Lake Winnipeg Basin
Landscape-based Water Stewardship in Action
Project Overview
The Lake Winnipeg Basin (LWB) Project shows how farm‑level actions, when coordinated through a landscape‑based approach, deliver measurable ecosystem service value and help address shared water challenges. Four farms in Manitoba, Canada, covering roughly 45,000 acres, partnered with eight organizations across food, agriculture, and environmental sectors to understand and communicate how water stewardship practices add value on and off the farm.
The project aims to:
What:
An ecosystem service valuation demonstrating how collaborative landscape-based approach1 centered on water stewardship can create value for farms, the watershed, and the value chain through comprehensive farm planning and the implementation of water stewardship practices. This approach provides a powerful framework for better understanding, valuing, and managing freshwater resources within the broader landscape.
Project Background
Lake Winnipeg, the world’s eleventh‑largest freshwater lake, encompasses a watershed that extends across four Canadian provinces and four U.S. states. The watershed has a range of water challenges, including drought, flooding, and poor water quality. To help overcome these challenges, water stewardship must operate as a systems approach, enabling individual site-level actions to aggregate into measurable landscape-scale impacts. This approach not only fosters local momentum, but also amplifies shared outcomes that extend beyond individuals to benefit the wider region. This project demonstrates how site-level actions on farms can address shared water challenges and benefit portions of the Lake Winnipeg Basin.
Figure 1: The Lake Winnipeg Basin (Western Canada Wilderness Committee, 2008) from: https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/water_quality_trading_lake_wpg_basin.pdf
The LWB Project
The LWB Project aims to demonstrate how a landscape-based approach to on-farm water stewardship planning and implementation can generate multiple environmental outcomes through a pragmatic, collaborative process with the agri-food value chain. The LWB Project is situated in the Central Assiniboine, Redboine, and Pembina Valley watersheds, key sub-watersheds within the Lake Winnipeg Basin in Manitoba, Canada. By integrating good agronomic practices on the farm (e.g., regenerative or sustainable agriculture practices), the LWB Project demonstrates how they can create additional ecosystem service value throughout the watershed.
The Process
In 2022: Using the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) International Water Stewardship Standard2 as a guide, the partner organizations (listed below) provided participating farmers with support to develop whole-farm water stewardship plans for their operations. The farmers identified the current water stewardship actions they were taking and explored additional practices that could be applied across their acres, which are primarily used for growing potatoes, grains, and oilseeds. Water stewardship plans included land, nutrient, and water management practices for both cultivated and non-cultivated acres on the farm, such as:
4R Nutrient Stewardship
Changes in tillage
Cover cropping
Riparian habitat enhancement
Irrigation efficiencies
These practices, which yield multiple environmental benefits, are grounded in sound agronomy and tailored to each farm’s specific operations.
From 2023-2025: After developing the water stewardship plans, the four participating farms put parts of their plans into action during the 2023, 2024, and 2025 growing seasons. EcoMetrics, LLC, was engaged to evaluate the outcomes of the implemented practices from the farm water stewardship plans for each season, for each farm, and collectively for the region. This summary highlights the results from the 2023 and 2024 analyses.
Collaboration in a water stewardship landscape-based approach can generate value for both the farm and the entire watershed. The valuation of ecosystem services within agricultural landscapes through on-farm management practices can help collaborators report on impacts resulting from contributions in sourcing, supply, or sales regions as part of their value chain. It also highlights the value of management practices beyond the farm. This approach goes beyond isolated environmental attributes such as GHGs, soil health, or water quality, shifting the focus toward holistic ecosystem services and measuring Social Return on Investment (SROI).
Outcomes and Learnings
For example, one farm implemented riparian land cover on non-cultivated acres, which created additional value for several outcomes and confirmed that converting non-cultivated land to other land cover types can create significant value. The LWB Project has documented, measured, and demonstrated, through a third-party verifiable valuation (EcoMetrics), that participating farms are:
✅ Creating significantly more value by implementing practices that support water stewardship outcomes such as 4R nutrient management, cover crops, reduced tillage practices, irrigation efficiencies, seeding marginal areas to forages, and other practices (see Table 1 below);
✅ Already creating value to ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling, reduced runoff, water regulation, etc. (see Table 2 below);
✅ Reducing impact and providing value creation for the broader watershed and stakeholders while producing food;
✅ Contributing to quantifiable outcomes for GHG reductions and nutrient retention in the landscape (see Table 3 below).
Throughout this project, participating farmers have expanded their knowledge of water stewardship and the connections between their activities and the watershed and surrounding communities. The results emphasize the importance of adopting a watershed or landscape-based approach to agricultural sustainability, as it benefits the environment, communities, and local governments. The LWB Project demonstrates how the agricultural sector can support nature-based solutions as part of the nature-climate-food nexus through a collaborative, landscape-based approach, achieving local impact.
Why It Matters
Agriculture has the power to shape landscapes. When done sustainably, farming doesn’t just minimize harm, it actively improves the environment. That is the central insight of the EcoMetrics evaluations: well-managed, diverse, and ecologically-focused farms provide ecosystem services that deliver lasting benefits to both local communities and regional watersheds, often far outweighing alternatives such as urban development. Potatoes, in particular, carry a unique sustainability story. As one of the most nutrient-dense crops in the world and a staple in the global diet, potatoes have the potential to drive meaningful, positive change. Growers participating in the PSA Program are proving this every day, demonstrating how potato farming can strengthen food security while contributing to healthier soils, cleaner water, richer biodiversity, and more resilient landscapes.
The LWB Project illustrates how agriculture can support nature‑based solutions within the climate‑food‑water nexus. By working collaboratively on this project, farmers, and partners:
✅ Build resilience to droughts and floods
✅ Improve water quality
✅ Strengthen ecosystems and communities
✅ Enhance transparency and value in the supply chain
A landscape-based approach focusing on ecosystem services is a societal choice. It requires true leadership and vision, recognizing our dependence on natural systems, respecting diverse perspectives and knowledge systems, and re-imagining how we plan, govern, and invest in our shared water outcomes.
The following tables provide third-party verifiable evidence (EcoMetrics) that farms in the LWB Project are already generating measurable ecosystem service value – such as nutrient cycling, water regulation, and reduced runoff – while producing food. They also demonstrate how the adoption of additional stewardship practices amplifies this value, delivering quantifiable outcomes for greenhouse gas reductions, nutrient retention, and watershed-wide benefits.
Support and Partners
Partners include farms, food companies, agricultural groups, and environmental organizations, all working together to deliver shared outcomes for water stewardship.
For More Information
Email us at info@potatosustainability.org to begin your collaborative project.
Let’s start demonstrating your positive impacts!
1 Collaborative landscape-based approach is a management approach that recognizes the interconnections between people and nature in places where productive land uses – such as agriculture, livestock, forestry and mining – interact with ecosystem services. A landscape-based or systems approach shifts a commodity thinking to natural resource of concern perspective, and enables the impact agriculture can have to be fully realized across a region by working across sectors and beyond the scale of individual farms or management units to secure food, fiber and energy production, improvements in livelihoods and ecosystem conservation.
2 The AWS Standard is a global framework for water users to understand their water use and impacts, and to work collaboratively and transparently, intending to drive social, environmental, and economic benefits at the scale of a watershed from both site and basin-wide actions.
Who is putting potato sustainability into practice?