Lake Winnipeg Basin Project
Landscape-based Water Stewardship in Action
Project Overview
The project aims to:
What:
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 from their contributions to ecosystem services. Using water as a lens, the partnership is promoting collective action and collaboration within a landscape-based approach.1
Project Background
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
Process
In 2022, using the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS2) International Water Stewardship Standard as a guide, four participating farmers developed whole-farm water stewardship plans for their operations with support from partner organizations. The farmers identified the current water stewardship actions they were taking and explored additional practices that could be applied across their farms, covering roughly 45,000 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, tillage, cover cropping, riparian habitat enhancement, and irrigation efficiencies. These practices, which yield multiple environmental benefits, are grounded in agronomic science and tailored to each farm’s specific operations.
4R Nutrient Stewardship
Changes in tillage
Cover cropping
Riparian habitat enhancement
Irrigation efficiencies
After developing the water stewardship plans, the 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 Phase 2 of the LWB Project, covering the 2024 and 2025 analyses.
Approach
Collaboration in a water stewardship landscape-based approach can generate value for both the farm and the entire watershed. The EcoMetrics valuation of ecosystem services from on-farm management practices enables collaborators to quantify the impacts of these practices in regions where they source from or supply to, 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 greenhouse gases, soil health, or water quality, shifting the focus toward 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. Through this valuation framework, the LWB Project has documented, measured, and demonstrated, through a third-party verifiable valuation (EcoMetrics), that participating farms are:
✅ Already creating value to ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling, reduced runoff, water regulation, etc. (see Table 2 below);
✅ 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);
✅ Reducing impact and providing value creation for the broader watershed and stakeholders while producing food;
✅ Contributing to quantifiable outcomes for GHG removals and nutrient retention in the landscape (see Table 3 below).
Why It Matters
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 produce crops while supporting nature-based solutions through a collaborative, landscape-based approach, achieving local impact.
Water is a life-supporting service embedded throughout the fabric of nature. A landscape-based approach focusing on ecosystem services recognizes our dependence on natural systems, respects diverse perspectives and knowledge systems, and reimagines how we plan, govern, and invest in our shared water outcomes.
An ecosystem service valuation demonstrates how a collaborative landscape-based approach centered on water stewardship can create value for farms, the watershed, and the value chain through comprehensive farm planning and the implementation of management practices. This approach provides a powerful framework for better understanding, valuing, and managing freshwater resources within the broader landscape.
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 removals, nutrient retention, and watershed-wide benefits.
Phase 2 Partners
Partners include farms, food companies, agricultural groups, and environmental organizations, all working together to deliver shared outcomes for water stewardship.
For More Information
As the Lake Winnipeg Basin Project enters Phase 3, we look forward to sharing new insights, expanded outcomes, and continued progress from this collaborative effort. If you’re interested in learning more, getting involved, or exploring opportunities to support this work, we’d love to connect – please reach out to us at psa.program@potatosustainability.org.
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 a 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?