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LIFESTYLE NO LONGER ENOUGH, EMPLOYEES WANT CASHDON’T BLAME THE FARMER FOR SOARING FOOD PRICESCHECK OUT CG’S SPECIAL REPORT: THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABILITY

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The new 7240, 8240 and 9240 Axial-Flow combines have larger grain tanks (up to 410 bu.) plus a new 16 L engine on the 9240. Thanks to the larger engine and exclusive Case IH SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction)-only emissions system, you’ll get up to 47 more horsepower and up to 10% more fuel efficiency. How? SCR-only technology reduces exhaust emissions without power-robbing add-ons that throttle back performance. 53,000+ engines in the field with over 25 million operating hours in North America alone have proven it. Learn more at caseih.com/efficientpower.

CONTENTSBUSINESS

8 GROW FROM WITHINWhen the big fi rms go headhunting, they rarely get good value from their new stars. Here’s why that matters on the farm.

12 OUR SHARE KEEPS FALLINGGrain and oilseed prices are dropping, but food prices keep rising. And, says Gerald Pilger, farmers keep getting blamed!

14 THE WIDE VIEWJust outside Calgary, CL Ranches is winning the consumer battles that all of agriculture will soon face.

20 ON THE JOBCan agriculture compete for employees against the oilpatch and other industries? Our Lisa Guenther asks the workers.

26 WHERE TO NEXT?Somebody is always trying to sell you on their view of the future of agriculture. Hmmm… could they be right?

30 A NEW FARM THAT BUZZESEight years ago, Dragonfl y Farm struggled to get off the ground. Now it’s working toward $1 million in annual sales.

34 GUIDE LEGAL — WHEN BUSINESSMEN BECOME DIRECTORSIf your farm is incorporated, are you sure you are meeting your legal obligations?

35 THEIR OWN PATHFor this Quebec startup, farming success started when they developed their own, unique sense of direction.

38 THE FUTURE OF FUTURESJust because you can produce commodities in huge quantities doesn’t mean that the market infrastructure will fall into place.

42 THE GOAL IS GOUDADiversifi cation gets touted as a cure-all, but this successful value-adding family says it takes grit, more grit, and more grit again.

45 THE RIGHT TOOL AT THE RIGHT TIMEWhile our machinery makers eye overseas markets, Germany’s Lemken is racking up more sales in Canada.

62 GUIDE LIFE — SET THEM UP FOR SUCCESSTwo things are certain. Life for tomorrow’s farmers will be a challenge. But you can prepare your kids for success.

Our commitment to your privacyAt Farm Business Communications we have a fi rm commitment to protecting your privacy and security as our customer. Farm Business Communications will only collect personal information if it is required for the proper functioning of our

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JULY 2014

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 3

EVERY ISSUE

This summer, COUNTRY GUIDE signed on as offi cial media sponsor for the World Congress on Conservation Agriculture in Winnipeg. With farmers and experts from 33 countries, the insights were amazing and inspiring, as our team of journalists reports in this special section.

48 ALL IN GOOD TIMEFor these wheat growers, fungicide means every acre, every year.

52 PRESERVE BLACKLEG RESISTANCECheck if blackleg resistance is breaking down on your farm.

54 A BETTER WAY TO MILL BARLEY?Cigi tests mixing wheat with barley to open new health markets.

56 AGRONOMY RULES New in-fi eld strategies open up big yield potential.

58 IN SEARCH OF A GOOD LABELCanada needs pesticide labels that work for farmers.

5 MACHINERY GUIDEMid-size tractors evolve with a wave of new engineering.

64 GUIDE HEALTHManage your heart medications for better health.

66 HANSON ACRES When the Chinese farmers arrive on tour, they get an eyeful.

PRODUCTION

SEE CENTRE

EDITORIAL STAFFEditor: Tom Button 12827 Klondyke Line, Ridgetown, ON N0P 2C0 (519) 674-1449 Fax (519) 674-5229 Email: [email protected]

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The editors and journalists who write, contribute and provide opinions to Country Guide and Farm Business Communications attempt to provide accurate and useful opinions, information and analysis. However, the editors, journalists, Country Guide and Farm Business Communications, cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and the editors as well as Country Guide and Farm Business Communications assume no responsibility for any actions or decisions taken by any reader for this publication based on any and all information provided.

4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a j u l y 2 0 1 4

d e s k

The bull is only sleepingAs Country Guide market columnist

Errol Anderson (who returns next month) always is sure to remind us, commodity markets trade more on emotion than on fundamentals.

Markets climb on a combination of confidence and optimism — and maybe a touch of greed — and they fall on fear.

The same emotions drive the same cycles, time and again. They always have, and they probably always will.

But that isn’t to say that fundamentals have no role at all.

The truth is, the world’s supply and demand of grains and oilseeds — and increasingly its supply and demand of meat as well — are in precarious balance.

It’s why we’ve been reading so many headlines that say either that the sky is falling, or that the sun will shine merrily down on farmers forever.

In the recent past, I’ve read that within 10 years, the world will safely be able to idle a chunk of farmland the size of France. Of course, I’ve also read myriad reasons why humanity is on its inescap-able way to famine.

It’s why this month we sent associate editor Gord Gilmour out on assignment to ask whether there is any rationale for deciding which forecasts we should listen to. Does anyone really know which fore-casters have the best records?

We knew it wasn’t the kind of question we should expect a definitive answer to, but sometimes our job is just to ask the

questions anyway and to try to listen for the interesting insights that bubble to the surface. Not surprisingly, though, in this case the answers that Gord got from some of Canada’s brightest ag economists are mainly that long-term forecasting simply doesn’t work in agriculture.

It doesn’t mean that the question wasn’t worth asking. Read Gord’s story and you’ll find out why, but it’s related to the fact that farmers can’t escape having to predict the future. How else could you decide when it makes sense to invest, and when it doesn’t?

So in the context of that story, yes, we agree it’s reasonable to predict we’re head-ing into a stretch of $4 corn. But it’s more reasonable to predict it than to expect it.

With El Niño, and with the prospects of political strife in critical regions around the world, and with climate change, and with burgeoning global populations, and with the rise of the global middle class, and with our dependence on ethanol, and with… Well, you get the picture.

Maybe the bears will retain control for a year, or for two. Or maybe for only another month. But the bull will wake up.

Let me know what you think at [email protected]. But what I think is that our farmers are well positioned. Their financial resources and their man-agement capabilities are higher than ever. They can wait for demand to return, as it surely will. The world needs its farmers, and will soon remember why.

Tom Button is editor of Country Guide magazine

ISSN 0847-9178

J u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 5

Machinery By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor

In an era when everything seems to be getting bigger, equipment manufacturers are investing heavily in updating and upgrading the middle of the pack. These are tractors in the 220- to 325-horsepower category, which means they’re big enough to haul and to load, and to dig into most of the toughest jobs on the farm, yet small enough for impressive efficiency, ease of operation and manoeuvrability. These tractors get it done, including some with Tier 4B/Final emissions standards, and the lineup also includes models with newly expanded interiors, refined engine specs, and an impressive list of state-of-the-art options. If you haven’t taken a hard look for a year or two, you’ve got your work cut out for you. But it’s work that will pay off.

John Deere has added four new 7R Series models to your mid-size choices, and all offer high-power density with a high-horsepower rat-ing. Starting with the 230R and its 230-horsepower engine, look for a hitch-lift capacity of up to 15,200 lbs. and drawbar capacity of up to 10,000 lbs. Plus there’s your choice of CommandQuad, Infinitely Vari-able Transmission or the new e23 power shift transmission. There’s also

an integrated front three-point hitch with PTO options, providing more diversity to attach a mower conditioner or other implements. Add to that three more models — from the 7250R (250 hp) to the 7270R (270 hp) and the 7290R (290 hp) — each one designed by Deere to handle the bulk of your on-farm duties. www.deere.com

John Deere 7r SerieS

Massey Ferguson 8700 series

Introduced earlier this year at the World Ag Expo, Massey Fer-guson has brought its 8700 Series tractor to market with big expec-tations. With five models in all, this new lineup provides what the company literature describes as unparalleled power and fuel econ-omy, along with some pretty hefty hydraulic capabilities. The Dyna-VT continuously variable transmission (CVT) synchronizes the engine and transmission performance for smooth and almost intuitive handling, and the operator cab has also been redesigned, adding comfort, clear lines of sight and enhanced cab suspension. www.int.masseyferguson.com

6 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J u l y 2 0 1 4

Case iH PuMa 220 and 240

Whether you’re managing livestock and crops, or just crops, Case IH believes it has a Puma model to suit the demands on your farm. The new series of Pumas are available with the Tier 4B/final selective cata-lytic reduction (SCR) system, plus increased operator efficiency and better visibility. There are six new models in this series, with the 220- and 240-hp models delivering a combination of class-leading power and fuel efficiency, thanks to the 6.7-litre engine. Advanced ergonomics also mean greater comfort and superior operator efficiency during those times when more hours in the cab are required. www.caseih.com

Fendt 800 and 900 series

Two series of tractors with six times the selection: That’s the diversity that Fendt is promising with its new 800 and 900 Series tractors. In the 800 Series, there are four models — the 822, 824, 826 and 828 rang-ing from 220 to 280 hp — and three models in the 900 series — the 927 and 930 ranging from 270 to 300 hp. It’s the latest generation in Fendt’s line of high-horsepower tractors that offer mid-size power yet greater attention to ease-of-use efficiency. Of course, the 800 and 900 Series also boast Fendt’s VarioGrip system, giving the operator the option of adjusting front and rear tire pressures from the cab, together with enhanced operator comfort and visibility in the cab.www.fendt.com

An open letter to Canadian agWhen Greg Stewart retired as FCC President and CEO, he put his heart into this letter challenging all of us who work in agriculture to speak positively and tell the real story of ag. Reading it helps explain why FCC launched Ag More Than Ever, and why we remain so strongly committed to the cause.

Agriculture matters to this country, and there’s absolutely no question in my mind that the future for Canadian agriculture is bright.

The industry is thriving, family farms are prospering and I see incredible amounts of optimism, pride and passion across the country. And with this success comes a responsibility – an obligation to this industry to let everyone else in on the secret, which is this: even though it’s sometimes tempting to downplay your success by saying how tough farming is, you know in your hearts you’d never dream of doing anything else. Deep down, you’re intensely proud of what you do, and it’s time to quit hiding how successful this industry really is.

It’s our obligation to make our voices heard about where the industry is heading because believe me, if agriculture doesn’t take control of its own destiny, somebody else will. So if you’re benefitting from ag, you have an obligation to give back by driving the outcome, rather than waiting to be told what to do by someone who doesn’t fully understand or appreciate the industry. That means standing up and telling the truth about Canadian agriculture, because right now, that’s just not happening enough.

So let’s take a deep breath and say it out loud together: Agriculture is the best industry in the world. We’re honoured to be part of it. We can only hope that our children find the same fulfilment from whatever path they choose in life. We’re incredibly proud of what we do. And yes. We want the Canadian public to be proud of our success, too.

Short of fulfilling my childhood dream of being a farmer, my career in agriculture has been the best ride I could have imagined. I can’t help being excited for the future of this industry.

I’m forever grateful for the opportunity I have had to serve this amazing industry and the wonderful people in it. Thank you.

I wish you all great success. Stand up and be proud – you’ve earned it.

being excited for the future of this industry.


I wish you all great success. Stand up and be proud – you’ve earned it.


Agriculture More Than Ever is an industry cause powered by more than 300 partner organizations and 450 agvocates committed to speaking up and speaking positively for our industry.

Stand up, be proud

FCC is a proud partner of this cause.

Greg Stewart AgMoreThanEver.ca

32735 E AMTE_Greg_Exit letter_8.125x10.75.indd 1 2014-06-27 7:33 AM

8 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J U L Y 2 0 1 4

hen the big firms go headhunt-ing, and when they poach the best and brightest players from their competitors, they rarely get what they pay for.

The star hires are no longer stars. They’re mediocre at best, and there can be a powerful lesson for farmers in why they underperform.

What does it take to move a busi-ness or a farm from average to great? Or to grow a concept into an enter-prise? These are the questions raised in three contexts by new and newish books by a former ping-pong champ, a couple of Stanford University pro-fessors and a heavy-hitting professor of management at Harvard.

Each shows that growth is best when it comes from within, not hired from outside. And although each book casts a different light on the subject, they add up to a stern message for farmers as farm size

continues to grow.Importantly, the advice — including how to antici-

pate the hurdles that will get in your way, and how to jump them — are as relevant to farming as they are to the next big thing in Silicon Valley. The common point is that success is contextual more than portable.

Their bottom line is that outside experts may have valuable insights and services, but success is rooted to where you are and where you have been.

Table tennis champ Matthew Syed, an Oxford grad and a columnist for the TIMES of London, dem-onstrates in BOUNCE: MOZART, FEDERER, PICASSO,

BECKHAM, AND THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS, that excel-lence or, in his terms, winning in sport, is a product of striving. It isn’t the result of isolated genius. It comes from the development of skills, practice and relentless focus on the goal.

Mozart, usually thought of as a unique genius, had 3,500 hours of piano practice by the time he was six. His father, Leopold, was one of the great music teachers of his day. The old wisecrack about how to get to Carnegie Hall — “practice, practice, practice” — is the paradigm.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” Syed writes. This is glib, but it is the essence of industrial processes and farming. Reducing the influ-ence of luck and increasing the influence of prepara-tion means the difference between average work and superior work, horses that run with the pack and those that are winners. For Syed, that means focusing on the skills that produce the win. The implicit ques-tion of course is: which skills?

CHASING STARS; THE MYTH OF TALENT AND THE PORTABILITY OF PERFORMANCE by Harvard business school professor Boris Groysberg focuses on the ques-tion of which skills can be taken to new jobs from old. With 103 pages of appendices, notes and index to support 339 pages of text, it burrows into the question of whether excellence at work is portable or contextual. His guinea pigs are star analysts at Wall Street investment banks in the period 1988 to 1996. These are the folks who pore over financial docu-ments and visit factories in order to predict the sales, profits and share prices of companies they study. Groysberg’s analysis demonstrates that excellence is rooted in one workplace — one farm, if you like — and its tools and co-workers, managerial goals and company support.

Grow from within

R E V I E W S

Sometimes, that streak of independence in farmers is simple bullheadedness. Other times, it’s business smarts at their sharpest, which is why these three books are timely reads for farms at the crossroads

By Andrew Allentuck

BOOK REVIEWEDBOUNCE: MOZART, FEDERER, PICASSO, BECKHAM, AND THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS (HarperCollins, 2010)By Matthew Syed

CHASING STARS: THE MYTH OF TALENT AND THE PORTABILITY OF PERFORMANCE (Princeton University Press, 2010)By Boris Groysberg

SCALING UP EXCELLENCE: GETTING TO MORE WITHOUT SETTLING FOR LESS (Random House, 2014)Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao

The star hires are no longer stars. They’re mediocre at best, and there can be a powerful lesson for farmers in why they underperform.

ness or a farm from average to great? Or to grow a concept into an enter-prise? These are the questions raised in three contexts by new and newish books by a former ping-pong champ, a couple of Stanford University pro-fessors and a heavy-hitting professor of management at Harvard.

when it comes from within, not hired from outside. And although

continues to grow.

In a study of analysts of steel makers, airlines, etc. Groysberg found that the probability of an analyst continuing a winning streak of making right guesses about profits and, critically, getting more numbers right than other analysts at other investment banks was far greater for those who stayed than for those who allowed themselves to be poached by other investments banks.

Top analysts had a positive correlation of prior-year performance with successive-year performance if they stayed put. They had a negative correlation of successive-year performance with prior-year perfor-mance if they moved to another shop.

“Brilliance was not something that an analyst could pack in a briefcase,” Groys-berg writes. “Top of group records appear to have been embedded in where the ana-lyst worked. Support groups, the influence of management, managerial style, data resources, ability to travel, the kinds of clients with whom analysts interacted were highly influential on performance.”

Those firms which paid through the nose for star analysts did not get what they bargained for. Most of the time, the poached analysts lost their touch.

In other words, creating a great envi-ronment for doing business on the farm makes a real difference, both for you and your employees.

Interestingly, Groysberg’s perfor-mance drops were worse for men than for women, who are much better at taking their track records with them. Groysberg found women tended to cultivate external relationships with clients, other colleagues and sources of information more than men, and they thought more about the repercussions of moving.

There is also the effect of the so-called “winner’s curse,” the problem that some-one who does very well in one year or time period will be unable to do it again next time. The problem is exaggerated when the winner’s price or product rises, e.g., a farmer pays too much for land with an excellent production record, and then finds that in subsequent time periods, the land is not so productive or at least not produc-tive enough to recover the premium price.

Finally, there is the underdog effect. Not only is there some random amount of rotation of winners from fourth to first quartile or even from 10th to first decile, there is also the strong wish of recent fol-lowers to be leaders. Groysberg identifies this in the context of female analysts who, he speculates, “feel a need to be more than average, not just to be one of the group but at the top of the group.”

The last book of our three is both the flimsiest and, yet, paradoxically, the most provocative. Authors Robert I. Sut-ton and Huggy Rao, both management gurus at Stanford University, propose that if firms are careful to cultivate their talent, they can grow from within. That’s the theme and message of SCALING UP EXCELLENCE: GETTING TO MORE WITH-OUT SETTLING FOR LESS.

Sutton and Rao set up two polar cases of how companies sell themselves. They call those that are immobile “Catholic,” i.e. one size fits all. Then, those that are adaptive get called “Buddhist.”

Catholicism is outward looking, Buddhism looks inward. Catholicism is supposedly immobile and unadaptive, while Buddhism is flexible and ready to embrace new ideas.

We all agree there’s some stereotyping going on here, but you get the point.

The ideas Sutton and Rao bring up are provocative. They recall the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York when 38 witnesses heard her scream and did noth-ing. They call this the bystander effect, when many people take cues from others who may not react.

In a business context, this relates to your employees, or your family members, seeing something that seems to be going off the rails, and then doing nothing about it. We’ve all seen it happen. Probably we’ve seen it happen too many times.

To get past this passivity, a leader must not let subordinates fear taking responsibility, or fear being ostracized for recommending changes. Most of all, they

can’t be afraid that they won’t get any credit for their good work or good ideas.

Without such a positive environment, growing from within is all the harder.

Authors of business books read each other, and not surprisingly, SCALING UP EXCELLENCE is a summation of some of what has gone before. Putting aside cute phrases, the book has a great deal to offer. It portrays successful firms as idea mills in which astute managers can reach down to workers at the barricades and perhaps up to senior management to make the enterprise work for customers, employees and, of course, for the owners.

It can work for farms and ranches as well as national businesses. And the scaling-up model is unavoidable in large enter-prises. After all, everyone starts small. The book is a compilation of anecdotes in search of rules. One may object that a case study of a high-tech company may not work for a shoe manufacturer. Yet the mass of insights is persuasive. SCALING UP EXCEL-LENCE is a valuable, provocative read.

Each of these books raises the issue of motivation. All three also assert that indi-vidual excellence comes from within and is a product of group co-operation. They agree too that it is group excellence that supports individual achievement.

This is much the same argument that Tom Peters made in his IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE, the 1982 book which spawned a thousand — that’s not an exag-geration — followers and imitators. These three books follow in his footsteps, but they are valid, unique in their ways, and solid in their insights. Read them and think. CG

Andrew Allentuck is a columnist for GRAINEWS and author of several books on economics.

R E V I E W S

books on economics.

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 9

Syngenta now offers two canola seed hybrids.When you buy them, you know you’re getting quality seed that lives up to your high expectations. And, because they’re from Syngenta, you know you’re getting a whole lot more.

Visit SyngentaFarm.ca or contact our Customer Resource Centre at 1-87-SYNGENTA (1-877-964-3682).

Always read and follow label directions. The Alliance Frame, the Purpose Icon and the Syngenta logo are registered trademarks of a Syngenta Group Company. Genuity®, Genuity Icons, Genuity and Design and Roundup Ready® are registered trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC, used under license. Always follow stewardship directions. Details of these requirements can be found in your Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement, and the Monsanto Technology Use Guide. © 2014 Syngenta.

JOB ID: CLIENT: PUBLICATION: CLIENT SERVICE: __________________6248-1 D SYNGENTA CANADA COUNTRY GUIDE EAST PROOFREADING: __________________DATE: PROJECT: DESIGNER:JULY 29, 2014 CANOLA SEED DPS AD JIM GRAMOZIS ART DIRECTION: ___________________ MECHANICAL _____ PDFX _______ FINAL SIZE: 16.25" X 10.75" UCR: 240% PRODUCTION: _____________________

6248-1D_Syngenta_Canola_Seed_CountryGuideEast_DPS_Ad.indd 1 2014-06-26 4:36 PM

Syngenta now offers two canola seed hybrids.When you buy them, you know you’re getting quality seed that lives up to your high expectations. And, because they’re from Syngenta, you know you’re getting a whole lot more.

Visit SyngentaFarm.ca or contact our Customer Resource Centre at 1-87-SYNGENTA (1-877-964-3682).

Always read and follow label directions. The Alliance Frame, the Purpose Icon and the Syngenta logo are registered trademarks of a Syngenta Group Company. Genuity®, Genuity Icons, Genuity and Design and Roundup Ready® are registered trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC, used under license. Always follow stewardship directions. Details of these requirements can be found in your Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement, and the Monsanto Technology Use Guide. © 2014 Syngenta.

JOB ID: CLIENT: PUBLICATION: CLIENT SERVICE: __________________6248-1 D SYNGENTA CANADA COUNTRY GUIDE EAST PROOFREADING: __________________DATE: PROJECT: DESIGNER:JULY 29, 2014 CANOLA SEED DPS AD JIM GRAMOZIS ART DIRECTION: ___________________ MECHANICAL _____ PDFX _______ FINAL SIZE: 16.25" X 10.75" UCR: 240% PRODUCTION: _____________________

6248-1D_Syngenta_Canola_Seed_CountryGuideEast_DPS_Ad.indd 1 2014-06-26 4:36 PM

1 2 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J u l y 2 0 1 4

Our share keeps fallingFarmers’ portion of the consumer food dollar is plummeting. At the very least, it’s something consumers should know

By Gerald Pilger

b u s i n e s s

he disconnect between farm commod-ity and retail food prices is worsen-ing. Throughout 2013, major media warned consumers of rising food costs, with BNN on May 16 reporting, “How

much Canadians pay for their food is becoming a major concern.”

That same day, CBC added its voice, saying, “Canadian families are planning to cut back on the amount they spend at the grocery store in the face of rising food prices, a new report from one of Canada’s largest banks said Thursday. The RBC Canadian Consumer Outlook Index showed Cana-dians are displeased with rising food prices at the grocery store.”

A month later, on June 27, 2013, Globe and Mail entered the fray with, “Food prices far out-pace consumer price index,” followed on August 5 by the ToronTo Sun headline, “Canadian consum-ers cope with dramatic increase in food prices.”

Then came the fall of 2013, and as everybody on the farm knows, crop prices began a dramatic drop.

But there was no corresponding drop in food prices. In fact, spring 2014 headlines continued to report high food-price inflation.

This gap between what the farmer earns and what the consumer pays comes even more sharply into focus if you examine the slice of the food dol-lar that the farmer receives. South of the border, the USDA has been tracking this since 1950, and a September 2013 study entitled, “Farm-to-Food Price Dynamics,” by Dr. Randy Schnepf, agricul-tural policy specialist with the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) concluded, “Since 1950, the average farm share has been declining as a share of total consumer food expenditures, falling from about 41 per cent in 1950 to 15.5 per cent in 2011.”

It is important to note this 15.5 per cent farm share is simply the portion of the food dollar that farmers receive at the farm gate. It has nothing to do with how much the farmer gets to keep.

The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that in 2011, only about half of that 15.5 per cent farm share actually stayed with the farmer, with 7.6 per cent flowing from the farmer to agribusiness to pay for production expenses.

Since 1950, it should also be noted, consumer spending on food has jumped immensely. In 1970 U.S. consumers spent $102 billion on food. In 2011, they spent $1.1 trillion.

Even though consumer spending on food has increased more than 1,000 per cent over the last 40 years, the share of the retail food dollar that farmers receive dropped by more than half.

So, while consumers are spending more and more, the bulk of the added spending by consumers has been captured by handlers, processors, wholesal-ers, retailers and food-service providers.

Canada-U.S. Food dollar CompariSon, NomiNal, 1997-2009Year 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

FaRm SHaRE oF THE FooD DollaR

CaNaDa 12.1% 12.3% 13.1% 12.2% 10.6% 9.0% 11.4% 13.5% 12.0% 10.1% 10.4% 12.1% 10.5%

U.S. 17.8% 17.0% 16.2% 15.9% 15.5% 15.3% 15.4% 15.4% 15.3% 14.2% 15.8% 15.8% 14.4%

FaRm SHaRE oF THE FooD aND BEVERaGE DollaR*

CaNaDa 9.6% 9.8% 10.4% 9.7% 8.4% 7.1% 9.1% 10.7% 9.5% 8.1% 8.3% 9.6% 8.3%

U.S. 15.1% 14.4% 13.8% 13.5% 13.1% 12.8% 12.9% 13.2% 13.0% 12.6% 13.7% 14.0% 12.8%

*Note: Food and beverage dollar includes soft drinks and alcohol.

Canada-U.S. CompariSon, Farm Share oF the Food dollar, NomiNal, 1997-2009*

*Note: Food dollar definitions vary between Canada and the U.S. due to data constraints.

20.0%

18.0%

16.0%

14.0%

12.0%

10.0%

8.0%

6.0%

4.0%

2.0%

0.0%1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Farm share (Canada) Farm Share (U.S.)

Source: The State of Canada’s Processed Food Sector: Trade Balance CaPi • Nov. 2012

Canada’S trade balanCe in proCeSSed Food

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

0.0

-1.0

-2.0

-3.0

-4.0

-5.0

-6.0

-7.0-6.3 billion

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The value-adding and marketing share of U.S. consumer spending on food rose from $69.2 billion in 1970 to $963 billion in 2011. In 2011, 84.5 per cent of the money U.S. consumers spent on food went into transforming agricultural com-modities into food products, transport-ing those products to retail outlets, and on marketing and sales.

According to Schnepf, the relation-ship of food prices to commodity prices is not one to one. Food does not exactly follow commodity prices. Furthermore, food prices tend to be sticky. While they usually go up as commodity prices rise, often food prices do not fall when com-modity prices decline.

Schnepf pointed out biofuels have been blamed for raising food prices but he has found the 25 to 30 per cent rise in corn prices attributed to biofuel only added about one per cent to food costs. “Commodity prices are now a small component of food prices,” he says.

Schnepf also says there are many other costs that have a much bigger impact on food pricess, including energy costs, labour costs, transportation, pro-cessing and market competition.

The affluence of consumersIn 2012, while working as an exten-

sion agent at Colorado University, Kim Dillivan wrote a fact sheet entitled, “Where Does the Money Go? Food Marketing Margins Explained.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” Dil-livan wrote, “commodity-price increases contribute little to food-price inflation.”

Dillivan attributes much of the drop in farmers’ share of the food dol-lar to changing consumer preferences. “Improved economic conditions, both in the U.S. and internationally, increase consumer demand for value-added food. Instead of buying flour and bak-ing bread, consumers prefer to purchase ready-to-eat bread. Consumers are spending more of their food dollar to buy convenience and save time.”

Dillivan believes the general public does not realize how small a portion of their food dollar actually goes to the farmer. He also thinks the general public has been misled as to why food prices increase, so he sees farm-share data as an opportunity to inform the public about food pricing, and he sug-gests producers should use any chance they get to talk to consumers about food pricing and farm share.

farm share in canada

Instead of tracking farm share as they do in the U.S., Canada tracks the cost of a specific basket of food.

“Canada’s tracking of farm share has been sporadic at best,” says Jessica Kelly. While a graduate student at the University of Guelph, she analyzed the Canadian farm share for her 2014 mas-ter’s thesis entitled, “The Farm Share in Canada from 1997 to 2010: Identifying Trends in Value Distribution Along the Agri-Food Supply Chain.”

Kelly found farm share has also declined in Canada, dropping roughly 0.20 per cent per year.

However, her analysis has also identi-fied two significant differences from U.S. trends. First, farm share is much more volatile in Canada.

Second, the farm share that U.S. farmers receive is consistently higher than the Canadian farm share, averaging about 4.2 per cent more between 1997 and 2010.

Part of this can be explained by higher food imports in Canada, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, yet Kelly suspects there are other reasons Canadian farmers receive a lower percentage of consumer spending on food than U.S. farmers get, although her research did not investigate this difference.

Even so, Kelly says, “Declining farm share does not necessarily mean farmers are being treated unfairly.”

Instead, Kelly says declining farm share reflects the changing dynamics of our food system. It is an indication of changing consumer demand for more processed food products, as well as increased eating outside the home.

It may also reflect the farmer’s ability

to produce greater volumes of commodi-ties more efficiently, Kelly says, so a fall-ing farm share may actually be a signal of a strong and efficient food system.

acTion needs To be TakenRegardless of whether our declining

farm share is good or bad, farmers and ranchers should be making consumers aware of where their food dollars are actually going.

Understanding farm share gives producers facts they can use to inform consumers that food prices are less a function of commodity prices and more the result of consumer demand for highly processed foodstuffs.

Even more important, we as farm-ers need to be aware of the changing demands of consumers.

Consumers want to use their food dollars to purchase not only food, but also convenience and time savings. Unless we as producers can either pro-vide the food products that consumers demand — or partner with processors and retailers who can provide those products — we can expect the share of the consumer spending on food we receive will continue to decline.

Most of the spending by consumers on food is captured by value adding rather than production of raw commodities.

As an industry, agriculture needs to recognize this fact and expand rather than contract our food-processing sector. Unfortunately this is not happening in Canada (see sidebar).

Producers wanting a better under-standing of food pricing and how it relates to commodity pricing should read Schnepf’s paper: Farm-to-Food Price Dynamics. It is available on the web at: www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40621.pdf. cG

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J u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 1 3

Is Canada losing our food-processing industry?In November 2012, Dr. Douglas Hedley of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute pub-

lished, “The State of Canada’s Processed Food Sector: Trade Balance.” This paper presents a number of disturbing trends in the Canadian food-processing industry.

Highlights of the paper include:“Canada’s net trade in value-added processed food has deteriorated from a deficit of

about $1 billion in 2004 to $6.3 billion in 2011.”“While Canadian processed food exports stalled over this period, imports rose steadily.”“Canada’s net trade in processed food with the u.S. and Mexico has been negative for

the past four years, having fallen from a surplus of $2.2 billion in 2004 to a deficit of $1.3 billion in 2011.The trade situation with the rest of the world also deteriorated from a deficit of $3.2 billion in 2004 to a deficit of $5 billion in 2011.

The entire report is available at www.capi-icpa.ca/pubs.html.


The wide viewA half-hour west of Calgary, CL Ranches is winning the battles that all of agriculture may soon face

By Angela Lovell

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herie Copithorne-Barnes knows the feeling. Ranch-ing at Jumping Pound, Alberta, just 30 minutes west of Calgary, she looks

at today’s agriculture and sees it produc-ing the healthiest, cheapest food the world has ever known.

But she also looks around her and sees an agriculture under intense scrutiny from the beneficiaries of that food, and also under pressure from the neighbours who choose to share the space where farmers need to conduct their business.

She doesn’t have to look far. “we are next-door neighbours to a million peo-ple,” Copithorne-Barnes says. “we have a highly affluent community that lives around us because of the oil patch. They have paid a million dollars plus to live on their property.”

But, Copithorne-Barnes adds, “They

don’t work or socialize here... and they get upset when the tires of their Mercedes Benzes get covered in cow manure.”

Copithorne-Barnes’s great-grandfather, Richard Copithorne came to Alberta in 1884 from Cork, ireland and began assembling what became the nucleus of the 28,000 acres that CL Ranches grazes today. “Most of it is leased and includes some Crown and First Nations land,” Copithorne-Barnes says. “we have rela-tionships that have been built over three generations.”

Yet increasingly, her neighbours are also three generations from the farm.

Their lack of knowledge of agriculture and of what ranching is about, and how it works, is threatening the social licence that allows producers to do what they do, says Copithorne-Barnes, who farms with husband Tim and her 77-year-old father, Marshall Copithorne.

Continued on page 16

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Hemmed in by suburban sprawl and squeezed by consumer and government pressure, rancher Cherie Copithorne-Barnes focuses on ways to keep in charge of her own destiny. It isn’t easy, but it’s working.

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“My family has been in this commu-nity for 130 years. Everybody around me has been here no more than 30, yet their opinions are now becoming critical.

“Corporations and politicians are lis-tening to them, and there’s a reason for that. Corporations have realized, well in advance of us producers, that it’s impor-tant to figure out what our social respon-sibility is,” Copithorne-Barnes says.

“We as producers have to start catch-ing up on this because it’s not going away any time soon,” she says. “Happy cus-tomers are a result of being happy with what they see.”

Copithorne-Barnes realizes the future of her ranching tradition is being affected by influences that often have nothing to do with the realities of raising cattle, so she also knows that the voices of cattle producers and other farmers must start being heard above the din.

It’s the reason she is chair of the Canadian Round Table for Sustainable Beef, and why she is a strong advocate of the industry.

Animal welfare issues are a huge concern for consumers; they are driv-ing changes throughout the livestock industry. At the producer level, the revised Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Beef Cattle, which was released by the National Farm Animal Care Council in August 2013, has new requirements for the use of pain control during painful procedures such as castra-tion or dehorning.

At the other end of the chain, A&W restaurants recently launched its “Better Beef” campaign claiming that its beef has no added hormones or steroids, and McDonald’s Restaurants has announced it will begin purchasing verified sustain-able beef by December 2016.

Copithorne-Barnes has come to understand first hand the power that consumers and her neighbours have to influence how she produces her product.

CL Ranches, in part because it’s so close to Calgary, gets a lot of requests for tours. These include requests from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Canada Beef, as well as from the farm’s customers, such as Spring Creek and Sobeys who bring their clients to see a working cattle ranch.

“One group was from A&W and what they really wanted to understand was how to produce hormone-free cat-

tle,” says Copithorne-Barnes. After the tour, she asked why they were so inter-ested in hormone free, which the ranch has been producing for 17 years. “They said they’d been watching their Twitter accounts — and enough of their custom-ers were asking for hormone-free beef that they decided to go that route. You may or may not agree with what their final marketing plan was — but all they were doing was listening to what their consumers were asking for.”

About a year ago Spring Creek brought out its Sobeys meat team — or so she thought — for a tour of the ranch. An English guy with the entourage asked endless questions about the welfare of the animals and videotaped some of Copi-thorne-Barnes’ answers. “As we toured the empty feedlot the guy asked me, how do you feel about putting your cows in these pens after they have been free and running around all summer?” she recalls. “I told him you’re here in July and right now it’s green and beautiful. Picture yourself here in January, when it’s -40 and the wind’s blowing. You’d see every pen filled with calves; they’d have fresh feed in front of them; they’d be sleeping on good, clean bedding and there’s lots of shelter for them.”

Four weeks later she found out the English guy had been the market devel-opment co-ordinator for celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, sent on a scouting mission to look at how some of the beef pur-chased by Sobeys was produced and to determine if Oliver would allow his name to be associated with Sobeys meat.

The video of Copithorne-Barnes explaining how she raised her animals was already on Sobeys website. “I got a million-dollar endorsement that I didn’t ask for,” she says. “But I began to won-der what was going on here, and it didn’t take me long to realize that Sobeys was trying to achieve what every retailer wants. Jamie Oliver has the ability to satisfy its customers — he has 3.7 mil-lion followers right now. What retailer in their right mind wouldn’t like a guy like Jamie Oliver promoting them?”

Such experiences made Copithorne-Barnes realize how important it is for farmers to be a part of the conversa-tion about food and how it’s produced. “Whether you’re in the specialty stream or the commodity stream, the story that’s being told can affect all of us,” she says. “Retailers get this. They’re closer than ever to their customers… they’re in tune

with this new millennial generation and they function in the social media realm. They engage them and educate them in a way they understand — not by preach-ing — but by listening to their concerns. That’s what we have to start doing.”

Nor is it just production methods that producers need to explain, says Copi-thorne-Barnes, but also farmers’ social commitment to the rural communities they live in, as another incident taught her.

Copithorne-Barnes was shocked by a local radio report last October that her lease on 3,500 acres of public lands, which provided summer grazing for 550 cow-calf pairs, was about to be with-drawn because the Alberta government was expropriating the land to build a new ring road around Calgary.

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Continued from page 14

Three weeks and many phone calls later the province confirmed the story, but it still wasn’t able to explain exactly what it would mean for the ranch, and she is still negotiating a new lease arrangement. As word spread in the com-munity, however, an open house was held on the plan, which would impact a lot of people especially if, as expected, it blocks the road allowances that the community wanted to develop as emergency exits in case of flooding.

“One community member stood up and said, ‘I can’t believe CL Ranches would allow this to happen to that lease without consulting us and telling us, and if I hear that CL Ranches is going to get any compensation while my private land is being devalued, I am going to sue

them and the county and the province,’” recalls Copithorne-Barnes. “I was com-pletely taken aback. These were people whose kids go to school with my kids — they are my friends and neighbours and they were ready to sue me because they didn’t understand what was going on… If I hadn’t gone to that meeting and explained it, I can’t imagine how it would have played out.”

It was a useful reminder, says Copi-thorne-Barnes, that in the absence of someone telling the true story, rumour and supposition will often fill up the void. “The message is that we, as individual producers, have to get out and tell our sto-ries,” she says. “We might think the public is not going to come knocking at our door but the reality is, they are.”

Despite the constant encroachment of an urban population — or perhaps because of it — Copithorne-Barnes is one of the very few of her generation, includ-ing her five siblings, who has decided to stay in the area and ranch. “This ranch is in my blood,” she admits. “I am one of those crazy people who will probably die dead broke fighting for this place, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She’s not afraid to face challenges, and CL Ranches has a few unique ones. Its location, at an elevation that aver-ages around 4,000 feet, means the cost of keeping cattle is higher than in most areas. The ranch only averages 90 frost-free days and usually ends up feeding

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cattle for around 5-1/2 months. They have used genetics — developing what they call the CL SuperCross Breed — to help them stay in the game.

“CL has always strived to build the cow to suit our environment,” says Copi-thorne-Barnes. “With such a short grow-ing season, we must have cattle that don’t require high-energy or high-input diets… Our cows must be able to winter eco-nomically, remain fertile and raise a calf that weans heavy.”

The SuperCross was originally a breed made up of Hereford, Simmental and Braunveih, but the cattle began to become too large and had too high a feed require-ment so the ranch brought in a British breed, Sussex with better forage efficiency.

“The Sussex downsized the cows from 1,400 lbs. back down to 1,250 lbs.,” explains Copithorne-Barnes. “Genetics for us is always a continuous journey. We’ve achieved the appropriate-size cow again. Now, I’m looking to improve once again on performance without losing the fertility and structure.”

The ranch follows a strict and unfor-giving cull policy. All open cows and those in poor condition are sold. In fact, it was this policy, plus the fact that the ranch has always been in the bull-breed-ing business, that led it to supply the naturally raised, hormone-free market in the first place.

“We don’t castrate the bull calves coming off our cows,” says Copithorne-Barnes. “The bulls remain on grass until the snow no longer allows them to per-form efficiently, then they’re brought into the feedlot and we select the top 25 per cent performing bulls, leaving us with the bottom 75 per cent that must be cas-trated and fed out.”

Originally, the ranch fed them as bulls and sold them into the EU market, but this ended with the BSE crisis, meaning

they had to find another avenue to sell these bulls. “We went down the path of keeping them hormone free, castrating them and selling them into the ‘Natural Markets,’” says Copithorne-Barnes.

Although this has worked well in the past, with the new Beef Code of Prac-tice it may become a practice that’s less viable. “We will no longer be able to castrate these bulls without full pain miti-gation starting January 1, 2016, and this simply adds to the cost of raising natural beef,” says Copithorne-Barnes. “In my opinion, as consumers begin to ask for more natural products, any premiums we had received in the past will no lon-ger be as readily available as this market expands, and I worry that it might not remain viable because of this.”

The challenges seem endless some-times, admits Copithorne-Barnes. “I spend over 50 per cent of my time man-aging the non-agricultural events that occur daily. For example, I have a road construction crew parked outside my front gate about to dig up the only road I have that doesn’t have a road ban on it, not to mention 600 cows calving that have to be fed. It never ends here.”

To survive, the ranch has had to be resourceful. “Our other, diversified oper-ations simply help pay the bills,” says Copithorne-Barnes. “We use the natural resources that are readily available — space and gravel.”

The ranch is only 35 minutes from downtown Calgary and the airport, and offers some panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains, so it’s not sur-prising it was discovered by the movie industry. In 1991, producers for the Lonesome Dove television series, after a lot of scouting throughout Alberta, approached the ranch about building a movie set on the property.

“They needed a site that was completely isolated and close to Calgary, because in those days they would have to send the rolls

of film to the airport for shipment to be edited,” says Copithorne-Barnes.

The production company built a com-plete, circa 1850-1930 western town-site and studio set, and produced the TV series there for six years, after which the ranch bought it for about 10 cents on the dollar, built a warehouse to store the set decorations and props, and began to rent it out. “Movie companies come in and rent the location and all infrastructure, which they build and by contract must leave,” says Copithorne-Barnes. “All it takes to attract them is the 180-degree, unobstructed view of the mountains.”

The other diversification at the ranch is a gravel business, which takes advan-tage of a huge gravel resource located along the banks of the Jumping Pound Creek that runs some 11 miles through the property.

Nor does the future for Copithorne-Barnes look to be getting any less compli-cated. “There are so many changes going on around us here with regards to land use regulations starting to weigh in, each day makes you wonder if I am truly in the ranch business or the real estate holding business,” she says. “There’s talk of mak-ing eight lanes on the Trans-Canada and four lanes on Highway 22 to the east of us, and all that does is complicate our opera-tions by making it tough to move around. We are starting to look at non-agricultural projects that will not affect the cows… we know that these changes are inevitable and therefore instead of fighting change, we must look at ways of surviving them.”

In part, that’s because Copithorne-Barnes like other farmers has the next generation in mind, although she admits she struggles with the question of whether to encourage her children, Josh, 14 and Courtney, 11 to carry on the ranch. “Ultimately, I will leave it up to them,” she says. “If they decide that they would rather do something else, I would never hold it against them.” CG

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s farms get bigger, the challenge of finding work-ers to cover those extra acres or to help manage those larger herds is get-

ting bigger too, especially when agricul-ture goes head to head up against more lucrative jobs in other sectors.

Farmers are a bit perplexed, though. I mean, surely anyone would want the life that comes with working on a farm, espe-cially compared to the endless hours of an oil rig, for instance, or to working the mid-night shift in a grimy factory or at a job that makes you sweat out the summer in a grungy, dark downtown apartment.

Farming offers benefits that other industries can’t, farmers say, such as a chance to be close to nature, to work with a variety of machinery, and to live a healthy life in the open countryside.

That’s what farmers think.But what do farm workers think?Every region in Canada has its own

industries that compete for workers. In Saskatchewan, it’s the oil and gas sector. So I went to young people in our area, and I asked them, do they agree that farming really offers them a better work-ing environment than the oilpatch?

Even more important, I wanted to know — once they go to the patch, is there any chance of getting them back?

LovE oF ThE LandI started with Jesse Bannerman who

grew up on a ranch near Livelong, in northwestern Saskatchewan. These days the 25-year-old works as a farrier, he runs 115 commercial cattle with his younger

on ThE JoBCan farmers compete against the oilfield and other industries? Our Lisa Guenther goes straight to the source

By Lisa Guenther

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Jesse Bannerman works as a farrier, runs cattle with his brother, and works on a cousin’s farm. Or he could get one job in oil.

brother, Jake, and he works too on his second cousin’s mixed farm.

Though he’s obviously a busy young man, he’s happy to make time to talk about his experience working in ag and oil.

Earlier in his 20s, Jesse put in sev-eral months at Czar Feedyards, south of Wainwright, Alta.

“One of my passions is working with cattle. And I got to work with horses every day, so I really enjoyed that,” Jesse says.

Jesse cites the physicality of agricul-tural work as a benefit too, and the fact that he was always learning.

“If you enjoy being outside I really recommend it,” Jesse adds. “You get to see lots of scenery. Lots of wildlife, too.”

In other words, Jesse’s thinking and his experiences are exactly in line with what many farmers think: there’s no life like it.

Just a few miles down the road, Jesse’s cousin Chase Bannerman grew up on a seedstock Hereford operation, doing everything from haying to showing cattle through 4-H. Chase, now 20 years old, also clocked nearly two years at One Earth Farms, handling cattle.

Chase counts working with cattle and machinery as benefits that go along with farm work.

“There’s not a whole lot of the farm I don’t enjoy,” says Chase.

And it’s not just the scenery and the job that pulls workers into agriculture. The people themselves can be a draw.

“Everyone who’s involved in agricul-ture is very passionate about what they’re doing out here,” says 20-year-old Braden Clarke. Braden grew up on a farm seven hours from the Bannermans in the Wey-burn area, in southeastern Saskatchewan, and he still calls the area home. In high school, he worked for a neighbouring grain farmer and also did oilfield fencing.

Braden says people in agriculture take pride in their industry. “Everybody has their neck out on the line, and nobody really wants to be just putzing along and have someone out there who doesn’t want to help them better themselves.”

Robert Ellis packed in a lifetime of work experience into his 20s. He spent

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“ If you enjoy being outside, I really recommend it,” Jesse Bannerman says of his decision to work in ag


several summers working on a farm while in university and also added Aus-tralian farm work to his resumé.

Robert then jumped to the oilpatch, working as a swabber. Once the pump jacks have been pulled from oil wells, swabbers scavenge two or three barrels a time, up to five times a week. Robert’s boss expanded the business, and Robert bought in. When horizontal wells came in, their mineral rights soared in value, so they sold. And that is how Robert went farming.

Now 32 years old, he farms 6,000 acres near Elrose, Sask. He has three farm employees “and it just seems like more of a family-oriented thing and everybody kind of gets along and tries to get the common goal done at the end of the day.”

In the oilfield, by contrast, “it’s almost like you’re competitive with the next guy standing beside you,” says Robert.

Farm employees also generally work close to home, which isn’t the case for peo-ple with camp jobs, Robert says. Plus farm work slows down in the winter, he adds, and often employees get weekends off.

SOmEbOdy’S gOINg tO PAy

Nor is a love of agriculture necessarily enough to keep farm workers on the farm. the oil industry sends living expenses sky high, and Chase says farm employers need to keep up.

Chase knows it’s hard for farmers to keep workers in areas where they’re com-peting with the oilpatch. “but I think it all comes down to money, really,” he says. “People see opportunities in the oilfield and the money they can get.”

that’s certainly the case with Chase. After nearly two years of working with One Earth Farms, Chase’s uncle offered him a welding apprentice job, doing tank maintenance.

“It was too good an opportunity to pass up,” says Chase.

Chase adds some farmers have side businesses in the oilfield plowing leases, building roads, or towing equipment, and so they employ people for both businesses.

Robert agrees farmers don’t have much choice when it comes to competing with the oil industry for wages.

“down in our area there’s quite a bit of oil,” says Robert, who adds he pays what he considers big wages to his farm employees. “Wages have definitely gone up a lot for ag workers in the last five years, and they’re going to continue.”

Robert also suggests giving flexible hours when the season’s not busy. “And just trying to be a great boss to work for I think is a lot of it.”

Jesse bannerman says he would have stuck with the feedlot, but he had cat-tle at his parents’ ranch, which was a 3.5 hour drive each way. He went to work on the rigs to make some quick cash, then took a job close to home with an oilfield service company for a while.

In his mind, farmers are dealing with a fraction of the potential workforce.

Whether or not someone is suited to farm work depends on their goals and preferences, says Jesse. “If you like having fancy toys and things you might want to stick to the oilpatch.”

that’s partly why braden Clarke has been roughnecking for the last two years, and why he’ll be starting a two-

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“ It was too good an opportunity to pass up,” Chase bannerman says to explain why he jumped to the oilpatch

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year petroleum engineering technology program in Calgary for the fall.

But it’s not just the money that attracted Braden Clarke to the oilfield. “Nobody in my family was ever involved in the oilfield. So for me it was a big venture out. Kind of something that intrigued me.”

Braden’s crew also gets along, which is another plus of his current job. “With the crew I’m working with now, we hang out outside of our shifts.”

Chase enjoys his job, too, and com-pares it to working in the shop. “You’re actually building things. At the end of the day you can look at what you’ve done and feel you’ve accomplished something.”

Although Jesse eventually left the oil-field, he enjoyed parts of it, too.

“I just didn’t like it as much as farm-ing, but the biggest thing that I had trouble with was to get time off when I needed it just because there’re lots of guys who were farming more than us at the time,” says Jesse. “And everybody takes holidays at the same time. It’s hard for employers to keep everybody happy, which is understandable.”

Jesse suggests farmers keep their employees learning.

“If you’re doing something you haven’t done before you’re a lot more interested in it,” Jesse says. “That’s what I really like.”

MovINg To The pATCh ANd BACK

The hidden irony is that the farm is an ideal training ground for the skills needed by oilpatch. The solid work ethic that farming nurtures is sought after too.

Farm work gave Braden the confi-dence to handle new situations in the oilpatch, he says. And working on machinery helped out in the patch, too.

“You go to work on a rig and the guys are surprised you even know what the tools are called,” says Braden.

But just because a farm worker spends time in the oilfield, that doesn’t mean they’ll become estranged from the farm.

Braden puts in his shift on the rigs, comes home, and puts in another shift on the family farm. And he’s not the only one on his crew.

“one of the guys I work with, he’s now working for a farmer during breakup,” says Braden. he adds it’s com-mon for oil workers to help out either on

the family farm or work for farmers dur-ing spring breakup.

Chase hasn’t turned his back on agri-culture, either. he still works on the family farm and is investing in it, too. A good-paying job speeds him towards his farming goals, he says.

Jesse points out both industries are vital to Saskatchewan’s economy. The oilfield helps keep the small towns going, he says. And he was able to leverage the dollars he earned in the patch into his own operation.

“It’s tough not to have a secondary

job, and the oilfield provides a lot of opportunities,” Jesse says.

Robert’s dream was always to farm, and the oilfield helped make that dream happen. he recalls the day, in his early 20s, when his father held an auction sale, marking the end of the family farm.

“That was almost one of the sad-dest days of my life, thinking that maybe you’ll never get a chance to farm on your own again.”

But then, he got that job in oil and it all turned around. CG

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There’s job satisfaction in oil too, says Chase Bannerman. “You can look at what you’ve done and feel you’ve accomplished something.”

Canadian Forage & grassland assoCiation www.canadianfga.ca Ph: 780-430-3020

Addressing a Potential Market Failure in the Forage and Grasslands Sector

The CFGA recently addressed the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food on the issue of innovation and competitiveness in the forage and grasslands sector. One question from the committee centred on the issue of various forage legume inoculant markets that commercial enterprises no longer support. Producers relying on forage legumes understand that it has become a challenge to access inoculants for forages such as sainfoin, bird’s-foot trefoil, crown vetch, ladino, alsike, red and white clovers, as well as milk vetch. While the CFGA is addressing this issue through its Research and Extension Committee, it could take some time to resolve and may require an industry-wide solution that includes input from stakeholders such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, forage seed companies, as well as research and extension personnel in the public and private sector, among others. Ideally, the CFGA is looking for a solution that does not burden any one party and provides the inoculants required for these specialty forage legumes.

The Committee noted that sometimes markets fail for various reasons. The Committee asked the CFGA if there might be a co-operative model whereby the organization could take “ownership” of the products of research into forage legume inoculants on behalf of its stakeholders. This is an interesting proposition — and there are a number

of instances in agriculture where this type of model has evolved. CFGA will consider the feasibility of this scenario within the context of its long-term strategy.

That strategy will take form as it gathers information. The Research and Extension Committee has completed the framework for a research strategy, which is just one document the CFGA will need to construct its comprehensive strategy for the future. Currently, however, the CFGA does not have the capacity to develop all of the reports required internally, and may have to contract at least some of these services from external industry consultants. With the announcement of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s (AAFC) Canadian Agricultural Adaptation Program (CAAP) (2014-2019), CFGA may be able to take advantage of a $50.3-million program that provides non-repayable contributions for industry-led projects that help the agriculture, agri-food, and agri-based products sector adapt and remain competitive. If the CFGA were successful in obtaining a CAAP grant, project costs would be shared on a 50:50 basis between AAFC and the CFGA. The CFGA could include its own funds and/or the funds of its members, industry supporters and other project participants.

In addition to the inoculant issue, the CFGA seeks a more comprehensive

understanding of the workings of the Canadian forage seed sector. This is of particular concern given the recent rescheduling of forage seed to Part III of the Seeds Act and the limited capacity to test the performance of new forage varieties on a national basis. These issues will not only have an effect on the 80 per cent of Canada’s beef production and 60 per cent of the dairy cow diet that are currently dependent on forages, they will also have implications for the use of forages in land reclamation, restoration efforts and biodiversity initiatives as the availability of cultivated and native forage seed and inoculant declines.

The CFGA is actively seeking strategic partners in the forage and grassland value chain with a mutual interest in specific forage and grasslands initiatives. Partners could include any organization that is committed to sharing physical and/or intellectual resources with CFGA in order to achieve a defined common objective. The CFGA also recognizes that there are many individuals across Canada who appreciate the value of our forage and grasslands, are supportive of the CFGA, and may wish to be involved by becoming Patron Members of the CFGA. Those with an interest in becoming more actively involved in forages and grasslands in conjunction with the CFGA are encouraged to contact us through our website at www.canadianfga.ca.

©2014 CNH Industrial America LLC. All rights reserved. New Holland is a trademark registered in the United States and many other countries, owned by or licensed to CNH Industrial N.V., its subsidiaries or affiliates. NHM04148906L

learn more about how peter farms smart at nhsmart.com/peterJ


uman beings just can’t stand to feel that they’re being left in the dark. There’s something about the unknown that flat out bothers us. We go to enormous lengths to try

to see what might be coming next, and we divert a big pile of our cash and an even bigger pile of our even scarcer time and attention to following market reports, listening to experts and going to meetings and conferences to try to sort out what is coming down the pipe.

In fact, agriculture is among the worst, ever since the biblical foretelling long, long ago of seven years of feast followed by seven years of famine.

It’s only natural in an industry that is so tossed about by weather — and by the volatile prices that result — that farmers keep their eyes on the horizon for any kind of insight.

Increasingly, it’s also good business. With the resources that are needed to keep farming today, let alone the big dollars needed in order to expand, who wouldn’t be looking for a glimmer of the world a few years down the road?

But, if we turn to corn as a convenient example, in the last decade alone we’ve been told that a bushel will always sell for $8, or always for $3, or for maybe something in between, just as we’ve been told that land prices have topped out, or that they have barely begun to rise.

We’ve also been assured that the world will run out of food, only to hear from the next expert that farmers are more than capable of growing a glut, no matter how many mouths need filling.

The problem is, each of those predictions has sounded utterly reasonable, absolutely scientific, and totally believeable.

The question is, is there a way for farmers to separate the true from the misguided?

What’s a farmer to do?The answer might start with looking at just how

old the debate actually is. It might seem like all today’s talk about global population growth and the rise of the middle class has come about because we’re living in a new, unprecedented point in history. But there’s very little that’s unprecedented about it.

Just barely out of the age of antiquity, Scottish cleric and political economist Thomas Malthus coined the Malthusian principle in his 1798 work An EssAy on thE PrinciPlE of PoPulAtion. He theorized that every population will always expand until it exceeds its ability to feed itself.

Malthus has mostly been proven wrong so far. Better agricultural practices have continually boosted our yields to meet the need. But we still believe him, such as in the early 1970s, when the European think-tank the Club of Rome released its seminal work limits to Growth. It tried to put a modern spin on it, but it was in essence a rehash of Malthus’s central idea that limited resources would act as a check on growth. It came at roughly the same time that pop culture was fixating on the same issue, in books like Paul Ehrlich’s PoPulAtion BomB.

In other words, there have always been predic-tions that we’re on the edge of global starvation. And to date, farmers have always saved the day.

So when agriculture in the 1970s experienced another of its period price spikes, with demand out-stripping supply, many believed the future was here. In the rear-view mirror, however, the view is differ-ent, and predictable. Given a price signal and lots of encouragement from people like then U.S. agricul-ture secretary Earl “Fencerow-to-Fencerow” Butz, farmers made investments and kicked it up another few notches. As always, high prices solved high prices, and soon the world was awash in a grain glut.

Where to next?Someone is always trying to predict the future of agriculture. You might even be tempted to believe them… at your peril

By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor

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Is the world really going to run out of food? Or are farmers going to overproduce their way into gluts and low prices all over again? The truth is, no one really has a clue


More recently, history might not exactly be repeating, but it does seem to be rhyming. Economic growth in devel-oping countries is building demand for better food products, and at the same time the ethanol market is sopping up a huge portion of the U.S. corn crop. This has prompted the usual shouts of “it’s different this time” that usually accom-pany the boom right before the bust.

But is it different? Maybe. Or maybe 300-bushel corn will kill this dream too.

The point is, we don’t know. So should we even bother listening to the next big prediction? Does anyone even have a sniff as to what the future holds?

The cerTainTy principleAt the University of Manitoba, noted

agriculture economist Brian Oleson, often gets skeptical when he hears anyone tak-ing a long view with dead certainty.

“None of us really know,” Oleson said in a recent interview. “If either you or I, or anyone else for that matter, did, we’d take a big position in the market, make a lot of money and retire very rich to a beach somewhere sunny.”

In big part, the problem with long-term predictions is they’re inevitably being made by human beings, and most of us simply haven’t been around long enough to spot the natural rhythm of things, making us all too susceptible to believing what we want to hear — things like it’s a new era for farming, where the good times will last forever.

To gain a little insight into the longer trends, Country Guide was fortunate enough to talk to someone who’s been around the block a time or two, with the tales to tell to prove it. Charles “Red” Williams is a professor emeritus with the University of Saskatchewan and a well-known public speaker and newspaper columnist on agriculture topics. These days he’s looking hard at 90, but even a few seconds of conversation confirms his formidable mind remains in fighting trim. Contacted by a smart-aleck young writer looking for insight into the future, he chuckled a few seconds and delivered a crisp assessment.

“Well, I think Country Guide is brave to even take this on, and you’ll do fine if you just accept one thing — the

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Predictions to trustit looks like $4 corn is here for years to come

Is it folly to believe any prediction? Strangely, our three academics don’t think so, at least in the relative near term. In fact, they say there’s plenty of writing on the wall, if you’ll just clear away the clutter and look at what’s important.

So here are predictions from the people who spend a good part of their lives debunking other people’s forecasts.

Red Williams at the university of Saskatchewan tells us he’s most confident that technology will race onwards, including farm robots and other autonomous equipment that will see farmers effectively farming from their offices in many cases.

“I think that’s pretty much a given now,” Williams said. “I think engineers are right on the verge of putting a lot of things together right now, and enough progress has been made that you can predict that fairly safely.”

But there are important human factors at play too. Williams for one expects to see more smart and savvy women take dominant roles in farming and agriculture.

“I remember the first woman who studied agriculture at the university of Saskatch-ewan, and today they make up about 70 per cent of the students,” Williams said. “They’re not just doing well, they’re doing very well. The boys are all off digging holes in Alberta, and the girls are the ones getting an education.”

Brian Oleson says the news might not be welcomed by farmers, but the latest reports from the uSDA and the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) at the universities of Iowa and Missouri show that leaner times may be upon us again. Those reports are calling for corn to stay at the lower end of the range for years to come, as production meets demand.

“One person I spoke to told me he’d never seen such an abrupt change,” Oleson said.

Oleson said both reports confirm a growing consensus among agriculture econo-mists that the boom couldn’t run forever. And the numbers and timeline are far from encouraging for farmers.

“They took corn to around uS$4 a bushel, where it stays until about 2022,” Oleson said. “I agree. I think we are entering an era of $4 corn.”

John Cranfield agreed prices are likely to stay on the lower end of the range for a while, saying it’s a predictable pattern that the world has seen before, where demand outstrips supply for a time, sending a price signal to producers and investors.

It’s the archetypal patter. Prices rise, productivity grows for a time, and supply meets demand, and prices fall.

The historic curve got bounced by the sudden surge in demand coming from politcally mandated ethanol consumption, but Cranfield and Oleson both say that was a one-time-only surge.

“In a lot of ways we’ve seen the beginning of the ethanol boom, and the end of it, because of fracking,” Oleson said, referring to new technology used to release oil from shale formations.

Cranfield also said he’s expecting the emerging power of consumers to continue to have a major role in shaping agriculture, through consumer preferences. love it or hate it, producers are going to have to grapple with things like consumer attitudes toward sustainability and animal welfare, whether they’re scientifically justified or not.

But the new consumer age will create opportunities too, Cranfield said. “I also think there will be changing preferences from consumers and a greater market for things like functional foods.”



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second you write it down, you’re going to begin being wrong,” Williams said.

He explained that his generation didn’t do a great job of predicting the future, the next didn’t either, and the current one likely won’t beat anyone else’s record.

“Going way back, we had no idea what would be coming over the next 40, 50 or 60 years,” Williams said. “We just had a glimpse or two, really.”

To give some sense of just how fast things can change, Williams spoke of his own experience around the time of the Second World War. Prior to joining up, he finished one last harvest, as a member of an old-school threshing crew, running a team of four horses. Just a couple years later he had a front-row seat to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, even to this day one of the most impressive displays of mechanized warfare ever launched.

“There were 4,000 ships, many with 16-inch guns that pounded targets 25 miles inland,” Williams said. “You watched wave after wave of planes — thou-sands of them — coming overhead. The British even assembled, floated over and anchored a movable harbour just off the coast.”

Returning home, he was still in uniform when he got a message from his uncle, who farmed on the fer-tile Regina Plains, calling for help with the harvest. Still in uniform, he requested leave to help finish. When he arrived he saw the first sign of the change that was about to come.

“He had a small combine, and together he and I finished the harvest,” Williams said. “That was one of the greatest legacies of the Second World War — we created the heavy manufacturing capac-ity to build things like larger tractors and other farm equipment.”

Likewise the first agriculture chemicals were things like DDT, developed to protect troops from malaria, and fertilizer became much more readily available as high explosive plants were repurposed to nitrogen fertilizer production.

“God help us, but a war really speeds things up,” Williams said. “But at least after the war we were able to turn these things to peaceful purposes — we really did turn the swords into ploughshares.”

His central point remains strongly held — a young person leaving college today to go back to the home farm can’t possibly predict the unpredictable, or envision just how things will play out any more than the young man who marched to war in the early 1940s. Human history is littered with so-called black swan events that are utterly random, even to the most informed and involved participants.

“That’s the nature of black swan events — they’re totally unpredictable, that’s what makes them black swans,” says Oleson of the U of M.

Practical insightAll this adds up to a real hesitation on the part

of reputable academics to try to peer too far into the future, preferring to leave that to the self-styled futurists.

John Cranfield, an agriculture economist with the University of Guelph, puts it this way. He says there’s a really good track record of accuracy in the very short term, measured in a few months or a year, and he convincingly points to futures markets as the best example of this.

“As futures get closer and closer to maturity, they become a very good barometer that farmers can use to take action,” Cranfield said. “Farmers can use them to determine things like their crop mix, and to make other economic decisions. But further out than that, things start getting really shaky.”

Cranfield says medium-term predictions can have some value, over a time frame of five to 10 years, but even they should be taken with a grain of salt, because unpredictable things can happen.

“It’s like a public opinion survey you might see,” Cranfield said. “Those are usually said to be accu-rate, on average, plus or minus a few per cent, 19 times out of 20.”

Brian Oleson agrees that such predictions require caution, but also says the agriculture economics field has accrued a bit of a track record of success pre-dicting these medium-term trends.

“I think we’ve more-or-less been good,” Oleson said. “In the early 1970s we said there would be a period of prosperity, and there was, for about 10 years, until the early 1980s. By about 1982, we were saying we were headed into a tougher period, which we did. Beginning in about 2004 and 2005, we started talking about heading into a better period we thought would last about 10 years or so.”

But what about those big-picture, headline-grabbing statements about new paradigms and the like? Here nobody Country Guide spoke to was willing to plant a flag in the ground and try to defend their track record.

“When you get out a long ways — 25 years or even more — I wouldn’t say I have a lot of confi-dence in those sorts of predictions,” Cranfield said. “It really is a stab in the dark most times.” CG

“ as futures get closer and closer to maturity, they become a very good barometer,” cranfield says. “Further out than that, things start getting really shaky.”


The next generation of Canadian agricultural leaders is growing, and CABEF is proud to support them. Congratulations to these six exceptional students who have won $2,500 CABEF scholarships. Based on their applications, the future of the agriculture industry is in great hands.

Six more $2,500 scholarships will be awarded to grade 12

students in April 2015.

CABEF is a registered charity (#828593731RR0001). For more information on all registered charities in Canada under the Income Tax Act, please visit: Canada Revenue Agency www.cra-arc.gc.ca/charities.

CONGRATULATIONS!

Apply at cabef.org

@CABEFoundation

Donald Bertagnolli Rocky Mountain House,

Alberta

Danean Edgar Wolseley,

Saskatchewan

Michelle Ross Grenfell,

Saskatchewan

Colleen Crunican Denfield, Ontario

Stephanie Dousselaere

Cartwright, Manitoba

Mario Roy St-Jules-de-Beauce,

Québec

hile many dreamers might spend their whole lives thinking they’d like to farm but never do it, Cindy and Mike Wilhelm made it happen. In fact, only seven months after making the decision to farm, they were the

proud owners of a 70-acre farm near Chatsworth, Ont. that they named Dragonfly Garden Farm.

Eight years later they have established a successful farm where they raise pastured beef, pork, chicken, turkeys, ducks and geese which they market themselves through an on-farm store and CSA program.

This is no small feat, given that neither Cindy nor Mike had any farming experience or agricultural education before making the leap.

They did, however, have many transferable skills. Mike is an auto mechanic, which has been handy for keeping their older farming equipment running.

Cindy meanwhile has a diploma in marketing, which has helped her establish a loyal customer base locally and in Toronto.

Other than that, what they didn’t know they figured out how or learned through self-education and first-hand experience. “I have a reference book on every type of livestock we have,” explains Cindy who grew up in the small town of Monkton. “I came up through the 4-H program where the motto is to learn by doing.”

Admittedly, this isn’t always an easy way to learn, says Cindy, who also keeps beehives on the farm. “The bees are painful teachers,” she says with a chuckle.

It’s the kind of remark that convinces you Cindy is made of the right stuff for farming.

Early on, the Wilhelms did take a two-day workshop from the Ecological Farmers of Ontario on soil ecology that was really valuable, says Cindy. Healthy soil is the foundation of the farm, she says.

Although they are not certified organic, they follow organic farming principles, she says. They always planned to farm organically but the cost of getting certified was too high. They would have had to pay a fee for each commodity, she explains. “It would be a paperwork and financial nightmare.”

Instead they encourage their customers to come to the farm to see for themselves how the animals are raised.

A new farm that buzzesEight years ago, Dragonfly Garden Farm struggled to get off the ground. Now, it’s working toward $1 million in sales

By Helen Lammers-Helps

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“Our customers don’t demand that we be certified organic,” says Cindy. And since the Wilhelms don’t market outside of Ontario, it isn’t necessary to be certified organic, she says. What’s important to her customers is that the ani-mals be pasture raised and treated humanely. Her customers believe meat from pasture-raised animals is superior to meat from confined animals, she says.

Two-thirds of the meat they produce is sold through a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program to clients in cities within a two-hour drive, including Toronto, Waterloo, London and Hamilton. CSA members get 20 to 40 pounds of meat delivered each month between June and November, either directly to their door or to a common pickup location such as a health food store (the less expensive option).

Members can also choose from a mix of available meats. Cindy and Mike are partnering with nine other farms who sup-ply some of the meat such as lamb, bison, and turkey which they don’t raise themselves.

CSA members pay 50 per cent up front in May and the rest in August, which helps with the cash flow, adds Cindy.

The Wilhelms are now also offering cheese, eggs and veg-etables produced by other farmers as well.

To ensure that partner farms are using acceptable farming practices, the Wilhelms visit each farm annually, do spot checks and have the farmers sign a partnership agreement that Cindy created to cover all the bases of sustainable farming practices.

About 15 per cent of their meat is sold locally through either their on-farm store or through area stores that specialize in local food.

After discovering that it was difficult to get access to organic feed in their area, they became dealers for Homestead Organics, which accounts for the remaining 10 per cent of their income.

For marketing, Cindy relies on the website (www.dragon-flyfarmstore.ca) and an electronic newsletter that she produces through the Constant Contact direct email marketing platform. She has a database of 900 subscribers for her newsletter which she writes herself.

“The newsletter converts people from prospects to custom-

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Don’t underestimate the value of farm marketing, say Cindy and Mike Wilhelm, who built a whole farm on that strategy



Anne Marie Heinrichs is the kind of consumer who farmers often feel they just can’t get on the same wavelength

with.It doesn’t take long to find that out.

Based on her reseach, which included a television documentary on modern food pro-duction, Heinrichs says she felt inspired to switch to whole organic foods.

Then, only a few weeks after making the switch, she says, the chronic pain she had experienced for 25 years disappeared. After a few more months, she had shed excess weight and was healthier.

Farmers can cry foul all they want, but Heinrichs was convinced that this was how she wanted to feed her family. As a busy business owner and mother of three, how-ever, she had trouble finding the time to shop at several different places and to cook from scratch every night.

That’s what put her on a business path where perhaps she shares a bit more in common with most farmers.

Figuring there had to be others who were facing the same challenges, she launched Farmers Kitchen Table, a meal delivery ser-vice that focuses on healthy, local, sustain-able food. The meals are made by a local chef and are delivered right to the custom-er’s door two times per week in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph.

Meat and vegetables are sourced from

local farms including Dragonfly Garden Farm, Rowe Meats and Nith Valley Organics.

To accommodate customers with celiac’s disease, the autoimmune reaction to eating gluten found in wheat, barley and rye, Hein-richs partnered with a local bakery, Newton’s Gluten-free, that specializes in gluten-free bread, muffins, and desserts.

Many of the meals prepared for Farmers Kitchen Table are suitable for those following a Paleo diet, which is based on the concept of eating only the foods that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have eaten. Many naturopaths and holistic nutritionists recom-mend this type of diet.

For convenience, the meals can be ordered online, and the menu changes each week to add variety and take advantage of seasonal produce. Some dishes, such as lamb stew, are available year round.

Items from the weekly menu are deliv-ered fresh while those from the “Always Available” menu are frozen. Customers who aren’t going to be home at the time of deliv-ery can leave a cooler out. Some people have the meals delivered to their workplace so they can refrigerate them right away and then take them home with them, says Heinrichs.

Meals come in three portion sizes: Adult, Child and Senior. Predetermined portion sizes prevent people from overeating.

With an eye on sustainability, meals are

delivered in 100 per cent recyclable containers that can be used in the freezer, oven or micro-wave. Customers who purchase a monthly or annual membership can opt to have their meals delivered in reusable glass dishes.

Members also have access to the com-pany larder which includes gluten-free con-diments, preserves and snacks. They also receive invitations to exclusive members-only events such as supper clubs.

Heinrichs launched the business last March with a tasting event at the Walper Hotel in downtown Kitchener. About 200 people came out to try the ready-to-eat meals and meet the chefs, bakers and farmers.

Heinrichs continues to develop the concept and increase market reach. For example, she is joining forces with the Guelph-based Homefield Organics which delivers organic groceries. “Homefield will offer some of our frozen dishes on its weekly list that it sends to its customers so that it can have our meals delivered as part of its produce delivery,” explains Heinrichs.

Eventually, she hopes to add a retail loca-tion where meals can be picked up.

Sales are growing slowly, which is what Heinrichs expected. “It’s a new type of con-cept for people… to try to plan ahead and trust that the food will be there for their families!”

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Doorstep Delivery, hunter-gatherer style

For more information, go to www.FarmersKitchentable.com.


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ers,” Cindy says. She developed the web-site with the help of a graphic designer.

This year they also have a new cus-tomer. The Farmers Kitchen Table will be using Dragonfly Garden Farm meats for chef-prepared meals delivered direct to customers’ homes in Kitchener, Water-loo, Guelph and Cambridge. Geared to those who want local, sustainable food, the company produces ready-to-eat, glu-ten-free meals. (see sidebar.)

Cindy’s goal is to eventually have sales of $1 million from a combination of their own produce and 20 partner farms. Small farms need to band together, she believes. They also need political clout. Among the obstacles to their growth are the caps on the number of laying hens and meat chickens and turkeys they can keep since they don’t own quota. (They are limited to 300 meat chickens, 100 laying hens and 50 turkeys.)

This past winter, Cindy invested her time in developing an e-commerce site

on the farm store website to market the wealth of locally made artisanal food products. She took courses through an online business development program to gain the necessary skills. Currently she has 50 shelf-stable items such as bar-becue sauce, jams, jellies, pickles and relishes in the store pantry. She is hoping to double that number in the near future.

All of these pantry items have to be made in a commercial kitchen and must meet labelling requirements, says Cindy.

The Wilhelms believe the market is there. But they can’t just wait for the mar-ket to come to them. So, while it’s true that 13 million people live in Ontario, 80 per cent of them are in large cities.

Says Cindy: “I believe we need to meet them where they are and make it easy for customers to access these incred-ible artisan products.”

So far, cash flow has been the big-gest challenge of starting the farm, says Cindy. For the first several years every dollar they could spare was plowed back into the farm. Now with eight years

behind them, that’s getting a little easier, she says, even though they continue to expand the operation. They are renting an additional 96 acres and this year they are adding a walk-in freezer while also increasing the size of the on-farm store. Down the road they would also like to add U-pick blueberries, raspberries and strawberries.

With their “can-do” attitude, busi-ness acumen and ability to seek out information they need, she and Mike believe they have laid the foundation for a successful farm business and made their dream of farming come true.

In the early years they both had off-farm jobs to keep them afloat. “It was like working two full-time jobs each,” she says. Now they both work full time only on the farm.

The amount of work involved in get-ting the farm established was also daunt-ing, says Cindy. “I’m glad we did it, but I wouldn’t want to do it again,” she says, and then with a gleam in her eye, she chuckles some more. CG


Theirs is still a small farm, but the Wilhelms are succeeding in a business where others never get further than dreaming. The difference, says Cindy, is that they know it’s up to them to connect with their customers.

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hen a business transitions from a sole pro-prietorship or partnership to a corporation, the move requires a shift in how decisions are made. In particular, making decisions solely as a businessman (or woman, of

course) is different from making decisions as a corporate direc-tor, so it is important to know how directors’ decisions will be judged. In addition, it is helpful to understand the legal stan-dard for assessing a conflict of interest, and to know about one tool — the oppression remedy — that a court may use to rectify director misconduct.

The guiding principleThe guiding principle for all directors is to act “honestly, in

good faith, and with a view to the best interests of the organiza-tion.” This itself can require a shift in thinking: the sole propri-etor of a business can make decisions that best serve his own interests, but a director’s duty is to put the corporation above himself. So, for example, deferring taxes may benefit the owner but increase taxes payable by the corporation; approving such an action could be a breach of the director’s duty.

Where a court is asked to assess a director’s decision, the judge will defer to the business judgment of the directors, as long as the decision “lies within a range of reasonable alterna-tives.” That is, a court will not criticize a decision — even one that led to a bad outcome — simply because another reasonable person would have made a different decision. Any decision that was on the spectrum of appropriate choices in the circum-stances is acceptable.

A director’s decision is more likely to be on that spectrum of reasonable choices where the director can demonstrate due diligence in making that decision. Directors have a duty to inform themselves about the issues being decided, actively ask questions for more information, and consult outside profession-als where independent advice is needed. Directors must also be aware of potential problems that may flow from their decisions, and be proactive in preventing or mitigating those harms.

In determining the best interests of the corporation, directors must also consider the impact of their decisions on a range of the organization’s stakeholders — including investors, employ-ees, suppliers, creditors, customers and members — but ulti-mately the organization’s interests reign supreme.

Recent political events have brought conflict of interest concerns into public discourse. For a corporate director, a conflict of interest exists where a director has a “material interest” in a proposed transaction or decision. Any non-trivial benefit could be a material interest. That interest need not belong to the director himself — it could extend to family members or even friends.

Where a director believes he has a conflict of interest, he should disclose the nature of that conflict as soon as possible,

and refrain from participating in deliberations on that topic. To avoid the perception of pressuring other directors, it is also pru-dent to leave the room during the discussion.

When a director is an owner or employee in addition to being a director, he will by definition have an interest in many decisions. Those decisions should be made with advice from outside profes-sionals, whose recommendation, review or blessing can often shield a decision from attack. Thus, for example, an accountant should give an opinion about the fairness of proposed salary increases.

Where a director fails to identify and disclose a conflict of inter-est, that director might be liable to the organization for any profits made from the transaction. Similarly, the decision at issue might be overturned, although before doing so a court would assess whether the transaction was fair and reasonable to the organization.

The oppression remedyIn some cases, people who are unhappy with a director’s

decision can challenge that decision in court. Statutes in most provinces provide a tool for directors or shareholders to attack decisions that were “unfairly prejudicial” or taken in “unfair disregard” of one person’s interests. This “oppression remedy” is most often invoked for closely held corporations (especially family companies), but is available for the deci-sions of any corporation.

Decisions that are vulnerable to a court challenge under the oppression remedy usually involve conduct that is abusive, harsh, self-interested or coercive. It may relate both to the sub-stance of the decision, and to the procedure followed in reaching the decision.

To succeed, a shareholder or director who brings an oppression action must show that he had a reasonable expectation that a cor-poration or its directors would behave in a particular way, based on the relationship between the parties, past practices, promises made, or other factors.

Where a complainant can demonstrate that corporation failed to meet his reasonable expectations, which caused him harm, the court has a wide range of options to help the injured party. For example, the court can set aside or amend agreements the corporation has made, compel directors to take certain steps, or order that a party’s shares be purchased at fair value by the corporation or another shareholder. The court will take a broad approach and find the best way to undo the harm caused by the oppression.

While the oppression remedy can be both extreme and expensive to pursue, directors should keep all these principles in mind when making decisions and trying to act in a corpora-tion’s best interests. CG

Naomi Loewith is a litigator at Lenczner Slaght in Toronto. She regularly advises boards of directors, and has brought and defended legal actions about corporate decision-making.


L e g a L

When businessmen become directorsIf your farm is incorporated, are you sure you are meeting your legal obligations?

By Naomi Loewith, lawyer at Lenczner Slaght

s u s t a i n a b i l i t y s p e c i a l s e c t i o n

can our farmers save the soil, and feed the world?

page 4

are america’s days as ag powerhouseeroding away?

page 6

why has global no-till adoption hit a brick wall?

page 11

at this summer’s World congress on conservation agriculture, country guide joined farmers, agronomists, researchers and policy-makers from 33 countries in Winnipeg to explore the health of the

World’s soil. What We learned Was shocking, daunting, eye-opening… and encouraging.

Sustainable soybean farmingSoybean breeding has also undergone significant growth in the last 10 years to accommodate the need for sustainable farming practices. One such change is the use of new tools like Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) – now a widely used technology in Syngenta breeding programs. “MAS helps to ensure the breeding of varieties that have higher productivity than those currently on the market, so growers can continue to produce better-quality and higher-yield soybean crops with fewer inputs,” says Don McClure, Research Scientist, Soybeans, Canada. “The breeding efforts of Syngenta also allow Canadian growers to supply lesser-known markets that are not supplied by larger countries like the U.S., Brazil or Argentina. And certain high-quality crops like Identity Preserved (IP) soybeans are contracted with a premium to Canadian growers – an additional value that contributes significantly to the sustainability of the soybean industry as well as Canadian agriculture in general,” he concludes. With further agronomic developments on the horizon, soybean farming will continue to strive for sustainability into the future.

Integrated solutionsOf course, advances in agronomy are only a small segment of a larger commitment to sustainability that will revolutionize the field-to-market cycle. As Syngenta looks toward the future of sustainable farming, developing integrated plans for growers that include elements such as agronomic best practices, new scientific discoveries and proven methods for indexing and applying the results will strengthen farming effectiveness. Syngenta believes that these first steps will lay the groundwork for using precious resources – land, soil and water – to maximum efficiency. Once that foundation is in place, growing more with less will ultimately sustain the world.

The examples mentioned demonstrate the Syngenta commitment to sustainability. Through breeding innovations over the past four decades, Syngenta has been successful in delivering sustainable solutions to growers across Canada. Recognizing that agri-business plays a vital role in fostering long-term approaches to food security and sustainability, Syngenta is devoted to ensuring that its big picture perspective always has sustainable production practices as its focus.

Syngenta advances in breeding Syngenta believes that breeding advancements are a fundamental means to achieving this goal and, as such, focuses much of its research and development investments in this area. Within Canada specifically, Syngenta has been progressing the science of cereal crop breeding for more than 40 years, developing not only new varieties but also advancing innovative breeding technologies and techniques. “It is our ambition to transform cereal production worldwide by creating innovative solutions that set unprecedented standards for yield, quality and sustainability,” says Norm Dreger, Head, Cereals North America. “Our record of technology innovation, investment and involvement, in combination with future milestones, are compelling examples of our ability to propel the wheat sector forward in a sustainable way.”

Specific areas of cereal breeding that have a direct impact on sustainability include:

Pest-resistant genes Varieties that have inherent resistance to pests are an important component of a sustainable Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach. Syngenta is currently focusing its breeding efforts on a number of areas of genetic pest resistance, including: wheat midge resistance; resistance to multiple races of rust, including ug99 wheat stem rust; and Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistance. Genetic pest resistance provides a strong basis to protect the crop from pathogens and insects, as well as complements the use of foliar pesticides, allowing efficient use of active ingredients during the crop development cycle.

Agronomic enhancements A major Syngenta sustainability advancement has been the development of Agrisure Artesian® technology in corn hybrids. “More than a decade of research, using procedures unique to Syngenta, produced corn hybrids that convert water to grain more effectively through the activity of multiple, naturally occurring genes that influence water use in corn,” says Darcy Pawlik, Head, Cereals Portfolio, Syngenta North America. “Hybrids with Artesian technology surpass traditional drought tolerance in corn by maximizing yield with available water in good conditions and increasing the plant’s ability to yield under water stress, thus making optimal use of available water resources,” he explains. It is hoped that with further research and development, this technology might be adapted in other key crops to assist in water conservation as well as crop preservation in drought-prone areas across the globe.

Always read and follow label directions. Agrisure Artesian® and the Syngenta logo are registered trademarks of a Syngenta Group Company. © 2014 Syngenta.

Breeding for TomorrowSyngenta commits to delivering sustainable farming solutions

As a world leader in agri-business, Syngenta is keenly aware that farming must be carried out in a sustainable manner. Agricultural productivity must significantly increase in order to feed a global population. With the added stress of lost farm land to urbanization, soil erosion taking its toll and water resources under increasing pressure, Syngenta believes that businesses – not just government – need to play a larger role in fostering long-term approaches to food security and sustainability.

In 2013, Syngenta launched The Good Growth Plan – six commitments developed to address the global food security challenge with specific, ambitious and measurable targets. The first of these commitments is to make crops more efficient, with the goal of increasing average productivity of the world’s major crops by 20 percent without using more land, water or inputs.

JOB ID: 7131-1

DATE: JUNE, 2014

CLIENT:SYNGENTA CANADA

PROJECT:SYNGENTA SUSTAINABILITY PROFILE

PUBLICATION:COUNTRY GUIDE

DESIGNER:CHRISTINE

MECHANICAL PDF/X

FINAL SIZE: 16.25” X 10.75"

UCR: 280%

CLIENT SERVICE

PROOFREADING

ART DIRECTION

PRODUCTION

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Sustainable soybean farmingSoybean breeding has also undergone significant growth in the last 10 years to accommodate the need for sustainable farming practices. One such change is the use of new tools like Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) – now a widely used technology in Syngenta breeding programs. “MAS helps to ensure the breeding of varieties that have higher productivity than those currently on the market, so growers can continue to produce better-quality and higher-yield soybean crops with fewer inputs,” says Don McClure, Research Scientist, Soybeans, Canada. “The breeding efforts of Syngenta also allow Canadian growers to supply lesser-known markets that are not supplied by larger countries like the U.S., Brazil or Argentina. And certain high-quality crops like Identity Preserved (IP) soybeans are contracted with a premium to Canadian growers – an additional value that contributes significantly to the sustainability of the soybean industry as well as Canadian agriculture in general,” he concludes. With further agronomic developments on the horizon, soybean farming will continue to strive for sustainability into the future.

Integrated solutionsOf course, advances in agronomy are only a small segment of a larger commitment to sustainability that will revolutionize the field-to-market cycle. As Syngenta looks toward the future of sustainable farming, developing integrated plans for growers that include elements such as agronomic best practices, new scientific discoveries and proven methods for indexing and applying the results will strengthen farming effectiveness. Syngenta believes that these first steps will lay the groundwork for using precious resources – land, soil and water – to maximum efficiency. Once that foundation is in place, growing more with less will ultimately sustain the world.

The examples mentioned demonstrate the Syngenta commitment to sustainability. Through breeding innovations over the past four decades, Syngenta has been successful in delivering sustainable solutions to growers across Canada. Recognizing that agri-business plays a vital role in fostering long-term approaches to food security and sustainability, Syngenta is devoted to ensuring that its big picture perspective always has sustainable production practices as its focus.

Syngenta advances in breeding Syngenta believes that breeding advancements are a fundamental means to achieving this goal and, as such, focuses much of its research and development investments in this area. Within Canada specifically, Syngenta has been progressing the science of cereal crop breeding for more than 40 years, developing not only new varieties but also advancing innovative breeding technologies and techniques. “It is our ambition to transform cereal production worldwide by creating innovative solutions that set unprecedented standards for yield, quality and sustainability,” says Norm Dreger, Head, Cereals North America. “Our record of technology innovation, investment and involvement, in combination with future milestones, are compelling examples of our ability to propel the wheat sector forward in a sustainable way.”

Specific areas of cereal breeding that have a direct impact on sustainability include:

Pest-resistant genes Varieties that have inherent resistance to pests are an important component of a sustainable Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach. Syngenta is currently focusing its breeding efforts on a number of areas of genetic pest resistance, including: wheat midge resistance; resistance to multiple races of rust, including ug99 wheat stem rust; and Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistance. Genetic pest resistance provides a strong basis to protect the crop from pathogens and insects, as well as complements the use of foliar pesticides, allowing efficient use of active ingredients during the crop development cycle.

Agronomic enhancements A major Syngenta sustainability advancement has been the development of Agrisure Artesian® technology in corn hybrids. “More than a decade of research, using procedures unique to Syngenta, produced corn hybrids that convert water to grain more effectively through the activity of multiple, naturally occurring genes that influence water use in corn,” says Darcy Pawlik, Head, Cereals Portfolio, Syngenta North America. “Hybrids with Artesian technology surpass traditional drought tolerance in corn by maximizing yield with available water in good conditions and increasing the plant’s ability to yield under water stress, thus making optimal use of available water resources,” he explains. It is hoped that with further research and development, this technology might be adapted in other key crops to assist in water conservation as well as crop preservation in drought-prone areas across the globe.

Always read and follow label directions. Agrisure Artesian® and the Syngenta logo are registered trademarks of a Syngenta Group Company. © 2014 Syngenta.

Breeding for TomorrowSyngenta commits to delivering sustainable farming solutions

As a world leader in agri-business, Syngenta is keenly aware that farming must be carried out in a sustainable manner. Agricultural productivity must significantly increase in order to feed a global population. With the added stress of lost farm land to urbanization, soil erosion taking its toll and water resources under increasing pressure, Syngenta believes that businesses – not just government – need to play a larger role in fostering long-term approaches to food security and sustainability.

In 2013, Syngenta launched The Good Growth Plan – six commitments developed to address the global food security challenge with specific, ambitious and measurable targets. The first of these commitments is to make crops more efficient, with the goal of increasing average productivity of the world’s major crops by 20 percent without using more land, water or inputs.

JOB ID: 7131-1

DATE: JUNE, 2014

CLIENT:SYNGENTA CANADA

PROJECT:SYNGENTA SUSTAINABILITY PROFILE

PUBLICATION:COUNTRY GUIDE

DESIGNER:CHRISTINE

MECHANICAL PDF/X

FINAL SIZE: 16.25” X 10.75"

UCR: 280%

CLIENT SERVICE

PROOFREADING

ART DIRECTION

PRODUCTION

7131-1_CountryGuide-Promo-DPS.indd All Pages 6/24/14 3:42 PM

S - 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J u l y 2 0 1 4

innipeg was the site of 2014’s World Congress on Conservation Agriculture where farmers, agron-omists, researchers and policy-makers from 33 countries around

the globe met to discuss the world’s soil, as the stories in this special Country Guide supplement reveal.

In fact, Country Guide, and our farm readers, feel so strongly about the message, we made the commitment to become the official sponsors of the conference.

The quality of life of a projected nine billion peo-ple depends absolutely on how seriously we take the message at the conference, said University of Wash-ington geomorphologist David Montgomery, author of the book with exactly that title — dirt.

“As I studied erosional processes around the world, I came to see that soil is really a strategic resource that we don’t talk about at a societal level,” Montgomery said. “Global soil degradation is prob-ably our most underappreciated environmental crisis.

“I want to address the question: why would a geologist write a book that argues that changing the way we farm, by adopting things like conserva-tion agriculture on a global level, is one of the most important issues that we face as a species?”

It’s a serious issue with serious consequences if we don’t get it right. But amidst the dire warnings there’s also a sense of optimism. Panels of scientists in Winnipeg gave new insights into soil and they spoke of what it is and what it does. A group of experienced farmers from the American Midwest shared their stories of cover crops and how they use them to build their soil and care for their land. Del-egates from Africa and India told of new machines and management techniques aimed at their small-acreage farmers.

All of this underlines the scope of a global prob-lem that is being addressed at the local level.

And everyone knew the stakes. Conservation agriculture is about the preservation of soil so local industry may continue feeding a global market.

Many of us see the soil as nothing more than a mineral matrix that anchors plant roots. It’s an attitude that Montgomery says must change. He laughed as he spoke of the time he was a geology student and his professor said the most interesting thing about soil was that it had rocks underneath it. Now he marvels at that same soil.

“In the last few decades soils are seen as an ecosystem and the work that’s gone on in study-ing symbioses between the microbes, bacteria and fungi living in the soil and the nutrient transfers into plants has been amazing,” Montgomery said. “The things I learned in college about soil and fertility are increasingly out of date, and the idea that plants are actually secreting sugars into the soil to feed micro-organisms and trade within a whole underground barter system is something I never learned.”

That barter system brings into play essential nutrient cycles for every continent’s ecosystems. It’s no accident that every eulogy ends with the phrase ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The soil is where the Earth recycles the bodies of all living things.

It starts with plants as they use photosynthesis to convert solar energy into chemical energy. Their roots condition the soil, opening channels for moisture infiltration while introducing the chemical energy that nourishes soil biota. Soil biota, in turn, go to work on the parent material, releasing inorganic elements like phosphorus and potassium that feed back to the plants. Then the plants use those nutrients to build tissue that animals consume, and when those animals die, they return their nutrients to the soil where the soil biota breaks their material down into molecules that plants rebuild into living tissue.

The soil is also the basis for that simplified eco-system we call agriculture, where we grow specific plants and animals for our use. While agriculture is productive it also has the potential to be very destructive, and history records quite a series of catastrophes that should serve as warnings, like the collapse of Mesopotamia, the erosion of Iceland or the dust-bowl of the North American Great Plains.

“Walter Lowdermilk, 50 years ago wrote that we have the underlying hazard of civilization. By clear-ing and cultivating sloping lands we expose them to accelerated erosion by water or by wind and by doing this we enter into a regime of self-destructive agricul-ture,” Montgomery said. “Back in the 1930s Franklin Delano Roosevelt elaborated on this when he wrote that a nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.”

Agrarian societies seem to have a lifespan of 500 years, which is about how long it takes to burn out the soil. The good news is that, if given time, soil will heal itself and live again. The bad news is that it takes a lot of time, and we don’t have that luxury anymore.

“We need a different philosophy, a different

Why We careFarmers around the world know our soil is the stuff of life. Now, all of humanity needs to stop treating it like dirt

By Gord Leathers

s u s t a i n a B i L i t y C o u n t r y g u I D E s p E C I a l s E C t I o n

soil conservation, said Montgomery,

“is one of the most important

issues that we face as a

species.”

approach,” said farmer, business magnate and con-servationist Howard Buffet. “The day is over where you can bury your head.”

Conservation agriculture aims to keep our soils healthy and productive through three simple strategies. We want to minimize disturbance by reducing or elimi-nating tillage, keep the soil covered with living plants or trash, and run rotations of three or more different crops.

In this way conservation agriculture is the envi-ronmental cornerstone of sustainable farming. Sus-tainability takes it the next step into the realm of our economic and social requirements. People are important too, and farmers have to make a living off their land. When they do, they provide the economic base that maintains their neighbours in the local towns as well as the surrounding cities.

It’s why conservation agriculture must be more than just ecological.

“It really has to be a cultural movement,” claimed Rene Van Acker, associate dean of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. “I would argue that there are a number of elements required to achieve conservation agriculture, such as the desire to do it, the knowledge needed, political and market support, opportunities, co-operation and the technology to make it work.”

Mark Anson farms 20,000 acres in Indiana and Illi-nois along with his brothers and their sons, altogether making a board of 10 partners. Although the farm was profitable, Anson was not happy with the quality of the soil and, in general, he wasn’t happy with farming. He discovered cover cropping and planting forage rad-ishes or fall cereals as a way to get roots in the ground to nourish the soil after harvest and into the winter.

It’s not seen as conventional in North America, so it took a bit of convincing to get his family to try it out. It took a great deal of commitment to keep on going because, as with anything new, there were a few disasters along with some successes. In the end it was the desire to make it work that kept them going.

Cover cropping makes a farming system a lot more complicated and it takes a great deal of know-ledge to do it well. Anson and his family have spent the last few years learning about their soil and how to manage it better. It’s paying big dividends to him so he’s eager to spread the word and expand the knowl-edge. As more farmers understand the benefits, he hopes these systems will catch on. Although the prin-ciples are universal, however, the devil is in the details and each region, each soil type, has its quirks.

Regional quirks sometimes require unconven-tional technology. For example, the North American and European big-sky, big-iron approach is unsuit-able in Africa or India. There the farms are tiny, and their machinery must reflect, said Brian Sims, an agricultural engineering consultant to the Food and Agricultural Organization at the United Nations.

In these places much of the work is done by hand on very small plots and many of the implements are still animal drawn. In these cases a small, hand-steered two-wheeled tractor is much more suitable, but it’s not enough. Van Acker’s support component is just as important.

“It’s very difficult to introduce innovation to every single user,” Sims said. “It’s much more effi-cient to train service providers so that they know exactly how to operate the machinery, they can offer quality service and they understand the business.”

It’s a private-sector model that provides a great deal of local support. In addition to training farm-ers in conservation agriculture and mechanization there’s an incentive to train local people in finance and mechanics. This builds the community of small financiers, machine dealers and mechanics as well as educators. The farmers are now supporting the social infrastructure that, in turn, supports them. These are all things necessary for long-term sus-tainability, looking to people’s economic and social needs as well as safeguarding the soil.

Farming has always been a tricky business. It’s because we grow plants in ways they simply don’t grow naturally. Disturbed monocultural systems lose topsoil, hemorrhage nutrients and generally waste precious potential.

The good news is that we’re looking to nature and coming up with new ways of thinking and new ways of farming that can lead to reliable methods of food, fibre and fuel production while building more resilient farming systems.

“Mother Nature is a very good manager,” con-cluded South Dakota State University professor, Dwayne Beck. “She’s been managing ecosystems better and longer than anyone else. She harvests the maximum amount of sunlight, she leaves very few nutrients and she doesn’t leak.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. government — to cite just one example — spends five times more on crop insurance than it spends on research. “Does that make any sense?” Beck asks. “Lack of commitment is THE problem.” CG

J u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a S - 5

s u s t a i n a b i l i t y C o u n t r y g u I D E s p E C I a l s E C t I o n

said u.s. president, Franklin Delano roosevelt: “a nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”

S - 6 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J u l y 2 0 1 4

merican farmers are getting beaten badly by the likes of Brazil, Argen-tina and Australia. All those coun-tries are far outpacing the U.S. rate for adopting conservation farm strat-

egies, says Howard G. Buffett, and he believes a day of reckoning for the U.S. may come sooner rather than later.

It won’t be pretty, Buffett told the World Con-gress on Conservation Agriculture conference in Winnipeg earlier this summer.

“We have a mindset that has kept us trapped in thinking like our dad or grandfather,” said the son of billionaire Warren Buffett.

Besides being son of one of the world’s most famous business icons, Howard Buffett is a highly regarded Illinois farmer and an outspoken advocate for conservation agriculture, and he is a philan-thropist in his own right, serving as chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

If U.S. farmers were as sluggish at adopting electronic technology as they are at sustainable farming, they’d still be carrying around those giant cellphones from the 1980s with the long antennas. “We have not changed our thinking nearly as quickly as we have changed our adaptation of technology,” Buffett said

The reluctance to embrace conservation strate-gies is because some farmers are simply frightened by the unknown and shudder at the thought of modifying the way they’ve always done things, Buffett believes. Also, government policies have provided incentives not to change.

“In the U.S., we can afford to make mistakes and our kids don’t go hungry,” Buffett added. “We can afford to overfertilize and pay the bill and still get by. We can do things that aren’t perfect and be a little lazy… That just means we don’t have that pressure on us.”

By contrast, in regions that lack government

safety net supports, farmers are under pressure to be more creative about how to get the most out of their operations over the longest period of time.

“In Brazil, they could not afford not to figure out how to do it in a way that made them the most money, built their soil faster, and kept it from erod-ing,” Buffett said. “They’re 85 per cent no till.”

Australia faces constraints too, dealing with a limited amount of water in a harsh environment, so that country too has made big progress in adopting conservation practices.

But that doesn’t mean that the costs aren’t add-ing up in the U.S. As a result of slow adoption there, water is getting scarcer, and water quality issues are getting increasingly common.

Erosion rates during the last decade have also mirrored and sometimes exceeded those of the dust bowl, Buffett said.

“How we’ve gotten away with some of what we’ve gotten away with is amazing to me. Every-body has been talking about hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico for 25 years but nobody’s been able to do anything about it, and all you have to do is look at a map and you know exactly where it’s coming from, who’s doing it. And we don’t have to change our practices!

“If you did that in any other profession,” said Buffett, “you would never get away with it. Never.”

“We’ve gotten a free ride for a long time.”Buffett acknowledged numerous U.S. farm-

ers have made changes, and that “farmers have adopted tens of millions of acres of cover crops.” Such farmers are finding not only that conservation farming is working, and that the environment is better and the water is clearer, but they’re making more money too.

But many others have not gotten with the pro-gram, and they’re potentially at risk from the gov-ernment coming in heavy handed and telling them how things will be done in the future, said Buffett.

Too many farmers are blind to the danger, he said. And of those who can see it, many believe they will be able to fight it off.

They’re wrong, Buffett said.“The political landscape is changing in the

United States, and it’s not changing in the favour of U.S. farmers,” Buffett said. “That will make all of

Day of reckoningHow long can the U.S. compete in a world where other countries are working much more effectively at sustainability?

By richarD kamchen

s u s t a i n a B i l i t y C o U n t r y g U I D E S p E C I a l S E C t I o n

those institutions that have helped protect our situ-ation and our rights less powerful and influential.”

So although agriculture has won the big battles of the past, that’s about to change. When large urban areas start to raise a fuss about things like their water, Buffett warned, they’ll get what they want.

“Numbers always win,” he said. “A city like Los Angeles for instance has the numbers to defeat farmers.”

Besides, farmers should also worry about gov-ernment intervention, given so few of the politi-cians, bureaucrats and activities trying to influence agricultural policy actually understand farming.

“You’ve got policy-makers, politicians, bureau-crats and (certain) academics who’ve never had to grow anything in their life, who have never had to understand what it means to have Mother Nature kick your butt,” he said.

Fair or not, however, this is the choice that

farmers face: either do it yourself or have someone else tell you how you’re going to do it.

Not all farmers believe they’re facing what amounts to an ultimatum. “If you’ve gotten away with it for two or three decades and nothing’s hap-pened to you, you tend to think, ‘At least in my lifetime, what do I need to worry about it for?’”

Nor is regulation the only threat.Food processors and retailers are getting more

powerful too, Buffett said. Soon, they’ll demand that their products are grown sustainably.

“A company like Wal-Mart is going to demand this, and when they demand this, then the ADMs, the Cargills the Bunges and the other people in the world are going to have to figure out how to do it,” said Buffett. “(Change) may come from regula-tion, it may come from corporate demand or con-sumer demand, but it’s coming.

“It will probably come slow enough that we have time to adapt to it, but you can’t sit still.” CG

J u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a S - 7


at conferences and from podiums all around the world, Buffett is preaching the same message. “Change, or be changed.”

onsumers are the forgotten beneficiaries of ag sustain-ability, and forgetting to communicate with them can be one of agriculture’s most

damaging errors, says farmer and philan-thropist Howard Buffett.

“Consumers are our shareholders,” Buffett says. “At the end of the day, they do count, whether we like it or not.”

Nick Betts, who doubles as co-ordi-nator both of market development and also of sustainability for Grain Farmers of Ontario agrees, but notes that it isn’t a simple question.

Farmers need to make sure consumers are knowledgeable about what sustain-ability means on the farm, Betts told the recent World Congress on Conservation Agriculture conference in Winnipeg.

“Just because a consumer wants something that’s sustainable doesn’t mean what they want ‘is’ sustainable,” Betts warned. “It’s important that we come to grips with what that actually means. And then we need to effectively manage the system.”

There can be critical differences in how farmers and consumers define sus-tainability, he said. “If we do something to satisfy the farmers’ definition of sus-tainability, we’re not going to do the same for the consumer, and vice versa.”

There’s another concern too.While Betts believes farmers need to

adopt a consumer-centric approach, he has found resistance from those produc-ers who don’t want anyone telling them what to do. Surveys he’s seen reveal they’re concerned about third-party intervention, special interest groups, and unrealistic demands from the uninformed.

“Well, if we want uninformed indi-viduals to be informed, we need to have a consumer-centric approach to understand where they’re coming from,” Betts said.

Adopt ing a consumer-cent r i c approach means better understanding customer expectations, and Betts believes farm organizations can play a role here, while also educating and informing con-sumers about the sustainable impacts of their choices.

The upshot is, when customers ask if what’s being produced is sustainable, Betts said, the farming industry needs suc-cinct, scientifically proven answers.

“We need to ensure that there’s under-standing between the farmer and the value-chain partners, the special interest groups, academics, investors,” Betts said. “We need to communicate effectively and this in turn will drive those best manage-ment practices and make those pillars of sustainability transparent.”

Too often, environmental groups,

societal groups and farmers butt heads, even though they essentially want the same thing — a sustainable future.

The difficulty starts with everyone being defensive. Betts believes a para-digm shift is needed in how all sides react and how they deal with each other. We need that kind of perspective in order to see the big picture and where the com-mon road lies.

But another one of the big drivers in sustainability will be economics, because if something doesn’t make economic sense, it won’t happen.

“Marketers have to come down from their 100,000-foot view, and the farmers need to come up and see where that common ground is,” Betts said, “because if it’s not economical for the farmers, the marketers aren’t going to get their product.”

Lee Moats, a pulse no-till grower out of Riceton, Sask., also preferred con-sumer signals to guide the way, especially in contrast to the option of sweeping standardized government regulations.

“I’m a believer that the market-place ought to drive it more than it is,” Moats said. “I shudder when I see the well-meaning bureaucratic standard, but I really respond to consumer interest — sometimes misguided, but nonetheless.

“If I get that signal back to my farm, I’m very interested in respond-ing,” Moats said, although he admits to a concern about trying to live up to “somebody’s latest flavour of the month checkbox system.”

Moats believes organic farmers might be able to provide some additional clues to the farming industry about how to achieve their goals.

Said Moats: “Maybe some of us non-organic guys should spend a little time on some organic farms and see what they’re doing, because they may have a few hints for us.” CG

WHERE’S THE CONSUMER?The public should have a voice, but there are risks

BY RICHARD KAMCHEN

S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y C O U N T R Y G U I D E S P E C I A L S E C T I O N

S - 8 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J U L Y 2 0 1 4

SOIL CONSERVATION COUNCIL OF CANADA

The face and voice of soil conservation in CanadaSOIL CONSERVATION COUNCIL OF CANADA

CONSEIL CANADIEN DE CONSERVATION DES SOLS

The Soil Conservation Council of Canada (SCCC) has a rich history as the face and voice of

soil conservation in Canada. In 1987, as a follow up to his 1984 Soil at Risk Report, the late Senator Herb Sparrow founded Soil Conservation Canada (SCC).

Their focus was soil conservation with protection from wind and water erosion, from excessive tillage and from non-agricultural development. Soil Conservation Week and the Canadian Conservation Hall of Fame were introduced to bring attention to the need for soil protection. All of this continues.

Through time, SCC evolved into The Soil Conservation ‘Council’ of Canada (SCCC) to encourage stronger participation and more interaction by existing soil conservation groups and other stakeholders. Following this change, the “Council” engaged in new activities and challenges.

In its constant search for excellence, the Council has re-assessed its role, its operation and its priorities so it can be most effective in the present time and circumstances. There will be a shift to take greater advantage of the Council structure. A strong emphasis on collaboration and cooperation by Council members will be helpful in addressing issues of common concern. There will also be new effi ciencies and opportunities as this change unfolds.

As the SCCC moves forward, its principles and priorities have been strengthened in many areas as it builds on new information, new research and discovery, and addresses soil related issues in a timely way.

• The advocacy for soil conservation will remain the central cause but will now encourage a more active role in issues related to soil management. These include soil care, soil health and the affected water, air, habitat and natural areas.

• The Council emphasizes that soil conservation is a primary contributor to sustainable agriculture. History suggests that without sustainable agriculture we do not have sustainability on a social, economic or environmental scale.

• Science is the basis of agricultural progress, therefore, it is important to partner in scientifi c activity.

• Increases in agricultural production should be the product of practices that improve soil health and the environment.

• Sustainable intensifi cation of agricultural production on existing farmland is a priority because this reduces the expansion of agriculture to natural areas.

• All Canadians have a shared interest in and should participate in safe-guarding our soil because the benefi ts provide many environmental goods and services for the public good.

• Agricultural soil is a limited primary resource that needs protection for food production as it is coming under increasing pressure as population growth accelerates.

• The SCCC will provide the much needed national leadership role as a catalyst for cooperation and action, a forum for discussion of critical issues and a point for information exchange.

The Council continues to support the legacy and vision of Senator Sparrow while moving forward with new ideas, new vigour and new commitment.

Membership is encouraged for interested organizations, businesses, industry, government, researchers and individuals who wish to support sustainable management of our agricultural soils and the related environment. While farmers and farm groups will be core participants, society as a whole will benefi t through participation and should play an active role. Members of the Council can take pride in their support of an organization that operates at the front line of the soil conservation cause. More information on SCCC and membership is available on the website: www.soilcc.ca

The legacy and vision continues

www.soilcc.ca

PHOTO: ONTARIO MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS

PHOTO: SEED HAWK

PHOTO: DUCKS UNLIMITED CANADA

eriously? Can it really be better to till up and down some slopes instead of across?

That’s one of the conclusions from early work with precision agriculture in Austra-lia, where the technology is proving a boon

for field crop productivity.It turns out that older technologies have blinded

us to much of what’s really going on in our fields.It also means, says Australian precision agricul-

ture consultant Tim Neale, that while Australian farmers have notched some big gains in managing different soil types with no till and with controlled-traffic farming, there are a number of critical issues to overcome, including soil erosion, waterlogging, soil acidification and various man-made challenges.

On these issues and many others, precision farm-ing will be part of the solution, Neale believes, although not always in the way farmers might think.

Neale, who runs PrecisionAgriculture.com.au, points out to some relatively inexpensive and simple

changes for dealing with water drainage issues. In one example he cited, a farmer adding a couple stra-tegic subsurface drains was well rewarded.

“His numbers showed that he made $100,000 in two years from doing that change and it was about a $5,000 drain,” Neale said.

Soil acidity is another hurdle for Australian farmers, but instead of just blanketing fields with lime, Neale said variable-rate lime applications have proven to save massive amounts of lime simply by taking advantage of grid-based in-field pH sampling.

Variable-rate nutrients have also been shown to be big production boosters and cost savers.

In a field test of a variable field with good and poor soils, chicken litter was spread on one side with both types of soils and none on the other. A small rate of chicken litter was applied — only two tonnes per hectare — but the results were tremendous.

“When we ran the yield monitor over this, the yield in the poor soils actually matched the yield of good soils,” said Neale. “That is extremely exciting, because we’re actually at a point now where we can reduce the variability of that field considerably just by adding manures strategically to these poor areas.”

But one-size-fits-all solutions won’t provide the same results and may even be wasted, given that all fields are variable.

“Everyone wants to start precision agriculture with variable rate. I think that’s the last thing you want to do,” said Neale, who urged producers first to understand their farm’s issues and think of ways in which to alleviate them. “In some cases, it might be a soil-depth issue, so putting more nutrients on is a complete waste of time.”

The sleeping giant that farmers face, however, is the person in the mirror. Are farmers creating their own problems?

Said Neale: “We see all the time in satellite imag-ery and yield maps these things that people are doing during their normal activities in the field that are causing huge variability… That contributes signifi-cantly to the variability of cropping systems.”

Neale cited the example of poor fertilizer distribu-tion that was costing the farmer in question $80 an acre. Fortunately, man-made mistakes are often the easiest and cheapest to solve.

“Man-made problems represent a large portion of where we see losses,” said Neale. “But it’s much easier to fix a problem with something you stuffed than fixing up a whole soil type.” CG

PreCision sustainabilityby riChard KamChen

Precision technology is teaching us some surprising eye-openers


S - 1 0 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a J u l y 2 0 1 4

yield monitors and precision technology are showing many yield issues are easier to fix than anyone believed

f conservation agriculture is so great, why aren’t more farmers doing it? It’s a question that surfaced repeatedly during panel discus-sions at the recent World Congress on Conser-vation Agriculture in Winnipeg.

Presenters from countries spanning the alpha-bet from Australia to Zambia left little doubt that conservation agriculture is a worldwide movement. Zero tillage is growing rapidly. In some regions of Western Canada and Australia the adoption rate is over 90 per cent. In other regions, other integrated farming systems are catching on too.

But we aren’t anywhere near a global tipping point.Speaker after speaker extolled conservation agri-

culture as a means of maintaining soil quality while improving productivity. Josef Kienzle, an agricultural engineer with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said conservation farming, when done right, can increase crop yields, decrease production costs, produce higher profits and result in better liveli-hoods. As an example, he said reduced tillage can chop power requirements by 50 per cent, allowing for the use of smaller, more efficient machines on small holdings.

Yet as Yash Dang, a senior soil scientist with the Queensland Department of Science in Australia pointed out, only 7.1 per cent of the world’s arable land is no till. Even in Australia, the system appears to have plateaued, and some growers there are start-ing to talk about going back to tillage.

Such talk is heresy to soil conservationists, but it’s reality to producers who are confronting not only herbicide-resistant weeds but also increases in soil- and stubble-borne diseases.

“Strategic tillage is one of the tools in the tool box,” Dang said during a panel discussion on sustainability.

The risk of a possible slowdown in conserva-tion agriculture comes at a time when the world faces a potential crisis in food production. Statistics presented during the conference showed the global population is projected to increase from the current 7.2 billion to 9.6 billion by 2050.

Feeding those teeming numbers will require a 60 per cent overall increase in food output, and in order to meet that target, crop yields must increase annually by 1.38 per cent globally, and by 1.87 per cent a year in developing countries.

But, as Kienzle noted, the world’s annual growth in crop yields is actually slowing. Currently it stands at 1.5 per cent. In 1960 it was 3.2 per cent. At the present rate, the annual increase by 2050 will be just 0.8 per cent — far short of the actual requirement.

Add to that the vagaries of weather brought on by climate change — crippling droughts in some regions, devastating floods in others — and the need for agri-cultural sustainability becomes even more urgent.

“Conservation agriculture is and always will be a fundamentally important movement,” said Rene Van Acker, a University of Guelph plant scientist. “It is a non-optional movement. It has to happen.”

But, as speakers acknowledged, there are road-blocks on the path toward adopting conservation agriculture. Constraints range from the lack of infrastructure and training in developing countries to human resistance to change, which can happen in any nation.

“There are a lot of things that are smart things to do, and a lot of things that are better things to do that people don’t do. It’s just human behav-iour,” Howard Buffett, chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a private chari-table U.S. organization, said at a press conference during the conference.

“You do something a certain way. You’ve done it for years that way,” Buffett said in an effort to identify what he felt was the crucial question. “Why would you change?”

The soil shockOnly 7.1 per cent of the world’s arable land is farmed no till

By Ron FRiesen

Conservation tillage is supposed to save soil, preserve yields and increase farm profitability. So why has the global move toward no till stalled so far short of the goal?

s u s T a i n a B i l i T y C o u n t r y g u I D E S p E C I a l S E C t I o n

Continued on page S-12

J u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a S - 1 1

he topsoil of one of America’s largest agricultural-producing states is vanishing at an alarming rate, with wind and water erosion directly linked to the cropping practices and to the fencerow-to-fencerow philosophy that farmers have turned to in order to

cash in on high prices for corn, soybeans and other crops.Around Iowa’s western and southern edges, soil losses can

exceed 50 tons per acre a year. In the southwestern region losses average 10 to 20 tons per acre annually.

In the middle of that region, however, there is a 3,100-acre commercial farm. Its annual soil loss rate is zero.

It’s where Seth Watkins lives with his family on the farm established by his great-grandfather James Shambaugh in 1846.

Sometimes, Watkins admits, he’s pessimistic when he looks across the landscape at farms that are suffering severe erosion, and he wonders about the future of agriculture in his home state.

“I’ve got a child who’s going to want to farm,” Watkins said during the recent World Congress on Conservation Agri-culture in Winnipeg.

“If she wants to own it, we need to make sure it’s there for her,” Watkins said.

Fortunately, based on his on-farm experience, he believes that it’s a realistic goal.

Watkins was part of a plenary panel discussion about regional perspectives on agricultural conservation in North America.

His views are similar to those contained in a 2011 report from the Environmental Working Group, a private non-profit U.S. organization. It says Iowa farms are losing topsoil up to 12 times faster than the U.S. government will admit.

The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has estimated soil and water erosion in Iowa averages 5.2 tons per acre of soil a year, slightly higher than the suppos-edly sustainable annual rate of 5.0 tons.

But the EWG report, titled Losing Ground, found that in some regions of Iowa as much as 64 tons of soil are lost from each acre of land every year.

The report raises a grim warning about the misuse of the Corn Belt’s fertile soil, which took millions of years to accu-mulate.

“From the dust bowl of the 1930s to the barren moon-scapes of today’s Haiti and Madagascar, history is littered with evidence that what nature has provided, unwise practices and policies can rapidly squander,” the report says.

The EWG report, based on research by Iowa State Univer-sity scientists, paints a shocking picture of what’s happening on Iowa’s farm fields.

Saving iowaStronger commodity prices are threatening many soils. But not on every farm

By Ron FRieSen


Above everything else, said Van Acker, the biggest barrier to adopting sustainable agricultural practices is a chronic problem with farm income.

He presented statistics during a panel discussion to show that, while farm cash receipts in Canada have increased over the decades, realized net farm income has remained rela-tively flat because of escalating input and operating costs.

Van Acker said farmers need opportunities to pursue sustainable practices and diverse cropping systems. But the reality is that, in industrialized countries, farmers are in a cost-price squeeze. How can they adopt diverse rotations when they are under increasing pressure to increase cash flows in order to stay ahead of rising costs and narrowing margins?

The story is the same the world over, whether you’re farming thousands of acres in Canada or a single hectare in Bangladesh, Van Acker said.

“Agriculture is an economic enterprise around the world,” Van Acker repeated. “Whether you’re a small-holder farmer or a large-scale farmer, you have similar bur-dens in that respect.”

Van Acker said producers who adopt diversified and integrated farming systems do so either out of personal conviction or by capturing opportunities for higher returns from the marketplace, such as organic agriculture.

Farmers have always responded to the marketplace and will continue to do so if given a good enough reason, Van Acker added. The whole zero-tillage movement in Western Canada was driven by farmers in response to soil erosion brought on by a series of dry years in the 1970s and 1980s. The eventual drop in the price of glyphosate when the pat-ent for Roundup ran out encouraged zero till even more.

Van Acker said governments have a role to play in giv-ing producers opportunities to explore new practices. That requires research funding to provide farmers with a scien-tific base to pursue sustainability.

Unfortunately, government policies can be counterpro-ductive to conservation agriculture. Many criticize the U.S. ethanol program because it subsidizes corn production and encourages intensive cropping, which then contributes to soil erosion in the Corn Belt.

Jodi DeJong-Highes, a regional extension educator at the University of Minnesota, agreed government policies, which tend to favour corn and soybeans, are important factors affecting conservation agriculture. Another factor is land ownership. DeJong-Highes said farmers who own the land may be more inclined to practise good stewardship than those who rent it and are only interested in getting as much return out of it as possible.

In the end, the public may decide the future of conserva-tion agriculture. In the United States, public concern about damage from run-off agricultural chemicals in Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico could result in government reg-ulations on fertilizer use. A growing public interest in how food is grown and how animals are raised could also extend to how the land is farmed. That could force farmers to treat their soil more sustainably.

“At the end of the day,” said Van Acker, “it is the demands of society that drive our agriculture. Cg

Continued from page S-11

S u S t a i n a B i l i t y C o u n t r y g u I D E s p E C I a l s E C t I o n

It says farmland in 440 Iowa townships encom-passing over 10 million acres eroded faster in 2007 than the so-called sustainable rate cited by NRCS. In 220 townships totalling six million acres, the soil loss was twice the sustainable rate.

The EWG report also says the incentive for farm-ers to maximize production at the expense of the land is bolstered in part by government programs. Those include subsidies for corn required to supply ethanol plants, four of which are within 60 miles of Watkins’ farmyard. Other farm policies that encour-age farmers to plant crops on fragile land are also blamed for accelerating the rate of soil loss.

The report says soil loss and run-off are aggra-vated by “gullies” that reappear during heavy rains on rolling land where farmers have previously tilled, channelling run-off water off the field, com-plete with soil nutrients.

Watkins said the loss of excess nutrients from farmland is so bad that Iowa today is the second-largest contributor of nitrogen and the third-largest contributor of phosphorus to the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, where the loss of oxygen caused by agricultural chemicals kills marine life.

There are other more subtle effects of soil degrada-tion flying under the radar. Watkins said surveys show a third of the Iowa’s natural plant and animal species — songbirds, wildflowers and even earthworms — are classified as “conservation concern” — the first step on the path to being declared endangered species.

That’s the bad news. Now the good.Watkins is part of a small but slowly growing

number of Iowa farmers who are forgoing con-ventional agricultural methods to practise land

stewardship instead of just aiming for increased production.

Watkins, his wife Christy and their children Spenser (12) and Tatum (nine) operate Pin Hook Farm near Clarinda, Iowa. They own 500 acres and rent another 2,600 acres.

The family’s conservation methods include mini-mum tillage, cover crops, wildlife set-asides, ripar-ian buffers, terraces and ponds to retain water on the landscape. The farm’s 550 beef cows are late-season calvers — a strategy which Watkins said conserves fuel. He also practises a form of strip farming which integrates native prairie grass into his cropland.

The results are evident in the soil. Watkins says soil erosion on Pin Hook Farm is zero while pre-cipitation and nutrient retention are higher than on conventionally cropped farms.

“We find that, if we use each acre to its best use, it gives the best long-term return.”

But doing this is the easy part. Watkins says it’s not all that hard to switch a farm to no till and cover crops. Instead, the hard part is to get other farmers to undergo a mindset change away from production-driven farming and toward sustainable ag, he said. “We have to show them that there are better ways.”

Watkins is a realist. He knows farmers can’t go back to the horse-and-buggy days of subsistence living on a 160-acre holding. But, as he considers the damage that intensive agriculture is doing to Iowa, Watkins believes taking better care of the soil is the answer to an improved quality of life.

Said Watkins: “It’s good for my business, it’s good for my community, it’s good for my state.” CG

J u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a S - 1 3


Catch-22: the all-out race to grow more high-price corn has damaged Iowa’s soils, making its farms more vulnerable to drought and yield loss

HEALTHY PEOPLE

HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT

HEAL

THY

ANIM

ALS

BEEF Improvements in the way North American cattle are raised and fed have signifi cantly reduced this sector’s

impact on the environment. A comparison of cattle production in 1977 and 2011 showed an increase of 13% more total beef from 30% fewer animals while yielding a reduced carbon footprint of 16%.7 Similarly, through improved genetics, feed, housing and the use of innovative animal health technologies (vaccines; hormones; antibiotics and production enhancers such as beta agonists) one pound of beef raised today (compared with 1977) uses 19% less feed, 33% less land, 12% less water and 9% less fossil fuels.8

DAIRY Despite a doubling of dairy cow productivity in the last 50 years, the industry is unable to keep pace

with population growth, with 14% less milk available now per person globally, than in 1961.9 By embracing modern production tools and technologies, future demands can be met by increasing outputs per animal. Some estimates indicate that by using today’s technologies to produce a half a glass more per cow, dairy farmers could annually save 66 million cows, 747 million tons of feed and 388 million acres of farmland — the size of Alaska and 618 billion gallons of water — the annual domestic use of Germany, France and the UK combined.10

SWINE In 1959 it took eight pigs — including breeding stock to produce 1,000 pounds of pork. Today,

it takes just fi ve pigs. And hog farmers today use 78% less land and 41% less water than they did 50 years ago.11

POULTRY Due to innovative animal health techniques, a baby chick is vaccinated to prevent a

number of diseases and illnesses that have the potential to be devastating to the bird’s health before it is even hatched. However, the last decade of change in certain regions to egg production practices demonstrates how the removal of innovation, changing practices and social pressures have dropped global hen productivity. For decades, production increased 1¾ eggs/year. Since the late 1990s the productivity trend has reversed due to disease, changing practices and the removal of innovation. The decrease is 0.8 eggs per year. To compensate for these losses, demand is being met by adding hens. On this path, hen numbers will need to double to meet the anticipated demands in 2050. However, just one more egg per hen per year helps meet demand and requires 4 billion fewer hens. By using innovation, not adding hens, we would save 113 million tons of feed; 65 million acres of land and 74 billion gallons of water.12

MODERN LIVESTOCK MANAGEMENT PRACTICES REDUCE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

With per capita meat consumption rising, global meat production has already tripled from the 1970s, and risen by 20% since 2000 alone6. By improving production effi ciencies, for both crops and animals, less land, feed, water and fuel are required to produce our food. Animal health technologies while just one component of livestock management, provide a cumulative

health effect through disease prevention, control and treatment. The use of vaccines and animal pesticides lowers animal stress attributed to disease and pests. This combined with improved animal nutrition, comfort, housing and veterinary care all factor into improved production outcomes, animal well-being and a safe and affordable food supply.

ANIMAL HEALTH TOOLS HELP PRESERVE NATURAL RESOURCES

The Path Forward…Almost one billion households worldwide rely on livestock for their

livelihood.13 With increased urbanization, this number will decrease, requiring increased outputs from fewer farmers. The time is now to make choices on how we want to grow, share and consume our food to ensure it is done in a cost effective and sustainable manner. Sustainable modern livestock production that incorporates innovation and acceptance of new technologies, can feed the growing global population.

Choice between organic and conventionally raised food is a luxury we as Canadians have. However, only through the effi ciencies of modernproduction practices will we meet our environmental, social and economic commitment to ensure each of the 9 billion has suffi cient protein in their diet.

WE’VE ONLY GOT ONE PLANET.LET’S USE ITS RESOURCES WISELY!

CANADA’S OPPORTUNITY TO FEED GROWING POPULATIONS

As Canadians, we enjoy one of the world’s most abundant, diverse, safe and affordable food supplies. Our health, quality of life and longevity are thanks to a host of factors: modern health-care, safe and affordable food and water, and our stability – economically and socially. Much of this quality of life is owed to advancements in food production. Livestock production over the last 50 years, has also benefi ted dramatically as a result of innovation, technological development and implementation.

WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?It is often described as having three interrelated components

Critics stress livestock production’s need to reduce our environmental footprint, and raise food sustainably. At the same time, we must optimize animal health and sanitation; disease detection; animal nutrition; comfort; breeding and genetics; vaccination; parasite control; animal housing and productivity. Continued use of existing and new animal health products in Canada and around the world are critical components of this sustainable production.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reports that added farmland will help produce only 10 percent of the additional food the planet needs by 2050, and 20 percent of that food will come from increased cropping intensity.4 Accordingly, the FAO concludes that 70 percent of the world’s additional food needs can only be produced with new and existing agricultural technologies.5

We believe that through the continued development and use of innovative crop protection and animal health products and technologies, a suffi cient food supply can be ensured for a growing population. More food will be produced using less land, water and fossil fuels. Natural habitats will be conserved along with farmland, housing and parkland. Use of safe, and modern animal health management tools and practices will continue to contribute to sustainable agriculture while supporting animal well-being and food safety.

ENVIRONMENT

SOCIAL

ECON

OMIC

THE FACTS9 BILLION It is estimated that the world’s population will reach 9 billion by 2050.1

3 BILLION The growing middle class will expand by 3 billion, mostly living in urban centres.2

60% INCREASE The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization predicts a 60% increase in demand for meat, milk & eggs by 2050.3

WE CAN DO IT!*Source: For details in regards to the sources used for this advertorial, please contact CAHI at www.cahi-icsa.ca

HEALTHY PEOPLE

HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT

HEAL

THY

ANIM

ALS

BEEF Improvements in the way North American cattle are raised and fed have signifi cantly reduced this sector’s

impact on the environment. A comparison of cattle production in 1977 and 2011 showed an increase of 13% more total beef from 30% fewer animals while yielding a reduced carbon footprint of 16%.7 Similarly, through improved genetics, feed, housing and the use of innovative animal health technologies (vaccines; hormones; antibiotics and production enhancers such as beta agonists) one pound of beef raised today (compared with 1977) uses 19% less feed, 33% less land, 12% less water and 9% less fossil fuels.8

DAIRY Despite a doubling of dairy cow productivity in the last 50 years, the industry is unable to keep pace

with population growth, with 14% less milk available now per person globally, than in 1961.9 By embracing modern production tools and technologies, future demands can be met by increasing outputs per animal. Some estimates indicate that by using today’s technologies to produce a half a glass more per cow, dairy farmers could annually save 66 million cows, 747 million tons of feed and 388 million acres of farmland — the size of Alaska and 618 billion gallons of water — the annual domestic use of Germany, France and the UK combined.10

SWINE In 1959 it took eight pigs — including breeding stock to produce 1,000 pounds of pork. Today,

it takes just fi ve pigs. And hog farmers today use 78% less land and 41% less water than they did 50 years ago.11

POULTRY Due to innovative animal health techniques, a baby chick is vaccinated to prevent a

number of diseases and illnesses that have the potential to be devastating to the bird’s health before it is even hatched. However, the last decade of change in certain regions to egg production practices demonstrates how the removal of innovation, changing practices and social pressures have dropped global hen productivity. For decades, production increased 1¾ eggs/year. Since the late 1990s the productivity trend has reversed due to disease, changing practices and the removal of innovation. The decrease is 0.8 eggs per year. To compensate for these losses, demand is being met by adding hens. On this path, hen numbers will need to double to meet the anticipated demands in 2050. However, just one more egg per hen per year helps meet demand and requires 4 billion fewer hens. By using innovation, not adding hens, we would save 113 million tons of feed; 65 million acres of land and 74 billion gallons of water.12

MODERN LIVESTOCK MANAGEMENT PRACTICES REDUCE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

With per capita meat consumption rising, global meat production has already tripled from the 1970s, and risen by 20% since 2000 alone6. By improving production effi ciencies, for both crops and animals, less land, feed, water and fuel are required to produce our food. Animal health technologies while just one component of livestock management, provide a cumulative

health effect through disease prevention, control and treatment. The use of vaccines and animal pesticides lowers animal stress attributed to disease and pests. This combined with improved animal nutrition, comfort, housing and veterinary care all factor into improved production outcomes, animal well-being and a safe and affordable food supply.

ANIMAL HEALTH TOOLS HELP PRESERVE NATURAL RESOURCES

The Path Forward…Almost one billion households worldwide rely on livestock for their

livelihood.13 With increased urbanization, this number will decrease, requiring increased outputs from fewer farmers. The time is now to make choices on how we want to grow, share and consume our food to ensure it is done in a cost effective and sustainable manner. Sustainable modern livestock production that incorporates innovation and acceptance of new technologies, can feed the growing global population.

Choice between organic and conventionally raised food is a luxury we as Canadians have. However, only through the effi ciencies of modernproduction practices will we meet our environmental, social and economic commitment to ensure each of the 9 billion has suffi cient protein in their diet.

WE’VE ONLY GOT ONE PLANET.LET’S USE ITS RESOURCES WISELY!

CANADA’S OPPORTUNITY TO FEED GROWING POPULATIONS

As Canadians, we enjoy one of the world’s most abundant, diverse, safe and affordable food supplies. Our health, quality of life and longevity are thanks to a host of factors: modern health-care, safe and affordable food and water, and our stability – economically and socially. Much of this quality of life is owed to advancements in food production. Livestock production over the last 50 years, has also benefi ted dramatically as a result of innovation, technological development and implementation.

WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?It is often described as having three interrelated components

Critics stress livestock production’s need to reduce our environmental footprint, and raise food sustainably. At the same time, we must optimize animal health and sanitation; disease detection; animal nutrition; comfort; breeding and genetics; vaccination; parasite control; animal housing and productivity. Continued use of existing and new animal health products in Canada and around the world are critical components of this sustainable production.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reports that added farmland will help produce only 10 percent of the additional food the planet needs by 2050, and 20 percent of that food will come from increased cropping intensity.4 Accordingly, the FAO concludes that 70 percent of the world’s additional food needs can only be produced with new and existing agricultural technologies.5

We believe that through the continued development and use of innovative crop protection and animal health products and technologies, a suffi cient food supply can be ensured for a growing population. More food will be produced using less land, water and fossil fuels. Natural habitats will be conserved along with farmland, housing and parkland. Use of safe, and modern animal health management tools and practices will continue to contribute to sustainable agriculture while supporting animal well-being and food safety.

ENVIRONMENT

SOCIAL

ECON

OMIC

THE FACTS9 BILLION It is estimated that the world’s population will reach 9 billion by 2050.1

3 BILLION The growing middle class will expand by 3 billion, mostly living in urban centres.2

60% INCREASE The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization predicts a 60% increase in demand for meat, milk & eggs by 2050.3

WE CAN DO IT!*Source: For details in regards to the sources used for this advertorial, please contact CAHI at www.cahi-icsa.ca

orages and livestock can not only help you manage your soil for sustainability, they can also help you manage the evo-lution of herbicide-resistant weeds, says Martin Entz, professor of natural systems

agriculture at the University of Manitoba.No-till farming has come a long way and has

brought a lot of change to agriculture. But there’s one big change that it hasn’t made.

In most parts of the country, farming remains pre-dominantly an annual grain-based system.

Now, the resilience of that system is in doubt, Entz said at the recent World Congress on Conserva-tion Agriculture in Winnipeg.

Weather had been at the top of the list of things challenging such farms. Drought in the early 2000s destroyed no-till farms in Montana, and the wet peri-ods in Canada and elsewhere have played havoc on conservation farms, Entz said.

“When we look at the challenges, we think that perennial plants would be wonderful,” Entz said.

He points for instance to the farmers in eastern Manitoba and in the province’s Interlake area who experience excess water on fragile soils.

They have dealt with those challenges by putting more ground into alfalfa.

“They grow that because they know they need to deal with this water there. Planning for the wet con-ditions, this is a wise move,” Entz said. “The beauti-ful thing about having the alfalfa seed production is it mimics the native prairie plants, and that’s never a bad thing.”

Incorporating perennial forages into grain rota-tions is very effective in a number of ways, including providing superior yields, reducing nitrate leaching, and offering significant weed control and greater resilience to extreme weather.

But what are you supposed to do with all the alfalfa if you grow it?

Entz’s answer is straightforward: Feed it to livestock.“All of these challenges bring us to the topic

of livestock integration. We can’t avoid it. We can drain that salt land, we can try to tile drain that wet-

land, but things are changing,” said Entz. “We’ve had the warmest May in the history of the planet this year and May has been a particularly warm month for five years now. That means more rain during planting.”

Entz extolled the virtues of forages for rumi-nants, saying when livestock eat grasses, “things with cell walls that are tough, they actually make better milk, better cheese, better meat.”

So the shift from grains to forages for ruminant production has not only environmental and agro-nomic benefits, it has human health benefits too.

“And that to me is exciting and it’s a way of get-ting people’s attention. And maybe consumers are going to start demanding this more and more,” Entz said. “That would be great for the landscape, and I think it could be good for farmers.”

But do farmers believe this?“We’re still focusing on expanding soybean pro-

duction in this province. We think it’s good for agri-culture. Well, it may be good for agriculture, but it’s also good for agriculture to think about producing food that’s really good for people. And we can do that using those natural systems.”

Removing perennials has been detrimental to agrol-ogy and weed resistance, and removing nutrients from forages through haying but not returning those nutri-ents with manure is damaging too. Entz recommended leaving animals on fields so those soils capture more nutrients, which will then result in greater yields.

Entz repeated some old wisdom from his German ancestors, saying that if you want to see how good a farmer is, go look at his manure pile.

In the West, winter grazing is another good idea, especially considering the Prairie landscape is frozen for about five months of the year.

“We accumulate a lot of carbon and then soil biota stops working because we have no heat. That’s a problem because sometimes we want to process that carbon, especially in a conservation agriculture system,” said Entz. “And the beautiful thing about livestock is those rumen, they are nice and warm. It’s why we think of the rumen as portable soil.” CG

SuStainability on the hoofAcross Canada, livestock must be part of a healthy agriculture

S u S t a i n a b i l i t y C o u n t r y g u I D E s p E C I a l s E C t I o n


by RiChaRd KamChen

rong turns are part of steering any business to success, as are some unexpectedly bumpy roads. There is no such thing as a perfect road-map, with the upshot that many

young farmers suffer indecision along the way, and some even abandon their course at times.

All the same, the story of Lookout Holsteins and Jerseys in North Hatley, Que. doesn’t include any time spent looking in the rear-view mirror.

Their own pathLike a growing number of operations across the country, Quebec’s The Lookout finds success by heading in a direction all it’s own

By Amy Petherick

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When they started farming together in 1988, Callum McKinven and Katherine Beerwort were newlyweds without any significant worldly possessions. Callum had grown up on a farm that was well known within the Jersey-breeding world, but it had been inherited by his brother.

Katherine came from a large family that had also experienced great success - as Holstein breeders — but that property also passed into the hands of a brother.

What they did have was a mutual love for cows and a mutual determination that the lack of a place to house some cows wouldn’t slow them down. They searched and found a farm with some quota that was available for rent in Donnan, Que. and started buying young stock.

“We started off with a bang,” Cal-lum fondly recalls. “One year after that first year that we started, we had the most all-Canadian nominations for Hol-steins in the country.”

They quickly built name recogni-tion for Amlaird, a herd name chosen to honour Callum’s father’s farm back in Scotland and everything seemed on track. But then, four years into a great start, their lease on the Donnan farm came up.

The couple found a little place they could afford to buy not far from Rich-mond, Que., but it didn’t come with quota.

Buying a dairy barn without quota is hardly a recommended practice in the dairy industry. For most farms, it would be classed as not exactly a bright move. But the couple had already calculated that

their collective expertise was in producing great cows, not necessarily milk.

Callum had “the eye,” what his dad had called his ability to forecast the potential of a cow based on her looks and heritage. Already making great inroads into the cattle-judging world, the couple developed a business plan that — unlike most in the dairy sector — had little to do with staying put.

“A lot of stuff gets done when I’m judging shows,” Callum explains. “It gets me to a lot of places and I make a lot of contacts.” He says he’s judged as many shows as anyone he knows, and it’s taken him to 28 different countries so far.

The benefit to the business has been the vast clientele list he developed in his travels. Not that this was his conscious objective. Callum will tell you he was

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just appreciating good cattle and sharing his mutual passion with other breeders, which naturally led to making friends.

“For example, I might judge a show and make a cow first in her class or champion, and after the show, I’d go into the barn and buy her.” If the asking price was more than his budget would allow, but still fair, then he’d call a friend who would appreciate the animal the way he did and ask them to partner with him.

Callum says as a result, he moved quite a few famous cows in and then out of their little barn, including one World Dairy Expo winner. And again, the cou-ple seemed to be on a winning path.

It’s hard to believe, then, with so much going in the young couple’s favour, this behaviour would lead to the end of Amlaird.

Gerald Halbach, a dentist living in Arizona, had bought a lot of show ani-mals from Callum and Katherine. In 2003, he came to Quebec for a visit. “Gerald had got the notion of maybe try-ing to own a place up here, and we just happened to be driving that afternoon when this place was just put up for sale,” recalls Callum.

Located only one kilometre from the farm where Callum had grown up, the place that they called The Lookout had deteriorated. At one time, it had been a popular spot for family picnics and “parking,” and the farmer who owned it used to let Callum collect bottles off the grounds. But now it was run down.

Callum confided to his dad that he was saving the money he made to buy The Lookout someday.

Hearing the story, Halbach asked Cal-lum, “Why don’t we buy this and start from scratch?”

By 9 a.m. the next morning, the deal was done. A new prefix was adopted to reflect the new partnership and to acknowl-edge the property’s history. “We sold the other place, bought quota, and started to be real farmers,” Callum exclaims.

Even with an investor now on board and the opportunity to secure milk pro-duction revenue, the business stayed true to the couple’s original vision. “I’ve always figured if you’re going to do some-thing, do what you love,” Callum says.

Unlike the large free-stall barns and the automatic feeding and milking sys-tems that were being erected around the same time, the facility built at Lookout Farms was an old-fashioned tiestall barn that would only allow for 30 cows to be milked. They didn’t even install auto-matic takeoff units — now embraced by dairy farms across the country — because Katherine still prefers a more hands-on approach to udder care.

They also made the unconventional decision to purchase all the farm’s feed — hay and grain included — so they could dedicate all their land to pasture.

“This farm would not survive on just a milk cheque,” Callum says. “We didn’t have the machinery and the land area for the crops, so when I pencilled it all out, it was better to buy all the feed rather than rent land and buy machinery.”

Every second year the couple formally reviews the way they run their business, but their practice of setting short-term goals and carefully evaluating how they spend their time is just as important.

Though he’s home more than he used to be, Callum still gets around to other farms four or five times a week. At home, Katherine and their three daughters care for 160 head, several of which are high-pedigreed heifers bound for big-time show rings, and there’s a development plan to be carefully followed for most of them.

Unlike many modern dairy farms which have diversified over the last five years, the goal at Lookout is the oppo-site of the popular “be in and out of the barn as quick as you can” philosophy. “I’m not mechanically minded, my love is working with cows and it’s my wife’s love as well, so we focus on that because that’s what we feel will make us money,” Callum says.

None of this is to say that special-izing an operation is the only way to go, though. Callum assures me that the year BSE shut down the live cattle sale busi-ness, reducing their $2 million in gross revenue by more than 99 per cent, he was grateful for a monthly milk cheque.

All three daughters hope to continue participating in the farm in the future, though Callum believes the oldest two are right to pursue careers that allow them more versatility. He’s pleased they’re applying the lessons they’ve learned on the farm in their own ways.

“Whether you’re a farmer or running a different kind of business, your clien-tele’s first impression is everything,” Cal-lum says, offering as an example: “We go the extra step to make sure people are impressed when they come here, right down to the Facebook page. My daugh-ter’s really picky about putting good pic-tures on it.”

It’s just one of many ways customer experience is emphasized in this family. To ensure those impressions are lasting, any one of the family members may offer full disclosure to a potential buyer on an animal’s faults, may discourage a pur-chase which could prove to be a wrong fit with the buyer, and will likely offer a sat-isfaction-or-your-money-back guarantee.

Callum says that it has always been a greater goal for him and his family to be reputable business people than to make a quick buck off one-time customers. He says it may not be a strategy that will make them rich, but he believes that as long as they always can have food on the table, keep the bills paid, and live every day to the fullest, they’ll be on the road to success… a road that despite some occa-sional bumps will have no wrong turns. CG

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hey used to call Winnipeg the “Chicago of the North.” In fact, in 1943, wheat contracts traded on Winnipeg’s Grain Exchange Building surpassed the wheat volume in Chicago.

But that lead was short lived. The Second World War effectively killed wheat futures in Winnipeg, ushering in the era of the Canadian Wheat Board’s (CWB) single desk.

Just because you can grow a crop, it turns out, doesn’t mean that a fast, fair and open way to sell it will evolve too, even if you can grow a lot of it.

It’s a lesson the West is learning again.Until a few years ago, futures for feed wheat and

barley, oats, peas and rye were all available through Winnipeg. But these days, canola is the only active commodity futures contract north of the 49th.

Today the Winnipeg exchange is known as ICE Futures Canada, a subsidiary of the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). The western Canadian grain indus-try is in the midst of tumultuous change once again.

Yes, the exchange has a chance to grab hold of those lost futures markets.

But whether the Winnipeg Exchange rises again is no simple story.

Futures markets to manage riskAn irony of the story is that it is occurring at the

very time that farmers are getting more expert at mar-keting. Futures trading used to get scoffed at as mere gambling, but more sophisticated marketing strategies mean they can reduce risks, not increase them.

“They’re not that complicated,” says Neil Blue.Blue was farming in the early ’80s when he

noticed strange things happening in the grain mar-kets. Specifically, the same grain, coming from the same bin, was graded differently from spring to fall.

That phenomenon spurred Blue to learn the ins and outs of the markets. Paying attention to market-ing in the ’80s, “which was a really tough period in farming, meant the difference in some years between losing money and breaking even,” says Blue.

Blue still farms in the Vermilion area of north-eastern Alberta, though he’s quick to point out his operation isn’t as large as neighbouring farms. He’s also worked as a market specialist with Alberta Agri-culture and Rural Development since 1994, teaching courses to help farmers get the most bang for their buck out of the big commercial markets such as hogs, cattle and major grains.

Blue says a futures market provides farmers with flexibility and a way to diversify pricing.

“You can sign up and lock in a price in advance of delivery without having a delivery commitment and therefore still not have the fears… of having a production shortfall and therefore having to buy out of a contract, which a lot of farmers really, really dislike,” says Blue. If production is wiped out unex-pectedly by hail, for example, “you could go back to your futures position and easily remove the portion you’re now overpriced with.”

But helping western Canadian farmers hedge risk isn’t an easy task. Blue is disappointed in the lack of functioning futures markets for crops north of the 49th parallel. A few years ago the Winnipeg Exchange had future contracts for canola, feed barley, feed wheat, flax, oats, peas, and rye. Today canola is the only crop that trades with any volume in Winnipeg.

the future of futuresWill the West ever get realistic cereal futures?

By Lisa Guenther, CG Field Editor

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“It’s quite frustrating now when we do these courses and all we have to talk about are U.S. mar-kets,” says Blue. “It doesn’t encourage farmers to sign up for accounts, either.”

Farmers can, and some do, use futures contracts from U.S. exchanges. But the exchange rates compli-cate those transactions, says Blue.

Blue isn’t the only one who sees problems with a dearth of western Canadian futures markets.

“The constituents that suffer the most in this type of environment are the producers because before, they used to have two sources available in terms of price discovery,” says Hugh Benham, trader and owner of Market Mentor.

Trading is in Benham’s blood. His great-grandfa-ther, E.L. Drewry, was one of the first members of the Winnipeg Exchange. Benham started with the exchange in 1989, handling commercial accounts.

“It was with a little bit of sadness that the open outcry came to an end,” says Benham, but he adds electronic trading allows him to work from any-where. Benham left the exchange in 2006, and these days he works from Canmore, Alta.

Benham has worked for several cattle feeders in Alberta. He also wrote a discussion paper for the Alberta Cattle Feeders looking at the possibility of revitalizing Western Barley Futures.

Although five ICE barley contracts traded in early June, Benham says five contracts of open interest

don’t add up to price discovery. These days feeders’ and producers’ only option for price discovery is to look at the cash barley market, he says.

Rough tRansitionAs the CWB’s single desk came to an end, ICE

introduced a suite of wheat products, including a milling and durum wheat contract, plus a barley futures contract. But the new futures contracts are not trading.

The last two years have been difficult ones to launch a new futures contract, says Brad Vannan, president and chief operation officer of ICE Futures Canada. Vannan is a 30-year veteran of the grain business. Before joining ICE in 2008, he worked as the vice-president of merchandising and transporta-tion at Agricore United.

Low risk, a stable price, fluid transportation, and little difference between different classes of wheat didn’t add up to success for the new ICE contracts in the first year, Vannan says. The Winnipeg contracts were designed to differentiate the Canadian market from other North American markets, he explains.

And grain industry players were busy adapting to the new marketplace following the single desk’s demise, Vannan adds. Participating in the new market was more work than participating in one of the existing markets, Vannan says, giving commercials and other players little incentive to pick up the new contracts.

This last year of bin busters and transportation bottlenecks was no kinder to the Winnipeg futures contracts. By the time market participants realized the extent of the logistics pileup, it didn’t matter where they hedged their grain, says Vannan.

“I could hedge in Kansas City. I could hedge in Chicago. I could try Winnipeg. But none of them are really going to work because the transportation sys-tem is not functioning correctly,” says Vannan.

The ICE wheat contracts do have supply on their side, Vannan says. Wheat production is similar to canola production in Western Canada. “So we felt that there’s enough depth there to facilitate a contract.”

But a contract also needs a breadth of companies willing to use it, says Vannan. “And that usually comes over time. Everybody’s not going to jump in at the exact same time. You’ll have early adapters and then if it proves to be successful, it’ll evolve and more people will join in.”

Drawing people away from incumbent markets is difficult, Vannan says. Within North America, there are three wheat contracts, each over 100 years old, each catering to a specific wheat variety, Vannan points out.

Benham says he thinks there’s interest among some players in reviving barley futures, “but is there an incentive for the commercials? Probably not.” Commercial grain companies can lay off that risk in Chicago, he says.

But Benham is cautious about laying blame at the commercials’ feet. They would likely use the

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contracts if there was more open interest, he says. Open interest measures the number of outstanding contracts at the trading day’s close, and is a sign of a healthy contract.

Commercials and farmers aren’t the only players needed to make a market successful, says Blue. These contracts need market makers, or firms that buy, then immediately sell from their own inventory or find an offsetting order.

Lots of trading activity also adds up to liquidity, which marks how easily an asset can be bought or sold in the market, says Blue. Liquidity makes for a robust market.

Contract design plays into it, too. ICE Winnipeg has industry committees to help

review contract rules, Vannan says. And, he adds, the exchange aims to create relevant, useful contracts. Con-tracts that favour one side or the other won’t trade.

Although a small percentage of the contracts are delivered on, “the process behind the delivery goes to the very core of what makes that futures contract functional,” says Vannan.

It’s essential to maintain a strong connection between the futures price and the cash price for grain, says Vannan, “so that the hedge remains relevant.”

Blue had a few calls from farmers this past winter wanting to open a sell futures position and deliver canola against it. A weak basis level makes that option more attractive, he explains.

But Blue says it’s not economically feasible to deliver canola on a sell futures position because delivery locations can levy an administration fee at their discretion. He’d like to see a way to have economically feasible delivery against the canola contracts, or have it cash settled against a three-day rolling average or some other cash index.

Both Blue and Benham are critical of the barley contract ICE created when the single desk ended. Rather than setting the delivery point in Lethbridge, near Alberta’s feedlots, ICE put them in Saskatchewan.

The problem with a Saskatchewan delivery point, says Benham is “it doesn’t give you a realistic price discovery mechanism because of freight back-offs and the way freight works in Western Canada.”

Part of the challenge in creating a futures contract is drawing a broad audience, Vannan says. Narrow contracts don’t help with price discovery because there’s not enough competition between traders, he explains. “It’s like going to an auction and only hav-ing two people show up.”

And Vannan says the Lethbridge pricing point is only important in Western Canada. Consolidation in the grain industry has cut the number of commercials, which were important middlemen, Vannan says. Feedlot numbers have also dropped drastically in the last 13 years, and barley acres are about half of what they were.

“If it’s going to work, Canadian barley has to represent a global price,” says Vannan. “But it doesn’t in the same way that canola does, unfor-

tunately, because there are lower-cost suppliers of barley in the world right now.”

Blue says others have tried to create a feed barley cash trading market. Producers would sign on to a cash contract that allowed them to deliver barley at a later date, he explains.

“Those have struggled also, and I’m not exactly sure why,” says Blue. He would like to see either a way to physically deliver against the barley contracts or have it cash settled against a cash index.

For his part, Benham thinks the cattle industry needs to secure a reliable feed source or Alberta could end up exporting feeder cattle instead of fin-ishing them. Possible solutions include developing higher-yielding barley varieties to boost acreage, sourcing other feedstuffs, using proprietary software from AgValue Group, or using marketing products that would allow feeders to source cash barley.

But Benham thinks the feeder industry may develop a different feed barley exchange to provide price dis-covery. Because futures are derived from functioning cash markets, Benham thinks this is a viable option.

“If you chose to make a market somewhere else, there’d be nothing to prevent you from doing that,” says Benham.

The fuTure of fuTuresICE’s wheat and barley contracts aren’t function-

ing right now, but Vannan seems cautiously optimis-tic about the future.

“But it’s still early days yet. It’s been two crops — two crops that have come into the marketplace under considerably different conditions,” says Vannan.

Western Canadian farmers are quick to adopt crops that provide the highest returns, says Vannan. Canola is a prime example, where the futures market supported growth in canola production. The indus-try’s investment in canola technology and farmers’ quick adaptation to the crop also helped the futures market function better, he adds.

“So those things go hand in hand. There’s lots of synergies that come out of that,” says Vannan.

And with recent change in the international wheat markets comes opportunity, Vannan says.

He cites the Euronext wheat contract, traded in Paris, as an example. For several years, that contract didn’t gain volume. But the Black Sea gained promi-nence as a global grain supplier, making the Euro-pean contract a better hedge than North American contracts, Vannan says.

“Now it’s probably the fastest growing and one of the most important wheat contracts there is,” says Vannan.

The open wheat market could spell good news for Canadian wheat contracts, he says. North American wheat acres are being pushed farther north and west by corn and soybeans, he adds. Canadian contracts representing Canadian production will be the natural benefactors in time, Vannan says.

“That timing might not be right now. But I’ve got a feeling that it might not be that far away.” CG

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The goal is gouda

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Adam and Hannie van Bergeijk got their top-quality Gouda cheese into Sobeys, but only by overcoming a series of roadblocks

wo years after he began making cheese commer-cially on his New Hamburg, Ont. dairy farm, Adam van Bergeijk admits he is

pleased with their progress. “We’re close to our targets,” he says.

But van Bergeijk also admits it’s been a long haul to get to this point.

About 25 per cent of the milk from their 180-cow Holstein dairy operation is used to make Gouda-style cheese. The cheese is sold through a distributor to 250 stores including Sobeys, Loblaws, Zehrs, Foodland, Farm Boy and Metro, as well as several specialty shops.

The van Bergeijks also operate a store at the farm which is open Fridays and Saturdays.

Making cheese isn’t new for Adam and his wife, Hannie. They have a long history of making award-winning Gouda cheese on their farm in the Netherlands. Both had trained at the Gouda Cheese Making School in the city of Gouda in 1981.

When they immigrated to Canada in 1996 with their three teenaged children, van Bergeijk continued making cheese, but only for their own personal con-sumption. Although in the Netherlands it was common to sell farmstead cheese, the rules here made that difficult.

That changed, however, when the Dairy Farmers of Ontario introduced its Artisan Dairy Program to encourage small-scale makers of traditional dairy products, and van Bergeijk saw his opportunity.

The hardest part was getting the



After surviving red tape, cost overruns and delays, the van Bergeijks say success in value adding hinges on your skills — and your resilience

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cheese plant built, says van Bergeijk. It took four years, with the red tape proving a big stumbling block. The Ontario Ag Ministry approved the plan for the state-of-the-art cheese plant but van Bergeijk was not able to obtain a federal licence.

“The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) wasn’t interested in work-ing with us,” he says. As a result, he is not permitted to sell his cheese to other prov-inces. “The rules are difficult to explain to the public,” says van Bergeijk, who also had to satisfy DFO regulations, although by the end of the project, he was impressed with the support he got both from DFO and from Dairy Farmers of Canada.

Getting the building permit approved at the township level was also a long and involved process, adds van Bergeijk.

As well, there were unforeseen con-struction costs that made the project go over budget, and a big learning curve for the contractors who weren’t familiar with the equipment which had been purchased from the Netherlands.

“It’s all sorted out now,” says van Ber-geijk who is happily making cheese three times a week, about 400 kg at a time.

Fresh milk from the barn goes directly by pipeline to a 4,000-litre tank in the cheese plant in a separate building where it is sampled for quality standards.

“We are the only ones in the province who use milk directly to make cheese,” says van Bergeijk. Using warm milk, he says, keeps more of the flavours.

The van Bergeijks focus on making a

natural cheese from unpasteurized milk with no additives.

Cheese-making is a combination of art and science, and for those interested in the cheese-making process, there is a detailed slide show on MountainOak’s website at www.mountainoakcheese.ca.

Since the cheese is made from unpas-teurized milk, it must be aged for a mini-mum of 60 days, and each cheese is given a unique number so it can be traced — there are now more than 3,000 cheese wheels in storage which must be turned daily.

So far the family makes 14 differ-ent types of Gouda-style cheese, all sold under the MountainOak name. There are four plain cheeses: mild, medium, aged (aged nine months) and Gold (aged 15 months). There are also several flavoured cheeses including wild nettle, chili pepper, black pepper, cumin, Friesian (cumin and cloves), mustard, fennugreek, pumpkin seed and black truffle.

“It is very important to get the right balance of spices,” says van Bergeijk. “Too much and it will overpower the taste of the cheese.” He makes small batches of new flavours which he tries out on friends and family. He also monitors how well the different cheeses are selling.

Already the quality of MountainOak cheese has been recognized with two awards. The aged Gouda won first place at the British Empire Cheese Show in Bel-leville and the Gold cheese won second place at the Canadian Cheese Awards.

While getting the cheese plant up and running was the biggest hurdle, mar-keting has also been a bigger job than

expected. It takes a sustained effort to create awareness of their cheeses and to have people remember them, explains Hannie. So far this year they have done more than 40 demonstrations in grocery stores and at food events. They have a team of eight people trained in proper food-handling procedures to do cheese demonstrations. To help them manage the onerous job of marketing, van Ber-geijk hired a marketing manager who works almost full time organizing dem-onstrations and shipments.

The milk used for cheese making must first be sold to the milk board. Then the van Bergeijks buy it back from the board at a 10 cent per litre premium. (Van Bergeijk says he hopes to negotiate a better price in the future.)

Van Bergeijk is also concerned about the impact of the CETA European trade deal which will allow more subsidized European cheese into Canada. While he says he can compete on quality, he can-not compete on price with subsidized European cheese.

To that end they are trying to encour-age consumers (including other farm-ers) to support local farmers. “This is a Dutch-style cheese made from Canadian milk,” he says.

Van Bergeijk figures if we can make it here, why should we import it? The cheese plant creates jobs and contributes to the local economy.

In a typical week, Adam spends about 75 per cent of his time working in the cheese side of the operation and about 25 per cent still helping out with the farm which is managed by his young-est son, Arjo and his wife, Baukje. They also have three full-time staff, besides Adam, working in the cheese plant, as well as two part-time staff who work in the store along with Baukje and Hannie.

Another son, John, and his wife, Angela, have a dairy farm just a few kilometres down the road. A daughter, Liesbeth, has a dairy farm with her hus-band, Peter de Boer, near Tillsonburg. In total, Adam and Hannie have nine grandchildren.

Developing a value-added business isn’t for everyone, says Adam. It takes someone with an adventurous spirit, says Hannie. And, adds Arjo, “someone who doesn’t give up.”

Van Bergeijk agrees. “When there is a roadblock you have to think, how am I going to manage it so I can get to my goal?” CG

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Marketing will take more time, skill and commitment than you’ll probably estimate up front, say Hannie and Adam.


The right tool at the right timeGerman implement manufacturer Lemken bases its Canadian growth strategy on providing equipment tailored to local needs

By Scott Garvey, CG Machinery Editor

Continued on page xxContinued on page xx

B U S I N E S S

his time the conversation was the opposite of what I’m used to. In the last few years it’s become common enough to hear North American machinery

executives talk about how they’re going to get their share of the huge new markets in the emerging economies. But in May, I was at implement manufacturer Lemken’s factory in Alpen, Germany, and the growth market on the table there was Canada.

In just nine years, our country has grown to become Lemken’s fourth-largest export market.

Short-term thinking goes against the grain at this family-owned firm that has existed since 1780. Just as John Deere started out building plows in his own Midwest black-smith shop, Wilhelmus Lemken did exactly the same thing on the other side of the Atlan-

tic. Both men founded brands that now have long-term, global strategies. Both brands also see superior overall value as their core advan-tage, and both are strongly associated with a trademark colour in their home countries, green for Deere, blue for Lemken.

The comparison is actually kind of strik-ing. “I’m focused on growth, but only on profitable growth,” says Anthony van der Ley, Lemken’s CEO. “(Some companies) are more focused on absolute growth, but not on the margin. We can get any order if we drop the price. If I’m interested in the short term, I can double the sales in three years. But don’t ask me if the company is going to exist in 10 years.”

Implement manufacturer Lemken used a 500-year-old farmyard in central Germany as the venue for its International Press Day in May. PHOTOS: SCOTT GARVEY


J U L Y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 4 5


Despite being unwilling to sacrifice profits for rapid growth, van der Ley says Lemken has actually achieved such growth in Canada. In 2013 the company’s sales hit 15.4 million euros (about C$22.9 million), up from nine million in early 2012. And he is bullish about 2014.

“In Canada this year we are aiming at 18 million euros, which I think is too low,” van der Ley says. “I would like to see 25, but we have to be realistic. If you add our U.S. volume to that, this year would be 28 million (in North America). There is a huge market, huge potential.”

For Christian Jungmann, Lemken’s export sales manager, the key to the Canadian market has been to provide “the right (tillage) tool at the right time.” Lemken’s bread-and-butter products are cutting-edge tillage implements.

“Ten or 15 years ago when someone here in Ger-many talked about Canada, everyone was just think-ing about big fields, big structures, big distances, this kind of thing,” Jungmann says. “No one was aware the eastern part was completely different.”

After setting up a Canadian subsidiary in Quebec, where many farms have a lot in common with those in Europe, an unexpected thing happened. A former company employee who emigrated to Manitoba called Jungmann suggesting there was a potential market for the brand’s tillage tools on the Prairies. After setting up a field demonstration there and immediately get-ting five firm orders for implements, executives found themselves looking for their first Prairie dealer.

“That was a step we had not planned in the beginning, to be honest,” says Jungmann. “We thought we’ll go into the East. Then I thought we’ll go over to B.C. At that stage, 2005, 2006, I had not thought about the Prairies, because it was known for no till. So everyone told me no tillage tools can be sold there. There’s no business. You can stay at home. Everyone believed that.”

Sales across the Prairies continue to exceed expecta-tions, and now Lemken has 17 dealers with multiple locations across the region. “The good news was there was no need for us to visit dealers,” Jungmann says. “The dealers came to us.”

Building on the method it used to get those first five Prairie sales, Lemken management believes that once farmers see what blue machines can do, they’ll be hooked. So demonstrations — even impromptu ones — have been a large part of the brand’s marketing efforts.

“To promote the products, we have a lot of dem-onstration tours going on in the different provinces,” says Laurent Letzter, Canadian sales manager. “We rented a tractor in Ontario. For a couple of days I was driving (between scheduled demos) and we’d see some dust in the field, see a farmer working. We’d stop and ask if they’d like us to help them do some work. They can stay in their cab and see our dem-onstration guy doing a couple of passes. We’d leave them a brochure and they keep on working.

“One dealer in Alberta hired four demonstration people. He said 80 per cent of the demos he’d done turned into sales,” Letzter says.

The company also emphasizes followup support

b u s i n e s s

Continued from page 45Christian Jungmann, export sales manager (l) and Laurent Letzter, Canadian sales manager.

and service in its Canadian operation, just as it does at home in Germany.

“If you do something, you have to deliver the best service,” explains van der Ley. “Price is impor-tant, but it’s not the most important thing. If we had to sell on (purchase) price we would lose.”

“Product development is very important to Lem-ken, because we always try to innovate,” adds Letz-ter. “The foundation of the company is to bring new innovation to market, not just to increase turnover. There are over 100 engineers working here (in Alpen) to develop new products. When you count 1,000 employees that’s 10 per cent who are working on cre-ating new innovation.”

But that innovation is only valuable if it meets farmers’ needs. What works well in Germany or France isn’t necessarily useful in Alberta or Ontario.

“The farming systems in North America are dif-ferent,” acknowledges van der Ley. “First we want to make sure we understand the market and get feedback.”

Because of Lemken’s relatively flat management structure, Letzter can channel Canadian farmer feed-back (much of it gleaned from those field demon-strations) directly to engineers at the Alpen factory, which has resulted in several design changes on units bound for Canada.

“Most units in Europe have three-point hitches, but in the West that wasn’t even an option,” Letzter notes. “We had to do a full line of drawbar units. And now that we have it, we see opportunity in other markets.”

Shortly before taking the stage to give his official address to farm journalists at Lemken’s Interna-tional Press Day event in Kassel, Germany (also in May), van der Ley talked about the growth he expects in North America. And the numbers he throws out are ambitious. He backs them up by estimating future global farm income. Like every equipment company executive, he knows that farm income is the real driver behind machinery sales.

“In the next 10 years, we feel the world will have a tremendous agricultural commodity scarcity,” van der Ley says. That translates into strong farm incomes.

“If you look at the global implement market, last year, in 2013, it was a 96 billion (euros) market worldwide. In the next 10 years it will nearly double. Why? Because in the developing world, farmers are purchasing tillage equipment. That is a fantastic opportunity for Lemken. The market in China will triple. India will double.”

“We think the biggest growth potential is in Asia,” van der Ley goes on. “But on the other hand, if you look to absolute sales volumes, because big-ger machines have a higher sales value, then there is tremendous potential in North America. In China and India there is big potential, but machines are very small, so you have to sell a lot of machines for a decent value.”

So van der Ley believes Lemken will need to stay flexible to cash in on those opportunities.

“You cannot grow only by increasing your sales,” van der Ley says. “You have to adapt your organization.” CG

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The brand’s name displayed at the entrance to its Alpen, Germany factory.


ristjan Hebert knows exactly what his target is when he is spraying fungicide on his wheat. “One hundred per cent,” says the Moosomin, Sask.-area grain grower, who farms with his father. “Our

goal is to get it all covered at the heading stage.”

That’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when the biggest question about fungicide use on cereal crops was whether it was even worth doing, espe-cially during an era of lower grain prices.

But Hebert has the numbers to back up this strat-egy, having run on-farm trials early in the adoption curve to determine how the economics of fungicide applications on wheat stacked up.

“We always do three years of testing. No numbers or data are as good as the ones you get from your own farm,” Hebert says. “After three years, if the return on investment is always positive, we adopt it whole farm.”

In this case those numbers did add up, and they have continued to show a payback when he has peri-odically revisited the question over the years. Basically, he says, the numbers have never dipped into the red. So now every wheat crop gets fungicide applications.

“It has always covered at least the cost of the product and the application,” Hebert says.

Lethbridge, Alta.-area farmer Henk Kamper echoes Hebert’s sentiments, saying fungicide applica-tions are an important part of their crop protection strategy, so his family, which farms under the Kamper Enterprises banner, doesn’t waste a lot of time every season wondering if they should fill the sprayer.

While they farm in an area with drier conditions, the Kampers grow under irrigation. This can build dis-ease pressure that might not otherwise exist by creating the perfect conditions for its development.

“For us the question with fungicide applications on our wheat isn’t ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” Kamper says.

Back on the Hebert farm, the fungicide mainly goes down through their ground rig, using dou-ble-sided nozzles, a system Hebert says gives the most consistent results. But when the inevitable time crunch hits the 8,000-acre operation, the total cover-age target remains most important.

“I’d rather do it with our sprayer, but if time won’t permit that, we have no problem calling in a plane or helicopter,” Hebert says.

Hebert says that while the aerial results aren’t as consistent, any application still has a worthwhile impact on yield and quality. He stresses, however, that aerial application is a last resort and his much preferred option is to go in with a ground rig. He strongly suggests using double-sided nozzles and, if necessary, slowing down a bit to get proper coverage.

All in good timeThe fungicide question on wheat is settled for these farmers. It’s every acre, every year… but always at the right crop stage

By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor

P r o d u c t i o n

“ After three years, if the return on investment is always positive, we adopt it whole farm.”

— Kristjan Hebert, Moosomin, Sask.

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“If you’re going to do a pass, get the best cover-age you possibly can,” Hebert says.

Kamper says their operation is similar, and they’re likewise dedicated to doing the job right, using a sys-tem with three main pillars.

At application time it’s mainly a question of using the right equipment and getting the spray mix right. Kamper says they use between 15 and 20 gallons of water an acre, depending on which fungicide they’re spraying. Less than that will mean incomplete cover-age. They also use double-sided nozzles (see photo) to ensure coverage on both sides of the heads.

“The right nozzles, the right water volume, the right timing — this is our strategy to get the most out of our fungicide applications,” Kamper says.

Once the application system has been refined, the main challenge is hitting a narrow spray window. And while there’s been some debate over the years about what the best timing is, that’s increasingly become a settled question, according to one industry player.

Every fall, after the harvest at Richardson Inter-national’s Kelburn research farm, just south of Win-nipeg on the banks of the Red River of the North, Wes Anderson spends a few days pouring over an Excel spreadsheet of the latest data in his ongoing fungicide trials.

Anderson, the company’s agronomy manager, has spent a lot of time over the past few years looking at optimal fungicide timing on wheat crops. He’s currently got about 10 years of solid data from farm trials, as well as anecdotal evidence from the company’s team of agronomists situated throughout Western Canada.

“We did the first of our trials with what are now older products — Tilt and Headline,” Anderson says. “Then we did lots of trials with Folicur, and lately we’ve been using the newest products, like Prosaro. I think we’ve got a lot of good data.”

That data is sending a clear message, Anderson says. Growers looking for the best time to apply fungicides should be targeting the heading stage most years, with earlier applications only in the event of heavy pressure from leaf diseases that could hit the flag leaf and hamper yield.

“Our Kelburn data shows that four years out of five, applications at the T-3 (heading) stage give the best eco-nomic results,” Anderson says. Partly that’s because of a mild yield boost, but mainly it’s a question of crop qual-ity, with the heading-stage applications keeping a lid on fusarium-damaged kernels and DON mycotoxins, and therefore preventing downgrading.

A representative of one of the leading fungicide manufacturers agrees this seems to be the consen-sus that’s emerging.

When Troy Basaraba joined Bayer in 2003, cereal fungicides were still very much in their infancy. Folicur was just emerging and the ongoing debate amongst growers was over whether or not there was a compelling economic case to be made for the appli-cations on wheat.


p r o d u c t i o n

“�The�right�nozzles,�the�right�water�volume,�the�right�timing�—�this�is�our�strategy�to�get�the�most�out�of�our�fungicide�applications.”�

—�Henk�Kamper,�Lethbridge,�Alta.


Double-sided nozzles are becoming the design of choice when these farmers spray fungicides.


Now, the question has become what’s the optimal timing for fungicide appli-cations, and Basaraba has been heavily involved in recent years in a Bayer pro-gram that runs strip trials throughout Western Canada in commercial fields to compare various fungicide treatments.

“Initially the thinking was you should protect the flag leaf from leaf diseases at all costs,” Basaraba says. “We’ve seen that change over time and evolve to more focus on protection from fusarium head blight. I would say that over the past six years or so, we’ve seen a move from flag-leaf timing to applying it at heading time.”

There are a number of factors that have gone into this evolution, Basaraba says. New products offer multiple modes of action and better protection from fusarium. Other farming practices such as minimum- and zero-till farming sys-tems have changed the environment for the disease, leaving much more crop resi-due on the field surface where it can act as a host to the disease. Then there’s been the general spread and growth of disease pressure throughout the region, so that even parts of the Prairies such as Alberta where the pressure has been lower are grappling with this new reality.

“They’ve definitely got it there — it’s just less than everywhere else,” Basaraba said.

Basaraba agrees with Anderson, say-ing timely scouting can help refine the appropriate application timing in season, and that it’s always going to be a balanc-ing act between protecting the flag leaf during times of high pressure from the leaf disease complex, while at the same time grappling with the perennial chal-lenge of fusarium.

“Basically it’s Agronomy 101,” Basaraba says. “You need to keep your nose in the crop.”

While Basaraba concedes that every growing season is going to vary, he says the numbers on his spreadsheets don’t lie, and the question of what the best fungi-cide timing is has become a lot closer to settled in his mind as season after season of data have accumulated.

“I think it’s quite clear that most sea-sons, you’ll get better yield protection, better response and a better return on investment at heading,” Basaraba says.

Basaraba says typically the portions treated at head timing have about a half a bushel more yield. And even more importantly, they’ve generally got better grain quality.

Back on the farm, both grain growers

confirm that they’re mainly shooting for head timing applications these days.

“We apply at head timing with fun-gicides, and we see that timing as the best,” Kamper says.

It’s not even necessarily a question of yield, although there is likely some yield benefit. For their farm, the key question is quality. That’s what they’re paid for and by spraying just at the time of head-ing and flowering, they protect qual-ity and prevent damaged kernels and elevated levels of mycotoxins.

Another wrinkle in the operation is that they include both wheat and grain corn in their rotation, providing a second potential host crop for fusarium head blight. But even without the corn issue, the farm and others in the area have to face the simple fact that — like most other parts of the Prairies — fusarium has become a fact of life and the disease is always there, just waiting for the right conditions to flourish in the crop canopy, making hitting it with a fungicide at head-ing a perennial goal of the farm.

Hitting that head-timing window, however, is easier said than done, because it’s such a narrow one. Just four or five days long, for the typical modern com-mercial-scale grain grower it makes for a lot of ground to cover, Kamper concedes.

P r o d u c t i o n


“�Four�years�out�of�five,�applications�at�the�T-3�(heading)�stage�give�the�best�economic�results.”�

—�Wes�Anderson,��Richardson�International

“You can do it if you’re set up for it,” Kamper says. “Keep scouting, and be ready to move as soon as they head out. Be ready for it and go at it as hard as you can.”

Producers can also do a few things earlier in the season to make life a bit easier, such as taking care at seeding time to do a good job to get even germination and emergence so the entire field begins heading at the same time, setting up conditions for a more successful application.

Hebert agrees head timing seems to deliver the best results, although he admits he’d hit it at flag-leaf stage too — if there were only enough days to do the work. As it is, they typically blend a low rate of fungicides and spray them along with weed control products, hoping to keep the leaf diseases in check until the head-timing applications.

“This means we’re typically applying our weed control products a bit toward the later end of the application range,” Hebert says.

It’s all just part of the farm’s central philosophy, which assumes every crop that goes into the ground has a 100 per cent chance of remaining healthy and hitting its full yield potential.

“We do everything we can to manage the evironment and fertility to protect that 100 per cent potential,” Hebert says.

“It really is a bit of a balancing act,” Anderson agrees. “It all comes down to how bad the leaf disease pressure is earlier in the season, and if it gets really bad, you can’t always wait for heading.”

In recent years, fusarium head blight has become endemic in Western Canada. Unlike leaf diseases, which frequently have to be blown in from farther south, this disease winters here. It’s always laying in wait, ready for the next time weather condi-tions line up for a full-blown epidemic. That makes it the more important of the diseases to manage proactively, and the more likely candidate to deliver a bigger bang for the buck and effort.

One thing that has become apparent in recent years is that farmers are taking cereals management much more seriously than they used to. They’re optimizing their fertility and weed control packages, and they have increased their use of fungi-cides and are paying more attention to application timing as part of that trend.

“We’ve come a long way with wheat,” Anderson says. “These crops are much more intensively managed than they used to be just five or 10 years ago.”

Another area where there have been improvements is in the available fungicides, such as Prosaro, one of the latest offerings. Initially Anderson says he wasn’t expecting much beyond a little

modest evolution in efficacy, but instead he’s finding it’s deliver-ing a bit more than expected.

“We’re finding it (Prosaro) is delivering longer and better protection,” Anderson says.

Bayer’s Troy Basaraba agrees the exception to that rule is when there’s “massive” leaf disease pressure, something like rust spores blowing in from down south during a spring with good conditions for the disease’s development.

Under those conditions, Basaraba agrees with Anderson that earlier applications can have a positive return on investment too. CG

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 5 1

P R O D U C T I O N

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lackleg has a way of sneaking up on you. A farm can go for years without any noticeable problems. But without the grower knowing, blackleg races within a field can shift — often in response to

seeding the same genetic resistance source over and over — and infection starts to show up where it hadn’t before. Severity starts to creep up, with a rat-ing of 0, then 1, then 2. Then bang!

The next time canola goes on that field, plants start dying off in big numbers in August and the grower wonders what’s the matter. By then, yield loss can be significant.

Fortunately, this is still a fairly rare occurrence in the current blackleg era on the Canadian Prairies. However, incidence is increasing. The purpose of this article is to encourage growers to check canola crops this fall — ideally a week or two before cutting or shortly after — to see if blackleg is showing up.

If it isn’t, that’s good. You can use this year as the year-one benchmark in your new blackleg scouting program.

“The ultimate goal is to catch blackleg before it gets serious enough to cause yield loss, and then take preventive measures to keep levels low, or

make them low again,” says Clint Jurke, agronomy specialist for the Canola Council of Canada. “It can be done.”

How to scoutReview what you’re looking for. Many young

growers may not be familiar with blackleg because it was so long ago that it was a major issue. Through-out the season, blackleg symptoms can include leaf, pod and stem lesions. Leaf spots are dirty white, round to irregularly shaped, and usually dotted with numerous small, black pycnidia. Pycnidia appear as tiny round specks that may be seen more easily with the aid of a hand lens. These specks are a distinguish-ing feature of blackleg.

Basal stem lesions — “cankers” — are associ-ated with serious yield loss. Stem lesions may be up to several inches in length, and are usually white or grey with a dark border. Numerous pycnidia form in the centre of the lesion. Basal stem lesions may also appear as a general blackening at the base, often pro-ducing a gnarled, woody appearance.

“Basal stem infections are what you’re looking for with the pre-harvest scout — which is the easiest time to accurately identify blackleg,” Jurke says.

Clip canola stems this harvest to check for blackleg in your fields

By Jay Whetter

P r o d u c t i o n

Stem lesions are dirty white and usually dotted with numerous small, black pycnidia — the tiny dark specks. Source: Gary PenG, aaFc

Blackleg IncIdence In PraIrIe ProvInces

Incidence of blackleg across the Prairies has started to increase again, reaching levels not seen since before resistant varieties saw widespread adoption in the late 1990s. Gaps in the graph indicate years when disease surveys were not conducted.

Preserve blackleg resistance

p r o d u c t i o n

Step two in blackleg scouting is to get a good set of garden clippers. Then in the week or two before harvest, select 20 random plants from a few loca-tions in the field. Pull up each plant and clip the stem just below ground level. Look for black discoloura-tion of the cross-section. A rating of 0 means no blackleg stem discolouration. A rating of 5 means the stem is completely discoloured and blackleg has killed the plant. A wedge of black that covers 26 to 50 per cent of the cross-section is considered a 2.

“Varieties with a resistance rating for blackleg should have very low infection levels. If R-rated varieties are showing damage levels higher than 1 on average across a field, that means the pathogen pop-ulation might have shifted or increased substantially and the variety is no longer resistant to the races in that field,” Jurke says. “It is time to take action to prevent major yield losses the next time canola goes on that field.”

How to manage blacklegGenetic resistance is the simplest and, for most

fields, the most effective blackleg management tool. Blackleg has not been an issue at all for most grow-ers since the late 1990s when resistance was first introduced in a big way.

However, disease surveys show an increase in blackleg incidence across the Prairies over the past five years or so, especially in Manitoba and Alberta. “Tighter canola rotations are likely a factor,” Jurke says. “We are relying heavily on resistance alone to manage the disease, and very few are actually scout-ing for it.”

A key component of integrated pest management (IPM) of blackleg is to add diversity to the opera-

tion by rotating crops, hybrids and fungicides. “The most effective management is to extend the canola rotation on a high-risk field to at least a two-year break,” Jurke says. “Rotating hybrids and fungicides could also help — although research is ongoing to determine the best ways to apply these steps.”

Gary Peng, research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in Saskatoon, worked with researchers from University of Manitoba and from Alberta Innovates on a fungicide assessment over the past few years. “The research does not show an economic benefit to fungicides for blackleg control — except when susceptible crops are grown under high blackleg pressure,” Peng says.

Other AAFC research in Saskatchewan in the late 2000s found that burning canola residue and tillage did not reduce incidence rates.

Ongoing scienceResearchers with AAFC in Saskatoon and

University of Manitoba are working on ways to improve our blackleg monitoring. “We want a sys-tem where we can quickly identify which pathogen races are present in a field and across a region, and then identify canola varieties with effective defence mechanisms that line up with that group of races,” says Peng.

“That way, growers can choose hybrids with resistance to the blackleg pathogen races present in their fields or region, and also make more informed decisions when it comes to rotating varieties and preventing virulent races from becoming dominant,” Jurke says.

The project needs growers to participate in col-lecting samples this fall and for the following three years. If you are interested, please email principal investigator Dilantha Fernando with the University of Manitoba at [email protected]. CG

Jay Whetter is communications manager with the Canola Council of Canada, and editor of the free Canola WatCh agronomy newsletter. Sign up at www.canolawatch.org and follow @CanolaWatch on Twitter. To read a summary of Phase 1 of the black-leg identification study, read the Canola Digest sCienCe eDition 2013 here: www.canolacouncil.org/canola-digest-past-issues/. Look for study 3.3.


p r o d u c t i o n

Blackleg severity is on a 0-5 scale, with 5 being completely discoloured and dead. Use this image as a guide when clipping stems before harvest to scout for blackleg. If plants from a black-leg-resistant variety commonly show ratings of 1 or more, the blackleg population in the field may have shifted to a more virulent race.

“ The ultimate goal is to catch blackleg before it gets serious enough to cause yield loss.”

— Clint Jurke


he milling performance of Canadian food barley may be improved by blend-ing it with wheat, opening up commer-cial potential for its use as a healthy ingredient.

Funded by the Agriculture Funding Consortium, with food barley varieties supplied by the Alberta Barley Commission, a one-year project conducted by Cigi (Canadian International Grains Institute) is aiming to provide innovative milling techniques and knowledge that would enhance the competitiveness of barley and wheat flour in health food and ingredi-ent markets.

Cigi’s milling and analytical services areas are car-rying out the milling and analysis on site.

Food barley has a number of beneficial health properties. Consumption can reduce the risk of coro-nary heart disease, it can modulate blood glucose lev-els, and it may offset certain cancers. These benefits are attributed to beta glucan, phytonutrients, anti-oxidants, and vitamins contained in barley. Health Canada approved a health claim in 2012 for foods containing 1.0 gram of barley beta glucan as a way to lower cholesterol.

The milling project builds on previous research Cigi conducted in 2008-09 in which new opportuni-ties for foods made with barley were identified and

developed in partnership with international and domestic companies. Toward the end of the project, a U.K. bakery asked Cigi to try blending 15 per cent barley flour with wheat flour for pan bread, says Ashok Sarkar, head of milling technology at Cigi. “Rather than blending flours, it was decided to blend the grains and mill them together. The initial co-milling of barley and wheat was successful but not pursued further at the time.”

Since hulls need to be removed before milling bar-ley, hulless barley is easier to work with, says Elaine Sopiwnyk, Cigi director of science and innovation, who is leading the project. However, the hulless food barley varieties (especially those that are “waxy” with lower levels of amylose, a component of starch) are sticky when milling. This can pose a problem for millers although waxy starch properties are also associated with higher levels of beta glucan. Blending barley with wheat appears to resolve this issue dur-ing the milling process.

“Wheat is coarser and more granular, which helps with sifting and prevents the barley flour from clog-ging the sifter screen perforations,” Sarkar explains, adding that the project will use hulless barley ranging between a normal starch type to fully waxy. “Just imagine flours sifting through fine fabric — if you add sand it will keep the screen clean.”

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A better way to mill barley?Cigi investigates improved milling of food barley by blending it with wheat

By Ellen Goodman, Cigi

Health markets could boost food barley sales if Cigi's project succeeds.

Ph

oto

: CIG

I

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In 2005 Sarkar successfully milled Millhouse, the first registered non-waxy hulless food barley variety in Canada, at a relatively high extraction rate of about 74.6 per cent. “I said then we could actually someday pull barley from one bin and wheat from another and mill them together. But that was just a hypothesis and nothing was done. Then this request from a bakery customer happened later so we tried it.”

The current project came about when Cigi’s mill-ing results were presented at a meeting of barley researchers at the Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals. Sarkar says the Alberta Barley Commission (ABC) was in attendance and subsequently recommended that Cigi apply for fund-ing for further work.

“ABC helped review the project proposal and provided three food barley samples for us to work with — two tonnes each of CDC McGwire (normal

starch), CDC Rattan (partial waxy), and CDC Fibar (full waxy),” says Sopiwnyk. “The varieties will be used to determine what blend of wheat and barley will provide optimum milling performance and nutri-tion in the flour as a healthy ingredient which will help us develop guidelines on milling barley for the industry. Right now the use of food barley is limited in North America, but this project has the potential to increase its use.”

Sopiwnyk recently returned from a Cigi mission to Japan with other industry representatives to inves-tigate that country’s use of food barley where it is used in an array of products including barley flour, beta glucan extract, sochu (liquor), mugicha (barley tea), miso, pearled barley, and rice extenders. The group also met with Japanese industry associations and processors of barley products, many of whom are current customers of Canadian food barley. CG


p r o d u c t i o n

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Barley has great health benefits, but it clogs up flour mills. Now, Cigi may see a solution

heri Strydhorst isn’t doing a lot of fishing this sum-mer. And if her research bears out, you just might be willing to give it up, too.

An agronomy research scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development in Barrhead,

Strydhorst is leading an incredibly complex, multi-layered, multi-site, multi-crop research project designed to find out the extent to which an intensive systems approach to crop man-agement can boost yields in wheat, feed barley and peas.

“There hasn’t been a huge amount of work done on advanced agronomy systems,” says Strydhorst. “There have been lots of one-off projects on things like multiple fungicide applications, or the effect of plant growth regulators — and all of that is valuable research.” But, she adds, there haven’t been many opportunities to look at what happens when you use all of these practices together in a systems approach to crop man-agement.

So, what does Strydhorst mean by an advanced agronomy sys-tems approach? Basically, she and her team are stacking multiple agronomic practices in a field to determine where the synergies lie and where the cut-off points are in the quest for higher yields.

For example, there are plenty of independent research data to show that two fungicide applications in wheat can boost yield. But what if you include a plant growth regulator (PGR) in that crop and give it a supplemental treatment of liquid urea ammonium nitrate (UAN)? What about two fungicide applications and a higher rate of UAN? What about differ-ent application timings? How do these practices impact each other? Would these interactions differ depending on soil zone? How much is too much, and where is the point of diminishing returns when it comes to input cost versus increased yield?

If you think that sounds like a lot, brace yourself. “We are looking at 48 wheat management practices, 64 barley manage-ment practices and 15 pea management practices,” says Stry-dhorst, adding that the three-year study is being conducted at five sites across Alberta and encompasses irrigated land as well as thin black, black and grey soils.

In all, Strydhorst and her team are testing about 50 dif-ferent management systems in wheat and feed barley aimed at maximizing yields, and 15 management systems in peas aimed at improving harvestability. Her goal is nothing short

of increasing wheat and barley yields by 25 per cent while maintaining peas in the rotation, in an effort to make western Canadian farms more profitable.

That’s why it’s important to Strydhorst that a portion of her funding is coming from farmers through the Western Grains Research Foundation. “The WGRF is a huge contribu-tor to this project,” she says. “The knowledge that farmers are willing to spend their dollars on this means a lot to me.” She adds that this funding has helped leverage additional dollars from the Alberta Crop Industry Development Fund (ACIDF).

Indeed, the importance of this work to growers is evi-denced by the fact that Strydhorst’s project has six funding bodies (including WGRF and ACIDF), the majority of which are farmer directed (Alberta Wheat Commission, Alberta Barley Commission, Alberta Pulse Growers Commission and Alberta Innovates — Bio Solutions).

Optimizing existing technologyThe first thing you might notice about Strydhorst’s research

is that canola is nowhere to be found. “There has been so much work done on canola and malt barley,” she says. “We need the work in these other crops now, but we are planting all of our systems into canola stubble because we know that’s the reality for growers.”

Another reality assumed by the research is that farmers are getting the basics right before advanced agronomic practices are over laid. “We are doing all the basics as they should be done,” Strydhorst explains. “We’re seeding early, using certi-fied seed, seed treatment, proper seeding rates and depth, early herbicide applications — this is the control factor. Then we want to see what happens when we add a fungicide certain times, in-crop UAN and PGRs.”

Strydhorst believes that farmers already have top-of-the-line technology in the form of plant genetics, crop protection products, fertilizer, even machinery. Her focus is on how growers can optimize the potential of these things through advanced agronomy. “I think it’s critical for Canada to be competitive on an international scale,” she says. “We have the genetics, but I don’t think we have the agronomy to maximize those genetics. Or sometimes we buy the new chemical, but then don’t use it properly.”

Agronomy rules

P R O D U C T I O N

Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF) is a farmer-funded and -directed non-profit organization investing primarily in wheat and barley variety development for the benefit of western Canadian producers. Through investments of more than $57 million, WGRF has assisted in the development and release of more than 100 new wheat and barley varieties over the past decade and a half, many of which are today seeded to large portions of the cropland in Western Canada. WGRF also invests in research on other western Canadian crops through the endowment fund. In fact, since 1981 the WGRF endowment fund has supported a wealth of innovation across Western Canada, providing over $26 million in funding for over 230 diverse research projects.

www.westerngrains.com

WGRF is committed to utilizing the Endowment Fund for the benefit of western Canadian crop producers by managing and investing the fund in order to provide future long-term benefits to producers. To find out more, visit us online.

Cultivating Growth Increasing Endowment Fund expenditures for the benefit of western Canadian crop producers

$15 millionin new funding to crop research over four years

Leveraged to $30 millionby co-funding

New research funding examples: Weed Management Blackleg & Clubroot in Canola

Improving Oat Nutrition Pulse Disease ManagementGraduate Student ScholarshipsFusarium Resistance in Cereals

More than

100new projects

Research priorities identified by producers

File: 162816-07 WGRF Endowment Sheet Project: Half-page Ad

Size: 10 x 6.63 Bleed: 10.5 x 7.13"

Project Manager: Michelle Wilson Designer: Michelle Wilson

Client: Western Grain Research Foundation SEPtEMBER 12, 2013 8:34 AM Operator: MWilson

Colours: 4C Printer: Globe Printers - [email protected]

WGRF Endowment Fund Half-page Ad_final.indd 1 2013-09-12 8:34 AM


This project aims to raise yields 25 per cent through better agronomy

By Clare Stanfield

P R O D U C T I O NP R O D U C T I O N

www.westerngrains.com

WGRF is committed to utilizing the Endowment Fund for the benefit of western Canadian crop producers by managing and investing the fund in order to provide future long-term benefits to producers. To find out more, visit us online.

Cultivating Growth Increasing Endowment Fund expenditures for the benefit of western Canadian crop producers

$15 millionin new funding to crop research over four years

Leveraged to $30 millionby co-funding

New research funding examples: Weed Management Blackleg & Clubroot in Canola

Improving Oat Nutrition Pulse Disease ManagementGraduate Student ScholarshipsFusarium Resistance in Cereals

More than

100new projects

Research priorities identified by producers

File: 162816-07 WGRF Endowment Sheet Project: Half-page Ad

Size: 10 x 6.63 Bleed: 10.5 x 7.13"

Project Manager: Michelle Wilson Designer: Michelle Wilson

Client: Western Grain Research Foundation SEPtEMBER 12, 2013 8:34 AM Operator: MWilson

Colours: 4C Printer: Globe Printers - [email protected]

WGRF Endowment Fund Half-page Ad_final.indd 1 2013-09-12 8:34 AM

At its core, this research is about what is possible in terms of yield when you do everything right. “Last year, I had a farmer ask me at a field day if he should cut his wheat fertil-izer dollars and put it all into fungicide, since the results of a dual fungicide application trial looked so good,” says Stry-dhorst. “But you can’t steal from one pile to feed another. If you don’t do everything right, then none of it matters.”

In other words, building big yields is about setting a strong foundation and building on it carefully, brick by brick. “This is intensive management,” Strydhorst says. “We are looking at the best growth staging to apply a PGR, or the best timing and growing conditions to apply UAN. You have to get the basics right and then ask what you can tweak to build yields.”

The plan is that if growers can consistently achieve wheat yields of 54 bu./ac. and feed barley yields of over 75 bu./ac., then these crops become very economically competitive choices when it comes time to plan rotations.

With the peas, it’s less about yield than about reducing the pain-in-the-butt factor. “The whole purpose is to get those things to stand through harvest,” laughs Strydhorst, recalling a farmer recently telling her it took him five days to harvest a quarter of peas.

She explains that 2014 is a prep year for the pea work — basically growing wheat that will be harvested at different stubble heights and then peas will be inter-row seeded into that stubble next year. “We will seed CDC Meadows into 14-inch, seven-inch and no-stubble fields,” she says. “We’ll do

inter-row seeding, using stubble as a trellis, then add a PGR and look at timing and rates. If we can make it more attractive to grow peas, that would be great.”

Focus on farmers’ needsAll this talk of dual fungicide applications, PGRs and UAN

applications — won’t all this cost too much? Not really, says Strydhorst. A 30-bu./ac. yield increase in wheat more than off-sets the cost of two fungicide applications, for example.

But she cautions this is not simply a checklist of things to do to get higher yield. It’s about helping farmers farm bet-ter by knowing when to push the crop and when to cut their losses. Is the yield potential there? Are the growing conditions looking good enough to apply fungicide a second time? “It’s about knowing your crop and babying it,” says Strydhorst. “It means you can’t take that fishing trip in June or July.”

And farmers are at the forefront of her thinking, with many field days, winter meetings and media outreach plans included as specific project objectives. “If I do this work and farmers don’t know about it, then I’m wasting my time,” she says with a laugh. “The more farmers and agronomists we can talk to about this, the better.”

Strydhorst admits that maybe agronomy research isn’t as flashy as something really high tech, but the difference that advanced agronomy can make to farmers’ yields is what gets her up in the morning. “I want to get farmers excited about agronomy again.” CG

5 8 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a j u l y 2 0 1 4

In search of a good labelOn virtually every pesticide container, it’s written in big, bold letters, “Read the label and booklet before using.” My guess is almost no one complies, and with good reason

t can be a ridiculous request. Labels have become virtual novels. The label for the most widely used pesticide in Canada, glyphosate, can be over 100 pages long. If you tank mix glyphosate with another herbi-

cide such as Pardner, add another 59 pages to your bedtime reading.

Has anyone ever taken the time to read 160 pages of label text before applying their pest con-trol treatment to a single field?

To compound the issue, labels are technical in nature, written in hard metric, and there is no stan-dard format for how the information is presented.

Growers understandably turn to other sources for information about their pest control products. For some, that information may come from their dealer, for others from an agronomist, and for still others it may come from a neighbour. But do even these folks have time to read through hundreds of labels and stay completely abreast of the new infor-mation?

We know that the label contains vital informa-tion about rates, timing, pre-harvest intervals, crop rotation, and restrictions. Get any one of these parameters wrong and you risk poor control, crop damage or residues. You may even put your own safety at risk. Yet between the government’s need to protect us from all risks, and the manufacturer’s need to ensure we use their products correctly, labels have evolved into something that does nei-ther, since they just don’t get read.

Labels have always been a pet peeve of mine. In addition to their sheer length and difficult lan-guage, there are a couple issues that really stand out as impediments to the proper application of pesticides. The first is the following statement found on the vast majority of products:

“Refer to the tank-mix partner label for use directions, restrictions and precautions.”

In modern weed control we rarely use one pes-ticide, but rather tank mix two or more products. Unfortunately many manufacturers make tank mixing a daunting task by failing to provide full instructions on their labels. Instead, they take the approach of demanding farmers find and read the tank-mix partner label themselves.

I do not want to pick on a single product, since this is a very common practice in the industry, but Evito fungicide serves as a good example. Suppose you have powdery mildew in your durum wheat and choose Evito to take care of it. The Evito label states it cannot be used alone but must be tank mixed with another fungicide, such as Folicur.

Yet the Evito label includes no instructions for using Folicur except “Refer to the tank-mix partner label for use directions, restrictions and precau-tions. When EVITO 480 SC Fungicide is used in combination with other fungicides, always follow the most restrictive label restrictions and precau-tions.” This means growers must find a label for Folicur and read through that 17-page Folicur document in order to know how to apply Evito to their wheat crop. Again, I did not want to focus on Evito, a very effective fungicide, but it is a good example of what can be found on literally hun-dreds of labels.

In defence of pesticide manufacturers, it’s easy to understand why they are unwilling to include complete tank-mix partner instructions on their labels. Pesticide labels are already massive and the inclusion of full details on each tank-mix partner would bloat these out of control. Manufacturers also worry that there could be changes on the label of the tank-mix partner product, which would demand that they reflect those changes on their own product labels. When you have over 40 tank-mix partner products listed on your label, as is the case with a product such as Horizon, a manu-facturer could be in a position where it needs to rewrite its label every few months.

To avoid this responsibility, they simply demand that we read the label for the tank-mix partner, effectively shifting the burden onto the farmer.

The second major issue with modern pesticide labels is that information is not organized in a standardized industry format but is often scattered throughout the label, requiring us to read the entire label if we want to be certain we have all the neces-sary information.

Labels have evolved over time as more crops, tank mixes, and application methods are added. While manufacturers have done a commendable

P r o d u c t i o n

By Warren Libby, Savvy Farmer

Cr op pr oteCt ion

p r o d u c t i o n

job of adding new uses to labels, less thought has been given to how information is organized, mak-ing them a Mensa-like exercise to actually figure out precisely how to apply the product. Again, not to pick on a single pesticide, I will use the example of the very popular product Roundup Weather-MAX here. Let’s say you want to use Weather-MAX to control certain weeds in your soybeans. You would need to wade through that lengthy label and pull information from the following sections.

Page 14 — Mixing instructionsPage 18 — Buffer zonesPage 19 — Weeds controlledPage 31 — Surfactant informationPage 37 — Application rates and notesPage 41 — Tank mixes for soybeansPage 58 — Aerial application instructionsPage 70 — Broadcast and spot

treatment instructionsPage 71 — Application details and

PHI for tank mixes Page 77 — Spot treatments in soybeansPage 80 — Pre-harvest treatments

While Monsanto does a better job than most at providing information about tank-mix partners, it still does not provide enough, and demands that users “Consult the XXX Herbicide label for tank mixing instructions and use precautions including instructions on replanting to other crops.” So as noted above, in addition to reading that 101 page glyphosate label, you should also be reading the label for the tank-mix partner.

Manufacturers will continue to add more crops, pests, and instructions to labels, as they should. Health Canada will continue to demand more information be included to protect human health and the environment, as it should. Both are doing their jobs, yet that results in labels getting longer, more challenging to read, and more dif-ficult to follow.

It’s time for the pest control industry, led by the industry association CropLife Canada, to show some leadership on this issue. If the industry is genuinely interested in the proper and safe use of pest control products, it needs to make it easier for farmers to fol-low the rules. CG

j u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 5 9

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BRITISH COLUMBIAAug. 10-16: Mostly sunny and warm over-all apart from scattered shower activity. Often hot in the interior with sporadic thundershowers. Aug. 17-23: A few cooler nights but oth-erwise seasonable to warm. Sunny overall other than showers or thundershowers on a couple of days.Aug. 24-30: Seasonal to warm in spite of a few cooler nights. Generally fair aside from isolated shower or thundershower activity in a few areas. Aug. 31-Sept. 6: Frost pockets in some northern areas and at higher levels. Oth-erwise seasonal to warm. Fair skies except for rain on a couple of days.Sept. 7-13: Fair skies alternate with some rain. Frost patches inland and at higher elevations. Seasonal to warm with brisk winds at times.

ALBERTAAug. 10-16: Generally sunny with sea-sonal to warm temperatures. Showers or heavier thunderstorms occur on a couple of days. Aug. 17-23: Pleasant temperatures most of the week but with a few cooler nights. Sunny but expect showers or thunder-storms at times.Aug. 24-30: Patchy frost at higher eleva-tions and north but otherwise seasonal to warm temperatures. Showers or rain on a couple of days.Aug. 31-Sept. 6: Cooler nights bring a frost risk to many areas, especially north and on higher ground. Fair apart from scattered rain or showers.

Sept. 7-13: Changeable as fair skies and gusty winds interchange with rain. Variable temperatures with frost in several areas.

SASKATCHEWANAug. 10-16: Highs crest in the 20s most days under considerable sunshine. Show-ers or thundershowers occur on a couple of days.Aug. 17-23: Expect a couple of cooler nights but highs average close to normal. Sunny with a few passing showers or thun-derstorms.Aug. 24-30: Fair skies and seasonal to warm but a couple of cooler, blustery days bring showers and scattered thunder-storms, especially in southeast. Aug. 31-Sept. 6: Fair overall aside from scattered shower activity. Frost threatens on a couple of nights, mainly central and north.Sept. 7-13: Variable temperatures and weather. Some lows near zero south. Occa-sional frost north. Fair skies alternate with rain.

MANITOBAAug. 10-16: Seasonal to occasionally cool. Mostly sunny aside from some shower or thunderstorm activity on a couple of days.Aug. 17-23: Sunshine dominates but look for some showers or thunderstorms on two or three occasions. Highs often crest in the 20s but cooler nights.Aug. 24-30: Sunny skies and near-normal temperatures on most days but a couple of cooler, blustery days bring showers and thundershowers.Aug. 31-Sept. 6: Pleasant temperatures

under sunshine on many days but some rain on one or two occasions. Cool nights with some lows near zero.Sept. 7-13: Temperatures vary with frost at several localities, especially central and north. Fair overall apart from scattered rain. Windy at times.

w e a t h e rw e a t h e r


August 10 to September 13, 2014

NEAR-NORMAL TEMPERATURESAND RAINFALL

WARMERTHAN

NORMALAVERAGERAINFALL

CoolFrosty

CoolWet

spells

Occasionalrain

Chang

eabl

e

Show

ery

WarmDry

spellsVariableShowery

Prepared by meteorologist Larry Romaniuk of Weatherite Services. Forecasts should be 80 per cent accurate for your area; expect variations by a day or two due to changeable speed of weather systems.

August 10 to September 13, 2014NATIONAL HIGHLIGHTSSummer is expected to linger in British Columbia well into September as warm and relatively dry conditions envelop the West. In contrast, cooler-than-usual weather is anticipated in central portions of the coun-try stretching from southeast Saskatchewan to the southern half of Manitoba and much of northwest Ontario. The cool temperatures are likely to be accompanied by occasional wet spells resulting in above-normal rainfall. Across the rest of Canada warm, dry days are expected to be offset by cooler, wet out-breaks. As a result, temperatures and rainfall amounts should average out close to normal over much of the Prairies as well as most of Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. Typical of our climate in Canada, frost will make its first appearance in September in many parts of the country. An emerging El Niño is not likely to bring any significant changes to our weather pattern before this fall or early winter.

NEAR NORMAL MILDER THAN NORMAL

COOLER THAN NORMAL

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Education

There was a time when practical skills and hard work were enough to be a successful farmer. With increasing farm size and complexity, those days are gone.

“There are successful business owners with very little education, and I believe that is still possible, but the law of averages says there are very few really exceptional people out there,” explains Rich-ard Cressman, a farm business management coach in New Hamburg, Ont.

Gordon Colledge, a farm adviser in Lethbridge, Alta., agrees. While some children return to the farm with excellent practical skills such as weld-ing or operating equipment, Colledge says that this isn’t enough. It’s essential that the successor also understand the business side of the farm, including relationship management, resolving conflict with siblings and in-laws, and being an all-around effec-tive communicator, says Colledge.

“And he or she also needs to have a good grasp of the farm’s finances,” Colledge says. “If they wait until they meet with the accountant after the annual statement it may be too late.”

In a perfect world, Cressman favours a degree or diploma in business with a minor in communi-cations as the ideal academic preparation for farm-

ing. With more people involved in the farm, being a good communicator is more important than ever, he explains.

“The successful family figures out how to build communication into the management structure,” Cressman says.

Dr. David Kohl, a professor at Virginia Tech University, agrees that communication skills have become increasingly important for farm owners. Farmers need to be able to work with staff and family internally, but also externally with bankers, regulators, consumers and others.

One of the values of education is learning to be a good student, says Colledge. Farmers will need to be lifelong learners so they can keep up to date on the fast-paced changes coming to agriculture. They need to be taking advantage of courses and confer-ences, he says.

Reg Shandro agrees. A mediator in Red Deer, Alta., Shandro says other professionals are expected to participate in a minimum of 30 or 40 hours of professional development every year to stay current. Why not farmers? he asks.

By attending conferences, young farmers can also develop a network of like-minded peers who can act as a resource and sounding board, adds John Anderson, a farm adviser with Collins Barrow WCM LLP in Kingston, Ont.

Set them up for successSo your son or daughter wants to take over the farm. How can you help them succeed?

With more than half of Canada’s farmers over the age of 55, it’s estimated that $50 billion worth of

farmland will change hands in the next 10 to 15 years.

What will it take for the next generation to be successful? How important is education? What skills will be

essential? How can young people best prepare themselves for this new role?

We asked five experts from Canada and the u.S. to weigh in with their thoughts on these critical questions.

l i f e


ExpEriEncE

All of the advisers we consulted agree that in an ideal world, the successor should work away from the farm for three to five years. While many par-ents are eager to have the kids show commitment by working on the home farm, the long-term ben-efits from the experience and maturity gained while working away from home are substantial. Certainly they outweigh the short-term labour benefits of hav-ing an extra pair of young hands working at home.

A Cornell University study showed succession was twice as likely to be successful, and profits were three to five times higher, when the succes-sor worked away from the farm, says Kohl. “They need to learn to take orders from someone else,” he explains. “And parents will have more respect for them.”

Cressman agrees. “They need that time away in order for Mom and Dad to stop seeing their son or daughter as their little girl or boy.”

That time away gives the successor time to mature and to know if they really want to farm, adds Shandro. And they can make their mistakes using someone else’s money, he adds.

If the son or daughter says they want to farm but there is some doubt, rather than spending money expanding the operation to accommodate the child, have them work on another farm to see how they like it, suggests Shandro. “They can pick up skills and be mentored… the door is open for them to come back in five years.”

Some parents worry that if the child works else-where they won’t come back. Kohl’s response is to tell parents to concentrate on building up a really attractive business so the child wants to come back.

l i f e


Managing risk

Parents are wise to have an honest discussion with their offspring to determine their motivation for taking over the farm. Sometimes the child wants to work on the farm but is not interested in a manage-ment position, says Kohl. A neutral third party can help identify these situations.

One of the difficulties with the succession process is that when a son or daughter enters the business there is no job application process and no evalua-tion. “Just because someone has the same last name or DNA doesn’t mean they will be a good manager,” explains Anderson.

Both the successor and the parents should have job descriptions and performance reviews, adds Kohl.

Parents often have difficulty evaluating the suitabil-ity of their progeny for taking over the farm. He finds they are often biased, either positively or negatively.

The founder’s ego can also get in the way, says Shandro. They may overestimate their own abilities at that age, or the criteria they consider to be impor-tant may be outdated. The founder may even feel threatened by the successor.

A trusted third-party adviser such as a banker or accountant may be able to make a more objective evaluation. They can also help resolve differences when the parents aren’t in agreement, says Kohl.

One of the most important steps in a succes-sion plan is to assess the skills needed, identify any skills gaps and make an action plan for filling those gaps, says Anderson.

One area where kids are often lacking is their understanding of the farm finances. Parents tend to look after the farm finances and as a result the younger generation does not learn what they need to know, explains Anderson. This is one area where the parents may need to mentor the successor.

If the younger generation doesn’t have the neces-sary skills, you can hire these. Anderson gives the following example. There was a farmer who was ill with a terminal condition. While his son had been working in the farm business and was a good reliable worker, the father did not feel he had the necessary management skills or aptitude to run the farm busi-ness. The solution was to hire a farm manager to help the son with the decision-making on the farm.

When grooming the next generation, parents would be wise to avoid spoiling them. There are too many kids who were given new pickup trucks at 16, laments Shan-dro. “It’s very difficult to turn this around,” he says.

Farm succession is tricky business. It’s a very dif-ferent world from when most parents began farming and there are no cookie-cutter templates. Being well prepared and maintaining open lines of communica-tion will take some of the risk out of the process. cg

passionA passion for farming goes a long way toward making a successful farm manager. It will motivate the

younger generation to develop the necessary skills and fill in any knowledge gaps.Taking over out of a sense of obligation doesn’t bode well for success. “If the kid only wants to farm out of

a sense of guilt, it may be better to sell to someone else with a new vision,” argues Colledge.The successor should be coming back to the farm with an offensive rather than defensive mindset, says

Shandro. “If they are retreating to the farm for the lifestyle and because it’s a place of comfort, that’s not good.” He prefers to see people coming back to the farm because they are excited about the opportunities to grow the business.


h e a lt h

A short history of blood thinners

f you or anyone you know takes warfarin, you may feel that you are being treated like a rat, but not so! Warfarin reduces blood clot-ting and it also prevents thromboembolism or blood clots. As well, it reduces the risk for con-

ditions such as strokes caused by atrial fibrillation.It does the same, but is lethal, for pests including

rats and mice.Ideally you want your blood to flow through

your circulatory system. When a blood clot forms, it may “plug” the vessel, resulting in thrombosis, for example deep vein thrombosis or DVT. These clots can occur after joint replacement surgery, if you are bedridden and immobile, or even after a long air-plane flight. If the blood clot dislodges from its origi-nating location, it can travel through the circulation “plugging” other vessels in the lungs, heart or brain. This is known as an embolism and may cause emer-gencies such as heart attacks or strokes.

Blood clotting involves a series of reactions within your body, and much like a domino effect, one reac-tion or step causes another. Heparin and warfarin were until recently the two most commonly used anticoagulants. Both interrupt steps in the coagula-tion process, much like removing a domino in the cascade of steps that leads to a clot.

Heparin is available only as an injectable drug and has a short duration of action. It is ideal for hos-pital use where its dose can be monitored and dose changes can be made quickly. Warfarin, available as oral tablets, is longer acting, and thus it is suitable for your use at home.

Monitoring is essential with both heparin and warfarin because you don’t want your blood either too thin or with too much of a tendency to clot. With warfarin, regular blood tests are needed and your dose is adjusted depending on the international normalizing ratio or INR result.

Too much of an anticoagulant can cause bruis-ing and bleeding, and the antidote, vitamin K, may be needed. Warfarin is associated with a long list of potential drug and food interactions, and its effect can be impacted by drugs that can cause bleeding on their own, for example the non-steroidal anti-inflam-

matory pain relievers, as well as by other medica-tions that interfere with warfarin’s metabolism in the liver and foods that have a high vitamin K content. If you take warfarin, be really aware of what other drugs and foods you can and cannot take.

To prevent clotting after joint replacement, hepa-rin used to be used for several days to weeks after surgery until you were mobile enough so that the risk for clotting had decreased. Heparin required sev-eral injections each day, and this led to researchers developing low molecular weight heparin formula-tions such as enoxaparin and dalteparin. Although these still need to be injected, they only need one injection each day. For the 60,000 Canadians having joint replacement surgery each year, the once daily injection has certainly made recovery easier.

Atrial fibrillation is a heartbeat irregularity that reduces the ability of the heart to pump efficiently. This in turn allows “pooling” of blood and leads to an increased risk of clot formation. This type of arrhythmia is more common than you might think, affecting over 350,000 Canadians, including eight per cent of people over 80 years of age.

Symptoms can be mild, for example palpitations, fainting or chest pain, and they may be attributed to other causes. Increased age, diabetes, high blood pressure, other heart diseases, and even increased alcohol consumption are risk factors. Along with drugs to modify the heartbeat, warfarin is given to prevent clots and stroke. Lifelong treatment is needed along with lifelong blood tests to ensure the warfarin dose is correct.

Recently new blood thinners have been developed that, once the correct dose has been determined, do not need ongoing blood tests, for example rivaroxa-ban, dabigatran and apixaban. Taken orally, these drugs are effective and convenient, especially for con-ditions such as atrial fibrillation, but you still need to watch for bruising. And, even as you are reading this, researchers are looking for more effective and safer anticoagulants!

Marie Berry is a lawyer/pharmacist interested in health and education.

you probably take water for granted, but as the most common component of your body, you shouldn’t. Water or H2O is essential for life, but you may not get enough, and of course with the wide variety of types of water you may be wondering if there is one that is the most suited to overall health. Next issue, we’ll take a look at what science has learned.

By Marie Berry

The meeting is longer and more tedious than usual. A protracted debate about sign-ing officers is followed by a lengthy dis-cussion about the summer meeting. Will it be potluck or catered? Should we plan for indoors or outdoors? Do we want to play some games? A retired school teacher snorts, “And I drove fast to get here on time!”

The death of a longtime member is reported. A motion to donate $25 to his favourite museum creates more debate. Lloyd listens patiently to several speakers before expressing his frustration in vivid language. “The man was a member of this organization for many years. He was 103 when he died, but I am damn sure he would have been gone much earlier if he had attended meetings like this.”

I reflected on how conversation is frequently accentuated with mild profanities. Is there harm in adding the odd obscenity? Does cursing cause people to take us more seriously, or is the “reptil-ian” part of our brain acting up? Profanity can be more than words. We use expressions, gestures or other social behaviours to make our point. The rude, vulgar or obscene often captivates modern culture.

Swearing is an ancient practice. The Third Commandment, deliv-ered to Moses 5,000 years ago, says, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Cursing is more than including cultur-ally or socially unacceptable words in daily conversation. God is often the object of bad language, an easy target to express dissatisfac-tion. Cursing crosses a line when used to demean another individual.

Corb Lund, an Alberta country music icon, sings about down-to-the-bone emotions. A phrase in his song “Cows Around” caught my attention.

May you always have cows aroundWhat else you gonna spend that extra money onWhat else is gonna get you up hours before dawnWhat else is gonna keep you toiling on and on and onMay you always have cows aroundC’mon you know that you got too much time on your handsNot merely enough complication in your plansYou need to invite all the frustration that you can…May you always have cows aroundWhat else can make the bishop swear like a sailor might?I can think of more than a few things to make a bishop swear.

But does it do any good? My grandfather operated a ranch in central Alberta. When things did not go well, he would say, “It is enough to make a preacher swear.” Yes, I need to hear and respond to my own sermons.

Mark Zuehlke in his book ScoundrelS, dreamerS and Second SonS tells the story of a man named Majoribanks who ranched in the interior of British Columbia. Majoribanks used strong language while loading cattle onto a train for shipping to market. “Majorib-anks peppered his commands with a string of obscenities, all issued at a bellow that carried far on the early-morning air. The Presbyterian minister, a Mr. Langill, happened along, and, mortified by Majorib-anks’ language, strode over to the big man.” “Really, Mr. Majorib-anks,” he said, “don’t you think that a man in your position should be showing a better example to the men in your employment?”

“Hell, man!” exploded Majoribanks. “I’m not teaching a Sunday school. I’m loading cattle, and I’m giving the boys the best example I can. And I’ll bet that Noah swore when he was loading his animals into the ark.”

Suggested Scripture: Psalm 32, James 5:12Rod Andrews is a retired Anglican bishop. He lives in Saskatoon.


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ale’s shift running the swather was finally over. He’d never been so glad to see a truck pull into the field.

He was sh i r t l e s s when he climbed down from the cab to

switch off with his son Jeff. “I had to strip down to stand it in there,” Dale said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his T-shirt before he pulled it on. “If I was a dog, somebody would report this to the SPCA.”

This was the second day the Hansons had been swathing canola with no air conditioning. This was also the second day the service manager at the deal-ership had said he could send someone out “tomor-row.” With only one swather and two sections of ripening canola, the Hansons couldn’t wait. Dale had been baking in the heat all morning.

Dale’s father Ed had claimed to be too busy to take a shift in the swather, but he did have time for an opinion. “I can’t believe all this complaining,” Ed said. “I remember when the neighbours thought we were crazy just to pay for a cab.”

“At least you got a breeze without a cab,” Jeff said. “You could see that breeze, it was so full of

dust,” Ed retorted. “They make these cabs today so the windows

don’t open. We can throw the door open, but we’re

basically sitting out in the sun in a glass box. We should rent out space to grow tomatoes in there.”

Ed looked disgusted. “Lazing around with your stereos and your drink holders. You kids have no idea.” Then he smelled Dale. “Ah geez. I don’t know if I even want you riding back to the yard in my truck. Hurry up and get in. We should take the com-bine out and see if that winter wheat is ready to go.”

Jeff carried his cooler up the steps to the cab and took one last breath of outside air. “Elaine tried to get me to bring out a roast in a Tupper-ware container,” he said. “She thought it might cook faster than in the Crock-Pot.”

Jeff’s wife Elaine had taken her shift in the sauna of the swather the day before, while her mother-in-law watched the kids. Now, Elaine was waiting for her guests to arrive.

Over the past year, Elaine had been spending more and more time learning about farm policy. She’d joined a farm group’s working committee, made sev-eral trips to Saskatoon and Regina for meetings, and stayed up after the kids went to bed so she could read reports and sit in on conference calls. When one of the board members had phoned earlier in the week to ask a favour, Elaine agreed right away.

“A busload of Chinese farmers is stopping by on Tuesday afternoon,” she’d announced that

Interpret this!When the busload of Chinese farmers arrives on tour, they see more than any of the Hansons had planned

By Leeann Minogue

a c r e s

morning when most of the Hansons were out in the shop, looking over the combine. “They’re excited to see a Prairie harvest.” When another Saskatch-ewan farmer on the schedule had cancelled, the Hansons happened to be near the group’s route.

“A busload?” Ed said. “They’ve got so many people they’re shipping them over by the busload now?”

“They’re on a learning tour,” Elaine said, more patiently than might have been expected. “They’re stopping to see as many Prairie farms as they can.” Elaine was proud to be included, pleased to have a chance to show off the Hanson farm and to be part of an international farm network.

“They’ll spread disease from coast to coast,” Ed said.

“I checked,” Elaine said. “They’re following protocol. They’ve even got those disposable plastic booties.”

“I don’t like it,” Ed said. “What if they learn something?”

“That’s why they’re coming,” Elaine said. “Exactly. They’ll go home and grow more

wheat. So they won’t have to buy ours.” The rest of the Hansons weren’t sure exactly

how to answer that. They knew Ed was being ridic-ulous, but it was hard to find a flaw in his logic.

“We’re pretty busy, Elaine,” her father-in-law said. “I’m not sure we have time to be tour guides.”

“They’re bringing their own guide,” Elaine said. “And an interpreter.”

“Elaine and I talked about this, Dad,” Jeff said. “We’ll shut down for 10 or 15 minutes so they can get a good look at the machinery, then we’ll get back to work. It won’t hurt us to take a break. I’m kind of looking forward to showing them how we do things.”

“I’ve heard the rumours in town about how much farmland is being sold to Chinese buy-ers,” Ed said. “If one of those guys puts his hand up, don’t nod. He might be placing a bid on this place.”

Nobody bothered to reply to this. “The planners at the Chinese Embassy have been

giving me a lot of information,” Elaine said. “These people are used to a lot of formal protocol. I told them we’d do the best we can, but they might have to take what they get, visiting a grain farm at harvest.”

“No kidding they’ll take what they get,” Ed said. “I’m not getting all dressed up for a busload of farmers.”

“You’ll be polite, Dad,” Dale said. “Don’t worry,” Elaine said. “I’ll warn the inter-

preter not to translate everything she hears! Their driver said they’d be here between 2 and 2:30. I’ll

make sure I’m in the yard to meet them, then I’ll phone you guys to let you know when we’re com-ing out to the field.

The bus pulled into the Hansons’ yard at exactly 2:15.

After she showed them the yard and the machinery in the sheds, Elaine got on the bus and guided the driver out to the south winter wheat field, where she was pleased to see the combine already stopped next to the grain truck. She wasn’t as pleased when she heard Ed and Dale cursing. As Ed used his angriest language to explain how he’d plugged the feederhouse going through a green patch, Elaine watched the young interpreter turn every shade of red, from salmon pink all the way through to fire hydrant. Elaine hoped the woman didn’t understand all of the words he was using.

Elaine was sure things would go better when they went to see Jeff on the swather. He’d phoned her earlier to tell her he’d prepared a talk. “I’ve been repeating it over and over to myself,” he said, “so I’ll get it right. I’ve been thinking so hard, I could barely pay attention to the field! Call me when you’re coming.”

Elaine was so flustered after dealing with Ed, she forgot to phone Jeff. Luckily, the swather was at the edge of the field when Jeff saw the bus, so he pulled over right away.

Once they were off the bus, Elaine faced the group and had the interpreter translate. “This is my husband,” she said proudly. “He’s a fourth-gen-eration farmer, keeping up the family tradition.” Elaine watched the delegates while the translator spoke, but they just stared, open mouthed. One man giggled. A woman pointed. Elaine turned to see Jeff walking toward them, smiling. He’d com-pletely forgotten that while he was practising his speech in the sweltering cab, he’d stripped right down to his faded-green boxer shorts. CG

Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews, a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan

j u l y 2 0 1 4 c o u n t r y - g u i d e . c a 6 7

Ed claimed to be too busy to take a shift in the swather, but he did have time to offer an opinion

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