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Peer to Peer These farmers connect across borders PG. 22
The new path to farming Mark bernard sees his future beyond old crops PG. 16
CROPS GUIDE Clubroot: Yes, you can slow it down Coming: 52 bu./ac. canola crops WHEAT: Connect Rail + Elevators
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Contents
november 2015
BUSINESS 8
the right price A “battleground year” lies ahead, says market adviser Errol Anderson. But there will be profitable prices for good marketers.
12 full classes
Agriculture is the hot new program on campus, with booming enrolments and a surge in corporate funding.
22 Sometimes the best advice…
These farmers cross borders to meet farmers with similar operations, seeking fresh insights and new opportunities.
25 Peer groups
Peer groups aren’t new to industry, we learn in this month’s AME Management column. But they are new on more farms.
26 better employees
Giving your employees training opportunities really can be good for your farm, in both the short and long term
31 Guide HR — A simple way to get more done
The secret, says work psychologist Pierrette Desrosiers, is that the more limits you put on your schedule, the more you will achieve.
34 Weather Derivatives
At last, these new risk-management contracts are getting easier to price and evaluate.
52 home on the range
Sure, you’re tough. But could you ranch on this almost forgotten corner of southwestern Saskatchewan?
58 behind closed doors
New Holland takes machinery editor Scott Garvey on an eye-opening tour of the secure Pennsylvania R&D lab.
PG. 16 The New Way into farming We looked at the lists of college and university award winners from a decade ago to whether they’re succeeding at establishing their farms. What we found surprised us.
60 the great threat of 2015
Undeclared use of Clever and Manipulator may pose serious risk to our exports, and a bankruptcy risk to individual farmers.
CROPS GUIDE
65 he knows the weather
Meet our Larry Romaniuk, Country Guide’s long-range farm weather forecaster.
66
g uide life — About the Neighbours
Guide field editor Lisa Guenther based her acclaimed new novel in her own rural community. How good an idea was that?
EVERY ISSUE 6 MACHINERY GUIDE
Fendt’s Vario 500 tractors finally arrive in Canada.
68 GUIDE HEALTH
Arthritis may seem inevitable, but here are strategies that help.
70 HANSON ACRES If birthday cake tastes so great outdoors, so why not bring the outdoors into the kitchen? The Hansons find out… again.
37 clubroot marches on
The canola disease keeps leaping across the West, yet some farmers who scout are keeping it at bay.
42 boosting bread with barley
Barley may reduce the risk of heart disease and some cancers.
44 a big stretch
The Canola Council sets a goal of 52 bushels per acre by 2025. Is that possible on your farm?
46 winter canola catches on down south
Weather hasn’t helped, but U.S. interest continues to grow.
48 ‘What? Where? I don’t see anything…’
The payoff for early pest detection makes scouting worthwhile.
50 do we still need a transportation co-ordinator?
Maybe the timing of farm shipments really did boost prices.
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november 2015
country-guide.ca 3
desk EDITORIAL STAFF Editor: Tom Button 12827 Klondyke Line, Ridgetown, ON N0P 2C0 (519) 674-1449 Fax (519) 674-5229 Email: tom.button@fbcpublishing.com Associate Editors: Gord Gilmour (204) 453-7624 Cell: (204) 294-9195 Fax (204) 942-8463 Email: gord.gilmour@fbcpublishing.com Maggie Van Camp Fax (905) 986-9991 (905) 986-5342 Email: mvancamp@fbcpublishing.com Production Editor: Ralph Pearce (226) 448-4351 Email: ralph.pearce@fbcpublishing.com ADVERTISING SALES Sales Director: Cory Bourdeaud’hui (204) 954-1414 Fax: (204) 944-5562 Email: cory@fbcpublishing.com Kevin Yaworsky (250) 869-5326 Email: kyaworsky@farmmedia.com Lillie Ann Morris (905) 838-2826 Email: lamorris@xplornet.com
Tom Button is editor of Country Guide magazine
It wasn’t my best week I had been invited to speak to some accountants and lawyers who work largely in agricultural practices, and while it was clear we wouldn’t agree on everything, I thought we’d share support for one theme that I’ve been banging away at for as long as I’ve held this position. I showed them a list. I’ll show it to you too. It’s a list I put together with Country Guide writers and some farmers who are very plugged in. The list could easily be longer, but includes: • David Kohl at Virginia Tech • S cott Irwin, Darrell Good and Gary Schnitkey at the University of Illinois, including their FarmDoc newsletters • M ike Duffy and William Edwards of Iowa State with their Ask an Economist • Danny Klinefelter at Texas A&M • Chris Hurt at Purdue • Frayne Olson at North Dakota State Likely, you have heard some of these names, but I encourage you to Google them all and roam their websites. These are American ag economists in the U.S. land-grant-based university system who research and write about solutions to the real challenges facing their farmers, and strategies for seizing new opportunities. Much of their thinking applies north of the border too, and even when it might not, it is good for spurring some interesting thinking of our own. Now, show me your Canadian list. If it has any names at all, it won’t have many. 4 country-guide.ca
I raise this because of the respect I have for the brainpower and training of the people who make up our Ag Ec Departments, and because I have such faith in the value of the work that they would do if they could find the funding to free themselves from their reliance on trade and policy analysis. Clearly, when they have the opportunity, their thinking here is eye opening, empowering and invigorating. I also say it because, as you know, I also believe the real power driving agriculture is the individual farmer, making decisions one decision at a time. My discussion at the meeting I mentioned didn’t get far, though, and predictably, one audience member thought he had to educate me on the differences between our universities as if that would explain why we can fund weed science and soil science, but not farm management. As I say, it wasn’t my best week. But take my challenge. Go to those websites, especially if you’re a mid-career or young farmer. I promise to move on to other topics. In today’s agriculture, there’s no end of things to write about. But I admit I hold on to the hope that we could spend a sliver more for research and extension on farm business management the way we fund farm production. Have I been on the right path? After you check out their websites, send me a note at tom.button@ fbcpublishing.com.
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ISSN 0847-9178 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.
november 2015
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Machinery
By Scott Garvey, CG Machinery Editor
Fendt 500 Vario tractors finally arrive in Canada These long-awaited compact models are meant to appeal to mixed farming operations still a minor player in the Canadian and U.S. market. Nevertheless, their North American marketing rep said the company saw potential to grow the brand here. The 500 Varios, we three North American writers were told, would play a key role in that expansion, just not right away. Before the 500s could land on Canadian and U.S. shores, engineers had more work to do. Basically, a second version of the tractors had to be designed and built to meet North American engineering standards, which are significantly different than those in Europe. And that would take a bit of time. Fast-forward to August of this year and AGCO used the U.S. Farm Progress Show in Illinois as the venue to finally announce the arrival of the four-model, 125- to 165-horsepower 500s in North America. So was this year’s North American introduction a case of better late than never, or was it impeccable timing? Given that competing brands have been busy introducing similar tractors with compact chassis and ample horsepower, all designed to cash in on the strong, specific demands of mixed farming operations, you could argue the latter. Tractors like that which offer higher horsepower in a manoeuvrable, compact package and bring down high-end features from their more powerful brothers have been the showpieces at manufacturers’ product launches all summer. That is exactly what the 500 Series is: high-spec models whose horse-
The 500 Vario tractors offer higher horsepower in a smaller chassis to make them more manoeuvrable around the farmyard but still powerful enough to do some field chores. 6 country-guide.ca
november 2015
Photography: AGCO
The CargoProfi loader designed for the 500 Vario line offers the kind of high-end sophistication you’d expect from AGCO’s premium tractor brand.
t was September 27, 2012, in Marktoberdorf, Germany when executives at AGCO’s Fendt brand gave the world its first official look at their all-new tractor series, the 500 Vario, which offered bigger-than-expected horsepower crammed into a small chassis. During the official launch ceremony a band played as the door at the end of the factory assembly line opened and a 516 Vario model drove out into the centre of an applauding, admiring crowd. That ceremony was blended with the grand opening of Fendt’s updated and expanded tractor assembly plant in that small Bavarian city. The new plant provided the capacity to boost production levels from about 14,000 tractors per year to around 21,000, which surpassed the then-existing level of demand and gave the company room to grow production to meet potential future sales volumes. It was the height of the commodity price boom, so things were still looking pretty rosy in the new equipment market. It meant company executives had a lot to talk about that day with their invited guests, which included several members of the farm media. Most of those guests and reporters were from Europe, where the 500 Vario tractors were about to start landing on dealer lots, and there were only three of us who represented North American ag publications. We were there at AGCO’s invitation, but executives acknowledged that the Fendt brand was then
power range overlaps that of the largerframed 700 Series. “The Fendt 500 is versatile enough for a wide range of applications work, from light chores to field work,” said Josh Keeney, AGCO Fendt tactical marketing manager, in a press release. “It’s an efficient tractor that provides unrivalled competitive advantages from a tractor of its size.” Fendt is AGCO’s premium tractor brand, offering high-end features. So not surprisingly the CargoProfi loaders built to bolt onto the 500 Series are high end too, including features like hydraulic lift-height pre-set controls that allow the operator to bring the bucket up to a pre-set position with the push of a button. And the loader has a built-in load-sensing feature, giving the operator a readout of the amount of weight in the bucket. That could be handy if you are mixing feed rations. The loader functions are integrated into the tractor’s Varioterminal monitor. Inside the VisioPlus cab operators get a pretty comfortable work environment. The cab itself comes with a stan-
When this 516 Vario drove out the factory door behind it, it signalled the introduction of the 500 Vario Series in Europe. The Canada and U.S. launch had to wait until the tractors underwent a homologation process to meet North American engineering standards. Photo: Scott Garvey dard pneumatic self-levelling suspension to smoothe out the ride. Brand literature calls the cab interior “spacious” and “revolutionary.” That last description may be a bit over the top, but the cab is nice. Now with the addition of the 500 Vario Series, the other green brand offers
tractor options through the main 125- to 390-horsepower range, but it still lacks a competitor in the high-horsepower category. However, the 500-horsepower 1000 Series introduced in Germany last year is expected to eventually arrive here as well and fill that gap. CG
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november 2015
country-guide.ca 7
business
the right price A ‘battleground year’ is how analyst Errol Anderson sees 2016. Prices will be profitable… sometimes… but success will only come to producers who rein in their emotions By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor
t isn’t only agriculture. China has become the world’s largest market for an incredibly long list of commodities. Consider the manufacturing industry, for example, where the Chinese generate roughly half of global demand — they use 54 per cent of global aluminum production, 50 per cent of nickel, 48 per cent of copper and 46 per cent of steel. It’s no wonder that 2015 has become the year of China, with the whole world watching its financial upheavals, stock market corrections and other gyrations. As China ratchets its growth down, the result has been lower demand and the emergence of a multisectoral bear market in commodities. Global grain is no exception, says market analyst Errol Anderson. Chinese buyers might represent a smaller market share in these commodities — they’re roughly 20 per cent of global wheat demand, for example — but they’re still significant enough to knock demand down another notch within a market that is already struggling with supply. This is a sea change after a number of years of buoyant demand from growing economies and the imposition of ethanol mandates for vehicle fuels. That was a secular bull market. This is a secular bear, working its way through the excesses of the bull. That process always takes some time, and the farmer who understands the reality of where the market cycle is will be better positioned to grab profitable pricing opportunities when they appear, which they always do. On the other hand, Anderson warns, the farmer who hangs on expecting the bull to come roaring back may be disappointed, hanging on and hoping for better prices that never come, and in the end selling for less than if they’d had a plan and stuck to it. 8 country-guide.ca
COUNTRY GUIDE: Tell us a bit about the personality of the market right now. What do farmers need to understand in order to make a marketing plan that works? Errol Anderson: Key trade and economic wars are beginning to develop. There’s a global vegetable oil war going on between soy and palm oil exporters battling for market share, there’s a wheat price war going on between the U.S. and Russia as they battle for market share, and likewise there’s a battle for market share among oil producers. All this is combining to produce a strong undertow for all commodities, which really means we have to keep price expectations in check. On top of these trade skirmishes, there is also a global currency war ongoing right now. Central bankers continue their rush to print money in an effort to devalue their currencies and make their economies and exports more competitive globally. It’s actually a battle for the bottom. Who can devalue their currency the most? Demand is everything right now, and it’s not strong. I really think that 2016 is shaping up to be a battleground year. That’s going to keep commodities of all types, including grains, under a lot of price pressure. november 2015
business
CG: More than once I’ve heard you say that falling markets are more predictable than rising markets — now that we’re in one, what should we expect? EA: That’s really going to be the key thing for farmers to get their heads around right now. The plain truth is that bear markets always last longer than bulls. Bull markets charge ahead, but you can’t really predict where the peak is going to be — most times you only recognize the peak once it’s past, and when it is past, it can pass quickly and prices can move down even quicker. A bear market, on the other hand, lasts on average twice as long as a bull, and you can see the bottom. Prices typically head down to where they originally came from. You can see this on the charts. It goes down and trades sideways for weeks, at times for months. That’s where we’re at right now. Commodity prices in general are going to trade sideways to lower for much of 2016 — but I don’t want to say there won’t be opportunities to price grain profitably. There will be, there always are, even in bear markets. But for a farmer the important thing is going to be to understand that we’re in a bear market. Commodity prices can occasionally break higher, but those opportunities will be fleeting. Farm marketers need to be ready to move when the opportunities present themselves. If they’re not, profitable pricing may be missed. In this new economic environment, believing that bear markets are simply temporary and that higher prices will reassert themselves takes on a much higher degree of risk for the grower. Prices will not be as responsive as global markets work through these economic issues. There will be short-term opportunities — like the weather market we saw in early summer when farmers and traders were concerned about drought. But these events are opportunities to price profits. Production was an unknown making cash contracting a risky business. But there are market tools out there like put options that don’t expose you to delivery commitments. The key heading forward is for the grower to be ready to move on rebounds and profitable pricing opportunities. Remaining paralyzed while you wait for prices to recover to past levels may be self-defeating. You can really see this occur in any market. It’s a common error whether it’s a real estate investor or a grain producer, and one you can’t afford to make in the current global environment.
CG: Why do market cycles always repeat? Where are we globally in terms of the markets? What are the knowns and unknowns? EA: Market cycles always repeat because markets are simply made up of people and their emotions. november 2015
As a result, they are somewhat predictable. We are all human, and markets reflect emotions that swing between fear and greed. This is natural, but it must be respected. When markets experience a sudden setback, the greed that contributed to the market rise is quickly replaced by hope that prices will recover. Then, as prices continue their descent, these emotions are replaced by fear. And if the drop continues, panic selling can set in, driving prices even lower. This is natural, but you don’t want to get caught up in it. These emotional market swings directly impact the profitability and success of a business. And 2016 will already be challenging enough in all markets, including global grains. When assessing commodity markets, we really need to understand what’s affecting economies globally. In a very real way, we’re still working through the after-effects of the global financial crisis of 2008. At the time it was said that we were potentially facing another Depression. But central banks really pulled out all the stops with tools like quantitative easing, which is money printing and lowering interest rates in an attempt to kick-start inflation and the economy. These strategies served to kick the can down the road. But we’re simply not out of the woods yet, and I really don’t think we’re going to see the Federal Reserve increasing U.S. interest rates for the foreseeable future. There’s simply too much market contagion risk for the Fed to follow through on raising rates — though it’s made the wrong decision in the past, so anything is possible. What markets are going through right now is eerily similar to 1937, and students of economic history can tell you that was a very significant year when rates were hiked prematurely. This decision choked economic recovery, prolonging the Depression until the outbreak of the Second World War. Right now there really is little inflationary pressure, but increasing deflation risks. Central bankers really fear deflation because they can’t combat it. Consumers reinforce it by delaying purchases. This can become a deflationary spiral because it feeds on itself forcing prices to drop — a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right now, we have a lot of unused capacity in electronic manufacturing. And the price of consumer electronics is dropping globally. In fact, the cost of an Apple iPhone, for example, may actually drop over the next year as global competition heats up from Asia. For a farm in Canada, inputs are impacted by supply and demand and the value of the Canadian dollar. It’s possible some input prices may decline as a result of these deflationary pressures, but we may also need the added push of a gain in the loonie. Continued on page 10 country-guide.ca 9
business
Continued from page 9
CG: You’ve said you think market volatility, especially in a down market, is a good thing. Why is that? EA: That’s where you find profitable pricing opportunities in these sort of markets. Farmers often fear volatility, and find it stressful, when really they should be embracing it. Without periods of market volatility, they wouldn’t likely have many opportunities to price grain profitably. But it needs a trigger of some sort — weather or political unrest, for example — that causes buyers to become concerned about supply and speculators to buy the market. This can lead to sharply higher prices but often with a short shelf life. Without volatility, commodity prices would just trade sideways, potentially at unprofitable levels for long periods of time. So when price volatility heats up, farmers should embrace it and plan for it. They should understand what their cost of production is, and have a price that they’ll execute on. Doing this will take a lot of the emotion out of their marketing decisions. And a plan supports their profitability and future goals for their farm business. If price volatility is high, this can generate some attractive profits, particularly during heated weather markets when prices often surge well above their true economic value. CG: In this sort of environment, what are some of the common marketing mistakes producers make? EA: There’s a handful of common errors that any marketer should do their best to avoid and to not fall prey to. There’s seeking the highest price possible, which is an admirable goal but highly unrealistic. What’s much more likely to happen is they’ll hold their grain too long, miss the peak, and ultimately sell into a falling market. Often the price achieved here is less than if they had sold following their marketing plan. Let’s take canola for example. The cash market through the early fall was hovering around $10 per bushel, and an efficient producer might have a cost of production of $7 a bushel — there’s profit there. Within the last couple of years, canola bids have been as high as $14 per bushel. But holding out for higher bids later in the crop year is always a gamble. Given the turndown in economies, chances of canola rallying toward past heights are slim at best. The best decision may be to lock that profit. There’s also the thinking that if farmers don’t get the price they want, grain should just be stored. This strategy just works once in a while, but the truth is, it could be a long wait. There’s lost opportunity cost not getting needed cash flow, as well as risk of theft and spoilage. They’re assuming a lot of non-price 10 country-guide.ca
risk by storing grain. And in my mind, they should be planning to market their grain in the same crop year they harvest it. Another error may be assuming the market owes you a higher price because you got it before. But the truth is, markets today are about what the buyer is willing to pay. In the commodity world, we are now in a demand-driven price structure. And what you sold for last year is meaningless. During lean times, good managers and marketers distinguish themselves. Marketers who can take emotion out of the decision-making process and conduct business in a clear-eyed fashion set themselves up for success, especially when conditions improve.
CG: You’ve always told me there’s a difference between being a farm speculator and a farm business manager who’s pursuing defined goals. EA: The most important thing to understand is we have both a speculative and a business side to all of us. It’s just a matter of the degree. It can be really easy to unknowingly blur the lines between the two. We can all get carried away by the emotion of it all — getting too excited, trying to hit a market peak or even increasing business risk by scaling in unneeded long futures positions while the grain remains unpriced. The things that can really get you into trouble are the lack of a plan, and the inability to price in a rallying market. This can lead to lost opportunity and lost profits. In 2016 we’re going to be looking for a weather market — something that causes the bear cycle to break. A good farm marketer understands weather markets are often a temporary boost. And during this cycle of lower global commodity prices, it’s important to be ready to act when the opportunity allows a cash price to achieve a pricing target. On the flip side, a farm speculator tends to watch prices in the attempt to hit the peak. The risk there is you can become mesmerized by the market and the daily swings. You’ll watch markets almost obsessively, waiting for the right price to convince yourself to let the crop go, but then fail to act. Without a plan and the discipline to execute it, it’s really easy to become a speculator without knowing it. A lot of people have this image of a speculator as a wheeler-dealer when in reality it can be all of us, if we’re not careful. Here’s a warning sign. If you price a crop profitably, and the market then goes higher, do you obsess about the money “lost,” rather than acknowledge your plan worked and grain was consistently priced profitably? In reality, a rallying market is an opportunity to look toward pricing new crop production. This offers just another solid business opportunity. It’s all about how you look at markets, and your ability to handle emotion. CG november 2015
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business
Full classes It isn’t only a robust farm economy that’s driving post-secondary ag education, but job opportunities By Richard Kamchen and heavy recruitment too he story is the same across the country. “Our application numbers in all of our programs are up,” says Joe Varamo, manager of academic programs for Ontario Agricultural College, Canada’s largest ag university, where total ag enrolment has climbed to 2,600, up from 2,000 just four years ago. “We’ve gone from accepting approximately 450 students (per year) to about 625.” It’s clear there’s something special about agriculture on campus. At the University of Saskatchewan, for instance, growth in agriculture faculty students has far outpaced the rest of the university, and has even topped the department’s own ambitious targets. “Our undergrad enrolment is up 11.5 per cent this year and our grad enrolment is also up… it will be more than five per cent,” says Mary Buhr, dean of the U of S’s College of Agriculture and Bioresources.
Agriculture is the hot new program on campus, with enrolments booming and corporate grants up too By contrast, overall U of S enrolment managed only a 0.6 per cent rise. Buhr says the college’s current five-year plan ends in 2016 but its goals have already been surpassed with undergrad enrolment climbing around 10 per cent in each of the last five years. “We were targeting to grow to 850 undergraduates by 2016,” Buhr says. “In 2015, we are over 1,100.” But that’s not the only proof of the new muscle being shown by agriculture in academia. At the University of Manitoba’s faculty of agriculture and food sciences, for example, enrolment has surged due to the same national trends as at Guelph and Saskatchewan, but it also received an extra shot in the arm when the faculty absorbed parts of the former department of human ecology. 12 country-guide.ca
“We have seen a nearly 50 per cent increase in our degree program numbers by virtue of adding the bachelor of science in human nutritional sciences to our programs,” says spokeswoman Crystal Jorgenson. Jorgenson calls it a natural fit in terms of research collaborations, and adds that it has enhanced partnerships with researchers and industry partners. “In July of this year, the department of textile sciences became part of our department of biosystems engineering, and has increased our offerings in graduate education in some very unique and exciting areas,” Jorgenson adds. Similarly, at the University of Alberta, just under 400 students enrolled this year in the three ag programs offered by the faculty of agricultural, life and environmental sciences, up from 315 five years ago. Yet faculty dean Stan Blade also notes that the ratio of graduate students to undergrad is changing, with over 500 students at the master’s and PhD levels across the entire faculty. Part of this reflects corporate investment, with about $44 million in external money coming in each year over the last five years to support research and the growing number of graduate students. “I’ve spoken to a number of those grad students, and they think that they have further opportunities from a career standpoint by getting a graduate degree even on top of their bachelor’s,” says Blade. “We’ve seen the trend up in those graduate student numbers (partly) because of the huge investments that companies and others are making with us. But I think there’s also an appetite for people to get those higher-level degrees as well. That could be something to watch in the future.” Blade has also noticed that parents who have graduated from university often put emphasis on their children earning their degrees as well. “When people are running multimillion-dollar operations, they need to have a lot of skills,” Blade says. Job prospects are excellent too and students graduating with agricultural degrees have employers waiting to hire them. Continued on page 14 November 2015
“We have a strategy. What we need is capital.� People who know Agriculture, know BDO.
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business Continued from page 12 “This is a $27-billion industry just in our province, and clearly that kind of activity requires great people. We’re certainly confident we’re putting those people into the workplace,” says Blade. “I care about the fact that all of our graduates get jobs — and many of them get multiple job offers,” adds Buhr. “Our country needs our graduates, so that’s why we want more students, because they are fulfilling a need within the province and the country.” Varamo also sees a huge appetite in the agri-food and agribusiness industries for skilled professionals. “It seems as though many of our students upon graduation are finding employment… employment of choice in the areas of interest that they have,” Varamo says. In some cases, students have secured jobs before they even graduate, he adds. The University of Manitoba held its Agricultural, Science and Engineering Career Fair in October and numerous ag industry recruiters were on hand, eager to speak with students. “It has actually become increasingly competitive — employers want to interact with our students through pizza nights and information sessions in their search for top-quality summer and permanent employees,” Jorgenson says. U of M ag students typically have their summer or permanent job offers by November.
Explaining the numbers Student enrolment has trended higher in the last few years thanks in part to strength in the agriculture industry. “The agricultural economy is doing well, and all the signs are that agriculture will be a solid profession for many years to come,” says Buhr. Even so, Buhr adds that growth in her faculty has been outpacing the farm economy. Previously, enrolments had echoed farm income, with student numbers rising about two years after the ag economy started rising, and dropping about two years following a decline. That has changed. “Over the last few years the farm economy has been pretty robust and our numbers have been growing, but we’ve been growing at a faster rate than the farm economy,” says Buhr. “We expect we will be more independent of the economy because we have programs that aren’t as directly linked to primary agriculture. We’re expecting our numbers are not going to go down.” Programs like renewable resource management, agribusiness, animal bioscience, and next year’s Aboriginal agriculture and land management, are contributing by attracting students from beyond the farm and rural areas. “Once they come into the college, they realize the wealth of career opportunities in agriculture and are really turned on by it,” says Buhr. “All of our graduating students get jobs; they have a choice of jobs. And the word is getting out about that.” Heavy recruiting by all the agriculture depart14 country-guide.ca
ments has paved the way for the success they’ve experienced, and as at Saskatchewan, most schools are extending their recruitment to students with nonfarm and urban backgrounds. “Part of the initiative with our (recruitment program) is to reach out into those urban areas and communicate to a kid from a high school in downtown Toronto who’s never stepped on a farm that you don’t have to come from a farming background,” says Varamo. The U of M has had success targeting urban students by presenting its Student Ambassadors program at high schools, and by interacting with city kids at a variety of recruitment events both on and off campus, as well as through more indirect approaches like workshops for science teachers. Programs such Agriculture in the Classroom and campaigns such as Farm Credit Canada’s Agriculture More Than Ever also increase the overall awareness of career opportunities in the agri-food industry, Jorgenson says. “We have been conducting a strong student recruitment campaign for the last few years, and we are also seeing an increase in the number of students moving from our two-year diploma program into our degree program,” she says.
Enhanced learning Today’s agriculture degree graduates are emerging with an enhanced set of experiences, beyond what existed even 20 years ago thanks to experiential learning at home and abroad. “We get our students involved with volunteer programs in the city, and we have a number of practicums and internships within our various programs that get people out into the community and working in businesses,” says Blade, adding that international experience is available as well. “Over the past number of years, we have formalized programs that the faculty puts on for students to go to Cuba, India, Japan and Mexico.” Exchange programs provide valuable enhanced learning outside campus, and these ag faculties all offer their own unique experiences. “It sets (students) up to differentiate themselves from another candidate down the road when they’re applying for a job,” says Varamo. Schools are also developing more online courses for their own students and people in mid-career who don’t necessarily have time to spend on campus. “By no means are we unique in this, but this is something we keep hearing from people who want to enhance their skills, so we’re certainly going beyond the chalk-and-blackboard approach,” says Blade. Buhr notes her faculty is meeting the challenges of managing the ever-increasing number of students while still maintaining quality. Says Buhr: “We are looking at every possible method and new ways of doing things in order to continue to provide a quality education to far more students than we were expecting to have.” CG November 2015
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The new way into farming After 10 years on the farm, these top graduates have succeeded by transitioning their family farms from conventional to holistic By Maggie Van Camp, CG Associate Editor
decade ago, a fresh-faced group of graduates jumped into a grain industry beaten down by prices and Prairie drought, and a livestock industry ravaged by the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) debacle. It was hardly the best of times. By the end of 2004, a year and a half after the BSE crisis began, Canadian beef producers had already lost $5.3 billion, and with slaughter prices still trading far below their May 2003 levels, many were openly asking if financial health would ever return to the sector. Meanwhile, corn prices had stagnated below $2 per bushel, and realized net income on Canada’s farms seemed to fall month after month. Nor was that the only tough news. Consumers had started questioning conventional farming methods too. Genetically modified crops were in newspaper headlines, and organic had evolved from a fringe fad into an established market with presence in mainstream grocery stores. A few years later, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 2, a ballot that said egg-laying hens had to be able to stand up, lie down, turn around and fully extend their wings. It was the beginning of the war on traditional livestock production techniques. Perhaps the biggest wonder is that in the classrooms of Canada’s agriculture colleges, some of the top students still wanted to farm. But they did. So they did what any smart business person would do; they looked for viable alternatives and applied their formidable brainpower and passion to that goal. Two of those top graduates were Mark Bernard from P.E.I. and Jonathan Bouw from Manitoba. They had gone to college as mature students to pursue a career in farming, and somehow they made it work. Today both are farming… unconventionally. As they approach the 10th anniversaries of their 16 country-guide.ca
farming careers, Bernard and Bouw shared with C ountry G uide how their farms have changed through those years, and how their education prepared them — or didn’t prepare them — for the past decade, as well as their hopes for the future. At 23, Mark Bernard knew he wanted to take over the family farm so he went to Nova Scotia Agricultural College, now Dalhousie faculty of agriculture. He had already taken a business course at a community college and had worked on and off his family’s farm for a few years. He was a good student, and in 2006, Mark not only earned a diploma in agricultural business and plant science, but at graduation he won the FCC Farm Business Planning award too. For one of his class projects, Mark had written a theoretical business plan to convert his family’s conventional potato farm to an organic grain and oilseed operation that would sell its crops to organic dairy farmers in the Maritimes. When his dad, Wendell, studied Mark’s numbers back on the farm at Freetown, a half-hour west of Charlottetown, he suddenly saw the possibility of a future for his son taking over the farm. Until then, the prospects had seemed daunting. The Bernards had been successful table and seed stock potatoes growers, but the spread of potato virus Y (PVYn) and potato wart disease had disrupted exports and put the brakes on the expansion of processing in the Maritimes. In short, their markets had been pummelled, and when Mark enrolled at school, the family rented out their 550 acres. Soon after seeing Mark’s business plan, Wendell started converting 50 acres to organic through the three-year certification process. By Mark’s graduation it was already in organic production and by 2010 the farm was fully certified. Now they maintain a five-year rotation of wheat, soybeans, barley seeded with field peas, and oats — all 100 per cent organic. “I had a blank slate to come home to,” says Mark. November 2015
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“ There are lots of opportunities for growth,” Bernard says. “You just have to see them.” It was a good thing his plans were written on that slate in chalk, however, because the 10 years since have seen a continual process of change — and small growth. “My dad allowed the farm to take a new direction,” says Mark. “You see other farms with 80- or 90-year-olds trying to control everything and it’s a rough road to keep going on.” Since the farm was already incorporated and involved only one successor, the transition between generations was a simple valuation, share freeze and buyout. Sticking with the direction he had outlined in his class project, Mark’s original business plan had been to sell to organic dairies that had been proposed for in the Maritimes, but when they didn’t materialize, he wasn’t able to direct market everything right away. Instead a nearby organic hog farm became a significant customer until its production contract was not reassigned. Once again Mark was forced to diversify — this time by putting the grain through chickens on the home farm. Today, Bernard’s farm, Barnyard Organics, has 100 customer/shareholders of a meat and egg CSA (communitysupported agriculture) enterprise. Every Tuesday through the summer and fall, the Bernards pair up with a vegetable grower and a baker to meet their CSA customers in a church parking lot. This marketing route frees them from spending long hours at farmers’ markets and generates improved cash flow as payments for shares are collected in the spring. Also, it helps them build relationships with stable customers, and has Continued on page 18 Photography: Buffie Boily Photographic Arts
November 2015
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business Continued from page 17 opened links to other markets, such as selling grain to the baker. They sell organic chicken and hog feed, and organic roasted soybeans, and Mark is continually trying to encourage new farmers and to help them make it work economically. In effect, Mark is trying to help develop an organic local food industry within his area. Since graduating, he has watched the shrinking number of farmers with dismay. “Bigger acreages, bigger equipment. But we need better ideas, better farmers and better food in general… And to do this we need more players, not less,” says Bernard. By continually asking questions, Mark and his wife, Sally (also a graduate of the class of ’06) have found opportunities where others would see roadblocks. For example, after being selected as Atlantic Canada’s Outstanding Young Farmers in 2012, Mark was misquoted in a newspaper article as selling feed. When CFIA inspectors popped in to check out their phantom feed mill, instead of getting angry, Mark asked the inspectors about the processes to be able to make their own feed. This led to them investing in the feed mill that now supplies organic feed throughout the Maritimes, using all their grain and sometimes even buying in a little extra. Between 2006 and 2012, sales of organic products in Canada increased from $1 billion to $3 billion. There are lots of opportunities for growth, Mark says. You just have to see them, start small, and be willing to put in the work. For example, to enable timely and quality processing of their chickens they set up their own pro-
vincially inspected slaughterhouse on their farm. Then they can kill as many as they need, when they need them for the fresh market. In retrospect, Mark wishes the courses he took at university had covered more about marketing and human resources. “I wish I had more confidence with employees,” he says. On the other hand, the weed management class he took at university has helped him immensely with organic crop production. He learned weed identification, and the professor at the time included cultural practices as well as chemical controls. Mark wonders if more work experience at college, like the research work he assisted with, would help other graduates. It would give students more experience in different industries, sectors and commodities. In his opinion, one of the most significant changes since he graduated has been the introduction of global positioning systems, becoming standard equipment a few years later. However, he doesn’t believe technology is always good, especially when his customers are paying a premium to stay away from it. “GMOs are an unneeded technology,” he says. “If we have time, grow cover crops and use proper rotation, we can grow crops without it. It’s just another tool in the tool box but many farmers are using it as the only tool, they’re reliant on that only tool.” Sally and Mark have four children, and they are encouraging them to become involved in agriculture. You get to be your own boss, with many job titles in a day and produce quality food for people, Mark says. “Farming is the best job in the world. It’s so diverse, so free, so satisfying.”
Raised as a conventional farmer, Bernard credits the switch to organic grains for restoring the family’s optimism. 18 country-guide.ca
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Natural beef
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ith an enthusiasm mixed with resolve, Jonathan Bouw talks about farming since he graduated a decade ago: “The ethanol boom went bust. They promised $7 corn forever and now it is less than half of that. The BSE crisis took out a generation of cow-calf producers. Many of the older guys retired or went bankrupt. Their sons went off to the oilfield and are not coming back.” In 2005, Bouw graduated at the top of the agricultural diploma class at University of Manitoba. Even at that time, the job postings outnumbered the 50 graduates from the program. Although Bouw was invited to take an MBA at Asper School of Business, he declined in favour of coming back to work on the family farm a half-hour east of Winnipeg at Anola, Man. He had already earned a bachelor of arts at Bible college with the original intention of teaching, but the land called. November 2015
Back then, the farm consisted mostly of a struggling traditional beef feedlot. Today, Jonathan, his brother Stefan and father Herman graze 150 purebred Angus cows and 300 ewes on 1,700 acres, and also harvest 80 acres of organic grain. Going forward they’ll continue to retain heifers and expand the purebred herd to 250 cows. In 2009 Jonathan’s brother Stefan joined the farm permanently and they incorporated the farm to facilitate succession from their parents. Jonathan says the biggest succession challenge was to define roles and responsibilities, and it was also important to learn how to make group decisions for some of the bigger choices by including his wife Eileen and sister-in-law Kendra. For the first few years in this post-BSE era, it was tough sledding: It helped that his mother, Marilyn, worked an off-farm job as a teacher, and that interest rates stayed low, helping them survive the BSE crisis. “We swallowed a lot of equity,” Jonathan says.
Photography: Thomas Fricke Photography
“Embrace change,” Bouw advises. “ Talk to the disconnected urban consumers. Tell your story.”
Along the way, they refinanced, moving some long-term debt from their line of credit to a mortgage. They also shopped around for their mortgage and switched lending institutions to a credit union. The local credit union loans manager knew they always paid their bills, looked at more than their three-year history and understood their business plan was financially cautious, even though it involved untraditional farming methods. The Bouws are leveraging the trend toward consumer involvement in their food that Jonathan has watched accelerate in the last decade. “The grassroots groundswell of folks looking for local, organic and sustainable has changed the most in agriculture,” says Jonathan. Today, he sees even more growth ahead, with consumers becoming more aware of how their food is produced and putting more value on it as an opportunity. Continued on page 20 country-guide.ca 19
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Even if beef prices retreat, Bouw expects his market approach will maintain his margins. Continued from page 19 Other than purebred sales, 15 to 20 head a year are sold for direct sales of natural grass-fed beef sold as quarter-dressed carcasses. They are grazed for sixplus months of the year and raised without hormones or antibiotics. No grain is used to finish in their feedlot, just second-cut hay and alfalfa/grass silage. Right now, their beef is cheaper than retail, but when livestock markets and grocery store prices go down Jonathan is counting on his margins staying positive. “When commercial beef prices drop, we hope they (his customers) will stick with us,” he says. They’re already testing their customers’ resilience this year by moving from February calving to May, which caused a waiting list for quarters of beef. In the longer term, Bouw is excited about the opportunities for continuing to develop and sell breeding stock that is pasture hardy and will finish easily on grass. He feels this will better meet the need for farmers with off-farm jobs or new-entrant farmers. If you buy hardy cattle you can pasture and buy hay for 50 to 100 cows with one skid steer or a loader tractor, Jonathan says. “Cattle prices are encouraging now, but the industry will require lowcost producers to stay in the long haul. Plus low-cost production models allow new people to get into it.” They started into the purebred business back in 2000 when Stefan started keeping some heifers back for 4-H and bought a few Angus, but found they didn’t thrive in the low-input ranch environment. Since then, the family has been sourcing genetic lines that do better on grass, buying cows from breeders with similar goals. They’re currently investing in their purebred Angus herd, largely with a concentration on growing internally, but with some strategic purchases as opportunities arise. Throughout the last decade, however, their focus has also narrowed as they’ve honed their breeding goals and philosophies. They’ve only been selling two-year-old bulls for eight years. 20 country-guide.ca
Becoming part of the Manitoba grass-fed beef association and learning about holistic management has been transformative for Jonathan. He describes their farm as a growing forage-adaptive Angus enterprise, an increasingly successful organic cropping enterprise, a challenging yet profitable sheep enterprise and a sold-out grass-fed beef enterprise. The greatest thing Bouw learned in his postsecondary education is that curiosity and love of learning can bring success wherever you go. Over the years, he has continually used his research and learning techniques, marketing and people skills. “Things change so fast, and there’s so much information to sort through, so make sure you see evidence on the ground before believing a salesman or a study,” he says. “Keep learning and reading so you’re a lifelong learner.” Looking back, Jonathan wishes he had been taught more business and financial know-how, including things like cost-of-production analysis, or how to use debt successfully to build a business. In retrospect, it would have helped if he had learned up front how to better market his own products instead of allowing middlemen to profit when they were barely breaking even. From his worn tractor seat, he thinks the production lessons should include the importance of soil health beyond macronutrient balance and how grassland agriculture can regenerate soils and reverse erosion. “Think long term, build soil, don’t pillage it,” Jonathan says. “The soil is alive, so respect the living beings.” If you’re farming, question everything, and don’t do something because that’s the way Grandpa did it, says Jonathan. He says that more “agvocacy” is needed so that people know farmers well enough not to be frenzied by fearmongers and activists. “Embrace change and find ways to improve your soil,” Jonathan advises. “Talk to the disconnected urban consumers. Tell your story.” CG November 2015
Planting Scholars. Harvesting Leaders Nuffield Canada Agricultural Scholarships expand the horizons of innovative Canadian agriculturalists. Nuffield scholars travel internationally to gather information, build relationships and learn best practices to be disseminated in their home countries. The Program has sent nearly 1600 scholars from the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Holland and Ireland around the world looking for the best in agricultural technologies, policies and networks.
Tony Balkwill, Paris, Ontario Tony Balkwill, wins the inaugural Grain Farmers of Ontario Nuffield Scholarship. As owner of NithField Advanced Agronomy, he is also a third generation farmer who farms in the Oxford and Brant areas. His farming operation is the foundation for NithField’s research and development program and consists of 400+ acres of full production field scale research systems. With his Nuffield Scholarship, Tony will be looking at the challenges of accurately modernizing historical soil type maps into field specific management zones by studying the geology and make-up of agriculture soils and how they can be a foundation and predictor for variable rate farming, in the aim of increasing production potential and sustainability. Tony’s scholarship is sponsored by Grain Farmers of Ontario. Follow Tony @TonyBalkwill
Clair Doan, Norwich, ON Clair’s mission is to productively contribute to the Canadian agriculture industry as a passionate advocate, turkey and grain farmer and professionally as the Associate Vice President of Agriculture for Ontario at National Bank of Canada. Clair’s Nuffield project will focus on how Canada’s supply managed sectors, particularly poultry farmers, can manage during times of uncertainty with increased political and global market pressures. As an advocate for our system, Clair seeks to gain a thorough understanding of production and marketing models abroad. His focus is to ensure the industry remains relevant and competitive while seeking market opportunities. Follow Clair @clairdoan
Timothy Smith, Coronation, Alberta Tim Smith, the 2016 Glacier FarmMedia Nuffield Scholar, successfully rebuilt and grew from a small portion of a divided farm established in 1915 to successful 800 head cow/calf cattle operation. He and his family also own a custom forage harvest business, harvesting several thousands of acres each year. He is also highly involved in the agricultural industry, serving on his provincial beef cattle organization and representing Alberta Beef Producers nationally. Through his Nuffield project, Tim plans to research the valuation of ecological goods and services provided by cattle ranching. He believes there is much to be gleaned in studying how other cultures recognize and valuate pastoral benefit. Tim’s scholarship is sponsored by Glacier FarmMedia. Follow Tim at @Tim_Smith68
Thanks to Glacier FarmMedia and the Grain Farmers’ of Ontario for their continued support of our scholars.
Reports Below are two short summaries of recent research reports: Cheryl Hazenberg – Traceability. As producer s we are constantly told that consumers want to know more about where their food comes from. Over the past two years, I have visited Australia, Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, United Kingdom and Uruguay – countries that either import our beef, or are strong in the export markets. Cheryl visits a pasture Each country has a very different relationship with with Nelore heifers food, especially beef, but each had some type of used in a cross traceability system. None of them are perfect nor breeding program can they be replicated in another country with the with Angus bulls in same success. Central Brazil. Canada has an excellent system but I fear that we will need to amplify our efforts in the future to remain competitive; Canadian processing plants should adopt an in plant traceability system that ties to the CCIA tag number ensuring the product is traceable from birth to box. Basic information needs to be tied to every tag used in an animal and value added attributes should be included for specific programs.
Steven Wolfgram – Social License Steven, a swine veterinarian from Stratford, Ontario, has been investigating the factors that affect sustainability of food animal production in Canada – specifically, what farmers and others in the agri-food industry have to do to maintain a “social license” with the public. Social License is a term used for the general agreement in public that the “right thing” is being done such that no regulatory intervention is needed. On his travels, Steven met with farmers, veterinarians, and industry experts in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Ireland and Great Britain to observe in action different programs for Animal Welfare and Antibiotic use.
In Germany, Steven visited with Friedrich Ostehoff(r) and his cousin Andreas(l) of Ahrhoff Futtergut, an animal nutrition and supplement company.
In Steven’s report, he notes the agricultural industry needs to continue to build trust by being transparent. And that public opinion of farming practices could lead to more regulations being imposed. With regards to animal welfare and antibiotic use, these are complex issues with ever-changing expectations. Our responses need to be diverse and flexible and the overall goal should be continual improvement. Full versions of Cheryl’s, Steven’s and Darryl Chubb’s reports will be available on the Nuffield Canada website later this year.
WELCOME SHANNON Nuffield Canada recently welcomed Shannon McAr ton, of Dilke, Saskatchewan, as their new executive director. Shannon has 25 years of writing, communications, public relations, marketing and administrative experience and has worked for many of Saskatchewan’s farm organizations and agricultural businesses. In her new role with Nuffield, Shannon will look to keep growing the financial sustainability of this world class global scholarship program. Shannon can be reached at shannon@nuffield.ca or (306) 488-4725.
For full copies of these and many other reports, please visit
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@NuffieldCanada
www.nuffield.ca
business
Sometimes the best advice... armers love to talk to other farmers, as anyone who has ever spent five minutes in a country coffee shop knows. But it’s not always easy to have productive discussions with your peers if they are also your neighbours, and if you’re competing with them to rent or purchase land, or to sell grain at the best price. That’s why some farm owners and managers are taking a page out of the business world’s playbook by forming peer groups.
Making the peer group takes a commitment to understanding and talking about their own business, the Foxes find.
Trena and Myles Fox who farm near Gravelbourg, Sask. had tried joining a corporate peer group in Regina, but it wasn’t proving to be a good fit for them, so they jumped at the chance to join the First Farm Managers Network once they heard about it. “We see a huge benefit in networking with other farm families and learning how other top producers are trying to find new solutions to old problems, and looking at things from different angles,” says the couple. “We have to set goals for ourselves, which makes it real and accountable. There’s nothing like talking about your goal with 20 other people to put the fire in your belly to get it done.” Today, they are members of First Farm Managers Network, a peer group involving the owners and managers of nine farms from Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. It has been active for about a year, with the group meeting face to face in Regina about three times a year. As a peer group, it’s providing a valuable and effective platform to host candid discussions about farm management topics. The First Farm Managers Network was deliberately established with farmers from three different provinces to give geographical separation and prevent any competitive issues, but that separation also meant that it was important from the beginning for the members to learn about and become comfortable with each other. “It’s important that the people involved build relationships so they can get to the level of trust that’s required to make a group really effective,” says Jacqueline Gerrard, a farm business consultant with Backswath Management, which had the idea for the peer group and has been facilitating and offering administrative support for it. “When the group meets, the daytime is for the meeting and agenda discussion, and the evening is set aside for social interaction,” Gerrard says. “I think participants often learn as much after hours as they do in the formal discussion.” Continued on page 24
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Photography: Carey Shaw Photography
By Angela Lovell
Going a distance to talk business with similar farmers injects fresh thinking and insight into these operations
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In Saskatchewan Trena and Myles find their peer group injects not only fresh ideas and new thinking, but a drive to achieve more too
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Accountable to your peers
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Kristi and Dustin Burns of Windy Poplars Farms near Wynyard, Sask. were also looking for a way to do some benchmarking and professional development with people who are their peers but not their neighbours. The Burns say they’ve been impressed by how quickly the group has developed trust. “Over the three meetings we’ve attended, the trust and candour have really grown,” says Kristi. “The last topic the
group discussed was an employee conflict issue and people were able to speak openly to that because they have developed a comfort level with each other over the last few months.” The greatest value of the peer group is being able to have frank and honest discussion with like-minded people, says Dustin. “We all want to have a professional farm and good work/life balance, and to be leaders in our industry,” Dustin says. “We have implemented things that we have seen and heard about from other farms already. Whether it’s weekly meetings, or ways to deal with employees, or ways to deal with people we rent land from, it has been really valuable for us.” CG
Steps to a successful peer group Below are essential elements of a successful peer group based on experiences of the First Farm Managers Network, a peer group of nine western farms, with thanks to facilitator Jacqueline Gerrard of Backswath Management. For more background see next page for this month's AME Management column, entitled “Peer Groups” by Backswath’s Terry Betker.
1. Identity It’s important that the peer group has a name and develops its own vision with a charter and bylaws as to how it is going to function. That said, the intent is that the group eventually takes ownership and decides how it will run it and who will facilitate and organize the group.
5. Trust To avoid competition, peer groups often bring together farmers who don’t know each other. It’s essential they become comfortable enough with each other to have open, honest discussions. A peer group meeting should always include time set aside for members to socialize and build personal relationships.
6. Accountability Each person brings a personal or work-related goal to the group, which creates accountability, because they then follow up at each meeting with a report about how that goal is developing.
2. Facilitation
7. Focus
A well-functioning peer group should have facilitation, and it’s usually best to choose a facilitator from outside the group, and be prepared to pay for the professional service they offer. The facilitator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, and it’s not his or her role to give opinions about the topics discussed. The facilitator’s job is to find out what the members want to talk about, set the agenda, and make sure everyone gets a chance to talk and no one is dominating the discussion.
From the start the peer group must determine its focus. The First Farmers Network decided to focus on farm business management instead of production, with topics such as how to manage growth, where to invest, how to involve family, managing time, leadership, human resources, and how to structure the management team. Each group’s focus will depend on the farms involved.
3. Organization Organizing a peer group takes a lot of time and energy which few farmers have time for. This is another reason why peer groups don’t pop up organically. A facilitator is the logical person to perform this role. Arranging meeting dates and facilities, setting deadlines, and sending out information so the participants can prepare for the discussion are all important to ensure that participants get maximum benefit from their time together.
4. Farmers lead the discussion Peer groups are a farmer-to-farmer discussion forum. Each farm group brings a farm management topic to the meeting that they want to discuss. It can be anything from employees and finances to succession planning or the right equipment-to-asset ratio for the operation. Everyone gives input. 24 country-guide.ca
8. Mindset A peer group can include any size or type of operation from feedlots to potato farms, and in any geographical location, and farmers of any ages, but the most important thing is that they all share a common, progressive mindset and are open to new ideas.
9. Measuring progress Being able to measure progress towards a specific goal or the effectiveness of changes implemented as a result of group discussions helps reinforce the value of the group, and helps participants to set realistic timelines for themselves in the future.
10. Commitment Group members need to be fully committed to attending meetings and participating openly and honestly in the discussions. November 2015
ame-management
Peer groups By Terry Betker
eer groups are not a new concept. They have existed for years within different industries in several different types of applications. They are also known as peer advisory groups, business-to-business discussion groups, and peer advisory boards.
Background Farmers have used external resources to help with management challenges for years. Accountants, lawyers and lenders are long-established sources of advice and assistance. More recently, farmers have been using advisers who have specific expertise in production and marketing. As farms increase in size and complexity, the range of resources will expand to meet other needs, such as advisers who have experience and expertise in human resource management for farms. Another management resource that is gaining popularity among progressive farmers is the peer group.
Peer groups A peer group consists of a small number of people who get together in regularly scheduled meetings to share insights on experiences and performance. This is definitely not the breakfast group at the local coffee shop. Instead, a peer group has a high degree of structure and formality. Some of the reasons why farmers might join a peer group include: • Strengthen/advance management practices • Affirm or challenge how things are being done • Build collegial relationships with farmers with similar management mindsets • Introduce an element of accountability to ensure that things are getting done • ‘Board of Directors’ for the business • Input and feedback on management issues • S h a r e m a n a g e m e n t a n d d e c i s i o n - m a k i n g approaches • Potential for business investment and development • Learn from other farmers’ experiences, i.e. from people who actually have skin in the game.
Group composition Typically groups have five or six farms but can have up to 10. Having more than 15 requires careful facilitation so each individual is actively involved in the discussion. A well-structured group doesn’t have “freeloaders.” Each participant can expect to benefit from a meeting but must also make a contribution. Peer groups whose participants are progressive and have a business management orientation have better outcomes. November 2015
One of the challenges in forming a group is determining if the members are actually peers. The purpose is NOT to have a group of farmers who agree on everything. The purpose is to be challenged but not criticized. Farms should be at least a half-hour apart so members are able to speak freely and openly. Farms can have similar or diverse operations but there should not be any element of competition. Danny Klinefelter, professor and extension economist with Texas AgriLIFE Extension and Texas A&M University, says that farmers who are able to own their weaknesses and are willing to accept suggestions and criticism will get the most out of a peer advisory group. “If you can check your ego, learn to listen and be open to problem solving and sharing some details of your farm’s business, you’ll do well in a peer group,” says Klinefelter.
Meeting structure and frequency Members must be prepared to make the commitment and investment (time and money) to attend. Three key success factors are trust, respect and confidentiality. Participants should sign a statement acknowledging confidentiality. Groups decide among themselves how often they want to meet and what the focus of the peer group will be. The focus can be very specific, such as production practices. Or they can have a broader or more general management orientation. In-person meetings are required, especially while the group is being formed so that relationships can be established. Meetings can be anywhere from a half-day to two or more days. The group should develop a charter or set of bylaws to define how it will manage and govern itself, who can join, and how people are expelled. Groups function better with a hired facilitator whose role is to: • Plan and facilitate meetings (including logistics) • Co-ordinate data collection where applicable • Prepare reports • Get things started • Ask questions to ensure everyone is participating • Move things along if getting bogged down • Provide input and contribute to the discussion when appropriate. I’ve been in lots of discussions with farmers in the past year who have a real interest in the peer group format. Formed correctly and with the right participants, a peer group can have great benefit. I personally have been involved in a consultant peer group for nearly three years now. Our group has eight members with seven from the U.S. We meet four times a year (twice in person). Similar to a farmer peer group, we talk about best practices, challenges and issues. I find it to be hugely valuable. CG Terry Betker is an instructor in AME training courses ( www.agrifoodtraining.com) and a farm management consultant with Backswath Management Inc. He can be reached at 204-782-8200 or terry.betker@backswath.com. country-guide.ca 25
business
Better
employees By Amy Petherick, Contributing Editor
hen you want a little more crop from the field, you shell out a little more for fertilizer. Or if it’s a few more pounds you’re looking for from your livestock, you spend a bit more on feed. Is it true of employees too? Can a little extra investment boost your results? There’s an extra consideration, of course. Few farms can compete on wages with every business in the area, and they’ve had to face the possibility that almost any employee might leave for a better-paying job in, for instance, the oilfield or manufacturing. So why put effort into upgrading the skills of your employees, when it’s only going to benefit their next employer? But now there’s a new twist, because it turns out that investing in your employees can not only help the farm in the short term, it can improve employee retention too. There are many factors to consider, however. Gerard Bos, who works for the Alberta Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Workforce Development Initiative, says he is seeing primary producers with clear objectives. They are looking either to minimize annual staff turnover or to improve work quality. They also have a clear idea of how to get the job done in a business-smart way. Using cost-share programs like Alberta’s Retention Improvement Grant or Productivity Improvement Grant, farmers get to work with a consultant to identify specific employment needs and to implement a strategy that is customized to meet them. Such options are highly flexible, but do keep in mind that farmers really aren’t the main group that is supposed to benefit from these programs. “Our programs are open to primary agriculture and food processing… and 90 per cent of what we do is on the processing side,” Bos explains. Plus, skills training may not always be your best approach. “If it’s a feedlot and they have some staff but they don’t have any professional HR capacity, they might hire a consultant to develop job descriptions,” Bos says. “Or we’ve seen farmers use the funding to develop an orientation program.” 26 country-guide.ca
It turns out that giving your employees opportunities to improve their skills really can be good for business In the heart of southwestern Ontario, Gary Mawhiney of Ag HR Solutions, says incurring a few non-training costs might also be very effective for keeping employees. A Christmas or birthday card, for example, costs very little but can go a long way with an employee. Providing coffee and doughnuts at break time can be another low-cost investment. Mawhiney also often recommends drug plans because when an ill employee discovers a $200 drug is only going to cost them $20, they’re incredibly grateful for their employer. When designing retention programs, however, the guiding principal is very simple. “If you treat your employees as you treat yourself, or better, you’ll get it back in spades,” Mawhiney says. “You want the pros, and if you find someone who is giving you really good quality and is making a difference, why would you object to paying more?” Granted, not everyone can afford to spend more on labour. Still there are very simple ways to keep your hired help, or to make them run away. Mawhiney says he had one case where it seemed all of a farm’s workers were walking off the job all at once. On location, Mawhiney soon learned the very simple reason was because the couple running the farm had suddenly stopped saying hello to their employees in the mornings. Struggling through a divorce, the couple had been unaware how this one small change in behaviour was affecting staff, but employees had picked up on it as proof that the rumour was right — the farm was about to be dissolved. The upshot was that even the best employees started seeking new jobs, unaware that the owners were still committed to keeping the operation viable. It offers a critical lesson any farm manager is wise to heed, Mawhiney says. “Your employees need feedback.” Yet this too feeds back to the case for investing in skills enhancement. According to a study conducted this past spring by international talent consultant Mercer Global, a lack of communication from managers and lack of transparency about career progression within the organization impacts employee loyalty in almost every industry. More than 75 per cent of employees said they would November 2015
business stay at their job if they knew what their career path with the organization might look like, and over half of employees said they get “no input” or “input only once in a while” on how to do their jobs better. A quarter of employees said “not at all” or “hardly ever” when asked if their company makes it easy to understand opportunities for advancement. The biggest surprise, however, is that it can be fairly simple to give employees a reason for answering yes. Mawhiney points to conferences as an example, and he typically recommends employers send each of their workers to at least one conference per year, paying for the registration, travel, and meals of each individual, and also paying their wages for the day. Dr. Sara Mann at the University of Guelph suggests that keeping such strategies simple is the best way to retain and motivate hired help. You don’t have to do any goal setting. There doesn’t have to be a paper trail. You just need to give some consideration to three areas of your business, and then act with purpose.
1. Does investing in employees fit your business model? It’s not true that all businesses should always look to invest in their employees. Some businesses need to remain focused on cost management, and Mann says organizations intent on producing a highquality product or exceptional customer service tend to benefit most from investing in their employees. In rural areas, however, a huge consideration can be retaining good workers. “I think farmers would have a tendency to look more at the individual and think about what the right thing to do would be,” Mann says. “Given that positions are very specific on farms and involve some skills, it would be wise for them to invest in their employees to hang on to them.”
Another category of commitment is called normative, where an employee stays because of commitments to friends or family connections. “We don’t want employees to have either of these types of motivation because we know it doesn’t lead to higher motivation on the job or influence their job performance,” Mann says. “What we want is someone who has affective commitment and stays because they love to work there.”
When your employees brag about their workplace, those high levels of affective commitment produce employees who show up to work without being late and generally go above and beyond while they’re there. If that sounds pretty ideal, it’s important to understand one of the ways an employer can get this type of commitment from their employees is Continued on page 30
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2015-10-09 2:57 PM
business Continued from page 27 by investing in them. But the difference between generating affective commitment, instead of continuous or normative commitment, is communication. “Explain to your employee why you’re investing in them, and that you know there’s a risk they might leave,” Mann advises. “That will go a long way in boosting their affective commitment.”
3. Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it The two most effective, zero-cost ways to cultivate affective commitment are to provide continuous feedback and demonstrate fairness. “Telling your employees what they should stop, start, or continue doing on a daily or weekly basis is a really quick and easy way for employers to enhance the experience of their employees,” Mann says. This generates intrinsic motivation that too many managers neglect to foster. Managers also commonly fail to communicate their
reasoning for decisions they’ve made. “For any decision made in assigning a job, vacation, or hours worked, or any decision related to the individual’s employment, make sure the decision is fair and that the employee sees it as fair,” Mann recommends. Quite often supervisors will make a decision that’s completely fair, she explains, but when they don’t communicate why they made the decision, the perception is that it was unfair, even if there’s a good reason the supervisor simply hasn’t shared. If you feel confident your employees are happy with the amount of job performance feedback they are getting and that the decisions regarding their work are fair, it’s time to talk about motivation. “Different people are looking for different kinds of motivators,” Mann says. “Some people might like a snack at coffee break, other people could care less because they don’t eat in the morning.” Ask employees about your ideas for rewards. Find out if these are things they would like. Maybe it would put them
mOBile
behind at work. Maybe it conflicts with their commitments they have outside of work. Maybe it’s just not something that interests them. “Figuring out that you’re giving rewards that match the people you’re giving them to is really important,” Mann says. This is where you have to be careful not to project your own desires onto the people who work for you, she adds. Invite their input and ask what you could be doing differently. But don’t confuse rewards with reinforcers, she advises. Providing a snack at coffee break is a reward. It’s going to increase morale, but not job performance. A reinforcer on the other hand, is a reward that you give that is tied to performance. Often managers offer these in the form of a financial bonus but reinforcers don’t have to be a huge monetary reward. Managers who have these important conversations will soon learn that for some people, a half-day off would be more welcome and save an unnecessary cost while still reaping the reward of an invested employee. CG
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November 2015
HR
A simple way to get more done
By Pierrette Desrosiers
t is 6:30. You get up and plan to have a productive day. You look at your email inbox. You were supposed to look for just 10 minutes, and then you realize that it is 7:30. The children leave for school, you are in a hurry, and you completely forget your priorities for the day. You are in emergency mode. You do a thousand things all day, and at the end of the day you feel exhausted but haven’t accomplished what you were supposed to. You have too many things to do. As a leader and an entrepreneur, what can you do to achieve more and to be more efficient? We have never had so many tools, methods, and techniques and so much information available to help us be more productive. However, our lives as leaders are complicated. We become overwhelmed by the number of decisions, opportunities and choices. This abundance leads to reduced productivity and satisfaction as well as to increased stress and chaos. If we could cut down, would we be more productive? The answer from Leo Babauta in his bestseller The Power of Less, is straightforward… We would be more productive “and happier.” So yes, we should simplify our lives. But how? It sounds simple, right? We should identify what’s essential, and then eliminate the rest. But is that really so simple? According to GE CEO Jeff Immelt, the role of a leader is to, “simplify constantly.” He thinks that if a leader cannot explain the top three things the organization is working on, they are not leading very well. Can you name — and do your employees know — the three most important projects that you’re working on? If not, simplify and prioritize. As a coach, I ask a team, “What are your priorities, and what are your most important projects for the next months or the next year?” If everyone seems confused, I know we have work to do. In a 2010 survey, IBM’s Institute for Business Value identified one of the most important challenges as “the rapid escalation of complexity,” with 80 per cent predicting even more complexity in the future, so we can assume that a leader will increasingly need to develop the ability to simplify in the future. We all have limits. As human beings, we can consume, digest, understand, read, do, choose, and appreciate only so many things. When we exceed this limit, we lose ourselves. Paradoxically, having limitations increases our freedom. It forces us to make choices. Having
“less” and learning to set limits reduces stress and anxiety and increases productivity and satisfaction. What can we limit? Consider: • The number of suppliers and products we use • Equipment and tools • Subscriptions • Meetings and associations • Responsibilities • Information received • Clothing, trinkets, and toys • Children’s activities • The number of daily tasks to accomplish • Time spent on the telephone, Facebook, and texting • The number of future projects • Emails and websites visited • The number of hours that we work • The number of projects that we work on • Priorities… When we have too many priorities, we have no priorities. In fact, each category of activity may be rethought by setting limits on it. How? Select the situations with the most impact. One way to do so is to make the selection using one or more criteria, such as: • What gives you the most satisfaction in your life? • What will be the most profitable in the long term? • What brings you long-term recognition? • What has the most positive impact on your family, peers, or company? • What aligns with your values? • What are the most useful? • What will you still find relevant in 20 years? Or, to start, ask yourself which part of your life is overburdened. • Ask yourself what should be simplified first • Choose an area, and set a limit • Continue with another area, and note the benefits. Why? Simplifying your life has several advantages: • It reduces stress • It enables you to focus on ways to avoid spreading yourself too thin • It increases effectiveness • It increases satisfaction • It leaves time for what is truly important. We do not have enough time, energy, and room for everything, so we have to set limits for ourselves. Then we will be freer. However, as Doris Janzen Longacre has said, “The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn’t simple.” CG
Pierrette Desrosiers, MPS, CRHA is a work psychologist, professional speaker, coach and author who specializes in the agricultural industry. She comes from a family of farmers and she and her husband have farmed for more than 25 years (www.pierrettedesrosiers.com). Contact her at pierrette@pierrettedesrosiers.com.
november 2015
country-guide.ca 31
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business
Weather derivatives These new risk-management contracts are finally getting easier to price and evaluate By Maggie Van Camp, CG Associate Editor
griculture may be the most weatherimpacted industry on the planet — by far — but it isn’t the only industry that’s affected by the vagaries of temperature and rain. It’s estimated that a third of the United States’ GDP and 70 per cent of firms in the United Kingdom are also exposed to weather risk. Recently, Canadian farmers have begun exploring the use of weather derivatives to mitigate weather risk, particularly for higher-value crops like seed. It’s a relatively new tool for farmers, but weather derivatives were first introduced as long ago as the 1990s as a way for the energy sector to hedge against temperature-based usage swings. Soon other industries began using them too, such as retail and tourism, for example ski resorts. In the last few years, North American farmers have dabbled in weather derivatives (WD) to hedge against non-catastrophic but yield-impacting weather such as abnormal temperatures or precipitation. “The energy sector has used WD for quite some time, but agriculture is starting to show some interest,” says Sylvain Charlebois, University of Guelph professor and one of the authors of “Weather risk management by Saskatchewan agriculture producers.” A couple of years ago Charlebois, Saqib Khan and Morina Rennie surveyed Saskatchewan farmers and found about 9.3 per cent of the respondents had used weather derivatives and not surprisingly, most had used crop insurance. Of the sample of 397 respondents, 307 used insurance products, 37 used weather derivatives and 32 had used both within the past three years. “Weather derivatives are not widely used,” concludes Charlebois. One of the main reasons weather derivatives aren’t used often in agriculture is lack of awareness 34 country-guide.ca
and understanding, says Charlebois. In their survey, about half of the respondents who did not use weather derivatives weren’t even aware of this tool and another third felt they didn’t have enough skill in derivatives to utilize them. Yet compared to most small businesses, North American farmers in general are more involved in using derivatives, mainly through commodity futures contracts for price-risk management. And there’s growing interest in weather protection. More farmers are looking to mitigate weather risk as they grow higher-value crops and operate on a larger scale. Plus there’s the looming impact of climate change. In the Saskatchewan survey, 78 per cent of the respondents reported their farming business had suffered financial losses within the past three years due to weather-related events. Basically, a WD treats temperature and precipitation as commodities. A derivative is a contract that derives its value from an underlying point, such as an asset, a set interest rate or an index. Although most derivatives are traded off the exchange, standardized weather derivative contracts are now listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), and the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). As trading volumes in these contracts increase, market liquidity and price discovery are improving. “The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has WDs listed that you can buy yourself, or get them through your broker,” says Charlebois. The range of products available today can be structured to cover almost any type of weather variable, including temperature, rainfall, snow, wind speed and humidity, and the terms can be as short as a week to as long as several years. Of the Continued on page 36 november 2015
The Canadian Association of Farm Advisors (CAFA) Inc. is a national, non-profit professional umbrella organization dedicated to assisting farm families and businesses by increasing the skills of farm advisors and consultants.
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Farm advisors help manage the “What if….?” questions By Liz RoBeRtson, M.A., CAFA exeCutive DiReCtoR
“W
hat if… I died unexpectedly?” Life insurance is likely one of the best examples of a solution to a “What if…?” question. What if you died? Life insurance will help your surviving family members cope with a number of financial costs resulting from your unexpected death. There are other scenarios which the “What if…?” question can prod you towards seeking solutions and safeguards for your family and business. Let’s look at a few: • What if there are three years in a row of poor production? • What if interest rates rise? • What if my key employee quits? • What if there is a divorce on the farm? These are just four questions of many. Danny Klinefelter of Texas A&M University likes to use “What if…?” and “Says who?” questions to help farmers improve farm management. It encourages thinking about solutions that can be put in place so that the “What if…?” questions are manageable. Here is another question: How many farms or families do you know personally, have been put in a terrible position because
they didn’t take the time to ask the “What if…?” questions and then take action to implement solutions? It is not easy to ask challenging or difficult questions and harder yet to take action seeking and implementing solutions. But it isn’t an option. It takes time and courage but it demonstrates responsibility and accountability to your family and farm business. Get advice from professional farm advisors who have the expertise and training to walk you through planning and implementing. Seek advisors who understand the business of farming as they are continually learning about farming and have the resources of farm advisors with
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business Continued from page 34 37 respondents of the Saskatchewan survey who did use weather derivatives, about two-thirds used precipitation-related weather derivatives and half used temperature-related products. In general, temperature-related products are most widely traded. The settlement value of these weather events is determined from a weather index, expressed as values of a weather variable measured at a stated location. For example, in Western Canada, these derivatives are based on the weather stations in Calgary, Edmonton or Winnipeg. This means the weather index may be based on a monitoring station quite far away from the fields. So it brings into question the usefulness of derivatives based on information taken from hundreds of miles away. “Canada has always been behind the U.S. when it comes to data mining. This is something we need to get better at,” says Charlebois. “And because of climate change, we need to get better at collecting data on climate patterns.” As a result, weather derivatives can have greater exposure to basis risk than insurance. Although yields are highly correlated with weather conditions, it’s simply not possible to exactly link only adverse conditions to lower crop yields. Many variables in addition to rain and temperature are at play in growing a crop, with things like timing or soil structure greatly impacting yields.
Before you jump… Before you buy your first weather derivatives, quantify your exposure to weather risk by following these six steps recommended by Alfons Weersink, economist at the University of Guelph. 1. I dentify critical weather variables. What is the limiting factor on your farm? 2. I dentify the potential impact of this weather variable on sales, prices, costs and margins. Crunch the numbers for the worst-case scenario. 3. Gather a reliable, neutral source of historical data on this weather variable. 4. D etermine the time frame when the variable’s influence is operative. When do you need hedge coverage? 5. Q uantify the relationship between potential changes in this weather variable and your financial parameters. How much damage can a couple of degrees or an inch less rain do to the bottom line? 6. Estimate the sensitivity of the financial parameter to changes in weather. How much is hedging worth to your farm?
36 country-guide.ca
Compared to crop insurance Traditionally, farmers have relied on insurance products to hedge weather-related risks, mostly using government crop insurance programs. Crop insurance claims are settled on the reduction in quantity and quality produced, with payouts calculated according to a base price set at the time the contract is initiated. Programs vary by province and by commodity, but in general coverage is based on the farm’s production averages with the farmer choosing a coverage level of 50, 60, 70, or 80 per cent of these average yields. The crop insurance payouts are based on the difference between the actual yield and quality versus the expected production, weighted by the coverage level, but the link between the event and the loss of yield and quality has to be proven. By contrast, weather derivatives are triggered by a specific weather index rather than whether a specific loss can be attributed to this weather. There is another big difference too. Unlike crop insurance, WDs cover low-risk, high-probability events. They’re designed to hedge against low-severity but high-probability events, like a cooler- or hotter-than-normal summer, or higheror lower-than-normal precipitation levels. Whether it’s too hot or too cold may not be catastrophic but we’ve all seen the impact of such events on yields and the fallout on the income side of the balance sheet. Although a majority of respondents of the Saskatchewan survey used insurance to hedge against weather-related events, they felt their insurance coverage was not sufficient as a tool to manage weather-related risk. Of the 37 users of WD, 43.2 per cent believed that weather derivatives reduce income volatility and 85 per cent said they were helpful in mitigating weather risk. So what’s stopping the wider use of WD? Some economists have pointed to pricing issues as causing substantial uncertainty for both the farmers and the institution writing the contract. The Saskatchewan survey confirmed this with 35 per cent of WD users finding it too difficult to price these tools. Charlebois says only a few years later after they did the survey the amount of information about WD available to farmers has increased substantially. “Brokers, banks, can provide information on WD,” he says Besides, farmers are always looking for better solutions. It’s our nature. More than double the percentage of respondents of the survey said they’d consider using weather derivatives in the future. “I do expect WD to become more popular in ag as farmers try to find new ways to mitigate risks,” says Charlebois. CG
november 2015
By Gord Gilmour ⁄⁄ Associate editor
Clubroot marches on So far nothing appears to have slowed the spread of clubroot, so some are suggesting it might be time to rethink our approach ver the past dozen years the canola industry has poured an ocean of effort into halting the spread of clubroot around the Edmonton area. And while there have been advances such as new resistant varieties, one uncomfortable truth remains — the disease continues to spread. Dan Orchard, a Canola Council of Canada agronomist who discovered the first infected field in 2003, says clubroot has kept on marching outward without even missing a beat. “It continues to advance about 30 kilometres a year,” Orchard told Country Guide during a recent conversation. “It’s still spreading at its own pace.” While that’s frustrating for everyone in the area, Orchard says that continued spread is not a foregone conclusion and that it might be time to rethink the control methods and begin to work proactively to root the problem out while we still have the opportunity. That means getting out into fields and identifying the problem early, rather than waiting until the signs are obvious and the grower is suddenly dealing with a crisis and trying to slam the barn door shut long after the horse is already out. Orchard says agronomists like him bear some
University of Alberta technician Victor Manolii sets up a test for clubroot infection. He says that in 90 per cent or more of cases, infections are transmitted on soil moved in by equipment. Photo: University of Alberta
responsibility for not fully understanding the disease earlier and for making recommendations such as looking for affected patches in the field while driving by, or identifying unusual patches of premature ripening from the swather. “We know now that was a bad message,” he concedes frankly. “We should have been telling growers to get out and look for it before they think they have a problem, before it becomes so obvious. Checking entrances, waterways, low areas and other ‘hot spots’ before seeing above-ground symptoms is imperative to catching it early.”
Breaking the wheatcanola habit Getting ahead of the problem is going to pay growers dividends, but it won’t necessarily be easy. For example, there’s the question of crop rotations that are in a lot of cases too tight. The recommendation for clubroot and blackleg management is once every four years, but many growers around Edmonton are still growing wheat and canola back to back. In a lot of ways it’s a holdover from the bad old days of the 1980s and ’90s, when Prairie growers were holding on for dear life and had no choice but to push canola rotations. If they hadn’t, they’d quickly have been out of business. They soon learned how to manage a two-year rotation successfully, and many continue to do so, but the level of management is becoming increasingly intense, especially if pests become a problem. These days other crops are starting to pay bills a bit more reliably, and there are options to canola. However, getting growers to adopt them may not be easy. “I think it’s habit,” Orchard said. “Farmers are just like everyone else — they like a routine that works for them, and growing canola and wheat is comparatively easy, and with the absence of disease there isn’t really a yield penalty with this rotation.” Modern canola hybrids are tough and resilient, and weed control is a relative snap with herbicide-tolerant traits. Wheat and canola are also both relatively easy to store, market and move when compared to other crops like oats or field peas, for example. And other options, such as growing dehy alfalfa, remain niche markets at best, are simply unable to soak up the acres required for a wholesale change to cropping systems. “It’s not an easy challenge for growers, there’s no denying that,” Orchard said. “But it’s a necessary one, I think, especially in the clubroot-affected regions.” Continued on page 38
November 2015
country-guide.ca 37
A University of Alberta team scouting for signs of clubroot. Researchers say the key to stopping the spread is scouting fields where the problem isn’t obvious, but where it’s likely to appear next. Photo: University of Alberta Continued from page 37 That conviction stems from another uncomfortable reality that’s emerged as he’s watched the disease inexorably marching through the region — that sooner or later life is going to get complicated for canola growers. The response can either be front loaded as a preventive strategy, or back loaded as a mad scramble while trying to stay in the canola game. Neither are simple, but at least getting ahead of the game gives you some time to deal with the problem before it’s a crisis, which Orchard says appears to be the better solution. “There are farmers out there, right in the middle of the most affected areas, and clubroot has very little impact on their farm,” Orchard said. “Continually scouting for the disease and deploying resistant varieties has been their only change.”
No simple solutions One thing that has become apparent is there don’t appear to be any easy solutions. For example, just a few years ago growers were excited by the introduction of the first clubroot-resistant canola varieties — but that excitement proved to be short lived. Already the region has seen evidence of a pathogen shift which is able to overcome resistance after just a couple of seasons. This is most likely due to natural variations within the clubroot 38 country-guide.ca
population, as recent field surveys have shown new strains popping up. Just a year ago a new strain dubbed “5x” had the industry concerned because it was found to have overcome the genetic resistance of available varieties. This past season the news got even worse, with a further nine new strains identified, all capable of overcoming the available genetic resistance. In all likelihood this is a result of the application of selection pressure by using resistant varieties too frequently. “It’s like using the same antibiotic over and over again,” Orchard said. “Sooner or later you’ll wear out that antibiotic as the disease becomes resistant, and it would appear the same sort of thing is happening here.” Plant pathologist Stephen Strelkov of the University of Alberta has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the disease over the past dozen years, and he agrees with Orchard’s analysis. We reached him in France, where he’s spending a few months of sabbatical time doing research at that country’s national agriculture research institute. Strelkov says clubroot appears to have fairly variable populations, making it extremely adaptable to control measures, and thus very successful at overcoming genetic resistance in short order. “What we’ve seen isn’t anything too surprising,” he told Guide. “It’s what
we’ve seen in other countries where they grow susceptible crops, and what’s been observed in greenhouse trials.” Strelkov says this reality highlights the necessity for growers to move to longer rotations in affected areas, rather than burning through the available genetic resistance, something that’s likely to become harder and harder for plant breeders to identify and put to work. “I think we are picking the low-hanging fruit right now, and it’s only going to become a bigger challenge,” Strelkov said. It all adds up to thinking very carefully about how the new clubroot-resistant varieties are deployed. Growers in the most affected areas can’t just assume they’ll be able to keep doing what they’ve been doing and depending on the varieties to hold up. “Longer rotations are going to be the key because of what we know about the life cycle of the disease and its ability to remain in the soil for long periods of time,” Strelkov said. “Shorter rotations cause the inoculum to build very quickly to levels that will seriously impact canola production. The simple truth is that these growers are going to be faced with a longer canola rotation, one way or another. Either they get ahead of the problem themselves, or the disease will end up enforcing a rotation by default.” Continued on page 40 November 2015
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Clubroot by the numbers 2003 The year clubroot was first discovered in a canola field near Edmonton. 1,000 The mininum number of affected fields in the province of Alberta.
25 The number of Alberta counties
that have had clubroot detected within their boundaries. 2005 The year clubroot was first found in canola in Manitoba.
2011 The next time the pathogen was detected in that province.
10 The number of Manitoba
municipalities affected by clubroot. 2008 The first year the clubroot pathogen was detected in Saskatchewan soil samples.
30 The number of randomly
selected fields in that survey of the province.
2011 The year clubroot was first identified in canola plants in Saskatchewan.
2 The number of affected rural
municipalities in Saskatchewan.
7 The number of remaining
clubroot-resistant varieties as of August 2014.
2 The number of clubroot-
resistant varieties clubroot has overcome resistance to in some areas. 1
in 4 The recommended rotation for canola to prevent clubroot, blackleg and other disease pressure from building.
2 The observed number of rotations for clubroot resistance to begin to fail.
10 The number of seasons researchers say it should have taken if proper rotation had been followed.
2013 The year the first clubrootresistant varieties failed.
40 country-guide.ca
“ The simple truth is that these growers are going to be faced with a longer canola rotation, one way or another. Either they get ahead of the problem themselves, or the disease will end up enforcing a rotation by default.” — Stephen Strelkov, University of Alberta Continued from page 38
Start at the fringe One of the strategies that’s beginning to come to the forefront is encouraging growers to plant resistant varieties in the fringe areas where the disease is either new, or as yet unidentified but on the horizon. This could beat down a potential infection that’s currently asymptomatic because the spore load in the soil isn’t high enough to cause visible damage. It’s like vaccinating to prevent a disease rather than trying to fight the infection later. Orchard said that while tools like genetic resistance will remain important, other strategies will be necessary to slow the disease’s spread and ease the pressure on this single, most valuable tool. A small outbreak spotted early might be dealt with relatively easily by managing that patch separately. “You might seed around it, or sow it down to a non-susceptible crop like grass, or even treat it with some of the soil treatments that have been used in other places where clubroot has been a problem, such as lime or fungicides,” Orchard said. Other strategies might include reducing the viability of spores, including one unique strategy involving so-called “bait crops” such as ryegrass. This aims to take advantage of a quirk in the life cycle of clubroot where, when it uses certain crops as a host, or some reason it never matures to the point that it produces new soil-borne inoculum. “It takes the clubroot spores out of dormancy, but then there’s no host available that allows them to complete their life cycle,” Orchard said.
Clubroot bloodhound Both Strelkov and Orchard say the key to stopping the spread is scouting fields where the problem isn’t obvious, but where it’s likely to appear next. And for the inside story on best scouting practices, they both referred to Victor Manolii, a senior research technician working in Strelkov’s team at the University of Alberta. “He’s the best clubroot scout I’ve ever seen,” Orchard said. “Watching him work is like watching a bloodhound or a drugsniffing dog. He’s just amazing at finding this disease.” Strelkov said after identifying several thousand cases throughout the province, Manolii is “the best in the world” at scouting clubroot infections. We reached Manolii on his mobile phone while he was en route to a field visit in Alberta’s Two Hills County with the local agriculNovember 2015
canola ture agent, and he ran us through some of the key points to effective scouting. The first and most important thing to understand is how ithe disease is entering fields, Manolii said. While wind and water erosion can move it in from adjacent fields, the main culprit is very clear. “The majority of cases — 90 per cent or a bit more — is coming in on infested soil that’s being moved by equipment,” he said. Those aren’t necessarily tillage implements either. Spores can come in on any equipment including combines, swathers, grain trucks, oilfield equipment and even with beekeepers as they tend their hives. That might sound frustrating, but it leaves an obvious place to start scouting. “Start at the main entrance to the field, and scout there,” Manolii said. “Even more than that, there’s a very clear-cut pattern that most farmers turn to the right when they enter a field and start a field operation, so scout at the entrance and to the right of it.” There are two main ways to scout for this problem. You can pull plants that aren’t looking healthy and see if you can find galls on the roots — but by then you’ve already got a reasonably serious problem. Or you can take soil tests or root tissue samples and send them to a laboratory for analysis where a reasonably priced test can determine if the field has inoculum present at low levels. “There are both root tissue and soil tests using PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) technology, which can be very accurate,” Manolii said. It’s a relatively affordable process as well, with fees running under $100 a test at most commercial labs. Getting the test done early can be cheap insurance against a runaway problem, Manolii said, insisting a grower is always going to be better off knowing if the problem is present or not. If it is, but isn’t a huge issue yet, it will be cheaper and easier to manage and you might even get away with no significant economic damage ever happening. Manolii said that as well as the field entrances, growers should pay attention to places where water might be moving the inoculum into a field, like a water run, and low spots within the field, where the inoculum could be accumulating. He also said growers should pay particular attention to canola fields in late July and early August. “This is when the fields will be nice and green, and you want to be looking November 2015
for brownish patches, spots where the plants may already be dying.” Manolii said the cause might not be clubroot — it could be sclerotinia, blackleg or even just too much water — but if you see it, you should check it out. He concurs that getting on the problem early is going to be the best strategy, and is similarly concerned at the way the disease continues to march outwards. “We need to slow it down,” he said.
Orchard still thinks that’s possible, but to do so, it’s going to be important to get ahead of the problem and work back in, much like a controlled burn can stop a forest fire from spreading further. “If we can start working back towards it, rather than chasing after it, I really do think we can slow it down,” Orchard said. “We might be able to take it from spreading 30 kilometres a year to just three.” CG
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country-guide.ca 41
By Ellen Goodman ⁄⁄ CIGI
Boosting bread with barley Barley can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, regulate blood glucose levels and possibly offset certain cancers inding better ways to mill Canadian food barley into flour may open opportunities for its commercial use as a healthy ingredient. Preliminary work done several years ago at Cigi (Canadian International Grains Institute) revealed that milling performance of food barley is improved when it is blended with wheat, producing flour with enhanced nutritional properties. During that time a commercial bakery asked Cigi to try blending 15 per cent barley with wheat to mill flour for pan bread and results indicated there was no adverse effect on the milling process. Cigi recently completed a year-long project intended to determine the specific blends that would provide optimum milling performance and nutritional quality. The results showed that up to 40 per cent hulless food barley can be milled with wheat to produce a quality flour with suitable levels of betaglucan. This work will help Cigi develop guidelines for milling hulless barley for the milling industry. Funded by Alberta Innovates BioSolutions with food barley varieties supplied by the Alberta Barley Commission (ABC), the project was carried out by Cigi’s milling and analytical services areas. Work focused on developing milling techniques and other information that would improve the competitiveness of flour produced from Canadian food barley and wheat in health food and ingredient markets. Food barley has a number of beneficial health properties — consumption can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, regulate blood glucose levels and possibly offset certain cancers. The benefits are attributed to beta-glucan, phytonutrients, antioxidants, and vitamins contained in barley. In 2012, Health Canada approved a health claim for foods containing 1.0 gram of barley beta-glucan per serving as a way to lower cholesterol.
Hulless preferred Hulless barley is easier to work with since there isn’t a requirement to remove the hulls prior to milling, says Elaine Sopiwnyk, Cigi’s director of grain quality. “However, hulless food barley varieties, especially those that are characterized as “waxy,” are also sticky when milling. Waxy starch properties are associated with higher levels of beta-glucan as well as lower levels of amylose, a component of the starch, which contributes to the stickiness. This can pose a problem for millers but blending the barley with wheat appears to resolve this issue.” 42 country-guide.ca
Cigi milling specialist Ashok Sarkar and director of grain quality Elaine Sopiwnyk led the project to incorporate barley into wheat flour. Photo: Cigi Wheat is coarser and more granular which helps with sifting and prevents the barley flour from clogging the sifter screen perforations during the milling process, explains adviser in Cigi Technology and project leader Ashok Sarkar. The project used hulless barley with three different starch characteristics — normal, partial waxy, and fully waxy — blended with wheat at 20 per cent, 30 per cent, and 40 per cent. Throughput, or milling capacity, was maintained at the same rate for all millings. Commercial millers aim to manage throughput and extraction levels to meet a required particle size to control their costs, Sarkar says. The current pro ject showed only a slight drop in flour extraction rate without changes made to throughput. Baking trials using flours from milling 40 per cent CDC Ruttan (partial waxy) barley with CWRS wheat required only small changes in formulation and processing to produce pan breads with acceptable handling properties and end-product quality. The inclusion of 40 per cent hulless barley produces enough beta-glucan to meet the U.S. health claim of 0.75 grams of soluble beta-glucan per serving but proved to be more difficult to reach the 1.0 gram per serving required for a health claim in Canada, adds Sopiwnyk. “We plan to further examine the potential of additional blends in order to produce a flour that has the required functionality and beta-glucan levels.” CG Ellen Goodman is a communications specialist with the Canadian International Grains Institute in Winnipeg. November 2015
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By Pat Keena
A big stretch At current rates of increase, canola yields will average 38 bushels in 2025. The Canola Council is shooting for 52. Is it possible? ou don’t get there unless you try. That’s the reasoning behind the Canola Council of Canada’s ambitious plan for Canada to produce 26 million tonnes at 52 bushels per acre by 2025. “Targeting is the one word that defines this strategy over others before it,” says Canola Council president Patti Miller. “Targeting in agronomy and markets.” But does reaching that number mean breaking some of the council’s agronomic advice so far? Not that farmers haven’t been doing that already, ignoring the one-year-in-four rotation recommendation, with some even seeding back to back. Better returns for canola prompted them to take the chance. But there’s new competition for those acres. Soybeans have already taken a chunk out of canola area in the eastern Prairies, and Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer have plans for varieties that could occupy up to eight million acres in Western Canada. So to meet the Canola Council’s target, the increase will have to come from yield. Recent experience suggests that’s a challenge. Across almost a third of all crop acres in Western Canada, Prairie canola yields peaked Canola Council president Patti Miller says the Canola Council took at 40.6 bushels per acre in 2013 to provide the record production of 18.4 million tonnes. an in-depth look at the agronomic But the past five-year average yield was 33.9 and market potential of canola in bushels per acre, 5.6 per cent higher than the setting the 2025 target. previous five years, and well below the 13 per cent increase for CWRS wheat. If canola yields continue to increase at the current rate, they’ll hit just 37.6 bushels by 2015, compared to the council’s target of 52. Is it possible?
Some already there Miller says the Canola Council took an in-depth look at the agronomic and market potential of canola in setting the 2025 target. Curtis Rempel, the Canola Council’s vice-president of crop production and innovation, says they looked at crop insurance data, noting the upper yield and lower yield in different ecological zones, as well as yield realized in public co-operative trials. The council points out that some farmers are already achieving the yield necessary to reach the 2025 target. “Growing canola is not prescriptive,” says Rempel. “But all bets are off with some of the yields that we are seeing.” And many are using canola in tighter rotation than the long-held standard of one in four years. 44 country-guide.ca
To get more farmers on board with crop management techniques that will boost yield, the council wants to play a larger role in technology transfer. Rempel says today’s farmers need to absorb more information faster than ever before. He says growing canola successfully and achieving higher yield is more than just attending the traditional farmer meetings, but rather tapping into canola information available online, through social media and tools like the Canola Council’s Canola Watch, a weekly email update on agronomy issues. “There are guidelines that we feel strongly about, like seeding rates, speed, seed depth and soil temperature,” says Rempel. The council also intends to work closely with life science companies, which have communication avenues of their own to reach farmers with information about best management practices. “Canola is a complex crop and farmers have done an excellent job of understanding it and how to grow it,” says Chris Davidson, head of corporate affairs for Syngenta Canada. “But there is opportunity for improvement on yield and value.” He says to maximize yield potential, farmers must focus on weed control, trash management, seeding rates as well as herbicide rates and timing of application. Davidson says seed treatment and crop protection will continue to play an important role as new varieties are rolled out with genetic traits that tackle diseases like clubroot, blackleg and sclerotinia stem rot. Varietal development is also focused on improving shattering resistance to facilitate more straight combining.
Genetics will be key “As a member of the Canola Council, we had a say in setting the target. It’s ambitious, fine. It’s challenging, but it is a good path. The bridge will be yield,” says Michiel de Jongh, newly appointed president and general manager of Monsanto Canada. “There are three pillars working for canola production. Germplasm with modern breeding technology, biotechnology and agronomic practice. Many of the theoretical yields can be delivered; they are now in a lot of fields. When germplasm, biotechnology and good agronomic practice all come together for all farmers, you get that target yield.” Monsanto points to a digital future with “big data” to help farmers make their management decisions. In 2013 it purchased The Climate Corporation, which uses farmers’ own field data to prescribe decisions for a host of management choices, from seeding rate to input application tailored to individual areas of the field. November 2015
canola target Canola Council’s aim of 26 million tonnes by 2025 is “a bit of a stretch target” and that safer bets would be in the range of 22 million to 23 million tonnes. Since the target does not forecast a significant increase in acres, most of that growth will have to come from increased yield. Representatives of other crop organi‑ zations also have their eye on increased production on the same acres. “There is room for a complete bas‑ ket of crops,” says Brent Vankough‑ net, executive director of the Manitoba Wheat and Barley Growers Association. He acknowledges that the canola indus‑ try is dealing with disease challenges. “It would be interesting to push, from a research perspective, practices in wheat production that compliment canola and vice versa,” says Vankough‑ net. “As traditional agronomy avenues and public research funding diminishes, it is incumbent upon producer organiza‑ tions to take a greater role in delivering that information to farmers.” “All commodities have targets but ultimately it is international markets that will decide if that target will be
Monsanto’s Michiel de Jongh says germplasm, biotechnology and good agronomic practice can combine to reach the target yield.
Competition for acres Brian Oleson, professor and head of agribusiness and agricultural economics with the University of Manitoba, says the
Volume 40, Number 15 | SEPTEMBER 30, 2014
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PRACTICAL PRODUCTION TIPS FOR THE PRAIRIE FARMER
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SAFER GRAIN STORAGE Whether you’ve got enough storage space this year after last year’s bumper crop or you need temporary solutions, try these four tips BY ANDREA HILDERMAN
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1. BRING IT IN DRY
e were probably all expecting a tough harvest, despite hoping for the luxury of good weather and an open fall. Rain, frost and even snow in early September likely mean there will be an even greater need to ensure grain storage management strategies are well in hand. “Just because you are done combining does not mean you are done managing the crop,” says Joy Agnew, an agricultural engineer and project manager of agricultural research services at the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. “Grain requires regular monitoring while it is in storage to ensure it does not go out of condition — that is going to be the challenge from here on out.” Considering the value of the inputs and the hours and months of time and effort put into producing the crop, this is good advice. But surprisingly, it is advice that is often not heeded as carefully as it should be.
Grain going into storage should ideally be binned clean and dry. It’s debatable if that will be entirely possible this fall, and if not there should also be the means to either dry the grain or to aerate the bin throughout the storage period and a plan in place to monitor the grain in the bin on a regular basis. “Temperature cables are very popular and cost effective to monitor the temperature of the grain throughout the bin,” says Agnew. “The cables are put in place before the bin is filled and a reader hooked up on the outside provides a temperature profile of the grain in bin at any time.” This technology, like any other, is constantly advancing. Now there are wireless systems that will send email or text notifications when the temperature rises beyond pre-set limits. For farmers harvesting damp or wet grain, there will be added work to ensure the grain does not degrade or spoil in storage. “Ideally grain should go into storage dry,” says Agnew. “If that is not possible, natural air drying with the right capacity fans, even
under conditions of high humidity and low temperatures will draw off a lot of moisture. Any airflow through damp grain is beneficial.” Getting the grain cooled off is important to prevent any further degradation in quality. Turning grain in the fall or winter can have beneficial outcomes when it comes to mixing and cooling. Avoid turning grain in the spring when temperatures are on the rise.
0.1 cubic feet per minute (cfm) of airflow per bushel. A 5,000 bushel bin would require about 500 cfm from fans to cool the grain. Natural air drying requires at least 10 times that amount of air to dry grain in storage — one cfm per bushel of grain or 5,000 cfm for a 5,000 bushel bin. Aeration fans could never achieve those air flow rates. Moisture removal would be minimal and grain would spoil.
2. KNOW YOUR DRYING CAPABILITY
3. KNOW THE LIMITATIONS OF BAG STORAGE
“The next biggest misconception out there is the difference between aeration and natural air drying,” says Agnew. “Drying and cooling are very different and it’s critical farmers know this as there is a lot at stake if they don’t.” Aeration is cooling only and is a valuable part of grain storage management. Natural air drying, on the other hand, will actually remove moisture from the grain but requires much higher airflows than aeration fans can typically provide. High capacity fans are required to dry grain in the bin. Aeration requires about
Because of winter logistics problems and the 2013 bumper harvest, many farmers may need temporary storage for their 2014 production. “Grain storage bags are quite popular with farmers in recent years,” says Agnew. “Bags offer a convenient storage option, however, they also require diligent management to ensure the grain is maintained in good condition over the storage period.” Bags are prone to damage by wildlife so weekly monitoring is recommended
» CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
In This Issue
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Wheat & Chaff ..................
2
Features ............................
5
Crop Advisor’s Casebook
6
Columns ........................... 16 Machinery & Shop ............ 26
Protect your crop sale
NEIL BLUE PAGE 15
CALL A FARMER FIRST
met,” says Gord Bacon, chief executive officer of Pulse Canada. Pulse Canada is looking forward to International Year of Pulses in 2016 which he hopes will push the continuing success of pulses among farmers’ crop choices. “A commodity has to be com‑ petitive and beneficial to farmers.” The Canola Council maintains that domestic and global markets are clamouring for more Canadian product, not only as food and feed but also in nutraceuticals and industrial products. Bruce Jowett, vice‑president of mar‑ ket development for the Canola Council, says the industry will continue to expand in major markets of the United States, China, Mexico and Japan, which at pres‑ ent make up 90 per cent of business. Meanwhile, secondary markets for seed, oil and meal will need some attention in the drive to the 2025 target. Also, there’s the importance of capitalizing on small market segments, such as the growing Hispanic community in the United States where canola use is low but health issues like diabetes are equal or higher than other segments of the population. CG
Home ec teacher promotes local ingredients » Pg 27
Cattleman’s Corner .......... 35
John Deere’s 9R tractors get new features
FarmLife ............................ 41
SCOTT GARVEY PAGE 36
TAKING TIME FOR OTHERS
Rely on the unrivalled standability of Proven Seed
BREEDING BIG BIRDS
Busy farmers take time for CFGB growing projects » Pg 18
Just how did today’s poultry become so large? » PG 3
Learn more at provenseed.ca or ask your CPS retailer
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SerVinG manitoba FarmerS Since 1925 | Vol. 72, no. 42
Forage concerns after wet season High nitrate levels in frost-stressed crops can be fatal for cattle By Meghan Mast Co-operator staFF
C
attle farmers should test their feed this year because wet weather has compromised the nutritional value in late-seeded cereal crops, and cold weather could make them potentially dangerous, a provincial forage specialist says. “We’re quite concerned about nitrates this year after the stress that the plants have been under all summer and then with the recent frost and the crops being late,” said Pam Iwanchysko, from MAFRD, during the year’s first StockTalk webinar on September 16.
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Poor weather impacts wild rice operations Wild rice has been harvested in northern Manitoba for thousands of years, but modern demands may outstrip supplies as the grain increases in popularity By Shannon VanRaes Co-operator staFF
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Murray Ratuski of Shoal Lake Wild Rice Ltd. at the company’s processing facility in the Rural Municipality of Springfield. photo: shannon Vanraes
all it too much of a good thing. Wild rice needs plenty of water to grow, but heavy rains and high water coupled with cool temperatures has hit producers hard this season, particularly in northwestern Manitoba and northeastern Saskatchewan. “There’s this little pocket that covers the majority of Canadian production and they had a terrible year. Some of the people I was inspecting, they were going to harvest nothing,” said Stuart McMillan, an independent organic inspector. “It’s hard to imagine with an aquatic plant, but they got drowned out,” he said. “At some stages of growth it’s really sensitive to rapid fluctuations in water levels.” Ideally, wild rice needs between three and five feet of water as a growing medium. “We’ve been calling it a perfect storm,” said Tracy Wheeler-Anderson, owner of Naosap Harvest in Cranberry Portage. “It’s just been a very, very odd year. The water table was high last fall, then we had an abnormal amount of snow and then we had an abnormal amount of rain, so come spring the water levels were way higher than what they normally are.” see WILD RICE on page 6 »
VO LU M E 1 1 , N U M B E R 2 2
High costs slowing cattle herd expansion Canada’s beef cattle industry is poised for expansion, but will high capital costs cause delays?
O C T O B E R 2 7, 2 0 1 4
Big shows offer a chance to reconnect Every year, Alberta’s farm shows attract hundreds of thousands of visitors — and socializing remains the major draw
BY JENNIFER BLAIR
AF STAFF
S
trong prices are signalling that it’s time to start retaining heifers and build the herd — but rising capital costs could cause some producers to hold off. “There’s lots of opportunities, but it’s costly,” said Rick Dehod, farm financial specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development. A decade of pain and low prices means many producers have other priorities than expanding at the moment, he said. “A lot of those ladies and gentlemen for the last 13 years have kept their cost of production down, and they’ve really managed their farms well and survived,” he said. “But they’re behind on some of their working capital and some of the things that need to be done. “I’m sure they’re going to take their profit and meet some personal goals and some farm goals prior to keeping those cows back.” That’s the plan on Jake Meyer’s farm south of Lethbridge.
SEE HIGH COSTS page 7
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The cattle on show are only one of the attractions at Farmfair International.
Before there were smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, farmers perfected the art of social networking the good oldfashioned way — face to face at meetings, trade shows, and conferences during the busy winter season.
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BY JENNIFER BLAIR
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nd that’s still what keeps ’em coming back for Alberta’s two biggest farm shows. “For agricultural folk, whenever they gather, networking is a major component of what they do,” said Dave Fiddler, show manager for Farmfair International. The Edmonton event has grown from humble beginnings 41 years ago into one of Western Canada’s largest — and lon-
gest running — farm shows. With nearly 300 exhibitors and 90,000 visitors over the week-long show, Farmfair attracts farmers from across the country who come to talk shop about beef. “It’s where the beef industry comes to meet,” said Fiddler. “It’s the largest beef event in Alberta, and that is the major draw.” Over the years, Farmfair has added equine events and sales, entertainment, and competitions to appeal to a broader audience
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country-guide.ca 45
By Julienne Isaacs
Winter canola catches on Down South Winter canola took a drought hit in the southern U.S. in 2015, but experts are optimistic about industry expansion
Above: Hybrid Hornet winter canola taken in western Kentucky in January 2014. Distributor Rubisco Seeds reports an average yield of 50 bushels per acre. Photo: Rubisco Seeds
t may have struggled with tough weather, but winter canola seems ready to take off in the Great Plains region of the southern United States. Spring canola is already widely grown in the northern states, but winter canola is a relatively new addition to rotations in the southern Great Plains, where temperatures prohibit spring varieties. Across the U.S., 1.7 million acres of canola were planted in 2014; in the southern Great Plains, 400,000 acres were planted to winter canola varieties. In 2015, the overall figure dropped slightly to 1.57 million acres due to drought, but was still the third-largest year on record. The United States Canola Association (USCA) is spearheading much of the canola industry’s development. One key initiative is its “Promote Canola
“ We’ve hit a speed bump with the weather and the price, but we’re optimistic that we’re going to create a canola culture down here because we need it so badly to rotate with wheat.” — Ron Sholar, Great Plains Canola Association 46 country-guide.ca
Acres” program, formed by the USCA Canola Acreage Task Force in 2007 to expand acreage in new growing regions. “By 2018, the total proposed U.S. acreage goal is 3.7 million with a national yield goal of 1.8 million,” the USCA says on its website. Regional goals are also set to increase, with the Northern Plains increasing from one million to 1.7 million acres by 2018 and the Southern Great Plains moving from 400,000 to 1.5 million acres. These figures are low compared to Canada’s 20-million-plus acres recently, but USCA assistant director Dale Thorenson notes that 10 years ago there were zero canola acres in the Southern Great Plains, so today’s acreage is significant.
Rotation option “A few years ago, a lot of people didn’t think acreage would be this high. You need to develop infrastructure, but winter canola has long-term potential,” Thorenson says. “There are 10 million, 12 million acres of wheat on wheat in the Southern Great Plains, but a lot of that is infested with cheatgrass and ryegrass. It’s a monocropping culture, and growers who are introducing canola are finding that their wheat yields are increasing by 15 per cent the following year.” This year the U.S. federal government appropriated $419,000 in research dollars for Kansas State and Oklahoma State universities for winter canola development and production, and $139,000 went November 2015
Down-south canola toward canola production in the southeast via Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. Josh Lofton, the cropping systems specialist at Oklahoma State, says canola research and breeding has been a collaborative effort among the three universities and the public sector. “Kansas State has a top-notch breeding program that has provided growers throughout the region with high-quality cultivars since the recent adoption of canola,” he says. “However, we also have several private companies that provide us with many high-end winter canola varieties and hybrids.”
Production challenges Great Plains Canola Association executive director Ron Sholar says winter canola growers have experienced their fair share of challenges over the last few years. Several years ago, the industry saw exponential growth in the region — over 300,000 acres, nearly 250,000 of that in Oklahoma alone. A disastrous drought in 2013-14 meant winter canola growers took a big hit on yield and quality; cautious growers halved acreage in the fall of 2014. “Environmental conditions are the primary concern,” says Lofton. “Producers in the state have a one-month planting window from September 10 through October 10, and if poor conditions occur within this time frame, this can result in producers either planting on the later end of that spectrum or not planting their intended acres.” Growers who plant later or plant into dry conditions run the risk of early freezes, which can decrease stands and winter survival. Some growers have also seen excessive fall growth followed by early-fall cold events, causing stand loss. Prices have also dropped precipitously. “Growers are having to use a short pencil to figure out how to make this or any crop possible, and take a hard look at every input,” Sholar says. “Wheat is cheaper to grow than canola, but you’ve had less opportunity for profitability historically.” He says the benefits of winter canola make it worth the risks. Adding winter canola to wheat rotations means dramatically higher yields, improved weed control and cleaner wheat seed. Canola yields, while they vary throughout the region, average at 1,200 pounds per acre (24 bu./acre), though they can go to 2,000 pounds per acre (40 bu./acre) or higher. “There’s a long history in this part of the country of not adding new crops,” says Sholar. “If you look at the crops that are grown here 50 years ago to today, there’s very little change. This is one of the things I’ve been most excited about, about canola. “We’re not talking about a niche crop — this is a crop that can be grown in production agriculture. We’ve hit a speed bump with the weather and the price, but we’re optimistic that we’re going to create a canola culture down here because we need it so badly to rotate with wheat.”
Expansion potential Lofton regularly talks to growers, extension personnel and industry representatives about both agronomics and long-term positioning of canola in the region. He says that despite recent challenges, he is hearing reports of nothing but increasing interest throughout the state. “As canola has become a critical rotation with winter wheat, many growers have said they know they would be much worse off without canola in the system,” Lofton says. “And there is great potential for winter canola to grow and November 2015
Growing winter canola was one of the subjects of a University of Kentucky field day in May this year. Photo: University of Kentucky
expand into more regions within the state and the U.S. Just recently, I have received calls from Mississippi and Colorado regarding winter canola production questions.” “We have a lot of potential for expansion here — we have a lot of acres that should be in rotation with canola and wheat. We do need to see price improvement and that our weather improves, but we’re optimistic,” says Sholar. CG
Trait Stewardship Responsibilities Notice to Farmers Monsanto Company is a member of Excellence Through Stewardship® (ETS). Monsanto products are commercialized in accordance with ETS Product Launch Stewardship Guidance, and in compliance with Monsanto’s Policy for Commercialization of Biotechnology-Derived Plant Products in Commodity Crops. Commercialized products have been approved for import into key export markets with functioning regulatory systems. Any crop or material produced from this product can only be exported to, or used, processed or sold in countries where all necessary regulatory approvals have been granted. It is a violation of national and international law to move material containing biotech traits across boundaries into nations where import is not permitted. Growers should talk to their grain handler or product purchaser to confirm their buying position for this product. Excellence Through Stewardship® is a registered trademark of Excellence Through Stewardship. ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW PESTICIDE LABEL DIRECTIONS. Roundup Ready® crops contain genes that confer tolerance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup® brand agricultural herbicides. Roundup® brand agricultural herbicides will kill crops that are not tolerant to glyphosate. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for canola contains the active ingredients difenoconazole, metalaxyl (M and S isomers), fludioxonil and thiamethoxam. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for canola plus Vibrance® is a combination of two separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients difenoconazole, metalaxyl (M and S isomers), fludioxonil, thiamethoxam, and sedaxane. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for corn (fungicides and insecticide) is a combination of four separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients metalaxyl, trifloxystrobin, ipconazole, and clothianidin. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for corn (fungicides only) is a combination of three separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients metalaxyl, trifloxystrobin and ipconazole. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for corn with Poncho®/VoTivo™ (fungicides, insecticide and nematicide) is a combination of five separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients metalaxyl, trifloxystrobin, ipconazole, clothianidin and Bacillus firmus strain I-1582. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for soybeans (fungicides and insecticide) is a combination of four separate individually registered products, which together contain the active ingredients fluxapyroxad, pyraclostrobin, metalaxyl and imidacloprid. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for soybeans (fungicides only) is a combination of three separate individually registered products, which together contain the active ingredients fluxapyroxad, pyraclostrobin and metalaxyl. Acceleron and Design®, Acceleron®, DEKALB and Design®, DEKALB®, Genuity and Design®, Genuity®, JumpStart®, RIB Complete and Design®, RIB Complete®, Roundup Ready 2 Technology and Design®, Roundup Ready 2 Yield®, Roundup Ready®, Roundup Transorb®, Roundup WeatherMAX®, Roundup®, SmartStax and Design®, SmartStax®, Transorb®, VT Double PRO®, and VT Triple PRO® are registered trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC, Used under license. Vibrance® and Fortenza® are registered trademarks of a Syngenta group company. LibertyLink® and the Water Droplet Design are trademarks of Bayer. Used under license. Herculex® is a registered trademark of Dow AgroSciences LLC. Used under license. Poncho® and Votivo™ are trademarks of Bayer. Used under license. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
country-guide.ca 47
By Jay Whetter ⁄⁄ Canola Council of Canada
‘What? Where? I don’t see anything…’ A head-in-the-sand approach to unfamiliar insects, diseases and weeds can be costly. Be observant. Early identification and fast action — when required — are best f Dan Orchard had not discovered clubroot in an Alberta canola field in 2003, we’d all be in ignorant bliss right now. Orchard really should have recognized the scientific principle that if something isn’t “discovered,” then it doesn’t exist and we don’t have to worry about it. He should have left well enough alone, as should those who discovered doughnuts make you fat and that Mars is pretty close and we should go there. Following the argument so far? No? Well, that’s good because the premise is ridiculous. Of course Orchard was right in sharing his clubroot discovery. Someone else would have made the discovery sooner or later, but earlier is better when it comes to slowing the spread and managing the impact of something so potentially damaging to the economic stability of a crop and an industry. Orchard’s clubroot discovery started with a phone call from the largest farm operator in the area. “He called me to say his field had ripened prematurely and he wasn’t able to properly swath it because plants were pulling out of the ground,” Orchard says. “As an agronomist, I took this an opportunity to get my foot in the door with this big farm, so I quickly responded to his request for a visit.” The grower said his regular agronomist had already been to the field, and had told the grower it was decaying roots and nothing to worry about. Orchard also expected to find something common, like blackleg or root rot or a nutritional problem. When Orchard arrived, he found plants laying on top of the ground because the swather just dragged them out instead of cutting them. He found “huge” galls on virtually every plant. “As I pulled the plants that actually stayed in the ground after swathing, they all had fresher galls,” he says. “This triggered my memory.” Four years earlier, while in his final year in agriculture at the University of Alberta, Orchard had done a report on clubroot in canola. “Of course I could only find info from other countries at that time, but based on what I had read for that report, I knew right away this was clubroot.” 48 country-guide.ca
Dan Orchard was the first to identify clubroot in Canadian canola, and recently added Hessian fly to his list of discoveries. Orchard called J.P. Tewari, the university professor and experienced plant pathologist who had assigned the report those four years ago, and said he was bringing some plants for him to diagnose. As Orchard recalls, the prof took one look and said instantly, “If this isn’t clubroot, I’ll eat my desk.” He put samples under the microscope to confirm. With a positive identification, Orchard called a friend, a more senior agronomist in Alberta, to tour the area with him. Together they found several more fields with clubroot. The friend shared the discovery with the media, which meant the news got out before Orchard had a chance to talk with Alberta Agriculture and the county agriculture fieldman. “This wasn’t the correct approach in hindsight, but it happened,” he says. And it motivated a lot more field monitoring. “Everyone was shocked with the level of infestation and the ball started rolling from there,” Orchard says. We know how the story goes from there. Clubroot is now well established in central Alberta and found in many areas of the Prairies. “If I hadn’t found it, someone else would have — although I’d like to think it would’ve been me anyway,” Orchard says. But if the discovery were a couple of years later, it may have caused a more serious setback to canola production in what is and continues to be a highly productive area around Edmonton. November 2015
pest watch The next big discovery Other diseases, weeds and insects will come along that require significant and widespread management. Swede midge could be one if it reaches a critical baseline population and conditions become right for an explosion. Glyphosate-resistant weeds are another biggie, given the value of glyphosate to the minimum-tillage program many Prairie growers have adopted. Something entirely unexpected could also come along. Jimsonweed got a lot of attention in the farm media earlier this fall. Westlock County north of Edmonton reported in late August that the weed had been discovered in canola fields in the county, and soon other counties made similar discoveries. Within a week, jimsonweed made the farm newspapers. Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium), also known as devil’s trumpet, is one of 21 prohibited noxious weeds on the federal weed seeds order. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has proposed reclassification from prohibited to primary because the weed is already found in many parts of the country — including in many gardens as an intentionally planted ornamental. All parts of the plant contain alkaloids toxic to humans and animals. The CFIA continues to investigate how jimsonweed seeds got into these canola fields. Jimsonweed needs hot soils to germinate, which the summer of 2015 provided. Drought-stressed canola was also less competitive, and because jimsonweed tends to emerge late, it probably established after most in-crop herbicide had been applied. It was the “perfect storm” for jimsonweed. What helped for early identification was that jimsonweed stands very tall and looks unusual, with a large spiky seed pod. Just a few weeds in a field will get noticed. It cannot build up quietly and take hold in a field the way clubroot can. Will jimsonweed become a major pest in canola? Unlikely. But nature can be hard to predict. If the weed does have staying power, the timely notice by Westlock County to identify and remove jimsonweed before seed set will have gone a long way to reducing any threat this weed may present. Early detection of unusual weeds, disNovember 2015
eases and insects is a good thing. This is another reason why walking fields is so important. With hundreds of insect species living in Prairie fields, growers and agronomists are bound to find something unusual if they look hard enough. Thankfully most of these are neutral and many of them are beneficial — in that they eat those few insects that are actually pests.
Be observant If unusual insects are found eating the crop, that’s worth a call to someone. Scott Hartley, provincial pest insect specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, recommends the grower, agronomist or homeowner send samples to the Crop Protection Lab for identification. “If the lab can’t identify it, the lab sends the insect to the National Identification Service in Ottawa or in some cases to other experts depending on the insect.” The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) keeps a list of regulated insects that are non-native to Canada and could be costly. Many of them are treeand fruit-eating insects, but swede midge and cereal leaf beetle used to be on the CFIA list, Hartley says.
Hessian fly is another non-native insect, and although it came to North America in the late 1700s, it took until just recently to be detected in Alberta wheat. Guess who found it? Dan Orchard. If Orchard is our Christopher Columbus of clubroot, he’s also the Henry Hudson of Hessian flies. These discoveries have little to do with chance. Orchard walks a lot of fields and keeps his eyes out for the unusual. And when he sees something, he acts — and determinedly so. He reported his Hessian fly suspicion every day for four days before an insect specialist would follow up. What Orchard’s experiences teach us is this: Look for the unusual. Don’t assume the cause is familiar. Find someone who can identify it. Keep asking around if you have to. Then talk about the risks and work together on an action plan — if an action plan is required. Many of these will be insignificant blips, but management is always easier when a true problem is discovered early. CG Jay Whetter is communication manager with the Canola Council of Canada. He is also editor of Canola Watch, a free and timely agronomy newsletter. Sign up at www.canolawatch.org.
Jimsonweed got a lot of attention when it was discovered last August in a canola field in Westlock County north of Edmonton. Photo: Wikipedia/Creative Commons
country-guide.ca 49
By Richard Kamchen
Do we still need a transportation co-ordinator? The answer may be no, but there’s still a need for improved logistics between railways and grain companies t’s been two years since the start of the infamous grain transportation backlog of 201314, but there’s still debate about whether a new organization should take over the former Canadian Wheat Board’s role as a transportation co-ordinator. “Most people like to focus on ’13-14 and say, ‘Look at the problems we created without the single desk.’ I think they’re missing the point,” says John DePape of Farmers Advanced Risk Management Co. (FarmCo). “We would have had problems with the single desk (too). At least without the single desk, we could see what it was costing. With the single desk, it would have been more difficult to quantify.”
“ You can’t just have 30 per cent extra capacity hanging around in case once in a blue moon you get a big crop.” — Barry Prentice, University of Manitoba “There’s only a fixed capacity to move grain. And if it had moved, it would have been tied up in terminals and elevators because they don’t have the capacity. You can’t just have 30 per cent extra capacity hanging around in case once in a blue moon you get a big crop,” says Barry Prentice, a University of Manitoba professor of supply chain management. What might have changed under the CWB’s delivery contract system would have been who got the blame for the mess. “It wouldn’t have all come into the railways at the same time. Farmers would have been angry at the wheat board instead of the railways because the wheat board would have been saying ‘don’t deliver that grain, we don’t want it,’” Prentice says. Without the CWB controlling deliveries, it took widening basis levels to prevent more grain from reaching the system.
50 country-guide.ca
“If you have more grain than you have capacity, that basis is going to take a hit,” DePape says. “When you have twice as much grain coming at you as a grain buyer than you can possibly handle, who would ever pay more for it? The market worked as expected under the circumstances.”
No single cause Mark Hemmes, president of Canada’s grain monitor Quorum Corporation, agrees that the single desk wouldn’t have made much difference given the severe weather in 2013-14 and noted the grain industry’s frustrations with rail service predate the CWB’s monopoly demise. A lack of co-ordination between railways and grain companies in getting grain to port remains an ongoing problem. Hemmes says removing the CWB is not the primary reason. “I think it’s more a case of where you get this push-pull between the railways’ desire to optimize their asset utilization and increase their profitability,” Hemmes says. “I don’t know what the solution is, but trying to find a singular cause in this situation is not as cut and dried as some people would like to make it.” The CWB at one time handled 60 per cent of all movement, and now it’s spread between 20-odd grain companies vying for export markets. Hemmes says he’s impressed with how well they’ve handled things without having the market clout of the CWB. There had been fears that grain companies would all jam the system after harvest. And that’s not what’s happened, Hemmes says. “The flow of traffic over the last three years really hasn’t changed remarkably, and the same challenges exist in the couple of weeks that lead up before Christmas to well into March, where railways’ ability to offer capacity is diminished.” Weather is a major element in that, but railways need to come up with a way to recover better, he says. “What happened in ’13-14 is a really great example of that. The way that whole thing
november 2015
Grain transportation
manifested itself, there were a couple of derailments, and then all of a sudden it gets cold — in Canada we always expect it’s going to get cold, but nobody expected it to go to -30 for six weeks straight — and that crippled them. And what compounded it was they couldn’t dig themselves out of it.” Hemmes says that a couple of decades back, the railways did have more surge capacity and recovery capability, but the pressures of stock market performance increased their focus on quarterly results over long-term thinking. Says Hemmes: “They’re answerable to their shareholders, not to shippers, especially in a marketplace where there’s virtually no competition.” Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association executive director Blair Rutter dismisses calls for a central coordinator. He advocates a contract system between shippers and railways that would include penalty clauses for nonperformance.
“We had a centrally planned system and part of that was the control of transportation by the wheat board. When you move away from that, you need something to replace it, and you could go the option of a central planner. But a preferred option is a contractually based system where it’s through contracts you get performance assurance,” Rutter says.
Improved logistics There have been some positive developments post-single desk. One is increased utilization rates in the country as it’s now grain companies that are responsible for optimizing space utilization. A central planner determining space and handling allocation for hundreds of different facilities can’t ever be as efficient as individuals focused on turning their own elevators at the best rate possible. “The same thing applies at the terminals as at the ports. Those guys, now that they have total control of every-
thing that goes through there, they do a phenomenally good job. And those terminals have become more efficient as a result,” Hemmes says. The CWB may have been very good at consolidating loads at port, but the grain companies are getting better, Hemmes says. “Now, each one of the grain companies is responsible to load one vessel as opposed to having five terminals loading one vessel. Depending on the commodity and the time of year, these guys do trade position. It’s in their best interest to look for ways to consolidate.” Another change is some shipping agents are booking individual holds instead of an entire vessel. “So you can buy two holds out of a six hold ship, for instance. The consolidation role has in some instances shifted away from the CWB and it’s now the shipping agents. They’ll charge a little bit of a premium on it, but it makes it a lot more efficient,” Hemmes says. CG
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business
Home on the range So you think you could ranch in this almost forgotten corner of Saskatchewan? By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor t’s on the network of narrow highways that snake through the rolling, grass-covered hills of southwestern Saskatchewan that you first notice the quiet. You can drive for 50 miles at a time and only see the occasional farmyard off in the distance. In contrast to the busy Trans-Canada Highway to the north with its continuous roar of highway traffic, you might see one or two vehicles. As they pass, you get the inevitable wave, usually just a single finger lifted almost laconically, a simple quick acknowledgment that there’s another person passing through this majestically isolated landscape of native prairie, cattle and not much else. In a province most of us think of as an endless patchwork of wheat and canola, this outpost of traditional grassland ranching is often overlooked, sometimes utterly ignored, or even worse endlessly patronized as unproductive and empty flyover country. Don’t tell that to the men and women who live and work here though. These are people with deep roots burrowed in this thin and arid soil with its covering of native grasses, flowering plants and stunted shrubs. Most of them are the descendants of American families that followed the grass north when railways and homesteaders displaced ranchers domino style up the spine of North America. To them this land is home, their spot to stand. And their ranches are their own domains, a landscape that has formed them more than they’ve formed it, a place that one must adapt to and work with rather than attempt to bend to one’s own will, as the local ranchers say. If you don’t learn that lesson, sooner or later you’ll be swept aside, just another tumbleweed whose roots haven’t been strong enough to hold it in place.
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Cowboy country When I arrive, it’s a rainy day in late July, the first rain for many a long month, and the parched prairie is drinking the water in. Doug Gillespie, a rancher from near Neville, Sask., has come a few miles out from his place to greet me. He’s concerned I might not have a vehicle up to the challenges of miles of a muddy grid road as a result of what he happily describes as “this beautiful rain” — he ranches at what he further describes as the end of “the longest 12 miles of grid in the world,” a spot he explains many have had trouble finding over the years. He takes me on a quick detour through the yard, nestled in the bottom of a valley, up against the northwest side, just to give me a sense of the operation. I mention that I’ve noted most of the yard sites seem to be similarly located, and he cracks a broad smile and explains it’s just taking advantage of the native geography to find protection from the cold winter winds for his animals. “God’s shelter is always going to be better than man’s,” he says with a characteristic chuckle. Gillespie is animated, talkative and a passionate advocate for ranching in the region. With his battered hat and rough work clothes, he looks every inch the authentic cowboy. He’s also the head of the Saskatchewan Stock Growers’ Association, one of the ranching industry’s main lobby groups in the province. He’s agreed to meet and introduce me to the business, along with his friend and neighbour Terry Ostrander, of nearby Hallonquist, Sask. We convene at the local farm supply Co-op outlet in the hamlet of McMahon, and in a quiet corner with a coffee pot and a few chairs, the pair attempts
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Doug Gillespie (left) and Terry Ostrander know the perils of ranching this land too hard. to educate a total neophyte on ranching in Saskatchewan. My first question is what makes their business so unique — something that’s instantly apparent to even the most untrained eye. Both consider it, and it’s Ostrander who speaks first, in quiet and measured tones that complement his neighbour’s more boisterous way. It is, he explains, a business where the land and climate define exactly what you can do, and if you’re going to be successful you’ve got to respect that and adapt. “You can’t expect nature to adapt to you, you have to understand what’s happening and be ready to make changes when you have to,” Ostrander says. For example, he explains that until this rain came, he and likely every other rancher in the region was preparing to cut his herd and send cows to market, rather than waiting and hoping for rain that might or might not come. Failing to move quickly enough would result in a double blow — selling cattle into falling markets after depleting the delicate rangeland that could take
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years to recover if overgrazed. It’s a point Gillespie quickly agrees with, saying the lesson is one that’s been hard learned over generations. It’s a delicate ecosystem that won’t stand mistreatment, and the most successful ranchers are the ones who have learned that lesson, Gillespie says. They’re ready to cut their stock numbers quickly when conditions turn dry and the grass stops growing, for example, taking that loss and surviving to fight another day, a strategy that makes both environmental and economic sense, he says. “Your first loss might be a loss, but it’s also always your cheapest loss,” Gillespie says. This theme resonated through our conversation, one that spanned several hours. Again and again the two spoke in terms of understanding and respecting their land, of working tirelessly to maintain its productivity and of not abusing it. Care for the land, they explain, and the land will care for you. In particular they point out that, unlike a lot of other sectors, their primary concern can’t be simply maximiz-
ing production year after year — the key is to leave about 50 per cent of the available grass still standing at the end of a grazing season, setting the range up for a quick recovery the next spring. Gillespie’s family arrived in the early part of the 20th century from South Dakota, and settled just north of the international boundary in a corner of what’s now the west block of Grasslands National Park. It was a land of rattlesnakes and arid grasses, a harsh land that even the most optimistic homesteader instinctively understood couldn’t possibly support cereal grain production. Ranching in this area was hardly a get-rich-quick scheme, with stocking rates of around four cows per quarter section, and the Gillespies were running around 300 head on about 20,000 acres. He says it’s a reality he’s had trouble at times explaining to other cattle operators who were used to far different numbers. He recalls discussing his operation with someone from the Edmonton area who insisted that what he really meant was he was running 300 cows on 2,000 acres. “He just couldn’t believe those stocking rates,” Gillespie explains. The area was also isolated — driving through it later that week, it really hit home, as miles flew by without a sign of human habitation beyond the odd abandoned building and teepee rings from the days the First Nations roamed this land. Gillespie says during the same conversation he was asked about his nearest town and said it was 47 miles from the ranch house. These days Gillespie ranches in a less isolated part of the province, about 30 miles southeast of the city of Swift Current, after moving in the early 1990s when the federal government formed Grasslands National Park. He says he fought the formation of the park “tooth and nail” but realized he had to act when it became reality. Continued on page 54
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business Continued from page 53 “I decided I wanted to be one of the first people to move, not one of the last,” Gillespie says. “I didn’t want to be out there all alone after all the neighbours had left.” Ostrander still ranches on his family’s original operation, as does his brother, though the two operate separately. It’s the Turkey Track Ranch, one of the province’s earliest ranches, having begun as an extension of a historic U.S. brand that arrived from Texas by way of the historic cattle trails in 1900. His grandfather bought the Saskatchewan operation in 1917, after also arriving from the U.S. as part of that northward migration. “They were looking for grazing land, as homesteaders displaced cattle in the south,” Ostrander says. The cattle of the time were primarily Texas longhorn, largeframed and smooth-coated animals that proved poorly suited to the harsher climate. A hard winter in 1906-07 without a warm chinook wind caused the Big Die-Off. Even today, when people say its name, you can hear the capitalization. Cattle were lost in the tens of thousands, causing many of the large U.S. operators to lose their appetite for northern ranching and leaving a group of smaller operators to pick up the pieces and figure out a way of ranching that worked in the north — a way that eventually centred around smaller-framed heavy-coated animals. At roughly the same time the industry began to feel pressure from homesteaders who were hungrily eyeing grazing land. At times this meant land was broken that was poorly suited for grain agriculture. It was farmed for a few years and then abandoned during the dust bowl of the 1930s, only to later become cattle country again, as the resilient local ranchers filled the gap left by abandoned homesteads. Ostrander says if he has a concern today, it’s for the future of the business. Over the years it’s survived a lot of challenges, but these days it faces two major challenges, all related to people. First, few of the young people show much appetite to live the same lives as their parents and grandparents, preferring instead to pursue careers in urban centres. Secondly, the industry is under a lot of scrutiny on the environmental and consumer side, with criticism that he views as unwarranted, such as the recent A&W move to hormone-free beef, or organic products being marketed as more wholesome. “I don’t honestly think that most people care, until it’s marketed to them as somehow safer, which just isn’t so,” Ostrander says. “That’s where I have a problem with it.”
Environmental boon At times ranching has been painted as an environmental disaster unfolding in slow motion. However, this rhetoric ignores the very nature of grasslands and how they evolved, says one geographer who’s worked extensively in the region. Joe Piwowar of the University of Regina has a special interest in the mixed-grass prairie of the region, where he’s been researching the effects of climate change. He says when you contrast this landscape against the rest of the Prairies — a region that less than 150 years ago was all covered with similar vegetation from Winnipeg to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains — the contrast is stark. Where farm fields have long displaced waving grasses in other places, here those grasses survive. “That’s a big part of the experience of visiting this place,” Piwowar says. “It’s not been broken. It’s the way it’s been for thousands of years, since the end of the last ice age.” 54 country-guide.ca
“ The ranchers who lived here did such a good job protecting it,” says a Parks Canada officer That evolution depended, in no small part, on the presence of a large grazing animal to disturb the sod with hoofprints and fertilize it with dung. Take that out of the equation and the system begins to become less productive, slowly at first, then more quickly as the cumulative effect begins to take hold. “I’m not a rangeland manager, but it’s pretty clear that without grazing, this land begins to suffer,” Piwowar says. “Cattle don’t perfectly replace bison, but they do perform many of the very important functions bison once did.” To understand how this balance works, you need to know the land, and the best place to see that is Grasslands National Park, one of the lesser-known jewels in the national park system. It’s comprised of two blocks of land, covering roughly 900 square kilometres in the southwest corner of the province, bordered to the south by the international boundary. Looking at it on a map, it’s a part of the world where the road network slowly fades out, first to narrow secondary highways, then to winding grid roads and finally to rutted paths across the Prairie. Here we meet Heather Facette, a resource management officer with Parks Canada, for a tour of the park. As we drive through the landscape, it’s hard to imagine a lonelier place on the face of the planet, a landscape of grassy plants, wildflowers and other broadleaf plants and small shrubs, all on rolling hills and valley bottoms. It’s so isolated that the region is a light preserve where stargazers can see the stars like few other places. We stop at a black-tailed prairie dog colony to have a look at the activities of the small rodents. Amidst their bird-like chirping as they communicate to each other about these strange intruders, Facette opens up about what makes this mixed-grass prairie landscape so special in her mind. November 2015
business “It’s a beautiful place — it’s the only mixed-grass prairie park in all of Canada, and I think it should be something all Canadians can see and enjoy,” she says. “It’s very unique and we only have it because the ranchers who lived here did such an excellent job of protecting it.” That might sound like heresy to an urban environmentalist, but in no small part it’s one of the truest statements I’ll hear during this visit. Contrast the environmental footprint of a farmer and a rancher. Where a vast swath of native grassland used to run up the spine of the continent from north Texas to Edmonton, are now fields of corn, soy, cotton, and wheat and canola, just to name the major crops. That’s not to cast shame on farmers — the world needs that food and fibre — it’s just an observation. You can still walk the landscape here and find needlegrass, bluegramma, western porcupine grass and shrubs like silver sagebrush. The native birds, insects and animals all still thrive on this landscape. And cattle grazing has played a key role in keeping the ecosystem healthy.
When you stop to think about it, this is hardly surprising, says one local rancher. Miles Anderson ranches near the hamlet of Fir Mountain and during our conversation he explains that this lesson was one Parks Canada had to learn from scratch, after coming in during the early 1980s with the perception they were going to somehow “save” the range from the ranchers. “They were bullies, to be perfectly honest,” Anderson says. “They came in and God help you if one of your cows strayed onto their land… it was like they thought a cow or a horse was a plague.” Initially the park completely excluded any grazing livestock, until they began to run into some of the expected problems of ungrazed land. They also came to the realization that the local ranching community was a valuable source of information and most importantly, the park wouldn’t thrive without the support of its neighbours. “They’ve changed their approach a lot over the past six or seven years,” Anderson says. As that’s happened he and the
park staff have found common ground and he’s now widely noted among park staff as a landowner who understands the ecosystem he manages, and actively shares information with park staff and researchers working in the area. A conversation with him is interesting and unexpected, as he speaks plainly as you’d expect a cowboy to — all the while peppering the conversation with words like ecosystem and other terms that an outside observer might find funny to be coming from his mouth. When I point out an urban environmentalist eavesdropping on our conversation would probably be pretty surprised, this is met with a wry chuckle. Anderson says he’s willing to talk to the park staff these days because they’ve in turn begun to understand and respect the local ranching community more, adding that the park-ranch relationship is significantly less rocky than it was. U of Regina’s Joe Piwowar says in part the problem was academics like him Continued on page 56
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business Continued from page 55 who didn’t always acknowledge or even understand the depth of the knowledge of local ranchers. For example he cited a study done by researchers from another institution looking at stocking rates and how they affected the rangeland. “I shouldn’t be bad-mouthing other academics, but I always chuckle at that a bit,” he confesses. “I bet if they’d just asked the local ranchers about it, they all had a pretty good idea what the optimum stocking rate was.”
Bridging the gap If there’s one person who can honestly claim to have a foot in both camps, it’s Jody Larson. He still runs cows on part of his family’s ranch near Val Marie, though a good portion of it is now owned by the park. He also has an office in town at the park’s visitor centre, where his job title is “realty program officer” a nod to his role in negotiating land purchases from ranchers still operating within the park’s designated boundary. When I suggest to him that the title probably doesn’t cover off all his duties, he grinned. “I tell people I translate,” he says. “Because really, that’s what I do. I translate between the local ranching community and Parks Canada staff.” At times it can be challenging, but less so lately. In the early years he concedes the relationships between the Parks people and the local community wasn’t always great. “I think there’s an idea where this land can somehow be ‘saved,’” he says. “With farmland, it’s been changed so much for food production, I don’t think there’s that same sort of thought.” The attitude that their land needed to be saved from them went over with the locals about as well as you could imagine, and park staff are noticeably cautious about how they speak of the legacy of ranching these days. They are also quite candid about how the park itself has begun to use grazing to manage their own range, including some cattle grazing, as well as a bison herd. Having more than one type of grazing is actually seen as a positive by Parks staff these days. “It’s important that we have a range of habitats to support wildlife,” Heather Facette says. “The habitats that are created by bison grazing and cattle grazing and ungrazed land are all different, and 56 country-guide.ca
“It’s a delicate balance,” Jody Larson says, but he believes the community is reconnecting. they support different wildlife, such as species of birds.” She adds that those habitat types can be both within the park and outside of it, and all combine to contribute to a healthy ecosystem for wildlife in the area. This growing mutual respect is also a natural product of the passage of time, Larson says. “Our kids go to school together, they play hockey together, we’ve got to know each other… as that’s happened, I think we’ve found we actually have a lot more in common than most of us would have thought.” An old sense of community has even reasserted itself, Larson says. In a land that seems almost empty, the few people who do live here tend to form meaningful relationships that span many miles. “I admit to him that in a small way I may have got a glimpse of this when I told Doug Gillespie that one of my next stops was to visit him at the park, and Gillespie explains that prior to his move, the two families were neighbours. “His dad was the best cowhand I ever knew,” Gillespie had told me. When I tell Larson this, he pauses, obviously touched by the tribute to his late father. I mention to him that this sort of sense of community is one of the things, along with the raw beauty of the land, I had noted on this trip, and wondered what his impressions were. He says to
him it boiled down to people looking out for each other, something that could be seen in the way children were raised in the area, working alongside their parents and neighbours at events like roundup and branding, almost being raised by the community as a whole. Preserving that is going to be a challenge as young people move away, ranches become larger, and perhaps the park begins to attract more visitors, instead of the few thousand folks who make the hours-long trek to an out-ofthe-way corner every year. “It’s a delicate balance,” Larson says. “You want to do your job with integrity and be a good employee, and showcase the land — it’s a sense of pride that the early settlers and First Nations were stewards of it. However, you wonder what effect a lot of visitors may have on the land, the people and the communities.” Larson concedes he has mixed feelings about how things have gone at times, especially how his family’s ranch is now largely part of the park. I ask him if that bothered him when it happened, and his answer is forthright and candid. “It still bothers me today, sometimes,” he admitted. “It’s not the same, being one of the people who manages it for the new owners, the government of Canada and the people of Canada. It’s never going to be the same as managing it for yourself and your own family.” CG November 2015
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business
Behind closed doors New Holland takes us into the secret world of its secure research facility in Pennsylvania By Scott Garvey, CG Machinery Editor n August 20, 1940, the New Holland Machine Company signed a deal with Pennsylvania inventor Ed Nault to take ownership of his unique hay baler design. Nault had patented a new knotter that was capable of reliably producing a tight bale, something other fledgling designs at the time really couldn’t do very well, according to Don Horning, a New Holland, Pennsylvania historian who provided journalists with some history behind the NH brand during a media event put on by the company in July. Nault and a partner were only manufacturing the balers on a very small scale prior to the sale, Horning explained. Just five weeks later, however, owners of what would become today’s New Holland, which was and still is headquartered in New Holland, had fine tuned the baler’s design and were beginning production, with advertisements for the improved machine running in the local newspaper. The success of that baler made NH the go-to brand for haying equipment in North America for years, building a reputation that still has a strong pull with many farmers. It also created a lasting pride in the quality of its balers that senior NH executives still feel today.
Bret Lieberman took over as New Holland’s North American vicepresident in June. Photos: Scott Garvey
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“Our history is something we can be proud of and something we can build on, but we really can’t be comfortable with what our predecessors did,” said Bret Lieberman, NH’s new North American vice-president during the July media event. “Our job will always be to leave the place in better shape than when we found it. “When I was manager at the (assembly) plant, I would show them (visitors) the knotter and say if it weren’t for this we probably wouldn’t be here today. Something so simple as a knotter on a square baler is where this company has grown from. That really put this brand on the map, and it really gave it the leverage to grow and expand.” Legend has it that Nault locked himself inside a farmyard corn crib while perfecting his prototype baler so as to avoid any cynical criticism from his neighbours who might catch on to what he was up to. Today, advancing the design of NH machines is still done behind locked doors to provide a measure of corporate secrecy, but the company’s R&D facility adjacent to the executive offices and hay tool-manufacturing plant is a far cry from Nault’s improvised farm workshop. The NH R&D building covers thousands of square feet and includes sophisticated test bays that can perform everything from continuous vibration tests to cold-weather simulations that chill machines down to Saskatchewan-like winter conditions for sub-zero durability testing. It’s the kind of must-have facility every major brand uses in order to turn out reliable engineering designs. During that July event, NH executives unlocked the door to their facility and allowed farm journalists, who were at the head office to see the launch of the brand’s 2016 equipment line, to wander through and see what engineers and technicians were up to. Although there were some of the usual restrictions on what we could photograph, the company was quite accommodating. Managers recruit the roughly 100 workers in the R&D facility from its assembly plant staff, but employees who want one of these coveted jobs need to prove they have exceptional drive so they can be counted on to make a meaningful contribution. Each one needs to have a top-notch work record and to complete a series of courses on their own time before even being considered. “We can teach the skills, but we can’t teach the attitude,” explained Ben Heiser, manager of the R&D lab. The jobs vary from welding prototype components to running the $500,000 3D printer that the lab uses to make to ensure concept parts have November 2015
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Clockwise from below: Terry Moyer, hay tools product validation manager, holds a circuit board sent to the R&D lab for testing. This year digital components play an increasingly important role in the brand’s haying equipment. An employee uses one-off fabrication jigs in the R&D lab to assemble this prototype header for testing. This moving, wall-sized image of a baler appears in 3D when engineers use it to evaluate component performance or assembly fitment before prototyping begins.
proper fit before going through the expense of sending a design out to a foundry to pour metal versions. “In some cases we go through virtually hundreds of iterations of a part before we actually build it,” said Mark Layton, a chief engineer. “It (the printer) is a very valuable tool engineers use for prototyping vehicles. That technology didn’t exist 10 years ago the way it does today.” In another test bay, a specialized machine vibrates and puts torsional stresses on combine concaves. Previously, labs would have to run a machine around a bump track, which meant scheduling drivers to keep the test going around the clock in order to put enough hours on in a short time. That non-stop pace was necessary to get a quick evaluation of how the machine would fare over several years of normal working life. And it was hard on drivers, who endured those stresses too. The 3D modelling and specialized prototype testing bays also do a better job both of determining where any potential faults lie and of determining why they occur, allowing engineers to make changes faster. “We’re trying to eliminate the build-andNovember 2015
break cycles,” said Layton. “We come to market with a product that is much more mature.” Just off the shop floor is the facility’s VR (virtual reality) room. There, engineers can take a 3D look at how components fit together or how they will react when working in the field. “Virtual reality came out of the need to take the complicated CAD (computer-aided design) models and simplify them,” said David Christopher, simulation manager. To get the most out of VR modelling, even the way crops react when fed through combines and hay tools has been studied and can be included in a moving VR image. That lets engineers see where inefficiencies, excessive wear or other problems are likely to develop, so precise refinements can be made. “We don’t want to do the old boiler plate process of just slapping more material on if you have a problem,” said Christopher. The lab also includes specialists who subject electronics to some pretty severe duty. Mark Hooper, senior director of marketing, pointed out that increased
focus on electronics means the new model introductions for 2016 look different than they have in past years. “I think you’ll see the difference,” Hooper said. “Last year what we presented was a lot of new products. This year it’s some new product, because we continue to invest. But it’s about delivering, now, the technology that allows that product to optimize, so we can help the users do more with the products we’ve just introduced.” “I’ve been with the company 25 years and I’ve never seen a refreshed line like we have today,” added Lieberman. That focus on technology is likely to continue on Lieberman’s watch if his comments during an evening reception are any indication. “To go fast, you need to keep your eyes up,” he told the journalists gathered there. “So if we as an organization are always looking at our feet about what we have to do today, what happened yesterday, the question is where are your eyes, because we have to have our eyes focused on moving forward. You can’t go fast if you’re looking at your feet.” CG country-guide.ca 59
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The great threat of 2015 Undeclared use of Clever and Manipulator could devastate our crop exports and bankrupt individual farms By Gerald Pilger
t has been a trying year for many Prairie farmers. Late-spring frosts, drought, and then a wet fall created headaches for many growers. Unfortunately, an even bigger headache could overshadow these weather issues, resulting in economic losses for every Canadian producer. There is a very real possibility we will lose sales and maybe even important markets this winter due to Canadian shipments of grain exceeding the maximum residue limits (MRL) of importing countries. The registration of Clever (quinclorac) and Manipulator (chlormequat) for use in Canada means MLRs are once again a major issue for both farmers and grain companies. Even though it is legal for farmers in Canada to apply these products, our primary export markets have severe restrictions on any residues in grains and oilseeds and even in processed products derived from those crops. As a result, grain companies are reluctant to handle any crops treated with these products due to the risk of a shipment being refused because of residues. “This is a very difficult situation,” says Wade Sobkowich, executive director, Western Grain Elevator Association. “We understand this problem is not caused by farmers. Farmers are caught between a rock and a hard place.” Sobkowich explains that the United States has no MRL for chlormequat. As a result, crops treated with chlormequat simply cannot be exported to the U.S. Likewise, a number of the countries which import canola and canola products from Canada, including Japan, have not established MRLs for quinclorac, closing the door on crops where quinclorac was applied. As a result, some grain-handling and processing facilities are outright refusing to accept any grains and oilseeds which had chlormequat or quinclorac applied. The Louis Dreyfus Commodities website states: “The U.S. export markets have minimal tolerance for quinclorac, the active ingredient in “Clever Dry Flow Herbicide.” Therefore Louis Dreyfus at Yorkton will not accept any canola deliveries that have been treated with this product for the 2015-16 crop year.” In a June 26 online news release, Cargill stated: “Cargill’s purchase contracts include a warranty by growers that in growing the commodity sold to Cargill, the grower has only used pesticides that are 60 country-guide.ca
approved for use on crops in major Canadian export markets (including U.S., Mexico, Japan, EU and China). As a result, any deliveries of canola treated with quinclorac will be rejected by Cargill.” Sobkowich points out the cost of segregating canola is very high and it would not pay for companies to accept canola if their primary sales program is to countries which do not accept quinclorac residues. However, he says there are other facilities which export to other markets which will take delivery of quinclorac-treated canola, or cereals to which chlormequat has been applied. “Farmers are advised to work with the grain companies,” Sobkowich says. “If one facility will not accept the crop, it is recommended you go to other locations. It should not be too difficult to find somewhere to deliver, depending on the area.” The trade response is evolving, however. When asked if his company was accepting quincloractreated canola, Aaron Anderson, assistant vice-president for western grains at Richardson Pioneer, told Country Guide, “All RP facilities have the ability to receive and handle Clever-treated canola. We will be assessing the needs of our grower customers and working with them to collect and market quinclorac-treated canola, where we can limit risk and maintain Canada’s reputation as a supplier of quality, food-safe grains and oilseeds to the world.”
Remember Triffid flax? This is not a new phenomenon. Globally there are cases every year when shipments of grains and foodstuffs are rejected because the phytosanitary regulations of the importing country are more stringent than the regulations in the country in which the crops are grown. Ignoring the rules of importing countries not only puts current sales at risk, but future sales as well, and it can result in significant economic losses for the growers in the country of origin. Triffid flax is an example of what can happen when an importer’s regulations are not adhered to. Just on the suspicion that flax exports from Canada contained a very low level of an unlicensed GMO variety of flax, Canadian flax prices dropped by a third. When those rumours were confirmed with the findings of Triffid in a flax shipment to Japan, 35 Continued on page 62 November 2015
CANADIAN FORAGE & GRASSLAND ASSOCIATION
www.canadianfga.ca • Ph: 506-260-0872
Hit the Books Have you evaluated your forage production costs yet? Success isn’t getting a bountiful harvest in before the neighbours. It’s creating and evolving a sustainable business strategy.
fixed costs (machinery depreciation, storage), operating costs (seed, treatment, fertilizer, fuel, crop insurance) and labour.
In our last feature, we talked about the importance of feed testing to prepare for winter. By now you’ve likely taken all the samples you need, or have already received the results in the mail. Besides determining what nutritional requirements you exceed or fall short on, there’s another reason to keep those numbers close to the office.
Once you have the numbers all done up, that feed analysis will need to be considered in your comparisons. It’ll also be a good opportunity to ask yourself some important questions. Were you able to harvest your forage on time? What is the quality of the forage? Will you need to supplement your feed? How does this year compare to others?
It might not be every forage producer’s idea of a good day, but calculating costs of production is essential to maintaining a sustainable business.
Forage production is justified when the cost of producing it is less than alternative feed sources (on a protein or energy basis) and the net result provides a return on the capital required.
First, knowing how much it costs to grow and harvest your forages will allow you to price it fairly (or, in looking for other feed, have a baseline for its value). Second, it will enable you to determine where improvements can be made, and whether or not other harvest strategies would be more valuable to your operation. Determining cost of production will require a look at some of the basics, like
There’s nothing stopping you from getting started on calculating your cost of production today. And if developing your own spreadsheet doesn’t sound like a walk in the park, head to the web. There are numerous excel calculators available online, through university extensions and provincial governments.
”Knowing how much it costs to grow and harvest your forages will allow you to price it fairly (or, in looking for other feed, have a baseline for its value).“
The Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association is online with a newly refreshed website and online resource. Connect with CFGA on Twitter @CFGA_ACPF and on Facebook!
Canadian Forage in the International Year of Soils – Capture the Intensity! November 17 – 19th, 2015 Sheraton Cavalier Hotel, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan With the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization having declared 2015 as the International Year of Soils, what better opportunity to showcase the contribution of forages to profitable livestock production, healthy cropping systems, and overall ecosystem health for Canadian society. The 6th Annual CFGA conference will highlight the profitability of intensive forage production systems and the potential of forages to provide ecosystem goods and services for all Canadians. Join us this November 17- 19th, 2015 in beautiful downtown Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for Canadian Forage in the International Year of Soils – Capture the Intensity!
www.canadianfga.com
business Continued from page 60 countries closed their borders to our flax exports, including 28 in the EU which accounts for 60 per cent of our flax export market. A University of Saskatchewan study estimated that the cost to the Canadian flax industry in the first year alone was $29 million due to demurrage, testing, and segregation costs. Furthermore, a Canadian industry study also found Triffid flax added that much or more in costs to the EU flax industry by 2011. As well, due to contamination of seed stocks, Canadian growers lost the rights to grow two flax varieties: CDC Normandy and CDC Mons. In 2003, Japan rejected a French shipment of canola when it found residue of an unapproved insecticide. Not only did the French shipper lose a $6-million sale, it also cost the company an additional $2 million in demurrage, shipping and handling. Most importantly, Japan lost confidence in the ability of French farmers to supply canola that meets their standards, which cost French farmers millions more in lost sales. Australian shippers lost $11 million when Japan found a shipment of canola exceeded Japan’s MRL for fenitrothion. It also resulted in increased testing of all shipments of canola from Australia. In 2013 Japan refused two containers of buckwheat from Manitoba because they exceeded Japan’s MRL for thiamethoxam. Earlier this year, three U.S. hay exporters were blacklisted from supplying hay to China after Roundup Ready alfalfa was found in hay shipments. Hundreds of containers of hay were turned away. The Japanese market for Canadian canola is worth over $1 billion. Farmers simply cannot afford to put this market at risk by knowingly or inadvertently delivering quinclorac-treated canola without informing the facility quinclorac had been applied. Not declaring the use of either quinclorac or chlormequat before delivery can not only put Canada’s grain and oilseeds industry at risk, it could bankrupt a farm business.
Essential farm steps 1. Segregate on farm all production which has had an application of quinclorac or chlormequat. 2. Declare all production from fields treated with quinclorac and chlormequat. 3. Work with the grain companies to deliver when and where treated crop can be handled. 4. Ensure you follow the labels of all pesticides to ensure residues are minimized (correct rate, timing, and pre-harvest interval). 5. Do not apply any pesticide for uses not on the label. 6. Do not grow unlicensed varieties of any crops.
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The Cargill news release reminded growers that the Declaration of Eligibility for Delivery Form must be signed by all producers prior to delivery. Furthermore, the news release states, “The declaration further includes an indemnity for all costs incurred in relation to any delivery that is made contrary to the representations made in such document.” Richardson Pioneer’s Anderson says that if a grower delivers quinclorac-treated canola without declaring it as such, “It will most likely come with some serious financial/trade implications.” Anderson says the cost of a rejected cargo of canola could be in the range of $20 million, not including future losses cost by lost sales. To say the costs would be significant is most likely “an understatement,” Anderson adds. “Our Corporate Quality Assurance and Food Safety systems allow us to conduct full traceability of all grains and oilseeds that are delivered to each individual sale… we are able to trace grain from source of origination to final delivery.” Yet in spite of the risk both to the farm business and our grains industry, there are still farmers complaining about having to declare their use of these products and who continue to apply pesticides to crops off label. There are likely even a few who will try to deliver crops grown with quinclorac and/or chlormequat without telling the buyer. They honestly see themselves as victims.
The blame game Most farm anger over the MRL issue seems directed at the grain companies but these companies might be the wrong people to blame. They do seem to be trying to protect our markets by ensuring we meet all the regulations of importing nations. Instead, Sobkowich says, “We (Canadians) need to review the entire process of registration.” Sobkowich’s statement made me realize that while our regulatory system ensures products are safe for consumers and the environment, that approval only applies within Canada. Furthermore, it doesn’t consider the countries we market to. Why is our regulatory system approving pesticides when our major markets will not accept treated crops? Pesticide companies also need to shoulder some of the blame. Do they really consider the end-user? However, farmers themselves may be the biggest problem. Too many ignore the first axiom of business: the customer is always right! Farmers need to focus so much on bigger, faster, cheaper, and easier, they may take a “let them eat cake” attitude to their customers. Are farmers so divorced from the end-user that they simply have no idea of what is needed, wanted or opposed? That is a very dangerous attitude in a world with a current surplus of grain stocks. True businesses would focus on producing products that the customers believe in and want, not just on what the businesses decide the customer should buy. CG
November 2015
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w e at h e r NEAR NORMAL
MILDER THAN NORMAL
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MILDER-THAN-NORMAL TEMPERATURES AND NEAR- TO BELOW-NORMAL PRECIPITATION
November 15 to December 12, 2015
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Nov. 15-21: Seasonal to mild overall in the west under fair skies apart from a couple of wet, cooler, blustery days this week. Periodic rain or snow with frost inland and at higher levels. Nov. 22-28: Look for occasional rain or drizzle on the coast with temperatures in the double digits. Generally mild elsewhere with scattered snow, possibly heavy in places. Nov. 29-Dec. 5: Temperatures vary and often trend to the mild side. Fair overall with some rain and drizzle in coastal areas changing to snow inland. Chance heavier snow north and east. Dec. 6-12: Fair skies dominate with milder-than-normal temperatures in most regions. Expect some rain on the coast on a couple of days with intermittent snow and frost inland.
ALBERTA Nov. 15-21: Look for seasonal to mild temperatures and fair skies although a couple of colder, windy days bring some snow or rain to southern regions, heavier snow in the north with higher wind chills. Nov. 22-28: Mild spells with thawing temperatures interchange with cooler, blustery days and some higher wind chills. Fair overall apart from periodic snow. Chance of freezing rain in the south. Nov. 29-Dec. 5: Fair skies alternate with snow and blowing snow on two to three occasions this week as cold and mild air intermingle. Windy from time to time. Occasional higher wind chills. 64 country-guide.ca
Dec. 6-12: Unsettled on a couple of days this week as disturbances move by bringing intermittent snow and drifting to the south. Risk of freezing rain. Seasonal to mild but colder in the north.
SASKATCHEWAN Nov. 15-21: Seasonal to mild and fair skies overall but expect a couple of colder, windy days this week with occasional snow and higher wind chills. Chance of rain in the south. Nov. 22-28: Changeable weather and temperatures as mild, fair weather days alternate with snow and occasional blowing snow, risk freezing rain in the south. Variable north with some snow. Nov. 29-Dec. 5: Temperatures fluctuate from mild to seasonal under windy conditions at times. Snow and blowing snow in the south on two or three occasions. Higher wind chills at times. Dec. 6-12: Temperatures trend to mild side under fair skies but look for disturbances to bring periodic snow and some cooling. Windy at times with blowing or drifting and higher wind chills.
MANITOBA Nov. 15-21: Variable weather as fair skies interchange with cloud and occasional snow, heavier north and near lakes. Chance of rain south. Temperatures are seasonal to mild. Nov. 22-28: Expect weather conditions to vary as snow falls in several areas, chance
heavy in places. Blustery winds create changeable temperatures from mild to cold with higher wind chills at times. Nov. 29-Dec. 5: Mainly seasonable and fair but look for some snow and blowing snow on a couple of colder days this week along with heavier snow near open waters. Dec. 6-12: Fair overall but a couple of colder, windy days bring periodic snow to many areas and occasional blowing snow to the south. Otherwise, expect temperatures to swing from seasonal to mild.
November 15 to December 12, 2015 NATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS A strong El Ni単o event is taking place in the Pacific Ocean. Past records indicate that this often translates into a milder and drier weather pattern across much of Canada. In spite of El Ni単o, wintry, inclement weather is still likey to occur over many areas of our country from time to time. Nevertheless, indications are that generally milder and drier-than-usual conditions will dominate the weather picture in Canada throughout the winter and possibly into the spring of 2016.
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. November 2015
w e at h e r
He knows the weather Meet Larry Romaniuk, long-range weather specialist at Country Guide By Angela Lovell hen you spend 60 years doing something, you get pretty good at it, and Larry Romaniuk is very good at forecasting the weather at least 75 per cent to 80 per cent of the time. Romaniuk prepares the long-range weather forecast for Country Guide, and he’s been doing it for 23 years since retiring from his 37-year career as a meteorologist with Environment Canada, a job he started soon after graduating in science from the University of Manitoba. He also wrote the forecast and weather trivia for “Harrowsmith’s Truly Canadian Almanac” for a number of years. Romaniuk does a self-analysis of his own forecasts every month. “Let’s say I forecast frost in midSeptember in certain areas and it does occur, I give myself five points. If it doesn’t occur, I take five points off my score, and it usually comes out to around 75 to 80 per cent,” says Romaniuk. When Country Guide surveyed readers a few years ago about how accurate they rated Romaniuk’s forecast, they perceived it as accurate about 75 per cent of the time too.
More than a crystal ball It’s a complex matter to create a forecast, especially three months in advance. So how does he do it? There are five basic factors, Romaniuk responds. First, he relies on sophisticated computer models which allow him to draw up a broad weather map of
Canada with an outlook for the general pattern, i.e. milder, colder, or near normal. Then he looks at the long-term weather records for each province to see what the local, historical averages and normals are for things like precipitation and temperature. The next factors are upper air circulation patterns such as troughs and ridges, and persistence — for example, if there’s been a drought, how much influence will that have on the forecasted weather in a region. But the biggest factor is Romaniuk’s vast experience and knowledge. “I need an idea about the geography, the climate, the peculiarities in each province and I keep that in the back of my mind,” says Romaniuk. “I’m also aware that I need to emphasize weather events which are most pertinent to agriculture, like first and last frosts, heavy snow or rain events, wind, or unsettled periods because farmers’ livelihoods depend on the weather.”
Fun moments in the weather room Romaniuk has had plenty of amusing moments in his career, like the time a colleague was live on air forecasting sunshine when it was pouring rain outside the closed blinds of the office. Romaniuk says the hardest part of being a meteorologist through all those years was constant shift work and having to go live on the radio near the end of a 12-hour shift. A colleague once fell asleep waiting to go on air. The station broadcast his snoring. Romaniuk has also forecast his share of wild weather, such as the tornado that hit the town of St. Claude in southern Manitoba 25 years ago, which he was later sent to investigate. “The antennas were turned northeast on the north side of the highway and on the south side they were broken off or twisted from the southwest, showing the rotation was right over the town,” he says.
What’s in store? So what’s the outlook for Canadians this winter? “With El Niño coming, everybody’s all excited because it normally translates into a milder and drier winter for us, particularly in Western Canada,” says Romaniuk. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to walk around in short sleeves every day. We’re going to have snow and the occasional blizzard but overall generally milder and drier than normal.” But, he adds with a twinkle, “You can check on me in about eight months and see how I did.” CG November 2015
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life
About the neighbours When Country Guide writer Lisa Guenther wrote her acclaimed new novel, Friendly Fire, she set the action in her own rural community. So we asked her to tell us, ‘How good an idea was that?’ By Lisa Guenther, CG Field Editor here’s a bit of danger, or at least perceived danger, around setting a novel in the rural community that you live in. Especially when the blurb on the back of the book says something about “eviscerating small-town platitudes.” A writer I know asked me, “Aren’t you afraid they’ll run you out of town?” She was being tongue in cheek, I think. But I’m not really worried about being run out of town. I give my community more credit than that. Still, writing about a tight-knit community does require thought. It’s not a decision that I made lightly when I was working on my novel, Friendly Fire. But I think it was the right decision.
The real danger of fiction in a real place If you live in a rural community, you likely know the biggest danger in all this. It’s that people in your community will start looking for the real-life inspiration behind your fictional characters. I suffered a bit of angst over this. My novel opens with the main character, Darby Swank, finding her Aunt Bea’s body floating in Brightsand Lake. The rest of the book follows Darby as she uncovers who killed her aunt. It’s a long look at violence against women and the consequences of turning a blind eye. As far as I know, no one has ever dumped a body in Brightsand Lake. But violence and murder are as likely to happen in my corner of Saskatchewan as anywhere else. For that exact reason, I didn’t want to base Bea, or her killer, on anyone I knew. I tried to build Bea, and most of my characters, from scratch. For example, I handwrote long passages from Bea’s point of view.
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life That writing didn’t make it into the novel, but it’s the kind of thing that helps a character sit up and take her first breath. When it came to naming central or controversial characters, I went through the local phonebook, crossing out local surnames as fictional possibilities. This may seem silly to some people, but I didn’t want to inadvertently hurt someone or fire up the rumour mill. Some friends have told me they’ve been trying to figure out which locals I drew on for the characters. My standard response is: “Did you find yourself in there yet?” And then we laugh nervously. But despite all this, some readers will see people they know in the book. I’ve already heard this from readers in other towns.
If you’re an aspiring writer, don’t feel that your rural background puts you at an insurmountable disadvantage. It doesn’t How is it possible for readers to see people they recognize in fictional characters? I think there are two reasons for this. For one, even if characters are drawn from thin air, if they are at all realistic, they will resemble real people. The other is that readers bring their own experience to a book. They think, “Oh, wow, that sounds like my Aunt Martha.” Or, “That happened to me.” Or, “I’ve been to a country hall dance like that. I know those people.” Of course, even if readers bring their own experiences to the book, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll like it. It might be a simple matter of taste. It might be that the tragic situations in the book are a little too familiar. It could be any number of other reasons. Writers don’t have any control over that reaction. And ultimately that’s not a bad thing, because to me it’s one of the most interesting parts of the publishing process. I do know that I created these characters in good faith. I don’t look down on them. I found moments of empathy for all of them. And although the book takes a stand against violence, it’s not a condemnation of my entire community.
November 2015
Why do it? While the characters in Friendly Fire are fiction, the places are very real. The church that Bea and her husband live in was a family home at one time. Moosehead School, a one-room schoolhouse, really is left open to visitors, a small testament to rural trust. Even the fictional forest fire is loosely based on a real fire that burned several cabins and homes on the shore of Turtle Lake in 2002. I didn’t fight it day in and day out, but I did for one night, hauling fivegallon water pails and driving the water truck. I remember commenting on the spooky, red moon with a neighbour. Other local people, along with government firefighters, spent weeks extinguishing the blaze. Of course, I could have avoided some angst by creating a fictional town. Other writers have done this. If you’ve read Cool Water by Dianne Warren, you’ll remember the entire story was set over one day in Juliet, Saskatchewan. And if you’re from Saskatchewan, you know that Juliet doesn’t exist. Yet Warren crafted that fictional town so skilfully that I, and many people in my book club, recognized it. It was familiar to us. So why didn’t I do the same? Well, for one thing, I’m not sure I could. Even if I’d changed the place names, Friendly Fire would still be set here. If I didn’t know this community so well, I’m not sure that I could get away with it. But I grew up here, and after 10 years in the city, I returned here with my husband. I not only know this place, but I love it. I love the landscape. I love the people. I love hearing stories about ravens stealing golf balls or the time soand-so lost a fight with a cat. There are many, many storytellers here. When I set out to write this book, I wanted to pour the world I knew into it. All of it — the dark and the light. I wanted to see this place reflected in fiction. But I don’t think that was the only reason I placed F riendly F ire in my community. When I was a teenager, a family friend and local teacher, Bill Kresowaty, used to give me feedback on my writing. One day
he told me that I didn’t have to come from a big city to be a writer. Maybe that sounds like a small thing, but it was important. I carried that insight in my pocket for years. The thing is, it’s absolutely true you don’t have to live in Toronto or New York or London to be a writer. Sure, the big publishers are concentrated in big cities, but there are publishers doing great work in every corner of Canada. And there are wonderful writers living in both urban and rural communities. In my area alone, we can claim novelist Rudy Wiebe and short story writer Edna Alford. Both have placed some of their writing in this part of Saskatchewan. And Edna, who still lives here, is my friend and longtime mentor. What I’m trying to get across is that your stories matter. If you’re an aspiring writer, don’t feel that you’re at a huge disadvantage because you live in a rural community. Ultimately all that matters is what you put on the page. (F riendly F ire is available in soft cover and Kindle from Amazon and other retailers.) CG
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h e a lt h
The aches and pains of arthritis By Marie Berry
t can seem inevitable that if you live long enough, of course you’ll be affected by arthritis, but it isn’t always so. Arthritis is an inflammatory condition of the joints which makes movement painful and difficult, but it occurs in two types; rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis involves the immune system, with about one per cent of Canadians being affected, usually between 25 and 50 years of age. The most effective treatments for rheumatoid arthritis target the immune system in order to reduce inflammation and pain. Osteoarthritis, by contrast, is much more common, affecting 10 times more Canadians. It is a degenerative disease of the joints, commonly known as a “wear and tear” condition, which is why older people are more often affected. Athletes who use their joints continually and excessively can be affected at much younger ages. The recommended treatment for osteoarthritis is considered to be acetaminophen, with two extra strength (500-mg) tablets four times daily for a maximum of four grams (eight 500-mg tablets = 4,000 mg or four grams). However, recent research has brought about some changes in this recommendation. Acetaminophen still is a good starting point for mild to moderate pain, not severe, but in lower doses of two regular strength (325-mg) tablets four times daily for a maximum of 2,600 mg or 2.6 grams. There is no proof that higher doses of acetaminophen are more effective for osteoarthritis pain, and American recommendations actually limit the maximum daily dose of acetaminophen to four grams for adults and 3.2 grams for seniors for any type of pain relief. The key is taking acetaminophen on a regular basis to prevent and control the pain rather than waiting to experience the pain before taking the acetaminophen to counteract it. Ideally, you want to take the pain reliever every six hours, which can sometimes be inconvenient! Acetaminophen is considered to be less risky than narcotic pain relievers because it is not linked
to drowsiness, constipation, and dependency. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like naproxen or ibuprofen will relieve osteoarthritis pain, but can cause problems for you if you have certain kidney conditions, if you are prone to stomach irritations, or even if you have heart disease. That said, a topical non-steroidal anti-inflammatory product like Voltaren Emulge will reduce pain without adverse effects, and can be used along with acetaminophen. For more severe pain, a non-steroidal antiinflammatory drug combined with acetaminophen is often recommended. If you have a heart disease risk, naproxen seems to be the best option, and if you have a gastrointestinal risk then celecoxib or low doses of ibuprofen are the best options. Because you can buy some of these drugs without a prescription, check with your pharmacist to make sure you are not harming your health. Narcotic pain relievers are for people who still have pain after such treatments, but these medications need to be taken in the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible period of time. Luckily, when it comes to osteoarthritis pain, there are numerous options, but you may need to try several before you find the right combination for you. Non-prescription remedies are often advertised, but vary widely in their effectiveness. Glucosamine may have a modest benefit. That may be all you need, but be aware it can take up to three months to work. Capsaicin Rub helps some people who can tolerate it. Capsaicin is derived from the cayenne pepper plant, and thus can cause burning and irritation. Other rubs are not considered effective, although the massaging action may help. With osteoarthritis you may limit your activities because you find movement difficult and painful. Pain relievers will help improve your mobility, but also remember that weight loss, keeping active, physical therapy, ice or heat applications, and even supports for your joints can also help. Marie Berry is a lawyer/pharmacist interested in health and education.
Hemorrhoids… even the word makes us feel uncomfortable! There are numerous non-drug, day-to-day approaches, however, and they will reduce your risk for hemorrhoids. Plus, with the various available remedies, you should feel more comfortable. Next month we’ll talk about hemorrhoids. Don’t be embarrassed!
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November 2015
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acres
By Leeann Minogue
Another generation, another lesson In which Jeff discovers an unexpected cost of “local” food his cake is delicious,” Elaine told her mother-in-law. “It always tastes better when someone else makes it,” Donna said, licking the last smear of icing off her plastic fork. “Open your present, Mommy!” Connor nagged for the third time. “OK, OK,” Elaine said. She set her plastic plate on the hood of her SUV and picked up the parcel she’d brought home from the bus station that morning. The Hanson family had surprised Elaine on her birthday. When Donna asked her to pick up some icing sugar and eggs at the Co-op, Elaine had thought nothing of it. When Elaine’s husband Jeff sent her to pick up a parcel at the bus depot, it never occurred to Elaine that this package wasn’t just more machinery parts. Even when both combines stopped in the middle of the canola field, Elaine had no idea it had anything to do with her until they all started singing “Happy Birthday.” After a few mid-harvest weeks of hauling kids back and forth to town to run errands and feeling like a single mother while her husband spent long hours out in the field, Elaine was so touched by this show of kindness it was all she could do not to cry as she opened the odd-shaped present. “Are you sad, Mommy?” Connor asked as one tear slid down her cheek. “Of course not Connor!” Elaine said. The rest of the Hansons laughed. But she shifted quickly from emotional to puzzled when she opened the present. It was a large spice container and a cookbook. “Oh oh,” Jeff’s grandfather Ed said. “I don’t know much about women, but I know you don’t get them cookbooks for presents.” “It’s OK,” Jeff said. “She said she wanted it.” “Really?” Donna asked dubiously. “Cookin’ with Wild Game,’” Elaine read the title out loud. Then she examined the bottle. “Wild Game Spice Rub?” She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but she couldn’t recall asking for this. 70 country-guide.ca
“Remember last fall?” Jeff said. “When those American hunters kept coming around to shoot ducks on our dugout? You said we should try it.” “Oh, right,” she said, remembering she had said it. “With people from all over the place coming to our backyard for these ducks, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t eat them,” Jeff explained to the rest of the family. “Good idea,” Dale said. “Let me know how it goes.” “We should eat more local food,” Elaine said. “Talk about the 100-mile diet! Those ducks are gliding right over my kitchen. But… I don’t think I would be much of a shot,” she hesitated, then looked at Jeff. “Maybe you can take care of that part.” “No problem,” Jeff said. Later that week, Jeff stopped in at the post office to buy a hunting licence when he went to town to pick up more glyphosate for fall spraying. That evening, he found his father’s old hip waders in Dale and Donna’s basement. “You sure you don’t want to come along?” Jeff asked Dale. “No, that’s OK,” Dale said. “No point shooting one if we’re not going to eat it. And Donna’s not much for cooking duck.” “I don’t remember having duck when we were growing up,” Jeff said. “You wouldn’t. It was a long time ago.” After supper, Jeff and Elaine loaded the kids up into the back seat of the truck and drove out to the slough. They left the kids playing in their car seats and walked to the edge of the water in the fading sunlight. “There’s dozens of birds out there,” Elaine whispered. “It’s like a free grocery store.” “You didn’t see the bill for the hunting licence,” Jeff said. A few minutes later, the flock of ducks lifted off toward the trees. Jeff raised his gun, took a deep breath and fired carefully. The first shot missed. But the second and third hit their marks. “All that practice paid off,” Jeff was pleasantly surprised. “I’ve been aiming over the coyotes’ heads november 2015
to get them out of the yard. I wasn’t sure I could actually hit anything.” Jeff pulled on the hip waders and lurched out into the muddy slough edge to pick up the birds. When they got back to the house, Jeff found some old newspapers in the recycling box and spread them out on the table. Then he brought the two birds in. They were beautiful. They glistened under the dining room lights. One of their wings was spread out, revealing rich dark-blue feathers. But their necks lolled off to the side, and Elaine couldn’t look straight into their shining dark eyes. Jeff brought his phone to the table, fiddled with it for a few minutes, then played a YouTube video of someone cutting the breast from a duck. He got a sharp knife from the kitchen and brought it to the table. He looked at the video, down at the duck, then back at the video. He set down his phone, picked up the knife and touched it carefully to the first bird’s chest. Then he turned yellowish green, dropped the knife, ran to the bathroom and threw up. Connor and Jenny ran to the bathroom to see what their dad was doing, and Elaine was left alone with the ducks, the knife and the plaid-shirted man in the video. She picked up the knife and took a deep breath. The she brought the knife to the duck’s chest and a rush of tiny grey feathers fluttered into the air. A few days later Elaine made supper for the Hanson family and packed it into Tupperware containers. Jeff took it out to the soybean field they were combining while Elaine put the kids to bed. When Jeff gave Ed his container, Ed opened the lid and sniffed. Then he eyed Jeff suspiciously. “It’s something with chickpeas,” Jeff said sadly. “And maybe some rice. It’ll be all right. At least it’s not tofu. Yet.” “Tofu?” Ed asked, incredulous. “There was an incident with the ducks,” Jeff said. “I told you women prefer jewelry. She punishing you?” “Not really,” Jeff said. “She didn’t like the duck?” Ed asked. “Wild game’s not for everybody.” “Actually,” Jeff said, “the duck was delicious. But if it’s so hard for us to butcher two small birds, Elaine doesn’t think we should eat so much meat.” “Huh,” Ed snorted. “Let’s hope that passes quickly. Tofu. I don’t even know where the heck that comes from. At least the ducks grew close to home.” “Tofu comes from soybeans, Grandpa,” Jeff said, rolling his eyes. “You’re combining some right now.” “Yeah, well. Whatever,” Ed said. “I’ve got to get this machine running again.” Ed took his Tupperware container and turned back toward the combine cab. Before he left, Jeff heard his grandfather talking into his cellphone, asking his girlfriend Helen to pick up a Number 11 from the Chinese Café and bring it out to him. “Good thing we’re just about done harvest,” Jeff heard him say. “I don’t know how long this ‘no meat’ thing is going to last. Took about three weeks with Donna, after Dale shot that duck and made her clean it.” Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews, a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan. november 2015
“I don’t believe in prayer” the conversation begins. A discussion about faith and prayer follows. “I applied for my dream job. It meant moving to another country but I was ready to go. I prayed for a yes. I was angry with God when a letter arrived saying, ‘Thank you for applying but… ’” I ask, “How would your life have been different if you had got that job?” My friend begins to list his blessings: home, family, friends, business… He mused, “Maybe it was good they turned me down. Maybe my prayer was answered.” Country music legend Garth Brooks sings a popular song, “Thank God for unanswered prayer.” He goes to a football game with his wife and runs into his high school sweetheart. Many years have passed since he prayed for God to make her his wife. When he sees her as an adult, he is really glad he didn’t marry her. And clearly, he says, she is glad she didn’t get stuck with him. Brooks sings, “some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” I am glad that God did not say “yes” to my childhood prayers of becoming a policeman. I would have been happy returning purses to elderly ladies or finding bicycles for children. I would have been hopeless when it came to arresting a longtime friend. How about prayers when the stakes are a lot higher? A mother and father sit by the hospital bed of their 12-year-old daughter who lies in a coma. The doctors say they have done all they can do. As the parents take turns stroking her hair, they pray for a miracle. A college senior applies to four medical schools. Three of them turn him down. The fourth envelope arrives in the mail. The student prays one more time before opening it. We often hear stories about people who prayed their knees off when the odds were against them. In the darkest point of the struggle, God pulled through and said, “yes” to their prayers. But what about the times when God says, “no?” Think back on your greatest disappointments in life — when it was clear the disaster you wanted to avoid was unavoidable, when the relationship you wanted so much fell apart, when your dreams did not come true in spite of your fervent prayers, God said, “no.” I wonder if these moments strengthen our character. Are we better persons because God does not say “yes” to all our prayers? The Bible says prayer is “powerful and effective.” We are not promised we will receive what we want. The answer may be “no” more often than “yes.” In the Lord’s Prayer all we ask for is “our daily bread.” This month we think about the horrors of war and pray for peace. I have a beautiful solid oak “Bishop’s Chair” in a corner of my study. It was given to me for safekeeping when the Anglican Church in Viscount, Sask. closed. I don’t sit in the chair but I reflect on the brass memorial plaque: “In Loving Memory of Flying Officer Edward D. MacMurchy — Who Gave His Life for His Country.” Edward was the only child of his widowed mother Cisely. I am sure she offered prayers in that small village church for his safe return. Her grief must have been enormous when the bomber he was piloting was shot down in 1943 over Europe. A mother’s prayer was not answered but the prayers of a nation were answered when the war came to an end. Suggested Scripture: Job 33:12-33, James 5:13-20 Rod Andrews is a retired Anglican bishop. He lives in Saskatoon. country-guide.ca 71
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