage on her farm, she'd only get about four cents per acre, minus fees, through the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Under Alberta's zero-tillage protocol, farmers can get credits of 0.16 tonnes per acre at a price of $4 to $12 per tonne, Reiter says. That's a bit better, but transaction costs -- including aggregator fees and verification fees -- can eat up 20 to 50 per cent of that. It's not a windfall.

Another issue, Reiter says, is that there's no price transparency in Alberta. "You can't find out what price other farmers are getting unless they tell you," she says. "It's like trying to sell canola without a futures market for price discovery."

For more on this topic, visit the SSCA website.

-- Jay Whetter is editor of Grainews.