Cattle are boosting the soil on this P.E.I. farm and fighting climate change [Video]

Sally Bernard’s black and white cows wander over a field in Freetown, P.E.I., chewing on hay and basking in the warm April sunshine.  

These are beef cattle, but their main purpose isn’t to make it to market — it’s to improve the quality of the soil beneath their hoofs. 

“They’re feeding the biology in the soil, which is then helping to sequester carbon,” explains Bernard, co-owner of Barnyard Organics.

“It’s just doing a whole slate of things that we don’t even really fully understand yet.”

Bernard is learning more about how to graze cattle on her organic grain farm through research as one of this year’s Nuffield Canada scholars. 

As part of the agricultural scholarship program, she’ll travel to different parts of the world to visit farms that practice both grazing and crop growing — and bring that knowledge back to P.E.I. to help her farm and others on the Island.

“I just …