Farmers are facing many challenges, including a changing climate. How can farmers improve their ability to adapt while also helping to combat climate change?
The Agricultural Climate Solutions – Living Labs program uses a collaborative approach to help farmers, researchers and partners work together to develop innovations. The innovations are supported by research and help farms become more sustainable and better prepared for a changing climate. It brings together farmers, scientists, and other partners to co-develop, test, and evaluate new practices and technologies in a real-life context. The solutions developed will focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering carbon, as well as providing benefits to protect soil health, water quality, and biodiversity.
Unlike most traditional research projects that happen in greenhouses, labs, or small field test plots, living labs take place on working farms. This means researchers have less control over the conditions, but the results are often more realistic and useful to farmers. The idea is to make it easier for farmers to adopt these practices on their farms.
The living labs approach is based on three core principles:
- Focusing on farmers’ needs: Farmers are involved from the very beginning. They share their knowledge, ideas, and challenges, working with researchers and partners to design solutions that work for everyone.
- Broad and diverse partnerships: Living labs connect many different groups—farmers, scientists, Indigenous communities, government agencies, and non-profit and producer organizations. Each one brings unique experiences, resources, and perspectives.
- Testing on working farms: New ideas are tested on actual farms, under real working conditions. This helps show whether a practice or technology is effective, affordable, and realistic in day-to-day farm operations.
Every living lab project begins with conversations among farmers, scientists, and partners. Together, they decide what the main challenges are and come up with on-farm research solutions. These ideas are then tested and refined using the innovation cycle:
- Testing: The practices are implemented on farms.
- Evaluation: Data is analyzed; researcher and farmer observations are collected.
- Co-development: Collaborators discuss how to improve and refine the practices based on the evaluation.
The cycle starts over again with testing those co-developed changes. This changeable, repeating process is different from traditional research, where conditions are kept as consistent as possible. Consistency allows the processes driving these systems to be understood, a necessary and key piece of knowledge. However, the goal of this project isn’t just to understand what’s happening—it’s to create realistic practices and practical tools that farmers can actually use.
As an example of this process in Living Lab – Nova Scotia, we have three ‘land swap’ fields where a vegetable farmer and a livestock farmer swap a vegetable field for a temporary pasture to build soil health and store soil carbon. In traditional research, those three fields would be kept as similar as possible. However, each farmer’s setup is a bit different, depending on their fencing, water systems, and whether they raise cows or sheep. While this will make our results more variable, it will give us insight into land swapping for different scenarios and give us more options to show other farmers who may be interested in trying this on their own farms.
Farmers who take part in on-farm projects play a vital role in building a more sustainable future for agriculture. They take on risks by using part of their farm to test practices that might not always work, but their efforts provide valuable information for other farmers to learn from. Their willingness to experiment and share what they learn benefits both agriculture and the environment.
Traditional research is still very important—it helps us understand how things work. But living labs take the next step: turning that knowledge into action. By working directly with farmers, this approach helps speed up the development and adoption of new practices that can minimize nutrient losses, reduce emissions, protect ecosystems, and make farms more resilient to climate change.
Living Lab – Nova Scotia is part of the Agricultural Climate Solutions – Living Lab program, funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC).
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