BY BRUCE JOHNSTONE, THE LEADER-POST MAY 25, 2009

Two brothers from Regina are planting 140,000 poplar trees on 400 acres of marginal farmland near Edenwold and hoping to turn them into carbon credits and ultimately cold, hard cash.

Greenfield Carbon Offsetters Inc., the province's first carbon offset farm, is also hoping to build a new, green industry in Saskatchewan, which has plenty of carbon emissions and farmland and trees with which to offset them.

Kalen and Derrick Emsley, co-presidents of Greenfield, along with business students at the Paul J. Hill School of Business at the University of Regina, talked about building a green business in Saskatchewan
when they were still in high school.

"Kalen was going into Grade 12 and I was going into Grade 11 when we first thought of it,'' Derrick said. "We spent that first summer researching, doing as much as we could to get to know the industry and what we
needed to do to do what we're doing right now.''

The idea is simple enough. Grow trees on farmland not suitable for growing crops. Sell the carbon credits from the trees to companies that need carbon offsets. Plant the trees, wait for a few years, then start
raking in the money. Of course, it's not that simple. First, you need access to land and equipment to plant the trees and manage the land. Then you need experienced planters to plant the trees. Fortunately, Kalen and Derrick's father, Doug Emsley, owns a company called Agricultural Development Corp., which buys Saskatchewan farmland, rents it out and sells partnership units in the fund to investors.

"That's one of the great things about this business,'' said Derrick. "It's scalable to anything we want. We've got (access to) unlimited resources through our father's company, Agricultural Development Corp. That company knows everything there is to know about the farmland in Saskatchewan.