Now excerpted in:
The Wild Alberta Food Project
Original research excerpted in multiple chapters of Repko and Szostak, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, 5th edition (SAGE, 2025).
An interdisciplinary investigation of regenerative agriculture in Alberta—from ecological promise to practical implementation.
TWAFP examines how law, policy, finance, technology, and farmer economics can turn regenerative agriculture’s ecological promise into durable adoption across Alberta.
EXPLORE THE PROJECT
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COMING SOON!
“Regenerative agriculture’s tantalizing ecological and
socio-economic promise will not be realized through further advocacy alone; scaling adoption will require coordinated leadership and the grit to confront the financial realities facing farmers.”
AN OPENED-ENDED RESEARCH VENTURE
The Wild Alberta Food Project began almost accidentally as a 25,000-word undergraduate capstone. Its original question was broad: how can regenerative agriculture improve Alberta’s food system? Answering it required ecology, sociology, economics, public policy, and—most importantly—the experience of farmers themselves.
The research produced an optimistic conclusion, but it also exposed a harder problem. Knowing what could or should happen does not make it happen. Farmers operate inside real constraints: uncertain returns, transition costs, weather, debt, measurement burdens, market access, and policy systems that do not always reward the outcomes society says it values.
The project now follows implementation. It asks how risk is priced, incentives are created, rights and obligations are structured, outcomes are measured, and promising practices are made investable. Its purpose is not advocacy for its own sake. It's focus is the institutional work required to make adoption economically possible.
WHAT IS REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE?
Regenerative agriculture is not one rigid recipe. It is a context-dependent approach to farming that treats soil health as an entry point to stronger ecosystem function, greater resilience, and more durable farm operations.
Practices may include reduced soil disturbance, cover crops, diverse rotations, integrated livestock, and reduced reliance on synthetic inputs. What counts as regenerative depends on the land, climate, production system, and evidence.
TWAFP is interested not only in whether these practices can improve outcomes, but in what makes farmers willing and able to adopt them at meaningful scale.
WHAT THE PROJECT EXAMINES
FARMERS & ECONOMICS
Does a proposed change reduce or intensify farm risk? Who bears transition costs? When do promised savings or revenues actually arrive?
LAND & FOOD SYSTEMS
How do soil, water, biodiversity, resilience, animals, farm management, and consumer demand interact across Alberta’s food system?
LAW & POLICY
What rights, duties, incentives, standards, contracts, and institutional arrangements can make adoption possible without losing sight of farmer autonomy?
MEASUREMENT & MARKETS
Can environmental outcomes be quantified, verified, and converted into credible economic value without the administrative burden swallowing the benefit?
TWAFP AMENDMENT NO. 1
2025 LAW & POLICY UPDATE EXCERPT
How can the law and lawyers help incentivize the use of Alberta’s carbon-credit market?
FROM RESEARCH TO IMPLEMENTATION
The project’s 2023 research identified Alberta’s carbon market as a possible x-factor in regenerative adoption. This first legal amendment returns to that hunch and asks a harder question: what must law, policy, and market design do before environmental value becomes usable economic value for farmers?
Alberta already has a mature emission-offset framework. Yet the potential value of agricultural participation can be difficult to realize. Protocol availability, measurement and verification burdens, transaction costs, weak data, and uncertain returns can all stand between ecological performance and dependable farm revenue. The problem is not simply whether a market exists; it is whether farmers can realistically use it.
THE UPDATE CONSIDERS
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Alberta’s existing emission-offset framework
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The economic and institutional barriers limiting agricultural participation
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Policy changes that could improve access and reward verified environmental performance
CENTRAL PROPOSITION
If regenerative practices create measurable public value, legal and market institutions must be capable of recognizing that value, pricing it, and returning enough of it to farmers to justify adoption.
TWAFP AMENDMENT NO. 2
2026 ECONOMICS UPDATE
What does Alberta's carbon market actually pay a farmer — and what would it take, in price and in design, to change the answer?
Amendment 1 made the legal case: nothing in Alberta law rewards a farmer for using the province's carbon-offset market. This second amendment prices the gap — what a farmer really nets from a credit today, the threshold at which participation becomes rational, and what closing the distance would cost Alberta compared to what it already spends per tonne of carbon everywhere else.
COMING FALL 2026
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott McKenzie created The Wild Alberta Food Project as an undergraduate interdisciplinary capstone. The work expanded after graduation into an ongoing public research initiative and was later excerpted in multiple chapters of Repko and Szostak’s Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, 5th edition.
He is now a joint JD/MBA candidate at the University of Calgary, where he continues examining the legal and business architecture required to move regenerative agriculture from possibility to implementation.
© 2026 Scott McKenzie
