Protecting
Our Environment

Discover how pesticides and plant biotechnology make agriculture more efficient and protect our environment and its biodiversity.

Canadian farmers are growing more food on less land and using less resources. This is great news for biodiversity and the environment. While it might come as a surprise to some, plant science technologies support sustainability:

• Without crop protection products and plant breeding innovations like biotech crops, farmers would need 44% more land (an area roughly the size of all the Maritime provinces combined) to produce what they do today.
• The carbon sequestration and fuel savings from no-till and conservation tillage practices saved an estimated 20 billion kgs of greenhouse gas emissions from being released into the atmosphere between 1996 and 2018, which is equivalent to removing about 13 million cars from the road for a year.
• Almost 34 million acres are maintained in a natural state (untouched by agriculture) due to increased production on existing farmland. This is the same amount of space as about 25 million football fields.
• Thanks in part to plant science innovations, more farmers have been able to adopt conservation tillage and no-till farming saving 1.2 billion litres of fuel between 1996 and 2018
• Canadian farmers continue to increase their no-till acres with 57 of our 93 million acres of cropland (61%) being no-till in 2021.

All the data presented on this site comes from the The Value of Plant Science Innovations to Canadians in 2020 report and the 2021 Census of Agriculture.