Country guide west

Revive your small town with this co-op

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| Time to get real on solar

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western EDITION / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / march 28, 2017

First-born quandary What makes you so sure he’s the best leader?  32

6 big lessons How the Glenns learned to win at diversification  12

CROPS GUIDE Seeding innovations from Scott Garvey 35 Watch those sulphur symptoms in canola 42 Publications Mail Agreement Number 40069240

6 MACHINERY

Heading to MARS This AGCO project is already testing swarms of small robots to do the job of today’s big machines.

Inside country guide / Vol. 136 Issue no. 6 / mArch 28, 2017

Business 8

t he inclusive, prosperous farm Believe it. Diversity on your farm will boost your productivity and efficiency.

20

co-op for sangudo a Theirs is a different kind of co-op, aimed to profit from reviving their small town.

26

s tepping up Here’s proof that farmers can not only win against wine, they can look to international success too.

32

t he first-born quandary What if your eldest son isn’t actually the best choice to lead your farm into the future?

48

ocky mountain looks r for more Canada’s largest machinery dealer has money to invest, but where will it buy next?

38 Market sees

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l arge, commercial… and organic Four grain farmers started with a plan to share machinery.

Now they lead in organics.

40 A few graphs

56

eyond local b Could this distributor help turn your value-add idea into a commercial-scale success?

35 CROPS GUIDE 35 Seeding innovations roundup

new interest in dry-product spreaders of interest

42 A nutrient-deficiency flare-up

44 Going beyond NPK

58

et real on solar g Here are two farms that prove just why solar may be farming’s energy source of the future.

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oung and on board y The techiques that associations use to train young directors could help on farm too.

46 Soft white spring spreads east

Guide Life 62 64 65 66

editating on the farm M Health Hanson Acres Reflections

12 Diversification lessons At first, Ontario grain grower Jim Glenn just wanted to plow snow for extra income in the slow winter months, but the six big lessons he learned about diversification in the process have reshaped the family farm, helped bring the next generation on board, and even funded the building of a cool new shop.

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COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

3

EDITOR’S NOTE

1666 Dublin Ave., Winnipeg, MB R3H 0H1 (204) 944-5765 Fax (204) 944-5562

Reading about you at the airport Masses of business books get sold at airports, complete with cover photos of business execs, Harvard profs, and HR consultants, but never a farmer. Maybe that should change I’ve mentioned once or twice in past that I’ve toyed with the idea of Country Guide publishing a series of business books based on the strategic insights we glean from the farmers in our stories.

And just to be clear… I don’t mean books for farmers to read.

I mean books that would be of great value because of the fresh thinking they could bring to readers in just about every other economic sector.

Of course there’s a big perceptual problem, because the public doesn’t actually associate farming with smart business.

Partly, farmers themselves can be blamed for this because of the way too many agriculture groups deliberately focus their public communications on the stereotype of farmer as gentle neighbour rather than the highly professional, highly scientific food producer.

As you’ve heard me say before, the typical farmer makes bigger decisions in a year than urbanites make in an entire lifetime, although those city cousins have little real idea that you are doing anything of the sort.

There’s another perceptual problem too. In my view, farmers consistentily undervalue the quality of their business thinking.

It’s a bit counterintuitive. We know from some pretty good research both in Canada and the U.S. that the more business training and the financial literacy farmers get, the more confident they become, so you’d think farmers would be ranking themselves higher all the time.

We also know from psychologists

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

that entrepreneurs in any field tend to overestimate their intelligence. It’s just an attitude that goes with the self-confidence it takes to run a business.

Yet I get emails from highly successful farmers telling me that they’re trying to position their farms for the future, but they’re uncertain about all the additional work they feel they have to do.

In part I think this is down to tall the uncertainty in agriculture.

You may be interested to know that we have been trying for a long time to write meaningfully about ways to lengthen your planning horizon.

We’ve been asking: beyond having good vision and mission statements, and beyond building your own business skills, what can you do to set out concrete, actionable 10- to 20-year plans so you can measure your progress?

It turns out we were waiting for the wrong people to give us our answer. If you missed it, go back to your March 1 Country Guide, and read again how Robert and Angela Semeniuk have set up their 10-year capital acquisition plan.

The experts weren’t in threepiece suits. They were on the farm, as happens so often.

EDITORIAL STAFF Editor: Tom Button 12827 Klondyke Line, Ridgetown, ON N0P 2C0 tom.button@fbcpublishing.com (519) 674-1449 Fax (519) 674-5229 Senior Editor: Maggie Van Camp mvancamp@fbcpublishing.com (905) 986-5342 Fax (905) 986-9991 Production Editor: John Morriss john.morriss@fbcpublishing.com Field Editor: Lisa Guenther lisa.guenther@fbcpublishing.com Field Editor: Shannon VanRaes shannon.vanraes@fbcpublishing.com Online Editor: Greg Berg country-guide.ca Design & Layout: Jenelle Jensen

ADVERTISING SALES Sales Director: Cory Bourdeaud’hui cory@fbcpublishing.com (204) 954-1414 Fax (204) 944-5562 Kevin Yaworsky kyaworsky@farmmedia.com (250) 869-5326 Lillie Ann Morris lamorris@xplornet.com (905) 838-2826 Advertising Services Co-ordinator: Arlene Bomback ads@fbcpublishing.com (204) 944-5765 Fax (204) 944-5562 Glacier FarmMedia President: Bob Willcox bwillcox@farmmedia.com Publisher: Lynda Tityk lynda.tityk@fbcpublishing.com Editorial Director: Laura Rance laura@fbcpublishing.com Production Director: Shawna Gibson shawna@fbcpublishing.com Circulation Manager: Heather Anderson heather@fbcpublishing.com Contents of this publication are copyrighted and may be reproduced only with the permission of the editor.

Country Guide, incorporating the Nor’West Farmer and Farm & Home, is published by Glacier FarmMedia LP. Head office: Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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I could come up with other examples from every issue, including the Glenn family this issue explaining how good buildings create business opportunities. Great stuff.

Subscription inquiries:

I guess maybe there should be a book in it after all.

The editors and journalists who write, contribute and provide opinions to Country Guide and Glacier FarmMedia LP attempt to provide accurate and useful opinions, information and analysis. However, the editors, journalists, Country Guide and Glacier FarmMedia LP cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy of the information contained in this publication. Use or non-use of any information is at the reader’s sole risk, and we assume no responsibility for any actions or decisions taken by any reader of this publication based on any and all information provided.

Are we getting it right? Let me know at tom.button@fbcpublishing.com.

Call toll-free 1-800-665-1362 subscription@fbcpublishing.com U.S. subscribers call 1-204-944-5766 Country Guide is printed with linseed oil-based inks.

PRINTED IN CANADA Vol. 136 No. 6

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machinery

Heading to MARS This new ag robot concept uses swarms of small machines

A

new research project underway in Europe may give farmers a reason to think swarms are a good thing. Far from swarms of locusts or other troublesome pests, the MARS (Mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms) pro­ject is working on creating swarms of small, autonomous robots that can seed farm fields on their own.

The MARS project is sponsored by the European Union and the development work is currently being done jointly by AGCO’s Fendt brand and researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany.

The swarm of small-scale robots can be controlled through cloud-based digital technology. Seeding or planting operations can be planned and monitored using the MARS app. And the amount of data and precision available through this system is astonishing.

The exact placement of each individual seed can be documented and saved in the cloud. Subsequent cultivation or herbicide applications throughout the season can then be executed extremely precisely, using fewer inputs.

“This procedure promotes sustainable, economic handling of food and pesticides and increases the potential of higher yield,” according to Fendt’s press release.

“Through their battery-powered, electric drive, low weight and autonomous operation, sowing can also take place under conditions where conventional farming usually cannot be used due to light and ground conditions or noise emissions.”

By Scott Garvey / CG Machinery Editor

The mini robots are hauled to a field in a special carrier trailer and then turned loose to get the work done. The system provides the operator with continuous feedback and data on the overall operation.

“An intelligent algorithm (OptiVisor) plans the robot operations based on the parameters that have been entered and calculates the time required to complete the task,” the Fendt release says.

“As soon as the logistics unit has been positioned, the use of the robots can be started with the app. While they are working, the robots communicate with the cloud so that geo-co-ordinates can be saved for the location of each seed. The OptiVisor algorithm guarantees reliable sowing of maize (corn) kernels at all times.”

If a robot should ever fail, other units nearby will instantly step in to take over, the project scientists say.

Work progress can also be followed live with the app, while the proprietary OptiVisor algorithm monitors the charging state of the robots’ batteries and ensures that all batteries are recharged in due time at the logistics unit.

The project is still under development and there is no word yet on when or if MARS will see commercial release. However, given the state of robotics development in everything from Amazon parcel delivery to Google self-driving cars, odds are we’ll hear more about this before long. CG

An operator can set the requirements for field seeding using an app and monitor the swarm’s progress in real time via cloud-based digital system.

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

The MARS research project uses swarms of small autonomous robots to seed fields.

Photos: Fendt

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COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

7

BUSINESS

The inclusive, prosperous farm Looking to boost your farm’s numbers? Bring a diverse work force to the job, and set them up to perform at their best

By Helen Lammers-Helps

A

s farm businesses grow and become more complex, farmers are recognizing the importance of harnessing the full potential of the farm’s human resources. This means creating an inclusive workplace where both male and female members of the team can thrive and help the farm business meet its goals.

A diverse workforce, it turns out, will help your farm produce measurably better productivity.

Diversity drives innovation, explains Pam Paquet, a Fraser Valley psychologist and business consultant.

A mix of genders, generations and personalities gives different perspectives, she says. “It challenges the old school thinking of if it ain’t broken, why fix it?”

Businesses and indeed the entire economy are best served when both women and men are employed at all levels, agrees Jaqui Parchment, senior partner for Mercer Canada, a global consultant in talent, health, retirement and investments.

Parchment says their 2016 global research study called When Women Thrive, shows that “while men bring important skills to a workplace, an equal proportion of women would introduce different, but just as effective skills, such as those involving team- and people-building, flexibility, problem solving, and emotional intelligence.”

Despite this, however, traditional job design and leadership competencies are more often closely aligned with the relative strengths of men, leaving potential business growth untapped, says Parchment.

Passionate Leadership Changing gender roles on the farm may require a mind shift for some members of the farm team. Strong leadership can help create a respectful environment where all team members feel valued and are able to do their best work.

These changes require buy-in from senior management, and they also require support for women’s unique health and financial needs, says Parchment, who explains that Mercer has coined the “6 Ps” to describe the changes necessary to help women thrive in the workforce: 8

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

• Passionate leadership • Personal commitment to gender equity • Perseverance • Proof-based decision making • Processes that are predictable • Programs for training and growth The 6 Ps can be a roadmap on the farm too, providing a kind of checklist to ensure your farm’s female team members will know they are welcome, and that they will be able to contribute at their best.

“In short, there must be a mix of personal commitment and structural changes that work together to improve diversity and inclusion,” Parchment says.

Formalized structure and clear roles It’s important to have a formalized structure with clarity of purpose, roles, responsibilities and the values of the organization, says Terry Betker, a farm adviser at Backswath Management in Manitoba.

In other words, a high-performing, inclusive workplace needs to become one of the farm’s values. It must articulate that belief, and as with other values, Betker says, “The business must live its values, and when faced with management decisions, it must test them against those values.”

Such values may be even more important for women than men, Betker says, especially if there are areas on the farm where women feel they aren’t welcome.

Paquet agrees, adding that it’s important to have clarity around what is expected of each team member.

Farmers may think they don’t need to set up job descriptions because it’s a family-run business, and everyone knows their role. Yet that can be exactly the kind of workplace where job descriptions are even more important, Paquet says, because there are too many unspoken assumptions floating around.

Like other assumptions, HR assumptions can be most dangerous when they stop you asking questions.

For instance, says Betker, it’s been easy in the past to assume that gender is a good basis for deciding who does what job. But when you challenge it, that assumption starts to crumble.

Continued on page 10

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BUSINESS Staff will be energized knowing that the company has a vision and is organized and focused on achieving the vision.

Teamwork will be enhanced as the group will know the end result and will work together to achieve the result.” From Ceres Rising by Michelle Painchaud and Jeanne Bernick “Most jobs can be done equally well by both genders these days,” Betker says.

And that’s not just true of shopwork or field work. For instance, don’t assume that keeping the books is women’s work, says Betker. A better way to determine who is best suited for a job is to use personality assessments.

“And if no one wants to do a job it would be better to outsource it,” he says. “Otherwise it won’t receive the attention it should.”

The assertiveness factor Men and women often have different communication styles, and this can present some challenges.

Paquet says women may want to look at a situation from different angles and talk about it, while men may be more analytical and present a decision instead of seeking input from the other team members.

Sometimes women also have a hard time being assertive when there is conflict, continues Paquet. There has been a lot of pressure historically on women to be the ones who step back in order to maintain group harmony.

Men seem also to have an easier time drawing boundaries between work and their personal lives, she adds, but coaching can help women to overcome this tendency.

Women also know that even though they need to be assertive in order to contribute at their best, assertive women are often characterized as “bitchy,” says Paquet.

“Women in leadership are often judged with a harsh brush.”

Communication is key Strong communication is essential to ensuring the farm team works together efficiently, says Betker. “Communications must be formalized with a clear meeting structure,” he says. “You must run the farm as a business.”

Cathy Mak, vice-president of human resources and compliance at Leamington’s Lakeside Produce agrees that communication is key.

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

“Employees need a voice, a listening post,” she says. She used an employee survey to elicit input from the company’s packing plant staff. As a result of the survey feedback, the company changed from a rotating shift schedule to a set schedule, which made it easier for the predominantly female employees to arrange childcare.

The result was a big increase in employee retention rates, says Mak. Like Mak, Anne Burnham, who runs Burnham Family Farm Market near Cobourg, Ont., says two-way communication is essential. “Good communication is key and I’m always working at it,” she says.

Burnham tries to check in with each of her employees individually at paycheque time to find out how they are doing and if they are having any problems. Listening to the employees is an important part of her job as a manager, she says.

She also gives the employees feedback on how the business is performing. “A paycheque is not everything for job satisfaction,” she says.

Burnham suspects that communication is one area where farm businesses can improve. Farmers who are used to working alone and making their own decisions may not be aware of the level of communication required, she says.

Reinforce inclusive values Michelle Painchaud, a business consultant who specializes in agricultural HR issues, says signage placed in common areas as well as clauses in employee manuals can reinforce the idea that each member of the team has value regardless of age or gender.

Painchaud has also seen companies create bonuses for being respectful and for being team players instead of the usual incentives based on profit or end of harvest.

And if proactive steps aren’t working, disciplinary steps may be required for employees who are disrespectful to other staff. CG

Tips for creating an inclusive farm business Source: Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council Agri HR Toolkit Negative behaviours to avoid Ignoring, dismissing, interrupting, or speaking over others.

Using negative non-verbal behaviours (rolling your eyes, shaking your head).

Failing to give credit where it is due.

Looking at your smartphone, computer or watch while someone is speaking to you.

Positive behaviours to reinforce Give everyone a clear set of rules and expectations to guide their behaviour.

Include these rules in an employee policy handbook and post them in the employee lunchroom.

Use inclusive language such as sales person, not salesman; cleaner not cleaning lady; staff in the office not the girls in the office; supervisor not foreman.

Be aware of how a joke or comments may be perceived.

What is funny to one individual could be offensive to another.

Training resources Workshops available from the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion www.ccdi.ca/services/workshops

e-learning available from Divesity@Work www.yourdiversityatwork. com/webinars

Mentorship, coaching for women from Women in Leadership www.womeninleadership.ca

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BUSINESS

Diversification lessons

I

n 1981, Jim Glenn wanted to supplement the farm’s income during the winter. So he fired up his new John Deere 3140 loader tractor and headed for town, doing snow removal for commercial properties in the village of Keene and the nearby city of Peterborough.

Between jobs, Jim would grow the business by keeping his eyes open for snow-filled driveways, introducing himself to the owners, and offering to clean the lanes right then and there, before dropping off his card.

As importantly, he quickly got very good at listening to potential customers, learning how to ask them the right questions that would lead to adding them to his customer base.

In time, those snowplowing revenues paid for principal and interest on a second tractor, and then three others, all while upgrading to bigger and better models.

And there was another benefit that helped build even more business over time. Jim was now able to justify hiring full-time employees instead of seasonal short-term summer labour.

When a diversification plan starts with thinking about the customer, it tends to go right, says Jim Glenn. But that still leaves the question of how to weave them into an efficient whole

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

By Maggie Van Camp / CG Senior Editor

Lesson #1: Customers will pay for better, consistent service and products It isn’t that complicated. Customers want you to show up when you said you’d show up, do the job you said you’d do, and do it at the price you said.

Yes, you do have to be price competitive, says Jim, but you don’t have to be the cheapest, as long as you match the product to the customer’s needs.

His first off-farm diversification helped Jim learn this lesson, and it also gave him the confidence and experience to expand into several other businesses, including selling and delivering hay, straw and shavings throughout Ontario, Quebec and the northeastern United States.

It also helped him slowly grow the farming base, with the next generation of Glenns, Matt (now 36) and Paul (33) joining the business full time.

Today, the Glenns farm about 1,500 acres along with their hay, straw, and shavings delivery business and their seed dealership. About 500 of their acres are in hay, and Glen Isle Farms buys about three times more than that from local growers to meet market demand.

Jim and his wife Marg left the dairy business, but they wanted to use their equipment and take advantage of the area’s natural ability to grow good forages. So they started into the hay business — growing, selling and delivering hay to horse and dairy customers.

They’ve been able to grow this business by matching customers’ needs to the products and service they provide, and they are always looking to expand their customer base. For example, with the trend to a scale increase in dairy herd sizes, the Glenns saw an opportunity to sell dry hay and straw as roughage in their total mixed rations (TMR) feeding systems.

These dairy farmers had become specialists in milk production and didn’t want either the hassle of trying to make their own dry hay, or the trouble of dealing with inconsistent quality. “They don’t even own a baler anymore,” says Jim. “They rely on us to provide dry hay or straw and they focus on milking cows and harvesting high-quality haylage to increase milk production.”

Photography: Deb DeVille

Succession spurred diversification and expansion for the Glenn family of Keene, Ont. And, oh yes, that beautiful new shop helped too

Lesson #2: Know what your customers want “It’s much easier to ask specifically what people want ahead and be honest,” says younger son Paul. “It builds trust.”

Marketing is also about matching customer needs with the product, and differentiating and blending appropriate products to meet those needs profitably. But it takes good communication.

For example, the Glenns have found that large dairy farms are a good market for the horse hay bales that didn’t fit the strict requirements for the premium “flake hay” market in the U.S. So they sort hay bales as they stack them and store in the sheds to separate the different grades of hay, and they do it with the lights fully on, the way their hay broker customers do during deliveries.

And they are always looking for ways to increase efficiency for everyone in the chain.

One of the breakthrough moments for this business was when they started taking payment for hay by credit card. It took the stress off collections, the customers love the convenience, and the drivers could just leave a statement rather than handling payments.

It also reduced overdue payment risk.

“I’m a member of our local chamber of commerce and that’s where I got onto a Visa program for small businesses,” says Jim. “It’s worth the two to three per cent; it gave us guaranteed payment, at delivery.”

Differentiated marketing also contributes to the success of their bulk shaving delivery business, Superior Shaving Supply, which mainly serves dairy, horse and poultry farms.

Jim has even found that communicating with competitors can also lead to new opportunities, even though it seems counterintuitive. For example, he met a competing shavings supplier who handled a lower-priced product. They decided to provide product to each other to blend and meet different customer needs and price points.

In this context, the lower-priced product works well for new dairy pack barns, which might be a market the Glenns would otherwise miss.

Continued on page 14

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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BUSINESS Lesson #3: Think expansion when you think buildings “The right building creates business opportunities.” says Matt.

In 1977, Jim’s father Clarence had had the foresight to build a small office separate from their home. However, by the time Matt and Paul were actively involved in the farm, the farm had sprouted the snowplowing business, seed and input sales, and the hay, straw and shavings delivery businesses, and it conducted them in three other, separate offices.

It was time to consolidate offices and to build a new shop. “We’ve built a new shop

NEW

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

every 20 years,” says Jim. “1974, 1994… and then 2014.”

In the early 1990s, they bought a farm with a heifer lot on a sand-and-gravel rise that was flat-topped and that would be easier for the trucks to access than the home farm, situated on a windy road with a big hill. This new property naturally evolved into the epicentre of all their businesses’ activities, so they rented an office trailer for this location and tried it as the official hub of their many various operations.

“It was a way to tell if this was the right location before making a big capital expenditure,” explains Matt.

Today there are over 13 different buildings in the yard and a fleet of 18 trucks. The layout of the yard and the design of the sheds allow them to store and efficiently transfer both bales of hay and straw and bulk shavings.

Some are drive-through sheds while others are pole barns facing mostly south, all built to fit 53' trailers into separate 24' wide bays.

They had outgrown the existing shop at the home farm and with succession planning, the Glenns started looking at how their businesses were growing and what profit centres should be developed to match the next generation’s skills and passions. Paul, for instance, is a diesel mechanic.

So they went from thinking about building a shop to service their own fleet to potentially servicing an expanded fleet and also other companies’ trucks and equipment with the potential of even selling some parts and trucks.

The plan they settled on tripled their space, and ended up at 13,000 square feet of shop and office space.

Already they wish they had made it bigger.

This decision has pushed revenues, this past year adding an additional 25 per cent.

Plus it has led to further add-on sales.

Customers come in to get their tractor or truck repaired or to buy some seed, and

they see that the Glenns have some parts, filters, and belts in stock, or that they deliver hay, straw and shavings.

They also discovered that having all their businesses in one site not only generated more sales, it also created efficiencies between the managers.

Although each of them manage specific parts of the organization, now that they’re in one location, they can quickly confer on bigger decisions. The downstairs office space accommodates Matt and Paul’s offices and their sister Joelle, who oversees payroll and other administrative duties.

During succession planning they decided

to set up four corporations to separate each business, and although it seemed too complicated at the time, it has worked out well.

It gives them a clear picture of how each enterprise or profit centre is doing. This also separated their other businesses from the farm corporation to reduce exposure to liabilities from the numerous business activities like snow removal and transportation of their products.

The new office also adds a practical professionalism to the family business. At first they were concerned about the perceptions Continued on page 16

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15

BUSINESS

of how a big, new building would make them look to customers, but instead it has had a positive effect. It’s been more of a quality response. “Customers want to do business here,” says Matt.

They’ve also found that non-farm business clients expect decent, organized office space. And other businesses are now seeking them out. As if to prove it, during our interview, a telephone buzzed. It was a European short-line company looking for them to become distributors.

Upstairs is Jim’s office and a boardroom with a long, rough-hewn table that Paul made himself. This is where they meet accountants, lawyers and, occasionally, politicians, and it’s where they work out deals with dealerships and customers. “It’s the best thing we ever did,” says Jim. “We are away from the noise, the interruptions downstairs,” Jim explains. “We can meet together, with suppliers and buyers.”

This is also where the Glenn family meets to discuss business decisions. In this space they can disagree freely, and have discussions away from staff and non-management family members.

“It’s neutral territory, not someone’s kitchen table where we are supposed to have dinner happily after,” says Paul.

The boardroom is wired for laptops to plug directly into projectors, Internet and eventually into a big screen.

A new interconnected phone system was installed to communicate between all the offices, including the boardroom.

“When I started farming we worked with what we had,” says Jim. “Today the younger generation brings so much energy and so much technology. I just sit back and smile.”

Lesson #4: Shop around for banks, professionals Sometimes when it rains, it pours, and you need a reliable umbrella when it does. During the shop building process, two neighbouring farms suddenly came up for sale. Jim had been trying to buy each for 40 years so the Glenns decided to take the plunge, even though this meant investing more in land, buildings and equipment than they’d invested in the previous 15 years combined.

Then during their weekly meetings with the contractor, they found costs were running significantly over budget. Delays in building permits affected construction too, which is when the costs for many of the trades began to multiply.

They also made changes to meet commercial code, like extra drywall and truss divisions, a larger septic system and even a wheelchair accessible bathroom.

One particular morning, all these factors and more came to a head when the costs from trades were tallied up. In retrospect, Paul wishes he’d acted as general contractor himself, so he could negotiate directly with tradesmen and keep better track of the cost overruns.

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“Even if you don’t want to pay for specific jobs that went over budget or weren’t done correctly, the builder can put a lien on your building. So you have to pay them no matter what kind of job they do or how many extra hours they charge you for,” Paul says.

Unfortunately, that very same week their long-time banker was let go, and the bank they had been with for decades suddenly got nervous and started stalling.

Although it was a stressful time, it led the Glenns to shop around, negotiate in more detail and rethink how they structured their financing. By switching banks, they saved more than $30,000 a year in fees, negotiated a lower interest rate and got better service.

“The other loaning agents had our financials and plans analyzed in four or five days and a proposal on our desks,” says Jim. “The old bank said it would take three months to run the numbers.”

The process of having several competing financial institutions review their financials and business plans taught Matt and Paul some banking principles, and they also learned about loan structure options. Most importantly, they learned to shop around for credit and spread out their bank relationships and loans as part of good business practice.

“It’ll give you different banking ideas,” says Jim. “Now I think you should shop it every couple of years.”

Their expansion has also proved the need for good professionals. When they ran into some challenges with trying to change the zoning from agriculture to commercial for their new shop, hiring strong, professional legal counsel has helped with the process and has been worth it. Matt and Paul are astonished at the extra cost of time, money and stress the zoning process on commercial businesses has been compared to their previous experience building for their farm.

Recently, they also changed accountants to one more specialized in agriculture. “The other accountant did a good job at our books but didn’t understand our business to know the right questions to ask,” says Paul.

“He thought our grain buggy was our drill.”

Although the new accountant’s office is in another town, it’s well worth the drive for better advice, specific to agriculture. “It doesn’t really matter where your accountant is, if you’re spending $150/hour, you want it to be good sound professional advice.” says Jim. Lesson #5: Moving wheels make more money With all their diversified businesses, the Glenns had outgrown their old 40' x 60' shop. They needed more space and easier access for the trucks, so they decided to build for the future, utilizing Paul’s skills as a diesel mechanic.

“Often commercial work pays higher margins than farming,” says Jim. The outside truck repair and sales spelled an opportunity for several reasons. First, having their own mechanics on staff resulted in a cost savings of about

$120,000 per year, says Matt. Using those skills in a bigger facility on the farm meant they had the extra capacity to repair other people’s equipment. Now they have five mechanics working in their shop.

New trucks depreciate in value rapidly, but once they reach 300,000 to 400,000 kilometres, prices level off for the next several 100,000 kilometres, especially if the trucks are well maintained. The Glenns also noticed when farmers like themselves went to buy transport trucks, they were automatically shown the units shoved at the back because of their poor condition.

From their own experience, the Glenns knew that farmers, although they don’t need brand new shiny trucks, do need reliable, safe units that can handle tougher conditions and field driving.

So they put a plan in place to take advantage of this niche and their skills by proactively reselling their own trucks. They buy them with about 500,000 kms, and use them for two to three years. Then the trucks are put through their own shop for an overall maintenance regime to ensure they are working well. They clean them

up, repair them, replace any tires that need it and then resell them.

The Glenns have their own diagnostic equipment and licensed software, which has become very important with trucks produced after 2008. “After the treatment, they’re 110 per cent right, ready to go,” says Paul. “We guarantee they’re in good operating condition.”

The price for good-quality, well-maintained trucks doesn’t drop very quickly between these two usage points. Compared to the cost that dealer repairs and parts would add to the older trucks, using their own shop and staff has meant decent margins, and it’s a predictable cash flow for the company.

With this replacement strategy, their running costs are extremely competitive at about 50 cents/km, says Paul. By having their own on-site repairs, it keeps their wheels turning because the hay/straw/shavings business operates yearround. “They (our trucks) make money mostly everyday if they are not parked in a shop being repaired,” says Matt.

For the Glenn family, diversification has also facilitated succession planning, creating more opportunities for the next generation to contribute based on their skills and interests.

Continued on page 18

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

17

BUSINESS With 18 trucks operating from the 13 buildings at the main site, having all Glen Isle’s teams head-quartered in the same office space helps to ensure effective logistics.

Lesson #6: Organize work flow to improve efficiency The layout of the shop is similar to a car repair shop so that trucks can be pulled in and lined up in a herringbone along the side to be worked on at various stages. Four large overhead doors with windows line the front, while at the back is a over-sized door for combines.

All their own farm equipment repairs happen in the back so any customer repairs are at the front. “Over the years I’ve learned to fix it at the end of the season, before you put it away,” says Jim. “That’s when you remember the little things that were going wrong.”

Jim prepared the site for construction, including the six-inch grade gravel hauled to the site by their own trucks and leveled with their own equipment. The concrete floor is finished with extra hardening to avoid pitting and sloped at three degrees to one centre drain, with some areas level for changing fluids. “Getting the floor right is the most important thing,” says Paul. The drain has only one trap to ensure enough flow so it won’t get clogged and so that if it does get clogged, it’s

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easier to clean out. The drain goes out to an oil/sludge separator before discharge into the septic tank.

They went with radiant tube heating instead of in-floor heating because it was cheaper and they also installed exhaust fans that can change the air in the shop in less than two minutes. In the summer heat, they can open a few end doors to catch a cross breeze.

Instead of buying an expensive hot water pressure washer, Paul found that separate water heaters attached to a regular pressure washer are about a third of the cost and just as good. Rainwater goes from the roof into a 3,000-gallon underground tank to feed the washers.

Investing in mobile electric scissor lifts instead of ladders has saved time and is much safer. Paul manages their parts inventory with new software, so they don’t need to keep much on site, only about $25,000. An outside company manages their bolt inventory.

“It has really paid to have that service — you don’t want to be spending time driving to town to buy bolts,” says Matt. CG

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BUSINESS

A co-op for Sangudo Times were getting tough in the rural Alberta community. Then, local farmers and businesses built a co-op to help local businesses grow and thrive

By Lisa Guenther / CG Field Editor

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Photography: Anthony Houle

I

t was a scene that is all too familiar for rural communities. In 2005, the local school division threatened to close Sangudo’s high school. The move “really ticked people off,” says Dan Ohler, who lives in the area, and a “huge roomful” of people met to figure out what to do.

Ohler is a certified coach who works with everyone from business teams to couples. Talking to him, a sense quickly emerges of what he must be like as a coach: lots of enthusiasm, matched with a focus on what needs to be done, what’s realistic.

Even so, Ohler and his neighbours at that meeting soon realized that fighting the school division was futile. And in the end, Sangudo did lose its high school, although students still attend the community school through Grade 9.

But that doesn’t mean the meeting was a wasted of effort. Instead, about a dozen people committed to rebuilding this little community about 100 km northwest of Edmonton and, as a next step, they went through a leadership and community development program sponsored by Alberta Recreation and Parks Association.

It was an experience that solidified the group, Ohler says, and it led to their building a $250,000 playground in Sangudo, which included a skate park and beach volleyball court.

They also fixed the ball diamonds, unleashing a torrent of volunteer support. “We had 300 community volunteers that came out on one day to do this major project,” says Ohler.

Ohler and his neighbours didn’t stop there. After the playground project, a smaller group emerged. They wanted to find a way to revive their local economy.

“That,” says Ohler, “is when the idea of the co-op came up.”

This is not for the faint of heart,” says co-op investor Dan Ohler.

“It’s not easy. It takes courage.”

A different kind of co-op In many parts of Canada, rural residents buy everything from groceries to fuel and fertilizer at their local co-ops. But Sangudo residents had something different in mind.

For them, the Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op would provide capital and expertise to local entrepreneurs.

Here’s how it works: People buy a membership share to join the co-op. They elect board members who vet businesses for the co-op to invest in. Once the board has approved a proposal, individual members can invest, if they want, by buying shares or lending money.

The co-op doesn’t run the business; that’s left to the business owners. It’s sort of a small-town version of “Dragon’s Den.” Instead of Kevin O’Leary and Arlene Dickinson, though, it’s farmers, ranchers, carpenters, and trucking business owners — which gives you a pretty good idea of what the Sangudo crew looks like.

In May 2010, the Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op incorporated. The next month the co-op invested in its first business — Sangudo Custom Meat Packers. The co-op bought the real estate and leased it to entrepreneurs Kevin Meier and Jeff Senger, in an arrangement that also sees Senger and Meier pay the co-op a set percentage of their gross sales.

Senger and Meier had the option to buy the real estate at a reasonable rate after three years. Once the lease expired, they completed the deal, and the co-op paid out the original loans.

But Meier and Senger weren’t sure about accessing capital from the bank to buy the real estate, so the co-op sold shares to members who wanted to buy back into the business, so while Sangudo Custom Meats now owns the real estate, the co-op holds the mortgage.

The co-op also bought the Legion Hall and leased it to the entrepreneurs who started Connections Coffee House. One of those entrepreneurs is Carol Ohler, Dan’s wife, who is also a business coach. When the lease expired after three years, she bought the real estate and now runs the coffee shop.

After that, co-op members bought three residential lots in Sangudo to build and sell houses. They broke ground on the first house last spring, and it’s now nearly complete.

Since 2010, the co-op has invested Continued on page 22

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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BUSINESS

Building new houses to earn a payback for investors and attracts new residents.

around $800,000 in projects in Sangudo, a hamlet of about 300 people. The co-op itself has grown from 21 members to 39, with investments ranging from $3,000 per person up to $50,000.

The accounting is a bit complicated since securities commissions require the board to report revenue and expenses for each project separately, but on the plus side, investors can see exactly where their money is going.

The land project hasn’t paid a return yet because they’re just finishing the first house. But the other returns have ranged from a low of two per cent one year (the co-op had to restructure, and the resulting legal bills ate into returns), up to 13 per cent, Ohler says.

In part, the higher returns are because the board members are volunteers.

Nuts and bolts “This is not for the faint of heart. It’s not easy. It takes courage,” says Ohler of starting an opportunity development co-op. Most importantly, it takes a huge level of trust within a small group of people, he adds.

Those people need a collective vision of what they want their community to look like in the future, and they must be willing to move it forward. “I think we all look at this as something that’s much bigger than ourselves,” says Ohler.

Before incorporating, Sangudo received a $50,000 award from the Alberta Community and Co-operative Association to study the feasibility of starting a co-op.

They hired Paul Cabaj to look into it. Cabaj was familiar with Community Economic Development Investment Funds, which are used to raise money to invest in local businesses within Nova Scotia.

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The Sangudo group adapted that concept to fit into Alberta’s Security Commission regulations, Ohler says.

“So we learned by fire. It was extremely expensive. There were a ton of legal bills.”

The work load was also huge in the beginning. “I don’t think any of us understood what was going to be involved.”

Fortunately, they had a solid group used to working together. When one person started to feel overloaded or had “their feet kicked out from underneath them by some naysayer,” the rest were able to keep the energy up.

Under national security commission regulations, there is a co-op exemption that allows members to loan up to $10,000 to the co-op. The Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op used this exemption to fund their first projects.

However, a much larger investment was required for buying lots and building houses, and there are strict limitations on how much a member can loan to the co-op. The Sangudo co-op decided to sell shares. Regulations also require the co-op to use one or the other fundraising method for a project, not a combination of shares and loans.

The Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op also underwent structural changes that allowed them to use RRSPs and TFSAs in their investments. Those investments are handled by Concentra Bank and the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation, explains Seth Leon, co-operative services manager of ACCA. Leon says the cost of transferring investments is about $50.

So far that cost has kept many Sangudo co-op members from transferring investments. “Unless a member is willing to invest — let’s say $10,000 — it may not be worth using the RRSP method,” says Ohler.

Can it work for you?

Due diligence on such a board’s part is vital to the co-op’s success, say Leon and Victoria Morris, executive director of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Association.

People, they say, need to see success, especially for the first project, and they need to get their money back.

Ohler agrees. Board members want to make sure entrepreneurs succeed, and that the investments are good for the community, he says. And they want to provide a return to members.

Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op invites local entrepreneurs to come to them for help, and members keep an eye out for opportunities. Entrepreneurs submit a concept, the board looks at its viability, and then entrepreneurs create a formal plan, to which the board gives a much harder look.

One of the keys is that entrepreneurs who are applying need to have skin in the game, too, says Ohler. “This is not a charity.”

The board has said no to pitches they don’t feel good about for one reason or another. But even then, they send the applicants away with options, which might include other funding sources, or things to do before coming back to the co-op with another application.

“So it’s not a just a shut-down no. It’s a ‘not yet,’” says Ohler.

The Alberta opportunity development co-op model, called Unleashing Local Cap-

Every project, from the housing development to the coffee shop managed by Ohler’s wife Carol, must have a plan to succeed ital, hasn’t moved east yet, but it’s worth looking into, because the terms may be similar if not exactly the same.

In Alberta, for instance, the co-op’s directors must live in the same rural municipality as the investment, while in Saskatchewan, say Leon and Morris, the province’s Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority “likes” that the co-op’s directors would be in the same area as the investment. That lowers the risk of fraud and creates more support for the business the co-op is investing in.

Knowledge can also be shared across provincial boundaries. For instance, administration is usually done by volunteers, and Leon says it is a source of burnout. If possible, try to build it into the business plan, he suggests.

Ohler says they’ve tried to deal with burnout through succession planning. They support succession planning for businesses, so it only makes sense the volunteer board would do the same. They had a new board member join at the last AGM. They have a new secretary, and Ohler has moved out of the chair into the treasurer’s post.

But the co-op is still at an early stage, and not many of their members understand what’s going on behind the scenes, although board members have created a policies and procedures manual to help with the transition.

There are other challenges, too. Borrowing money from other community members puts pressure on the entrepreneurs. It puts pressure on the board, too.

And fundraising also has its challenges.

It was easy and fun to ask people to invest in the first pro­ject when everyone was excited, says Ohler. Plus it was a small enough project.

And in fact, some excitement from the co-op’s first investment in Sangudo Meats did carry into the next projects. But while Ohler thought that once they got the first couple of projects done “everyone would be phoning us” to invest, “it’s just not that way.”

As the investments have grown more ambitious, the co-op members have had to venture further beyond their core group. “It seems to be much harder each time we go into a new project for some weird reason.”

There are easier ways to earn a return on investment, Ohler says, “but this is a vehicle for hope.” CG COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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BUSINESS Small-town problems, small-town solutions Dr. Gillian Richards is a research associate at Brandon University’s Research Development Institute, and it’s quickly apparent that she is happy to discuss the institute’s research.

Hers is a mild English accent; she wants to take a practical approach to rural issues.

That, it turns out, is because the barriers to rural development can be overcome, but it takes resolve.

At interview time, researchers were analyzing data from a Growing Forward-funded study looking at how to reduce barriers to innovation in southwestern Manitoba’s agri-food sector. Richards was looking, too, at the results of two other studies, including one that did case studies of five food processing companies that have brought new products to market within the last five years, and a second that conducted a rural survey of over 200 people involved in lending, in running small businesses, or in economic development.

Access to capital was identified as a barrier in all three studies.

That could include everything from venture capital to small loans, Richards says.

This is an especially steep hurdle in industries such as food processing. Often lenders want repayment within a short time frame, which doesn’t always work for food processors, Richards says.

“Food processing is capitalintensive and slow,” she says.

“Accessing dollars is difficult.”

The sheer amount of information some lenders and funding agencies want for a relatively small amount of cash

24

can also be a barrier, she adds.

Developing the knowledge needed to run a business also came up repeatedly.

To create a viable business, entrepreneurs need to research their market, customers, competition, supplies, pricing, profit potential, and many other aspects of the business, Richards points out.

“If you actually want to make a successful business, you have to be asking (many) of those questions, at the beginning and continually,” she says.

That knowledge gap isn’t solely a rural problem, Richards says.

But rural entrepreneurs face a double-whammy because of the distance between resources and networks. No matter how hard organizers try to reach rural people, “rural people are going to have to travel a long way” to attend workshops, Richards notes.

Dan Ohler says the Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op has also boosted the business IQ among active co-op members. Members have learned about everything from securities to tax issues, he says. And the process has been hugely beneficial to the entrepreneurs they’re supporting. Those entrepreneurs get help with business plans, they get an opportunity to explore different ideas, and they get help measuring the business’s performance.

Infrastructure was a top concern in two of the studies, Richards says. This includes infrastructure to support businesses as well as infrastructure to make communities attractive

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

to potential employees.

Buildings, medical services, telecommunications, and education all fall into this category.

Infrastructure is a bigger challenge for rural communities, she explains. And food processors in rural areas may have the steepest hill to climb when it comes to infrastructure.

Once they’ve gone through the pilot/incubator stage, they need to find a site to make their product at commercial volumes and efficiencies.

But it’s very costly to put together a plant that meets health regulations. One option is co-manufacturing, which is where a manufacturer rents out their equipment and facilities to another business owner.

A co-operative arrangement might work too, Richards adds.

Richards’ comments about infrastructure would ring true in Sangudo. For example, Ohler says the first few years were pretty tough for Sangudo Custom Meats. Margins are thin to start with in the meat business. When Jeff Senger and Kevin Meier took over the meat shop, they had to invest more money to upgrade the facility. The Growing Forward program kicked in some funding, and the co-op lent them some cash so they could participate in the program.

“I think they’re just at the point now where they’re starting to really make some gains,” Ohler says.

These aren’t the only challenges rural entrepreneurs and food processors face.

Others can include the small scale of local markets, distance to market, people

shopping in larger centres, and availability of skilled labour.

These all made Richards’ lists of rural challenges.

Food processors in particular also face challenges around rules and regulations and market entry for new food products, she adds. And risk aversion may also slow innovation, although researchers were still analyzing the data they collected on that issue at the time of this interview.

Much of the research at the Rural Development Institute centres on food processing.

Along with tourism, it’s an obvious type of economic development. It makes sense to process food near where it’s grown, Richards explains.

It also creates a host of other benefits, such as improving the balance of payments and increasing exports, generating revenue, creating jobs, cutting transportation, and improving food security.

But given the long list of challenges, why should policy makers care about rural economic development?

Healthy rural communities are important, Richards says.

“We can’t all live in cities.

Somebody has to grow our food. And some people prefer to live in rural communities.”

Richards also points to one of her favourite quotes, from an interviewee in the research projects. “Companies have to innovate or they will die.”

It’s the same, she says, with communities.

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BUSINESS

Stepping up It’s a great time to lead in the cider business, and this farm group aims to take their Broken Ladder brand international

B

ack when my grandparents’ generation of Okanagan farmers first formed a fruit growing co-operative to market their fruit, farmers made a good living growing and selling crops on a commodity basis. Sure, some of that fruit ended up in cans, in fruit leather or in other value-added applications, but that all happened after the fruit was sold.

Growers grew, and that was the end of the story.

Fast-forward 80 years and it’s a very different world.

Tightening margins and increasing global competition mean growing a great product is as necessary as ever, but it’s now just a first step. To be successful, growers and grower co-operatives need to complement great production with creativity, top-notch marketing savvy, and an eye for in-house value-add.

Many farmers have creativity and outside-the-box thinking in spades. But it’s darn difficult to come up with a viable, consumer-friendly, lucrative value-add, especially one that hasn’t already saturated its market and one you can handle in-house. Many fruit growers have tried various schemes; very few have been successful.

But Broken Ladder Cider — a 100 per cent fruit, totally natural, no-additive hard cider, produced inhouse by the BC Tree Fruits grower co-operative — seems like an idea that has had success written all over it since day one.

Not yet even two years into production, Broken Ladder Cider consistently flies off liquor store shelves. Now, it’s lining up for national and then international distribution. Best of all, the top-notch product is turning C-grade fruit — which would otherwise be sold for pennies on the pound to juice manufacturers — into lucrative returns for BC Tree Fruits’ approximately 800 grower members.

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By Madeleine Baerg

“It’s the ultimate good news story,” says Shannon Forgues, Broken Ladder’s promotions and marketing supervisor. “It’s a great way of adding value for farmers, and it’s a product people get really excited about.

“It’s alcoholic apple juice, clean and pure. People love that all it has in it is apples, nothing more. You might not be able to eat a few apples a day but you can sure drink them. And the brand and product has that farmer mystique to it, which is right in line with the whole farm-to-table trend.” *** Once in a while, you talk to someone who is so many mental leaps ahead of everyone else that you’re keenly aware you’re only hearing the highest peaks on the tallest slopes of a great big iceberg of knowledge and vision. Alan Tyabji — ex-CEO of Okanagan Tree Fruits and the visionary behind Broken Ladder Cider — is one of those people.

Ours is a small world and an even smaller town.

Tyabji happens to live just down our country lane. I’ve passed him a hundred times as I walk our dogs down the bumpy road towards our shared bank of mailboxes. Usually he’s zooming past in his little black car: a man constantly on a mission.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve passed him far less often. Since taking on the CEO role of BC Tree Fruits an hour and a half away, he’s worked long hours to keep the day-to-day operations of the fruit co-operative rolling and to bring Broken Ladder to market.

Today, as he ushers me into his cozy dining room, however, he’s got time to chat. Exactly one day into retirement, he’s still buzzing with enthusiasm for his product, still fully mentally invested in the Broken Ladder story. And what a story it is.

Photography: Lionel Trudel Photography Ltd.

We have been very, very aggressive about marketing Broken Ladder,” says brand builder Shannon Forgues To understand what makes the Broken Ladder concept so good, we first need to know a bit about cider itself.

Until just the last few years, Canadian-made hard ciders (especially out here on the West Coast) were typically made from grain alcohol, various flavourings and a ton of sugar rather than fruit. The end result is super sweet (and more than occasionally headache inducing) but certainly not trendy, foodie, or “craft.”

Demand for grain alcohol-based ciders is extremely limited, which makes that market stagnant and difficult to enter.

European and some American-made hard ciders differ in every way from grain alcohol-based ciders.

Made partially or wholly from fermented apples, these ciders are variations on what the Greeks and Romans made 2,000 or more years ago. That said, even within the fruit-based cider segment, there are two distinct streams: mass-produced ciders made from juice concentrate and sweetener, and craft ciders made from fresh-pressed apples.

As craft beer breweries and countless startup wineries gained increasing alcohol market share over the past decade, savvy alcohol marketers started seeing potential for a “clean,” fruit-based, European-style cider market, especially among food and drink-keen millennials (who, as a group, are more willing than other demographics to put their money where their foodie ideals lie). The fresh-pressed fruit cider niche was one Tyabji anticipated years before it started showing its potential, and one he was uniquely poised to help BC Tree Fruits jump upon.

Though Broken Ladder Cider has only been in production for two years, it stems from a concept first crafted a decade or more ago.

Back before multiple smaller fruit growers’ cooperatives amalgamated to form BC Tree Fruits, Tyabji headed the South Okanagan Fruit Growers’ Co-operative. In order to maximize returns to grower members, Continued on page 28

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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BUSINESS

It started as a search to find a market for apples no one wanted to pay for. Now, Broken Ladder is high status.

he looked at every angle, from decreasing costs to pursuing new markets and increasing sales returns. One avenue for value-add stuck out as particularly obvious.

“The co-op identified back then that there was a segment of fruit — the non-attractives — that just didn’t return sufficient dollars to growers. So, we asked the question: How do we do something with the fruit to get better returns to our members?”

The answer, they determined, was a European-style, all-fruit cider. Under Tyabji’s leadership and using a government development grant, the co-op developed an in-house, 100 per cent fruit, no-additive cider recipe. Then, it actively encouraged individual farmers to opt into a franchise-style cider-making business, offering production training and marketing support to any who took up the challenge.

“The concept was that farmers could capitalize on the central knowledge of our parent company and, more importantly, capitalize on the diversified distribution that they themselves brought. We set up protected regions so each farmer who applied would have a protected area,” Tyabji explains.

Only one farmer jumped on the opportunity before the program was disbanded when the local co-ops amalgamated in 2008. However, the legwork that went into creating one of B.C.’s very first 100 per cent fruit ciders would prove surprisingly useful just a few years later.

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If it seems strange that a fresh fruit co-op would foray into in-house cider-making, consider Tyabji’s background. Thirty years earlier, he’d helped transform Calona wines (in Kelowna, B.C.) from a lowvalue, poorly recognized regional brand to the largest winery in Canada. In the 1980s, he was a founding partner of Okanagan Vineyards, which he ultimately and successfully sold to Vincor International. And, he was a key actor in the Schloss Laderheim brand, an inexpensive wine that hit No. 1 in white wine sales in Canada in the 1990s. Having danced a time or two in the alcohol business meant he understood the necessary infrastructure, the regulatory environment and, most importantly, the market itself.

In 2012, Tyabji took over the reins of the entire BC Tree Fruits organization. He brought with him the memory of the cider project they’d developed in the south, but now he had a much bigger cast of potential players and a vastly bigger number of low-return C-grade apples with which to work.

“I was asked to come and change BC Tree Fruits’ direction. The need was much more significant because we were a much more significant organization than a small, stand-alone co-op. So, we looked at a broader, much more aggressive model. That’s how Broken Ladder was born.”

Aggressive is right. Right from the beginning, the vision for Broken Ladder was to go international.

“We planned to go after the provincial market as a first step, then go national in scope. But the long range vision is international,” Tyabji says. “It’s baby steps right now, but the potential for cider is huge. The vision and plan are to utilize 100 per cent of all commercial grade fruit that comes through BC Tree Fruits.

That’s an achievable plan.”

Tyabji started by building a heavy-hitting team, headed by Mike Daley, the recently retired director of operations for Growers Cider, Canada’s largest cider company. (Conveniently, Daley also happens to be Tyabji’s son-in-law.)

Together, the team built their product from scratch, focusing on creating a top-quality, no-corners-cut cider. They started with what Tyabji calls the “soul” of the product.

“We knew it had to be pure. That was the key element of everything; that was what would differentiate us from everyone else. There wasn’t another cider on the market that was 100 per cent fruit without any additives of any nature.”

And it had to taste good.

While taste is subjective, it turns out it can also be entirely scientific. For six months, a team of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada researchers, together with one of the Okanagan Valley’s best winemakers, analyzed components of the most popular no-additive hard apple ciders available on the market. Then, they fermented each variety of apple grown commercially in the Okanagan to identify their characteristics, before blending them in various combinations.

The final product is a blend of six local apples which together have enough natural sugar, complexity and acid to produce a crisp, refreshing, balanced cider.

“That’s it. Nothing else. No concentrates, no sugar, no water, nothing. Just the apples. And when you try it, you know it: it just tastes clean… pure,” says Forgues.

“We knew we’d have a product that was very, very good right from the start. The challenge was whether or not we could identify the market niche and convince buyers that we were the best in the niche,” says Tyabji.

Continued on page 30

“It’s all of our responsibility to speak up for agriculture.”

Emmett Sawyer, Agvocate 4-H Member and Farmer

Be somebody who does something.

Be an agvocate.

Learn more at AgMoreThanEver.ca.

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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BUSINESS

The Broken Ladder name, like so much of the product, was a group effort. It’s catchy and different yet rustic and “farmy.” The logo was a given. The BC Tree Fruits little green leaf logo, which carries huge impact in the B.C. market, was an obvious choice to underscore the quality, authenticity and “honest farmer” component of the product.

In April 2015, the product launched.

“I remember my first day,” Forgues recalls with a laugh.

“I packed up my first shipment, which was eight pallets to Vancouver and six to the Kamloops LCB (Liquor Control Board) warehouse. Fourteen pallets. I thought that was a huge day. Then the orders just kept coming.”

“It just didn’t last long, not long at all, on store shelves. Maybe it was there a month before it sold out.

So then we were frantically making more and more to try to meet demand,” she says.

“It was gratifying to see it take off but, because the team that was involved in the startup had 100 years of combined liquor market experience, it didn’t surprise us,” adds Tyabji. “We knew where to go and what to do.”

That confidence is evident in the warehouse selected for the fermentation tanks. While they started with just six fermenters, the room can easily hold eight times that many. A second shipment of tanks was ordered before the first cans hit liquor store shelves. Today, they are up to 19 fermenters and more are currently under construction. They’ve grown from one press to two, and they’ve added their own canning line to the process.

“The success of a product is a combination of opportunity in the market and quality of the product.

The cider market was growing; the natural market was growing, we just had to position ourselves correctly into the evolving market to succeed,” he says.

If Tyabji makes it sound deceptively simple — “positioning ourselves correctly” — the reality was anything but.

“We have been very, very aggressive about marketing Broken Ladder,” says Forgues. “Every event we could get it in, we were there. We’ve done piles and piles of in-store tastings, media drops, anything to get people talking. With a product like this, you have to get people to try it. You have to build momentum. You can’t just take an ad out in a magazine. They have to actually hold the can in their hand, taste the product, feel a connection to the brand and farmers who grew the apples inside the can. If you can do that, nine times out of 10, they’re going to love it and want more.”

Last year, BC Tree Fruits added an apples-and-hops and an apple-pear line, then launched into Alberta.

This year, they plan to diversify, adding smaller-volume glass bottles that better suit serving in restaurants.

In the three years since it hit the market, the brand has sold more than 1.2 million cans. They aim to sell almost that number again this year alone, with a goal of 40,000 cases. Next year’s goal is 55,000 cases.

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“Our hope is to grow by 20 to 30 per cent per year,” says Forgues.

To achieve that growth, Broken Ladder has a target demographic, namely hipsters.

“The first few months after we opened the tasting bar here in town, I was shocked that it was mostly men coming in to fill growlers. Traditionally, I’ve thought of ciders as appealing more to women. Predominantly, it’s 25- to 45-year-old guys who come in with women to start. Virtually everyone likes the product, but it’s the guys who are doing most of the buying and it’s guys who keep coming back.”

While the heavy lifting may seem complete for Broken Ladder Cider’s brand building, much work remains.

The team is currently in discussion with the B.C. liquor board to create a cider-specific origin and quality label similar to the VQA label applied to certain B.C. wines. In B.C., markups vary by product.

VQA-labelled wines allow the winery to keep significantly more of the shelf price. A “CQA” (or similar) label could garner similar benefits.

“If we could get preferred treatment for real cider through a VQA-style labelling system, we could crowd out commercial-style ciders and others that aren’t real ciders,” says Forgues.

“I believe the government is supportive of B.C. agriculture. Achieving a CQA label depends on whether the province expands the raw material classification. We have promises made but all of the rules and regulations have yet to be written,” adds Tyabji.

At the end of the day, Broken Ladder Cider’s real story is the dollars and cents back to growers.

“There is excitement. You have to remember that we are only in our second year. It’s when we are fully utilizing all of our commercial grade fruit, that’s when the full impact will benefit growers. That will evolve over time,” says Tyabji.

“We’re constantly looking to add the most value to the fruit that farmers produce. We were already adding some value to C-grade fruit by sending them to SunRype for juice. We moved forward with this venture because, by bringing it in-house and making alcohol instead of juice, we added more value.”

The potential is for better returns and bigger volume ahead.

“We expect that there will be many more competitors coming into the market with similar products, but we expect the market to continue to grow,” says Tyabji. “It’s a very good time to be in the cider-making business right now.”

“No matter who starts making cider, we’re out in front and developing a following with consumers,” adds Forgues. “If you’re in first you have a big advantage. Especially if your product is as fantastic as ours.” CG

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BUSINESS

The first-born quandary What if your eldest son isn’t actually the best choice to lead your family farm into the future?

F

or centuries, it worked for royalty. If you happen to be the first-born son, you were on the path to the throne, no questions asked. And it happened on the farm too. The eldest son was automatically in line to take the reins when Dad got old enough that he needed to step aside.

Increasingly, that kind of hierarchical approach is getting called outmoded, unfair and even dangerous for the future of the farm.

But it’s still in place, and the first-born child gets groomed to inherit the family farm, regardless of whether they’re the best person for the job.

In fact, sometimes the farm might be a lot better off if they were encouraged to go elsewhere to build a career.

And everybody else in the family knows it.

There may also be a temptation to try and accommodate as many family members as possible, simply because parents are reluctant to say “no” and risk bad relations.

“I have seen situations where people say, ‘My kids want to farm, so I’ve got to make room for them.’ But if they don’t want to farm together and one is dragging the other along, you are just pushing that problem out 10 years, and there’s eventually going to be a blow-up,” says Len Davies, founder of Davies Legacy Planning Group, who has guided many farm families through the succession process. “When you look at succession planning, you’ve got three circles — the family, the business, and the ownership. If your kids aren’t capable of running the farm and you’re saying, they’re going to be successors because they want to be, then all you’re going to do is mess up the management circle, which then will mess up the family circle, and mess up the ownership part.”

Nor is Davies alone. More farm advisers across the country report the same. “Just because you have a son or daughter who has grown up on the farm doesn’t mean that he or she is the best suited to run it,” says family farm coach and succession planner Elaine Froese. “You need to separate the fact that they are your children and say, from a business perspective, are they the ones that have the skill set that your farm team needs?”

Almost as bad is where an unwilling child inherits by default, perhaps as part of the sudden death of the parent who was running the farm operation, says Froese. It even has a name, legacy pressure, defined as the expectation felt by some young people who feel that they will continue the family farm when that’s not really their passion.

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By Angela Lovell

From Entitlement to Gratitude Froese says she’d like to see entitlement to the family farm replaced by gratitude. “Among the top stumbling blocks to a successful farm business transition is lack of appreciation, unwillingness to give up power and control, and lack of forgiveness,” she says. “From a conflict resolution standpoint, a collaborative model of resolving conflict and making collaborative decisions is a win-win for everybody, and is much more effective than a hierarchy.”

Froese emphasizes the importance of clear communication and what she calls the Three Cs — clarity of expectations, certainties of timelines and commitment to act.

“Clarity of expectations means the family has to sit down and be clear about what their vision is for the farm business, and for the family, and how each person wants to show up in both of those systems, and then speak to each other about what your ideal life looks like and why,” says Froese.

Certainty about timelines and agreements is also a must. “I know young men who are passionate about having a successful farm business but they’re not getting good leadership from the founder,” she says. “They want them to complete things. They want to know what their vision is and the timeline. They want to be compensated partially now, because they’re 35 with two young kids.

They can’t wait another 10 years and they don’t want everything to be resolved when there’s a death. Wills are great for the dying but they’re not great for the living.

They’re not appropriate as a farm business plan because the succession plan is for now; it’s for the living.”

Commitment to act means actually having to start giving things up to meet the current needs of the successor, not just future needs. “The successor needs certainty now and equity now so he or she can leverage for their future earnings. If the parents keep all their equity, they can’t get any advantage from growth,” says Froese. “There’s typically a huge fear of failure in the next generation and so that’s why the reins are tight for as long as possible, which I think is crazy. When you have a younger farmer who’s been there for 10 years and has done amazing things, why would it be any different if you changed or transitioned some ownership to them?”

Froese believes many farm men aren’t paying attention to their own self-care and emotional well-being, and if they are trying to live their lives vicariously through Continued on page 34

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.

www.cafanet.com

It is getting better all the time!

BY LIZ ROBERTSON, MA., CAFA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

I

n early February CAFA hosted our Farm Succession Update in Red Deer, Alberta and over a week later, I am still getting calls about what an outstanding day it was!

The speaker lineup was solid with two financial planners, one insurance agent, two family enterprise advisors, two lawyers, three accountants and two farmers — one taking a master’s degree and the other an owner of a successful agribusiness. All CAFA members as well!

The program was designed around the Three Circle Model of family business: ownership, management and family. We looked at the main function of each circle, and how they overlap and interact. From three circles there are seven distinct areas and four overlapping relationships — and that’s where most of the challenges in family businesses lie.

This was peer-to-peer learning at its best.

We had some leading professionals sharing their insight on different aspects of farm family, ownership and management so that everyone there left the room a better advisor, more informed for the next time they talk to farm families or businesses.

The energy in the room was palpable with advisors talking and learning new ways to do things or meeting that professional with the specific insight that was needed when working on that last client file. It is actually visible when connections are made and the relationship is ignited. Networking is an undeniable key factor in professional success.

CAFA’s advanced Farm Update Series, offered across the country, is a farm-focused professional development and networking event. Currently we offer Farm Tax, Succession and Management with more in development. CAFA’s Farm Update Series

offer what farm advisors want and need: professional farm-focused development and farm-focused peer networking.

CAFA’s next Farm Update on Management will be held June 8 in Woodstock, Ontario. It is going to be another outstanding program that we are doing in collabouration with the Ontario Institute of Agrologists. Farm advisors, consultants and agrologists all want to stay current with industry trends and benefit enormously from building professional networks. Better informed and connected farm advisors is better for all of Canada’s farms.

To learn more about CAFA’s Farm Update Series, feel free to contact our Education Committee: • Stan MacEwen at 306-384-4478 stan@Laskowskiwright.com • John Mill at 519-973-3323 john@johnmilltax.com • Liz Robertson at 204-348-3578 info@cafanet.com Be sure to check out our website as well for a listing of Certified Ag Farm Advisors in Canada and local meetings near you at www. cafanet.ca.

CAFA MEMBERS ARE THE MOST VALUABLE AND TRUSTED FARM ADVISORS IN CANADA March 23, 2017 Farm Succession Update, Ottawa. Finally, an information day in Eastern Ontario focusing on farm succession! Plenty of great insights and a unique networking opportunity. http://www.cafanet.ca June 8: Woodstock, ON: CAFA’s ever popular Farm Management Update.

Details announced soon.

Toll free: 1-877-474-2871 Email: info@cafanet.com PO Box 270 • Seven Sisters Falls, MB • R0E 1Y0

Follow us on Twitter @CAFANET

BUSINESS

Resources to help you choose the right successor: Susan Forward — Emotional Blackmail: When the people in your life use fear, obligation, and guilt to manipulate you. Harper Collins, 1997.

Dr. Kevin Leman – The Birth Order Book: Why you are the way you are.

Revell, 2009.

Elaine Froese — Farming’s In-Law Factor… how to have more harmony and less conflict on family farms.

Stephen Poulter — The Father Factor: How your father’s legacy impacts your career, Prometheus Books. 2006.

Jeanne Safer — Cain’s Legacy: Liberating siblings from a lifetime of rage, shame, secrecy, and regret. Basic Books, 2012.

The Kolbe Index — www.kolbe.com/why-kolbe/ kolbe-wisdom/kolbe-indexes/

the successor, that’s a mistake. “Live the life you were intended to live at the chapter of life that you’re at,” she says. “Respect your age and respect that your roles are going to shift. Be happy at the stage that you’re at, and be a leader to your team because I would like to see founders become wise elders. There’s always going to be a role for them.”

Equal Versus Fair Davies says he finds it odd that farmers have wrapped their heads around the difference between fair versus equal when it comes to the value of the farm, but they’re having a much harder time applying that same concept to skills. “If the farm’s worth $2 million and they’ve got four kids they can’t divide that and give each kid $500,000; they’ve bought into that concept,” he says.

“They’re prepared to tell somebody, ‘I’m sorry you’re not getting a quarter of this farm and this is the reason why.’ But they’re not prepared to say, ‘No, you can’t come in because you just don’t have a role here.’ They want to bring the brother in and that’s okay if the place can support two families, and it’s okay if they realize each other’s strengths and are willing to work with it. If they don’t realize that, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

Parents also have to be prepared for another child to turn up out of the blue looking for their share of the business. “Parents need to think about reallocating some of their resources to a personal business wealth bubble outside of the farm so they can allocate wealth to nonfarming or non-business heirs from a different place and leave the farm alone,” says Froese.

Understanding What Makes Everyone Tick Davies and Froese both use many different tools to help farm families identify the strengths, weaknesses and dif34

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

ferences in character of everyone involved in the farm succession, and where they best fit into the farm team.

“First of all you look at what the vision is for the farm.

If all parties are in growth mode, are they willing to make collaborative decisions?” asks Froese, who uses a tool she calls the ultimate decision-maker, which identifies who is making what kinds of decisions on the farm. “It’s very telling because the best managers are compassionate mentors and they train and lead to be replaced in the future. Most farm men don’t ever want to retire but their role is going to shift, and then it becomes the dance of letting go and figuring out which pieces they still want to have a role in, and when the ultimate decision-making goes from the founder to the successor. It’s more valuable when both have a collaborative decision-making role and they make decisions together based on their unique skill sets and perspectives.”

Davies uses a method known as the Kolbe Index to help families better understand what makes each other tick.

The Kolbe Index is a computer-based system that assesses each person based on responses to a number of questions across four Action Modes — instincts that humans use to creatively problem-solve — and rates the person according to his or her unique operating style.

“It tells you how each person will look at a task or an idea, so one person might be the Fact Finder, who likes to do research, while another is the Follow Through, the person who runs the office perhaps and gets things done.

You might have the Quick Start, who is the idea guy, and the Implementer who figures out how to make things work, and suddenly you have a nice team. I tried this with my kids and our family business and it’s a powerful tool. Now I look at my kids as assets. The problem with a lot of parents is if their kids aren’t just like them, and most of the time they’re not, they look at them as a liability rather than an asset which can work for you.”

Birth Order Does Play a Role Although it shouldn’t be the deciding factor in who is the best farm leader, birth order does have an influence, says Froese. “There are psychological differences or different needs or ways of showing up in the world based on birth order,” she says. “For example, people might say, ‘I can tell you’re the oldest child because you’re so responsible and a take-charge kind of person.’ That is typical, and does come with birth order. I do a map on every family I work with called a genogram. It’s important for me to know how old people are and line them up in descending order because that gives me some clues as to why they might be feeling they’re not getting their independence or ownership and control, based on their ages.”

Birth rite has no place on the family farm, Froese says, but there can be a place for engaged family members, and sometimes even outsiders, who are doing purposeful, meaningful work that’s aligned to their values and the way they are wired. CG

PG. 35 N ew equipment news for dry spreaders.

PG. 42 W hy to watch for sulphur deficiency in canola.

PG. 44 S till premature to invest in those soil health tests.

PG. 46 E thanol makes soft white an option on more farms.

The Fenix III metering system from Seed Hawk uses an entirely new and more powerful motor design mounted outside the metering body.

Photo: Scott Garvey

Seeding innovations roundup 2016 saw manufacturers introduce several enhancements to their equipment. Here’s a look at the year’s highlights

By Scott Garvey / CG Machinery editor

D

uring 2016, several Prairie-based seeding equipment manufacturers announced new design enhancements to meet customer demand. Here’s a look at the major announcements that will begin production for 2017 model-year machines.

Seed Hawk Responding to problems reported on the iCon seeding system it introduced in 2014, Saskatchewan-based Seed Hawk — now owned

by Swedish manufacturer Vaderstad — has introduced the all-new Fenix III system.

“We experienced a few problems with the metering system we introduced a couple of years ago,” explained Peter Clarke, Seed Hawk president and CEO, during an interview at Canada’s Farm Progress Show in Regina in June. “This update addresses all the issues our farmers identified in the spring of 2015 and 2016.”

To prevent dust and fines from getting into the drive motors, which caused trouble in the previous system, they have now been moved outside of the housing body and have a quick attach system that allows for easy and fast in-field changes.

Continued on page 36

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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crops Guide

“This is a larger motor than we had on our iCon system previously,” says Clarke. “This is a 40-watt motor versus our 10-watt system. It sits outside the meter housing, so it addresses issues of contamination that we faced over the past few springs.”

To accommodate moving the electric motors, the meter housing itself needed a redesign. Engineers used that opportunity to make some improvements to the flow of product through them as well. The company claims higher rates of product can now flow more easily through the meter body compared to the 2014 design.

For growers who purchased air carts in the last two years and have experienced trouble with the previous metering system, they will be able to change over to the new Fenix III system.

“The Fenix III system is retrofittable to all iCon systems that are on the market today,” says Clarke. “And the entire system works better than we’ve ever had before.”

The Fenix III system became standard equipment on all Seed Hawk air carts for the 2017 model year.

Designed to provide individual row metering, SeedMaster’s new UltraPro II is a redesign of the original UltraPro system.

Photo: Scott Garvey

New “tuneable” distribution towers allow operators to fine-tune product flow to distribution runs.

Photo: Scott Garvey

36

SeedMaster SeedMaster president Norbert Beaujot has long been known as a fan of individual row metering. Last summer the company introduced an updated version of its UltraPro metering system, which works on exactly that principle.

“With individual row metering you know that if you put a seed into one end of a 50-foot hose, it’s going to come out of the other end,” Beaujot said. “Whereas on a bulk system, you’re putting a bunch of product through a 2-1/2 inch hose and you hope it divides reasonably at the end. There’s a big difference.”

For about the last six years, the brand’s UltraPro onframe meter has offered customers an individual-row metering option. Now, the updated version of that system, the UltraPro II, becomes available on 2017 model year drills. The company claims the metering system will offer all the same capabilities as the previous version but with a higher throughput and some updated features.

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

The company wanted to improve upon the original UltraPro design and broaden its ability to handle other granular products, such as innoculants.

“Using that same (metering) concept for other products has been the objective,” said SeedMaster engineer Daniel Michaluk in August. “It has many advantages over our last on-frame metering system. It’s a two-meter setup and both meters feed into a common venturi block.”

“We see this model being fairly attractive to the pulse grower, because we’re handling seed very, very gently and precisely and we’re able to put it down the row very easily,” said Cory Beaujot, marketing and communication manager. “And we’re able to meter granular innoculant into that same air stream in an uncomplicated way to ensure that same seed is getting treated appropriately.”

Along with introducing the UltraPro II, which is designed to be mounted on a drill frame, SeedMaster also unveiled its new “tuneable” distribution towers to mate with the brand’s bulk-metering Nova SmartCarts.

The towers work with the company’s XeedSystem flow monitoring system, which provides real-time data on product flow that operators can use to optimize distribution through them.

The need to improve flow through distribution towers was identified by research the brand did in its R&D department, said Norbert Beaujot.

Those tests identified problems inherent in the distribution tower concept used by all brands, he said. Put simply, there can be a lot of variation in how much seed goes into one opener run compared to others on the same tower. That led to the creation of the tuneable design.

But because there are so many subtle changes that can cause big variations, adjustable towers are only useful if an operator knows in real time how the flow of product through them is dividing. Adopting the digital XeedSystem flow monitoring technology from Hungarian tech firm Digitroll provides that data to an operator, and pairing those two features made the tuneable towers a viable option the brand now offers on its 2017 model year drills.

seeding innovation

Bourgault has offered a smaller 80-foot drill using its new centre-pivot transport system.

It introduced a 100-foot model in 2015.

Photo: Scott Garvey

If the level of variation through the towers is too high, operators can quickly adjust airflow to match conditions.

“For a number of years now SeedMaster has been seeking out the best product for a blockage detection system,” said research farm manager Owen Kinch. “What we have now is not just a blockage detection system, but a flow monitoring system.”

“It (XeedSystem) actually has the ability to count individual granules to an extremely high level of accuracy — 98 to 99 per cent,” he added. “That’s for any seed from something small in size like canola to something very large like a fababean. What that has done is give us access to some very powerful information, real time, live inside the tractor cab.”

Bourgault Standing beside the new 80-foot, centre-folding 3420 Paralink hoe drill during Canada’s Farm Progress Show in Regina in June, Bourgault marketing specialist Rob Fagnou noted this was the drill’s first public debut.

“This is what we call the little brother to the 100foot we released last year,” he said. “The demand for the 80-foot was strong with this type of folding system in a drill. So right away we were in design mode, testing the 80-foot. Really, the design is very similar to the 100-foot.

It has the identical fold system and transports at the same size.”

With the centre-fold concept, both wings fold back from a middle pivot, so the drills can squeeze down to just over 18 feet wide and 16 feet tall. Along with the relatively narrow folded width, a steering feature on the back four sets of wheels makes the drill easier to get around narrow field approaches and other tight corners.

The saddle tank on 7000 Series Bourgault carts can now be filled with the on-board conveyor.

Photo: Scott Garvey

The operator can adjust their direction through the drill’s X30 controller.

Now, both the 80- and 100-foot drills are available in Bourgault’s QDC and XTA configurations with a choice of either 10- or 12-inch row spacings. They can also be ordered with or without mid-row banders.

“I think that’s what’s unique when you get to this size of a drill, not just the folding, but we sell it with 10- and 12-inch row spacing and with or without mid-row banders,” Fagnou said.

The brand also used the show to introduce a new feature on its 7000 Series air carts.

“We had some demand from farmers who had the saddle tank and wanted to be able to fill it with the conveyor or the auger,” said Fagnou. “Some guys were saying, depending on what they were seeding, sometimes the tank was sitting there not being used. So they were filling it up with wheat, let’s say, adjusting rates and stretching out fill times a little.”

So now saddle tanks on the 7000 Series carts can fill directly from the conveyor. CG COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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crops Guide

Market sees new interest in dry-product spreaders New machines designed to broadcast dry fertilizer are hitting dealerships for the 2017 season

By Scott Garvey / CG Machinery editor

F

or years, one-pass seeding systems that incorporate fertilizer application with the seeding pass had producers turning their backs on dry spreader systems. Many older designs of spinner spreaders lacked the precision that producers could now get from direct-seeding systems. But the logistical demands of getting everything done in one seeding pass have a few growers looking to transfer some fertilizer application to the fall in order to ease the spring workload. As a result, dry spreaders have seen a resurgence in buyer interest in recent years.

That fact hasn’t been lost on manufacturers, some of whom introduced new machines to the marketplace in 2016 to capitalize on that demand.

Salford As a result of a request from a Saskatchewan farmer, Salford initiated an R&D project to develop a largecapacity air boom spreader. The result of those efforts is a 20-ton spreader with a 66-foot redesigned Valmar boom that was unveiled at Canada’s Farm Progress Show in Regina in 2016.

“We took a 20-ton spreader and redesigned the (Valmar) boom a little bit,” said Dave King, the company’s director of sales and marketing. “We started working with this farmer to run a demo in the field.”

The new machine is meant to appeal to western Canadian growers, and Salford expects it will help generate new interest in the market for dry-product spreaders across the Prairies, which has lagged over the years.

“The units that were here in the past had less technology and features,” King notes. “And the sizes weren’t big enough. Today, we’re offering a lot higher technology in spreaders.”

Salford expects the air boom design will appeal to growers because it overcomes some of the limitations associated with spinner box designs, which have traditionally been more commonly used for dry-product broadcasting.

“As a general rule when you get to about 25 m.p.h. with wind, an air boom will perform better than a spinner,” King says.

For those who still prefer the spinner box design, Salford has added improved section control as an 38

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

option for its BBI equipment. Salford recently acquired U.S.-based BBI and brought it into the brand.

“Section control is not new to BBI equipment,” Richard Hagler, president of the BBI division of Salford Group, said in a press release. “We’ve been building models that can spread a full swath or manually turn on and off left and right side for the turf and orchard/ vineyard markets for over 15 years. What makes this new section control option such an advance over other machines on the market today is the ability to dynamically stop in an already-applied area, to turn on or turn off the left and/or right side of the spreader rather than a mechanical switch the user must operate.”

The feature will also help avoid broadcasting product outside field boundaries into buffer strips or waterways.

Section control was made available on a limited number of models through 2016, including the Javelin, with a 120-foot spread capability for urea, and the Magna­Spread, which has an 80-foot reach.

SeedMaster As spreader boxes and floaters garner more interest in the marketplace, SeedMaster engineers think they have developed a product that allows producers to spread dry fertilizer without making another relatively large machinery investment. It’s the Nova Flex applicator.

Introduced in mid-2016, the Nova Flex applicator allows the brand’s Nova SmartCarts to do double duty.

The applicator bar hooks up to any Nova air cart just as a regular air drill does and can fall-apply or top-dress granular fertilizer.

“The Nova Flex fertilizer and nutrient applicator really came out of the idea that people were sinking $300,000 plus into floaters, when they already have a highly accurate, highly technologically advanced metering system and holding tank in their yard,” says Trent Meyer, director of sales and marketing at SeedMaster.

“They already have the power to pull it. Why are we going out and spending money on another engine and everything else to take care of?”

“With new products coming out from the fertilizer companies, this really is a cost-effective way of utilizing the assets we have on the farm.”

seeding technology

Salford introduced a prototype 20-ton air boom dry-product applicator at Canada’s Farm Progress Show in Regina. Photo: Scott Garvey

Designed to work with the SeedMaster’s Nova SmartCarts, the Nova Flex dry-fertilizer applicator allows growers to make full use of existing equipment. Photo: Scott Garvey

The John Deere F4365 is a high-capacity self-propelled dry-product spreader.

Photo: Scott Garvey

Connected to a Nova cart, the Flex applicator is capable of delivering 350 pounds of product at working speeds up to 10 m.p.h.

And the zone control feature of the Nova carts allows for up to 10 zones to reduce application overlap.

“For a lot of floaters, if they have any zone control, it’s half width and they’re not blending,” Meyer says. “Not everyone’s going to apply multiple products at the same time, but at the end of the day there is the opportunity to do that (with the Flex).”

Inside the tractor cab, operators use the same monitor, so they don’t have to learn to use yet another system. The Flex applicator bar is available in a 70-foot working width and in a trailing or tow-between configuration to match both models of Nova carts.

“We tested it in the field in the spring and it’s really, really durable, stable and easy to run,” he adds.

Trailing versions of the Flex retail for about $45,000, while tow-between models sell for around $60,000. These types need heavier hitch and frame to support the cart, which accounts for the price difference.

John Deere Equipped with a 330-cubic foot New Leader dry spreader box, John Deere’s new F4365 applicator is designed for high capacity. The brand expects it will fill a need on large farming operations and with custom operators.

The F4365 can apply up to 1,100 pounds (499 kilograms) of fertilizer or 6,600 pounds (2,993 kilograms) of lime per acre.

It also has the ability to variable-rate apply up to four different products in a single pass, with spread widths of 60 to 90 feet.

Under the hood, the F4365 gets one of Deere’s PowerTech PSS 9-litre diesels mated to an IVT transmission. That gives it a 46 m.p.h. (74 km/h) road speed and maximum application speed of 30 m.p.h. (50 km/h).

“Service providers and large-scale producers can cover more acres faster, and in greater comfort, with the ability to variablerate apply up to four different fertilizers in a single pass,” says Dave Mulder, product manager with John Deere Crop Care.

Inside the CommandView III cab, operators get some updated features to add to the comfort Mulder was talking about, such as an improved seat swivel and cameras that show the field, dry box and rear spreader pattern. CG COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

39

crops Guide

A few graphs of interest At the Manitoba Agronomists Conference in December, Roy Arnott and Anastasia Kubinec of Manitoba Agriculture gave a joint presentation titled Agronomics & economics — crop management decisions need both! The full presentation is available on the Manitoba Agriculture website, but here are a few snapshots.

Crop Rotation – Yield (2010 - 2015)

Urea nitrogen fall vs. Spring prices (2001-2017)

CROP PLANTED Stubble Sp.Wht Sp.Wht 85 W.Wht 75 Oat 98 Canola 101 Flax 96 Soybean 108 Sunflower 102 Corn 98

W.Wht 84 83 86 105* 104 93 NSD 67

Oat 98 97 77 101 97 108 103 111

Canola 102* 98 95 86 103 104 91 112

Flax 105 94 92 87 79 104 101 NSD

Soybean 101* 105 100 100* 98 94 93 102

SF 101 87 104 75 71 101* NSD 119

Corn 98 74 99 99 78 103 95 89

Source: MASC Harvest Production Reports

Economics In rotations #1

Year 1 Canola

#2

$182 Canola

#3

$182 Canola $182

Year 2 W.Wheat (-1%) $176 W.Wheat (+1%) $176 W.Wheat (+5%) $238

Year 3 Soybean (+2%) $190 Soybean (+1%) $197 Soybean (+5%) $228

Year 4 Oat (+1%) $176 Oat (+4%) $199 Oat (+8%) $177

Year 5 Canola (+2%) $190 Canola (-1%) $176 Canola (-5%) $160

Year 6 W.Wheat (+11%) $176 W.Wheat (+1%) $197 W.Wheat (+5%) $238

Net Return $1,090

11-52-0 Fall vs. spring prices (2001-2017 $1,127

$1,223

Gross revenues minus operating costs from MASC Crop Rotation chart

Crop rotation can pay These charts by Anastasia Kubinec are based on provincial crop insurance data showing the yield effect of planting on different stubbles compared to the most recent five-year average. For example, planting spring wheat after spring wheat cuts yields by 15 per cent, but planting it on soybean stubble gives an eight per cent boost. The second chart shows the returns for various six-year rotations using that data. Assuming projected per-acre returns for 2017, a canola/ wheat rotation returns $1,090. Introducing two years of soybeans boosts that to $1,127 and a winter wheat/soybean/oat/canola/winter wheat rotation returns $1,223.

Time of seeding

Cheaper in the fall?

It’s an old question — is fertilizer cheaper in the spring or in the fall?

The answer: In the fall — usually. These charts prepared by Manitoba Agriculture’s Roy Arnott show the trend since 2001 for 46-0-0 and 11-52-0. On average, spring nitrogen prices are 13.3 per cent higher and spring phosphate prices 16.6 per cent higher over that period. The trend is even more clear if you exclude the sharp price changes in 2008 and 2009.

When is the best time to seed?

Using Manitoba crop insurance data, Anastasia Kubinec prepared this graph showing the relationship between seeding date and yield.

The vertical blue line shows the average date of Manitoba’s last killing frost, which is the third week in May. If you had to reseed after that date, canola is the clear winner, holding yield relatively well into early June while other crops fall off more sharply. CG

40

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

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seed treatment

crops Guide Pale and stunted flower petals are just one symptom of sulphur deficiency. The flower on the left is from a plant with enough sulphur, while that on the right is from a plant short of sulphur.

Photo credit: Canola Council of Canada

A nutrient-deficiency flare-up Everything goes along smoothly for decades, and the same old fertilizer combo produces the same old predicable results. Then soil levels for a particular nutrient dip below the critical threshold and plants grow funny and yields go askew. It happens

k”

By Jay Whetter / Canola Council of canada

J

ack Wood noticed strange patches of stunted canola in a field in 2013. By swathing time, those patches were clearly messed up. Pods were short and deformed. Stalks were skinny, and in the resulting windrows, the yield monitor dropped from 40 to just five bu./ac.

One adviser said it was heat blast. Wood wasn’t so sure because the field also had patches that were extra good. He also had a clue. He had grown flax the year before, and where he had gathered and burned the flax straw, the canola was in excellent shape.

More pathetic patches appeared in Wood’s canola fields in 2014 and 2015. Again, the adviser suggested heat blast. In 2015, Wood got a second opinion from a local agronomist. She thought it might be a sulphur deficiency. Subsequent soil tests in these patches confirmed that sulphur levels were very low, so this was a possibility.

Wood had been growing canola for years with a 34-17-0-0 blend. As a test, he added sulphur to his canola fertilizer blend for two-thirds of one field in 2016.

While the field did show an overall improvement, results in those poor-growing patches were especially clear. Any time the line between sulphur fertilizer and no sulphur fertilizer passed through a patch, the difference was striking, Wood says. Plants on the sulphur side were normal and healthy. Plants on the no-sulphur side

efi-

”

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

were stunted and “looked like they weren’t coming into flower,” Wood says.

In 2017, Wood will add sulphur to the blend for all his canola land. “I don’t know how I got along this long without adding sulphur fertilizer,” he now says.

Yes how?

Wood farms at Glenavon, Sask., in the dark brown soil zone. Brown and dark brown soils generally tend to have more sulphur than black or grey soils. So perhaps higher sulphur levels in the soil carried the load for longer than may have occurred in another soil zone.

The region has also been in a wet cycle. As Wood says, “2011 was a wreck” due to excess moisture. High rainfall can leach sulphur down in the soil profile, away from the root zone. Moisture also increases canola yields, and canola removes a lot of sulphur in its seed. The combination of high yields and leaching moisture could speed up a sulphur deficiency trend, making onset seem sudden.

Canola Council of Canada (CCC) agronomy specialist Warren Ward says more sulphur deficiency is showing up in lighter soils with higher rainfall.

Patches are fairly typical of sulphur deficiency. Of all the macronutrients, sulphur can have the most variation across a field, says University of Saskatchewan professor and crop nutrition specialist Jeff Schoenau. “In one field,

Crop Management you could have five pounds of sulphur per acre in the top six inches of soil on a hilltop and 10,000 pounds per acre in a salt-affected depression area,” he says.

As for areas looking better where flax straw had been burned, about half the sulphur that flax takes up remains in the plant biomass. Gathering up flax straw in one place can provide a rich localized source of sulphur as well as phosphorus and other nutrients. “However a hot burn can release nitrogen into the atmosphere and open up the soil to erosion,” Schoenau notes, “so burning is not really a good crop nutrition strategy. In time, nitrogen, sulphur and the other nutrients in biomass will eventually become plant-available again through natural microbial breakdown.”

Soils and sulphur Sulphur deficiencies were first recognized in the grey soils, and they still tend to show the biggest response to sulphur fertilizer, Schoenau says. But more frequent production of canola and higher yields have been drawing down soil levels in all areas and soil types.

Ross McKenzie, retired agronomy research scientist who worked 38 years with Alberta Agriculture, estimates that at least 25 per cent and possibly 40 per cent of soils across Western Canada are sulphur deficient.

“As a general rule, almost all brown and dark brown soils do have adequate sulphate-S in the subsoil and often the surface soil as well, but occasionally surface soil may be low in sulphate-S after growing a good high-yielding crop or after a wet fall or spring causing some leaching,” McKenzie says. “It will more frequently occur on sandy soils with low organic matter.”

Doug Schmunk farms the brown soils north of Leader, Sask. The brown soil zone has a broad spectrum of soil classifications, he says, and he knows where on his farm sulphur symptoms are most likely to show up.

He planted canola on Sceptre soil in 2016: “This soil is predominately clay lacustrine and is the best soil we farm. These fields do not vary much in soil type from corner to corner, and they are generally flat, so even after all the moisture we had in 2016, I did not notice a sulphur deficiency,” he says.

Schmunk also has hilly fields of Fox Valley loam: “I have planted canola on all these fields over the years and have noticed sulphur deficiency symptoms in various areas.

This happens pretty much on the calcareous areas or eroded hills or poorly drained soil.

In a year like the past one, I would expect

Sulphur deficiency symptoms Sulphur deficiencies often appear in patches, reflecting that soil sulphur levels can be highly variable across a field. In extreme cases, deficiency symptoms can start to show up fairly early in the season. In mildly deficient situations, symptoms may not appear until flowering.

Doug Schmunk farms north of Leader, Sask., and knows first-hand how brown soils can differ in sulphur content.

Photo credit: Jay Whetter

the deficiencies to cover larger areas due to the prolonged saturation which would cause leaching of the nutrients.”

Agronomy tips According to the Canola Encyclopedia, canola generally responds to sulphur fertilizer when the water-soluble soil sulphate content in the top 24 inches of soil is less than 20 lbs./ac.

McKenzie encourages growers to soil test for surface (top six inches) and subsurface sulphate-S separately. “When growing canola, if surface soil has less than 15 lbs./ ac. of sulphur, I would suggest supplying 10 to 15 lb./ac. of sulphur regardless of subsoil sulphur level to avoid an early-season deficiency,” he says.

Keep in mind that a composite sample can include cores from deficient areas within the composite — given the variability of sulphur levels in some fields. “So growers targeting high yields in fields known to have sulphur variability may want to include some sulphur in the fertilizer blend, even if the test result shows sulphur levels above 20 lbs./ac.,” says the CCC’s Ward.

Growers will also want to know that applying high rates of nitrogen without sulphur in sulphur-deficient areas can actually create a toxic imbalance in the plant. “Without correcting the sulphur deficiency, yields can be worse than if you applied no fertilizer at all,” Schoenau says.

Among sulphur sources, those immediately plant available are ammonium sulphate

Sulphur deficiencies tend to be more visually distinct than other nutrient deficiencies. With S deficiency, yellowing and leaf cupping tend to occur on new leaves first. At flowering, S deficiency will result in small pale-coloured flowers.

Common symptoms: • Top leaves are small and narrow, and are often cupped.

• Pale yellow leaves.

• Prolonged flowering if the crop is having trouble setting seed.

• Small flowers with very pale yellow colour.

• Short pods with little or no seed set.

• Patchy look to the field. Sulphur is highly variable across a field, so deficiencies will usually show up in patches.

Sulphur deficiency is more typical in sandy soil with low organic matter, but even in higher-yielding soils, high removal rates will also eventually lead to deficiencies.

For more on sulphur management, read the “Fertilizer Management” section at canolaencyclopedia.ca.

and liquid ammonium thiosulphate. Add these to the nitrogen blend banded outside the seed row.

While Jack Wood seems to have solved his patch issue, one always has to be open to the possibility that multiple causes or entirely unexpected causes are at play. In that spirit, Wood is cautiously optimistic: “Hopefully this year I don’t see any patches,” he says. CG Jay Whetter is the communications manager with the Canola Council of Canada.

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

43

crops Guide

Going beyond NPK New tests get closer to helping producers build soil health

By Julienne Isaacs

W

hat’s involved in a soil health assessment? And what makes soil “healthy” in the first place? Researchers at the Chinook Applied Research Association (CARA) in Oyen, Alta., are keen to answer these questions for western Canadian producers.

The association is launching a new lab in the CARA facilities that will collect and analyze soil samples to help producers improve soil health on their operations.

“Standard soil tests have primarily focused on the soil chemical composition. Recommendations generated from these analyses have been for applying soil amendments for increasing crop yields, but not for improving intrinsic soil conditions,” writes Yamily Zavala, a crop and soil health management specialist at CARA, in an overview of the topic geared to producers.

“Soil health assessments provide us with information about soil constraints beyond nutrient deficiency or excess,” Zavala says.

By now, most producers have likely heard of the Solvita test, which measures CO2 respiration over a 24-hour period in order to quantify microbial activity and potential nutrient availability in the soil. Producers can order Solvita

Manitoba Agriculture soil specialist is working with a Canadian Foodgrains Bank conservation agriculture (CA) project in Kenya. The hand at top is holding soil from a CA field while the soil in hand at bottom is from a non-CA field immediately adjacent. The CA field has been in CA practice for three years, or six cropping cycles. The CA soil has more aggregation and is darker, indicating more organic matter.

Photo: Marla Riekman

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test kits for use on their farms, and some labs include the Solvita test as an optional add-on to regular soil testing.

‘More complete’ package But soil health tests go beyond the Solvita test. CARA’s soil health lab will combine the Cornell Soil Health Assessment and Soil Foodweb soil health testing protocols, which Zavala says will make for a “more complete” package than stand-alone tests like Solvita.

The lab will analyze physical indicators of soil health such as aggregate stability, compaction and texture, as well as biological activity.

A key test in the latter category is the “active carbon” test, an indicator of readily available food and energy sources for the soil microbial community. Small changes over time are easily detected by this test.

Another important biological test measures soil microbial respiration over a four-day period (as opposed to Solvita’s day-long incubation period) for metabolic activity of the soil microbial community.

Other tests will evaluate ratios of bacteria and fungi, nematodes, protozoa, mycorrhizae and other organisms.

The presence of these microscopic creatures has important implications for soil health, as they are key to nutrient cycling and availability.

“These organisms are there in the soil, we just need to feed them properly,” says Zavala. “When you feed them properly, they start doing their job, which is to improve the soil so that conditions are better and microbial diversification can increase.”

Zavala is passionate about the need to look at the “whole package” of soil health in Western Canada.

“We’ve been looking at nitrogen or other deficiencies in the soil for years, but not in a holistic sense that can explain why the N is not efficient in the soil,” she says.

“For example, if the soil is compacted, aggregation is affected and then microbiology is affected. When we see that aggregation stability is poor in the soil, that’s an indication that management changes need to be made.”

First things first Not everyone is convinced producers should jump on the soil health bandwagon — at least before there’s enough data to link specific soil health parameters to management recommendations.

“We caution producers that we don’t really know how to use them, in terms of making recommendations for changing practices,” says Marla Riekman, a soil management specialist with Manitoba Agriculture.

Riekman is involved in a Manitoba Beef and Forage Initiative project looking at how continuous versus

fertility A brief guide to soil health tests • Soil respiration tests, such as the Solvita test, look at carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the soil to measure soil health.

• The Cornell Soil Health Assessment evaluates soil health indicators for biological, physical, chemical and other soil constraints.

• The Haney Test looks at biological and chemical indicators of soil properties. This test considers C to N ratios to help provide NPK fertilizer recommendations and suggest cover crop ratios of legumes to grasses.

Source: “Soil health assessment: an introduction to farmers,” Yamily Zavala, CARA

And then there’s the UW (underwear) soil test. At a field day demonstrating the 25-year organic rotation study at the University of Manitoba’s Glenlea research station, researchers buried T-shirts for a month to demonstrate microbial activity in organic versus conventionally farmed soils.

planned grazing affects soil health. She’s using North Dakota-based Agvise labs for soil testing on the project. Agvise uses the Solvita test and the Haney suite of soil health tests, which analyze chemical and biological soil data.

Some farmers, curious about how their farming practices affect the environment, are asking for soil health test information, says Riekman. But many farmers aren’t even doing general nutrient testing, which is the “first step” and the cheaper option, as complete soil tests, including soil health parameters, can quickly add up to US$100 to $150 per test.

“I fear producers are going to jump whole-hog into soil health testing when we don’t know how to make recommendations, and they’ll be wasting money,” she says.

John Heard, soil fertility specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, calls himself a “traditionalist” when it comes to soil testing, “and traditional soil testing is meant to produce soil fertility recommendations,” he says. “Until they’re properly calibrated, soil health tests may serve as a distraction from doing routine, proven soil tests with proven recommendations.”

More data needed Heard and Riekman agree that more data for soil types across Western Canada is needed before specialists can express more confidence in making soil health improvement recommendations.

Nobody contests the need for more soil health data; Zavala says the CARA lab will build up baseline soil health indicators for western Canadian soil types over time. “The more soil samples farmers send to the lab, the more information they’ll have for creating their own benchmarks,” she says.

The information will also be used for calibrating and standardizing soil health lab protocols for adjusting them to the Canadian soils and climatic conditions.

Riekman says producers can find out a good deal about soil health on their own without chemical analysis, particularly if they’re willing to get their hands dirty.

“If you get down into the soil, you can see a lot of what’s going on that might indicate whether your soil is healthy — for example, seeing what the aggregate structures look like, whether there’s a compaction problem or drainage issues,” she says.

Riekman is involved in a Canadian Foodgrains Bank project promoting exactly this approach to smallholder farmers in East Africa.

“There are labs there, but they don’t do soil health testing,” says Riekman. “Instead, we’ve created a hands-on assessment tool, like a flow chart to check off, that teaches farmers how to look at soil and evaluate it on their own.”

These, she says, are conservation agriculture principles that can just as easily be applied in Western Canada as East Africa. CG

CA

non-CA

Wanjiko 4.5

3.5

A Solvita field test kit was used to look at soil biological activity. The left paddle is from a conservation agriculture (CA) field and the right paddle from the non-CA field alongside. The CA field has higher microbial activity, as indicated by the lighter (more yellow, Zavala explains, low) colour of the paddle. Riekman thinks the increase isn’t due to the decrease in tillage, but due to leaving more crop residue on the field to protect the soil from erosion and preserve moisture, providing additional “food” for the microbes and making them respire more.

Photo: Marla Riekman

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

45

crops Guide

Soft white spring spreads east Ethanol drives new demand while research adapts SWSW to new regions

U Saskatchewan now produces more soft white spring than Alberta, with most of the production used for ethanol plants such as at Terra Grain Fuels in Belle Plaine.

Photo: VCM Construction

ntil relatively recently, there were few producers outside the irrigation belt of southern Alberta who had ever heard of, much less planted, soft white spring wheat (SWSW). However, backed by 50 years of research, the wheat class is suddenly showing a new potential to be grown on more acres and in more areas, and for more end-uses.

For the first time ever, Saskatchewan in 2016 outranked Alberta in SWSW acreage, with StatsCan reporting 420,000 acres there compared to 210,000 in Alberta, and with most of that production earmarked for ethanol rather than the traditional end-use of milling for pastry.

SWSW has also become a focal point for Canada’s wheat export trading strategy, although Cereals Canada president Cam Dahl cautions that while the international demand for SWSW is there, it will take some work — including research — to get production in Canada to meet that demand.

“We have to get to a point where it is economical for producers to contract and grow SWSW for export markets and have that reliable, consistent supply by which we can secure long-term customers,” Dahl says.

“It really it comes down to price. Transportation and logistics are critically important just as they are for all commodities, but when we’re talking about SWSW it just comes down to having price points that are competitive with the international market, and that offer prices to producers that provide the incentive to grow the crop.”

By Jeff Melchior

Expanding the area SWSW has traditionally been grown under irrigation in southern Alberta. A substantial milling industry has flourished around the wheat class in that area thanks to its high starch and low protein, making it ideal for cookies, cakes, pastry, flatbreads and noodles. But more recently, SWSW has also become a popular feedstock for ethanol.

Harpinder Randhawa, spring wheat and triticale breeder with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in Lethbridge, points out that 10 to 20 per cent of SWSW is used for traditional milling wheat, while the rest is for other industrial purposes including ethanol, silage and malt.”

“The feedstock people are looking for the higher energy that comes from starch,” Randhawa explains.

A long-running soft wheat breeding program at AAFC Lethbridge is looking to expand SWSW into other areas. Studies indicate SWSW can be grown to milling quality in central and north-central Alberta with the correct seeding dates and nitrogen management.

“It generally grows best in the brown soils but it has adapted to the dark brown soil zone too,” says Randhawa. “Fortunately, some of the cultivars we tested and developed worked out. We’ve been testing all across Western Canada in Alberta all the way up to Edmonton as well as Saskatchewan with a few locations in Manitoba as well.

“The other issue, other than soil type, is day length.

Some SWSW is slightly latish, maybe two to four days over what Alberta north of Edmonton can accommodate. That’s why adaptation is not suited all the way to the north, but in central and southern Alberta under irrigation it fits very well.”

Disease resistance A major challenge in developing hardy SWSW varieties is breeding for resistance to fusarium head blight and stem rust, says Randhawa. “The traditional soft wheat variety didn’t have a lot of resistance to diseases such as stem rust or fusarium head blight, which has been a problem to SWSW in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and now even in Alberta in the case of fusarium.

“We try to incorporate a good level of disease resistance with the package along with maintaining yield

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

white wheat

potential — even though it already has very good yield potential — and then still try to bring it to milling quality.”

Balancing disease resistance and quality is a constant challenge, says Randhawa, and part of the reason it can take up to 10 years to bring a variety to market.

“If you have similar germplasm from a quality point of view, that makes it easier because you’re not dealing with failing to meet the quality requirements for export.

But sometimes you have to bring in germplasm with quality profile from other market classes into the breeding process because the SWSW variety does not have the right level of disease resistance. It takes one or two cycles to try to bring up both the resistance and the quality because you can easily lose that aspect.”

Sprouting resistance Another challenge AAFC-Lethbridge has been tackling is SWSW’s tendency to sprout at harvest time, Randhawa says. “Most white wheats are susceptible to sprouting and this year it’s a particular concern because we had a late harvest, and on top of that had early snowstorms in southern Alberta. Our focus has been to incorporate pre-harvest protein intolerance and we’re slowly making progress.

“One of our new varieties will probably be available in 2018 — it’s called AC Paramount. It has slightly improved pre-harvest sprouting resistance at the same time as an improved falling number, which gives an indication of the amount of sprout damage that has occurred within a wheat sample.”

Randhawa says there are always new lines of SWSW coming down the pipeline. The best bet for growers, he says, is to consult the Alberta Seed Guide. “You have to pick a variety that fits your farm need, where you farm and your main concerns.”

Ethanol interest continues SWSW is a good candidate for ethanol because of its high starch profile compared to other wheat, says Dale Williamson, manager of sales and logistics with Terra Grain Fuels (TGF), a Regina-based ethanol production company which purchases 15 million bushels of wheat for ethanol annually.

“It is a good alternative to corn. Corn, depending on the area of the province, may struggle with heat units needed for production,” he says.

Although the class features a lower conversion rate to ethanol than corn, at 10.2 litres per bushel for SWSW compared to corn at 10.8 litres per bushel, Williamson says the ability to locally source SWSW for feedstock beats the conversion differential. “We would prefer the local wheat crop as the advantages of having a feedstock source locally is beneficial to TGF,” he says.

Despite the notable growth in acres of SWSW, there is not enough domestic production of ethanol to meet government-set mandates for fuel blends, says Williamson. “There is a five per cent mandate in Canada and a 7.5 per cent mandate in Saskatchewan. Canada does not

have enough production to meet the mandate so U.S. ethanol does come into Canada.”

Complicating matters for production in Saskatchewan are recent wet conditions. “It’s caused some disease issues with the SWSW — not any worse than other wheat cereals but just challenging for producers in general. Durum crops this year are also highly affected by fusarium and TGF is working with producers to enable them to sell their wheat for ethanol production. We are also taking all of the SWSW that was contracted to TGF this year.”

As far as TGF is concerned, Williamson says the company will continue to contract growers to produce SWSW in the coming years. “We look to contract in advance each year and expect SWSW will remain a strong demand for ethanol production.” CG

Fortunately, some of the cultivars we tested and developed worked out.

We’ve been testing all across Western Canada in Alberta all the way up to Edmonton as well as Saskatchewan with a few locations in Manitoba as well.”

Harpinder Randhawa, AAFC Lethbridge

Harpinder Randhawa, spring wheat and triticale breeder with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in Lethbridge, stands in a field of soft white spring wheat.

He is working on soft white spring varieties with improved resistance to disease and pre-harvest sprouting.

Photo: AAFC

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

47

BUSINESS

Rocky Mountain looks for more As Canada’s largest ag dealership chain turns 10, Country Guide sits down with its senior executives to look at how it got here, and where it’s going

By Scott Garvey / CG Machinery Editor Rocky Mountain Equipment’s flagship store in High River, Alta., is the model that executives hope will eventually be mirrored at all the company’s locations.

Photo: Scott Garvey

48

S

uspicion. Unease. Uncertainty. They were all sweeping across the West a decade ago when farmers began seeing their local Case IH and New Holland dealerships get gobbled up by a new and unfamiliar company.

Then they started hearing the name — Rocky Mountain Equipment — but that didn’t help. Except as the outsiders buying their local dealership, it meant nothing to them.

Today that’s changed, and RME has become, by far, Canada’s largest and arguably most well-known equipment dealership network.

RME has been on the leading edge of a trend that has seen the locally owned, one-store dealership that was common to all brands rapidly give way to multi-store chains all across Canada. Yet now, with over 34 outlets, more than 900 employees, and total assets north of half a billion dollars, RME has taken that concept much further than any other dealer network.

Right from the start, that kind of scale was the objective.

“From a vision perspective, we saw that opportunity,” says Garrett Ganden, RME president and CEO. “It came together faster than we thought, but we did see this as

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

where we wanted to get it to. Our intent was to consolidate the Canadian Prairies, really focusing on Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba. And once we had a real good foothold in that area, look at where it makes sense to expand.”

But when RME kicked off its grand expansion plan, no dealership group had ever targeted anything of that scale. And Ganden remembers some didn’t see the logic in the company’s strategy.

“They didn’t understand what the opportunity was,” he says. “A lot of people didn’t necessarily know how important agriculture was in the western Canadian marketplace, to the communities, to the overall economy itself. A lot of people thought you’re never going to get enough size to be relevant. And we’ve kind of proven that wrong.”

In the beginning the company expected to be able to absorb a few nearby dealerships before too long, but they found more willing sellers than expected. Their timing was perfect.

“Honestly, the opportunities came faster than we had thought,” Ganden says. “When we first went out in December of ’07, we were able to buy Roydale in Milk Continued on page 50

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BUSINESS

Jim Wood RME vice-president (l), and Garrett Ganden RME president and CEO. Says Ganden, “It’s just a matter of where is the right spot for us to go.”

Photos: RME

50

River fairly quickly, which allowed us to consolidate that piece of southern Alberta. And really, soon after that it was the expansion to Miller in Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan. That happened quite a bit sooner than we had envisioned. That turned out to be a blessing to us as an organization.”

But even though growth progressed ahead of schedule, Ganden remembers there were more than a few bumps along the way as RME changed from a privately held company to publicly traded firm and pushed itself to new heights.

“There were lots,” Ganden says. “First of all, we went public in ’07, and in ’08 the financial crisis hit. That in itself was a very trying time. There were lots of learning curves, lots of missteps, but lots of opportunities to take that knowledge and learning and make it better as we moved forward.”

The facts speak for themselves, though: 10 years on, no other dealership network in Canada has come close to matching RME’s scale.

“I think the big difference is Case IH welcomed us to get bigger,” says Jim Wood, who joined RME in 2011 as vice-president of agriculture, and who notes that other brands have different views on what constitutes an ideal dealership size. Without support from the manufacturer, RME would not have been able to get to where it is today.

But RME needed more than encouragement from its supplier. It needed to convince customers to do business with a relative giant headquartered far away when they were used to dealing with a local business. It’s why RME delayed rebranding all its outlets, leaving the original small business names in place for several years until it felt customers were comfortable with the transition.

“We didn’t want to make any big changes,” says Ganden. “Rocky wasn’t known. Rocky was this unknown business buying up businesses that had been there for 60, 80, 90 years. And we wanted to maintain that heritage.”

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

“We rebranded in 2012-13,” adds Wood. “Every store was running under whatever their name was before.

Really, when we rebranded, that’s when we became Rocky Mountain Equipment and tried to work on our synergies and efficiencies as a large organization.”

The rebranding includes eventually creating a standard look for all its stores, although that aspect is taking a little longer than initially expected. Along with a consistent appearance, the company wants to ensure customers also get an overall consistent experience when they walk through the doors.

“We’re trying to invest in the stores so they look professional and have the service capabilities,” says Wood.

“We’re also really focusing on the customer experience.

Not only is the consistency in our image important, it’s the consistency in the service we deliver. We’re going to continue to focus on that in the next couple of years.

That’s going to be our biggest opportunity.”

Opportunity or not, it will be a challenge, because through its strategy of acquisitions RME has amassed a collection of individuals used to working to the beat of their own drum, and it now has to get them to align with a broad company policy and standard customer approach. That’s a problem all expanding corporations face when they take over smaller firms.

“As you do these acquisitions, going through and trying to get everyone to think like part of a larger organization, where we take care of the customer and the community, that is so important to us,” says Ganden.

“With every single acquisition, there was a different thought pattern to that at every single store. Trying to get them to think along those lines has been a challenge throughout the time.”

And it will continue to be a focus for management in the years to come, because further growth is still on the radar for RME. “I think we have lots of room to grow,” says Wood.

“The larger you are, you have different challenges. But you also have scale and you have the ability to transfer people and technology around and make investments. Now, going forward, there are fewer acquisitions locally, so we have to think about where do we want to go next, while we focus on improving what we currently have.”

Wood sees further expansion as the company proudly flies the RME banner, because that initial customer uncertainty has faded, and after a decade farmers now know what to expect from the chain.

“Our market acceptance is fantastic,” Wood says. “I think we have a clear direction as to where we want to go. It’s more in the tweaking stage than building from the ground up.”

“Yeah,” agrees Ganden. “It’s just a matter of where is the right spot for us to go. I think it’s important to keep your stores in a tight geographic footprint, because that’s how you’re

able to share your inventory and make sure you have the services and the products to support the customers in the areas you’re in. So I think there is going to be opportunity for it, but it’s going to be in a tight geographic area.”

And even with a sluggish machinery market, Ganden doesn’t see a problem financing another growth spurt.

“We’ve spent the last couple of years trying to strengthen our balance sheet to get ready for that next wave of consolidation and expansion,” he says. “The capital is out there.”

In contrast, many dealerships, particularly in the U.S., are just focused on surviving the current sales market. There’s a lot of talk about the need to expand their range of services to remain viable. But even with lower sales volumes here too, RME sees itself as well positioned for the future by sticking to what it’s been doing, and likely with the same product lines it already has.

“We really don’t want to distract our-

selves from what we’re really good at,” says Ganden. “We really want to maintain that focus and direction, because that’s how you provide the manufacturers and customers with the support they need, as well as the overall farming community.”

“We’ve had the opportunity (to add new services and products), for sure,” agrees Wood, who then adds. “Case and New Holland build world-class products in all the categories. Why dilute your focus?”

Even if it sticks to its mantra there will still be a need for RME to continually reexamine its ability to deliver the right kinds of service and product support, particularly as technology in farm equipment begins the gradual process of moving toward some level of autonomous machine operation.

“I’m looking forward to it,” says Wood enthusiastically. “We’ve invested a lot in technology and supporting technology, so we’re ready for it.” CG

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51

BUSINESS

Large, commercial… and organic Agri-Fusion says its choice to go organic is a business no-brainer, with a collaborative new management design to make sure it pays

A At first, Agri-Fusion was limited to a machinery ring, but then the partners asked, “How can we boost our profitability even more?”

52

gri-Fusion’s four owners of Quebec largest organic farm never looked back at their choice to go organic. Whether it’s wheat, corn, soybeans, beans or peas, organic crops earn them twice as much per acre as conventional crops, and they cost much less to produce.

It’s a point I heard again from 67-year-old Gilles Audette, one of those four founders. Audette is a passionate man, and he showed it when we met in the cafeteria of the company’s grain centre, where he was moving into his office in the company’s brand new 14,000-sq. ft. headquarters, completed on budget at a cost of $3 million.

Located at St-Polycarpe, about one hour from Montreal, Agri-Fusion has 5,500 acres under cultivation.

Audette is still burning the organic flame, although the farm converted to organic in 2004 for a reason that may surprise many purists. It was all driven by the arithmetic that started with a challenge they gave themselves: How could they boost their profitability.

The four owners got out their pocket calculators and started running the scenarios.

Nor was this the first time. Agri-Fusion was born in 2000 because its members came together looking for a more affordable way to get access to a topnotch fleet of machinery.

When the four farmers looked at the new, high productivity machinery being developed by the major manu-

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

By Nicolas Mesly

facturers, they all had the same thought, Audette says.

“Quebec’s farm size does not justify the price and the size.”

But by forming a partnership, they were able, for instance, to run a new tractor 1,200 hours a year at a cost of $17 per hour, rather than the 250 hours at $75 per hour that Audette would have faced if he had tried to acquire it on his own.

To make it work, however, Agri-Fusion began running like a single big farm. All is shared, with the exception of the land, which stays in the hands of each of the four owners.

Income and expenses are shared each year according to land ownership.

Then, four years after the launch of Agri-Fusion, when the group was looking for a more dependable way to boost their net cropping returns, and when the organic discussion came up, their numbers showed that the economic gain from organic crops was handsdown superior to conventional crops.

Even if the organic crops yielded only half of conventional crops, the price given for organic grain would see them break even.

There was still some skepticism. Could the numbers on paper actually be reproduced in the field?

“We had now to convert these budgets from Excel tables to the fields,” Audette recalls. But from that first year in organic production, the results always beat expectations.

So, what are their yields like? Audette replies, “We don’t think in terms of tonnes per hectare but in dollars per hectare,” which has become a sort of motto for the company.

For instance, organic corn yields are 80 per cent of conventional corn. But that begs the question: Which is more profitable, to harvest 12 tonnes per hectare of conventional corn at $200 per tonne, or to harvest 9.1 tonnes of organic corn at $525?

“We get double income in organic… $4,800 per hectare versus $2,400 in conventional,” Audette says.

The spread of income is even larger for soybeans where there is little or no difference in yields between organic and conventional, says Audette. But organic soybeans are priced at $1,100 per tonne compared to

Audette’s experience with commercial grain production proved a big help as the four Agri-Fusion farmers transitioned to organic.

Is there no down side to organic?” I asked. Audette could think of only one, a big one: “In organic production,” he said, “there is no room for error.” $450 for conventional, which means a gross of $3,410 per hectare for organice versus $1,395 for conventional.

Moreover, says this producer, organic crops are less costly to produce. “We save near $1.5 million in seeds, fertilizers and pesticides,” he says.

“But is there no down side to organic?” I ask.

It turns out that there is, and it can be a serious one.

“In organic production,” Audette says, “there is no room for error.”

A gradual step It takes three years to transition a field from conventional production to certified organic, and there must be a good paper trail along the way. Ecocert is the organization which certified Agri-Fusion’s organic practices.

Agri-Fusion owners embraced organic production gradually, slowly increasing the number of hectares under cultivation year after year. This transition has allowed for the learning of new practices as well as spreading the risks.

In order to put the odds in their favour, the group did extensive land drainage and surface levelling. (In 2015 alone, they invested $650,000 to install 350 km of farm drains in nine different locations, on land which is mostly clay.)

From 130 hectares certified organic in 2006, AgriFusion fields were all organic in 2016, 10 years later.

Once the land is in good condition, Audette says they had to learn how to win what he considers the No. 1 threat in organic… weeds! “The Americans have forgotten the use of mechanical weeding. They rely only on GMO and Roundup. We look to the Europeans to get the proper machinery,” says Audette.

That helps explain why Agri-Fusion’s machinery inventory has climbed $5 to $6 million, including a 12-metre Lemken seeder which allows narrow seeding, a favoured technique to overcome weeds.

Another star in the machinery shed is the Einböck cultivator tined weeder guided by GPS. Equipped with cameras, it films the corn plants at stages from two to six leaves and allows the removal of weeds with an incredible precision. This versatile cultivator can be used in any crops which are seeded at 30 inches, including corn and beans. “Beans love to be weeded,” says Audette. It’s part of the reason, he believes, why organic bean at 10 t/ha are outyielding conventional beans at 8.5 tonnes.

During our interview, Audette makes sure I know that it took three years and an investment of $250,000 Continued on page 54

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

53

BUSINESS

With their in-house team of agronomists, Agri-Fusion’s focus is on soil vigour and compaction.

to convince the French multinational and king of frozen vegetables, Bonduelle, to get involved in organic production, its first such contract in North America.

“The company was afraid that the yields would not be there. We proved the contrary,” says Audette. Baby foods made of organic vegetable puree are a huge hit on the market. And Agri-Fusion intends to grow 450 ha of vegetables for Bonduelle this year.

Crop rotation, nitrogen, soil compaction and tilling Agri-Fusion grows eight crops in a four-year corn, soybean, vegetables and cereal rotation. But the farm has stopped wheat production even though yields reached four t/ha with a 13.5 per cent protein content following a bean crop the previous year. “We have two strikes against us. First, we have a humid climate which favours the development of fusarium. And second, it is difficult to supply the crop with sufficient nitrogen to obtain more than 12.5 per cent protein content,” Audette explains.

However, he has replaced those acres with spelt, which is sold at a very good price to a mill in Utah before getting to California, the organic magnet that defines food tastes in North America.

To avoid the introduction of lethal fungus such as sclerotinia, Audette mentions that they will never seed more than 40 per cent of the farm land in legume plants such as soys, beans or peas.

Audette also finds that apart from the weeding, organic production faces two other big challenges. The first one being to ensure a proper nitrogen supply to the crops.

Agri-Fusion uses poultry manure and cover crops, but for the last two years they have also spread fresh chopped alfalfa and clover to fertilize the fields. “The quality of this silage must be as good as the one you 54

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

would serve to a cow which produces 50 kg of milk per day,” Audette says.

The other crucial challenge is to avoid soil compaction from the high number of machinery passes. For example, in order to properly weed corn or other crops, you can count on an average of seven trips, and then, there is the mandatory tilling operation in organic production, which is done two out of three years. “This is not the best agricultural practice, but in organic production we do not have another alternative for the moment,” says Jofroi Desperrier, a young agronomist who has been hired by Agri-Fusion.

The future belongs to the young Audette sees a bright future for Agri-Fusion. “We do not depend on seed and agrochemical companies. We harvest and select our own seed, and there is an increasing demand for our products,” he says. The only bad news was the death of one of the four founders killed in a motorcycle accident in 2006.

By keeping the ownership of their land, each musketeer or his descendant is guaranteed an income that no other investment in a stock exchange can offer.

“The land is the most precious asset that a man can possess,” Audette says.

To keep thriving, Agri-Fusion, has hired five young talented directors such as Desperrier as well as experts in machinery, agronomoy and human resources. The company now has 25 full-time employees.

“These young lads will bring our enterprise to another level,” says Audette. The company finished fourth place in the bronze medal category in the 2015 contest of the Ordre national du mérite agricole du Québec.

The next step, says Audette, is to hire a general manager. But Audette isn’t retiring, so the manager’s office, he tells me, will be next to his own. CG

SOIL CONSERVATION COUNCIL OF CANADA CONSEIL CANADIEN DE CONSERVATION DES SOLS SOIL CONSERVATION COUNCIL OF CANADA CONSEIL CANADIEN DE CONSERVATION DES SOLS

The face and voice of soil conservation in Canada Le visage et la voix de la conservation des sols au Canada

THE COSTS OF SOIL DEGRADATION

D

oes soil degradation continue on farmland because its true cost has not been established or because its consequences and costs are not understood?

Canada has a long track record of responding to issues of soil degradation. Much has been achieved. Today we have land managers on a broad range of soil types and conditions who have shown they can improve soil without loss of profitability. Yet, soil degrading practices continue or have recently increased on much of our cropland. Why does this matter?

Degradation of agricultural soil impacts air quality, water quality and soil productivity. This incurs cost to agriculture, the economy and the environment. What are the long-term

implications for an affordable, reliable and sustainable food supply?

Evidence of degradation is widespread: reduced earthworm activity; algae in rivers and lakes; sediment in drainage ditches, waterways and harbours; compaction that interferes with sub-surface drainage causes surface runoff of water and sediment, and reduces crop yield; and loss of organic matter is evident in loss of soil structure and water-deficient crops.

USDA-ARS photography of Iowa farmland shows that the light-coloured soil on tillage-eroded knolls has tripled in size in 30 years. Is Canada any better? Any form of tillage contributes to this. Even where aggressive direct seeding is practiced, tillage erosion and soil aggregate destruction degrades

soil under the crop residue. What is the cost? Who will solve the problem?

Precision agriculture is being used to accommodate yield variability rather than correct it, so the degradation problem grows and the costs accrue.

Is our society, through government, willing to invest in healthy soil that will produce reliably and sustainably? By collaborating with land managers and engaging in an ongoing assessment of soil conditions, research and incentives to improve soil care can be focused and used more effectively. Will the agri-food and agri-business sectors be supportive? A commitment to action by all stakeholders is needed to reduce soil degradation and the resulting costs.

The Summit on Canadian Soil Health in August will seek answers to these important questions.

Celebrate soil care and protection during National Soil Conservation Week, April 16-22, 2017

SUMMIT ON CANADIAN SOIL HEALTH August 22-23, 2017 – Delta Hotel, Guelph, Ontario

Join leaders from agriculture, academia, government and others as we search for innovative solutions to the many challenges facing Canada’s soil resources, and work towards demonstrating how they will benefit agriculture, the economy and the environment.

VISIT SOILCC.CA FOR MORE INFORMATION

info@soilcc.ca

204-792-2424

www.soilcc.ca

@soilcouncil

BUSINESS

Beyond local The Farm Network is pioneering a new category of food business, helping farmers grow their sales of local products to reach commercial scale

By Lois Harris

W

hen Tyler Ferguson found a distinct gap in Canada’s local food system, he decided to fill it by starting his own sales, marketing and distribution company focused on getting more food products from the farm into retail.

That was the first step. But only the first step.

“I noticed that a lot of local food producers were stuck and unable to get out of their own immediate market,” says the owner of Hamilton-based The Farm Network.

Ferguson had just returned from several years living in the U.K. and in Europe, where there are strong local food systems, and where his background in the marketing and hospitality business had given him all the insight he thought he needed.

“We started by taking products to farmers’ markets and events, and then developed into a distribution company,” Ferguson says.

It made sense. If farmers couldn’t sell enough product through venues like farmer markets, he would set up a company that it would do it for them.

Most of the producers he initially contacted were enthusiastic about what the company was doing, so he and his staff set up shop at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market and did about 70 different events in the first year or so, bringing products to street festivals and fairs.

But then, the company fell victim to the same barriers that its producer partners were hitting. There were only so many hours in a day, only so many events they could physically attend, and only so many people to do the work, so the company hit a threshold, and they just weren’t going to be able to grow beyond it.

That’s when Ferguson started talking to retailers about the possibility of his setting up a service that provided product development, marketing and logistics for local food. Would the industry buy into it? he asked.

“They were right into it, because they said they didn’t have time to go out looking for great local stuff and the producers didn’t have time to get it to them,” Ferguson says.

Having started the business in late 2013, he was planning to launch the distribution service in late 2016, but

There are so many producers who have great products but can’t get them from point A to point B, especially at volume,” Ferguson says then recognized that the need was so great, he moved up the timeline and got things rolling in mid-2015.

Like most distributors, The Farm Network makes its money by taking a percentage from the wholesale value of the products.

“There are so many producers who have great products but can’t get them from point A to point B, especially at volume — they needed a central distribution point, which is what we’ve set up,” he says.

“Small scale producers are left out of traditional distribution models,” Ferguson says. “Most distributors and most bigger stores won’t look at them because they’re too small and won’t be able to supply product on a consistent basis.”

The Farm Network scouts out new products at farmers’ markets and on-farm markets and, more recently, has been taking calls from sellers who have heard about 56

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

its services, including help with warehousing and improved branding, marketing and logistics.

Ferguson is only interested in businesses that are up and running — operating for at least a year or longer — so the prospective partners know their products and markets.

He looks for branded and packaged products, the food has to be made in a commercially inspected facility, and the business has to have at least a minimal amount of inventory.

The Farm Network doesn’t deal with startups that are figuring out markets and products, but rather helps existing businesses scale up their production.

Ferguson partners with people who are looking to increase their businesses but don’t have the time or energy to do all the work.

He provides advice on how to improve packaging, how to better market the products, how to get attractive in-store signage for products, and more.

Then, there’s the whole logistics side of things, where the company picks up product in volume, brings it to the warehouse, reloads smaller amounts with other products, and trucks it out to retail customers.

“It’s a nice, full-service model and it’s being received well,” Ferguson says.

Among the partners who are happy with his service is Richard Bering, whose family owns White Meadows Farm in the St. Catharines area. The company makes a wide variety of innovative maple syrup products including maple herb dressing, red pepper maple jelly, maple vinegar, maple barbecue sauces and maple popcorn and candies.

While most of the 100-plus products the company makes are sold at the onfarm shop, Bering also feeds into The Farm Network.

“When Tyler got into distribution, it was fantastic for us,” Bering says. “He’s able to take the products from small businesses like ours and distribute them across a much larger area than we could ever do ourselves.”

In turn, Ferguson points to White Meadows as exactly the kind of business he likes to deal with — producing, as he says, “highquality products at reasonable prices and we’re working on making them more conveniently available — the trifecta of local food.”

After starting in late 2013, The Farm Network has grown to dealing with 17 different producers making about 450 products — everything from jams and hot sauces to

He’s able to take the products from small businesses like ours and distribute them across a much larger area,” explains Bering salsas, chutney and grapeseed oil. The network sells to 95 stores mostly in Ontario’s Greenbelt — from Mississauga to Niagara, and as far away as Elora, Kitchener-Waterloo and London.

The company has reached a point at which Ferguson is getting choosier about the products he carries and wants to diversify more into locally made snacks and beverages — a market he says is taking off.

The Farm Network is currently run by three full-time and one part-time staff and has two vans for pickup and distribution.

For the early stages of his business, Ferguson maintained relationships with smaller independent retailers. Compared to the bigger corporate stores, he finds them easier to talk to about what they need and want in products. Beginning this way also gave him the opportunity to see which of his producer partners wanted to grow beyond that market.

“We wanted to start small and grow, rather than start big and be overwhelmed,” he says.

Now, he’s moving into the mid-size retail market with some of the producer partners

who are ready to go there. He has tapped into Foodland Ontario, Sobeys and independent grocers, and is concentrating on reaching out to stores in the area between Orangeville and Clinton, which for now will be the company’s northern limit. Yet he’s also happy to continue with producers who are content with staying in the independent market, because he’s able to segment his services.

Ferguson is optimistic about the future of The Farm Network and for local food production.

“We will be ramping up and intensifying our focus in the geographic area we’ve defined, and we’ll continue diversifying our catalogue, and providing as much support as we can for our retailers and producers to make their businesses more profitable,” he says. “More and more local producers will increase the scale of their operations and, in turn, will be able to effectively compete with and outperform imports on price, convenience and quality.”

The Farm Network’s website is www.thefarmnetwork.ca and White Meadows Farms is at www.whitemeadowsfarms.com. CG COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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BUSINESS

Get real on

solar Despite the skeptics, these two farms prove that solar energy is likely to be the foundation of our commercial farms for generations to come

L

By Gerald Pilger

ast issue I made a case for solar power. I tried to show that economics of solar power are improving and that it is becoming a viable source of electricity. More importantly, I pointed out that society is demanding a switch away from fossil fuels, and that countries around the world are responding by investments in solar power. I called on farmers to consider alternative energy sources for their farms.

Unfortunately, the feedback to the story has been largely negative. I heard repeatedly that solar power is an inefficient white elephant. Rather than looking at what is now possible and what is being constructed today, readers repeatedly pointed to the failures and extravagant costs of some high profile and poorly designed solar projects from the past.

And I was flatly told that solar energy will never power a farm.

So let’s take a look at Sundrop Farms.

In 2016 Sundrop Farms opened a 20-hectare complex of greenhouses near Port Augusta, Australia. While size alone makes this venture noteworthy, what really sets it apart is that the farm relies on solar power for its electricity requirements and for heating and cooling, and even for the desalination of sea water for all its water needs.

(Note: Sundrop declined a telelphone interview with Country Guide while current expansion is underway, but answered questions by email and also supplied additional information on its present and future farms.)

58

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

Sundrop Farms utilizes 23,000 mirrors to focus sunlight on a 115-metre tower. At the focal point of this Concentrated Solar Plant (CSP), radiant energy heats water which is then used to heat the greenhouses in winter. The steam created in the tower also generates 39 MW of electricity for the farm operation and to pump cool sea water from Spencer Gulf five kms away. This sea water is used to cool the greenhouses in the summer, and one million litres of this seawater is desalinated daily to nourish the 180,000 hydroponically grown tomato plants in the greenhouses.

This closed-loop environmental system enables this single farm to produce 15,000 to 20,000 five-kg boxes of tomatoes daily (17,000 tonnes annually), which meets more than 15 per cent of Australia’s tomato demand.

While farmers are often credited as pioneers and early adopters of new technology, it was not farmers or even the ag industry that led to the creation of Sundrop Farms.

Sundrop Farms is the brainchild of German-born chairman and CEO Philipp Saumweber, a Harvardeducated former investment banker at Goldman Sachs.

About a decade ago, while employed as an investment professional with the hedge fund King Street Capital and as a director of his family’s Munich-based agricultural investment business, Saumweber Holdings, Saumweber recognized the need to grow food differently to meet the growth in global population. He sought to create a food production system which would meet three goals: • Better for people: high quality produce, all year, in any climate.

• Better for the planet: circular, restorative processes using abundant renewable resources.

• Better for business: genuine long-term partnerships for profitable, predictable supply.

These three goals are the backbone of Sundrop Farms’ mission statement.

Saumweber assembled a team of young entrepreneurs and in 2010 built a pilot plant to test the feasibility of growing tomatoes using just sunlight and sea water in the dry, barren lands of South Australia. The success of the pilot plant led to construction of the current facility.

Construction began in 2014 and the complex became fully operational last fall.

Sundrop Farms is a private, commercial farm operation. Much of the funding for this vast solar and greenhouse complex came from private investment and hedge funds looking to expand their agricultural portfolio. As a private company, financial details are unavailable. However, the total cost of the greenhouses and solar facility has been estimated around US$205 million.

Numerous news agencies, including Reuters, have reported that KKR, a global private equity firm invested US$100 million in the venture in 2014.

The key to acquiring this massive amount of funding was a groundbreaking long-term supply agreement with Coles Supermarkets in Australia. Coles will pay a fixed

price for all the tomatoes Sundrop Farms produces for the next 10 years.

Such a deal was made possible by the fact Sundrop production is not seasonally affected, meaning Coles could be assured of regular supply throughout the year. Furthermore, since the closed-loop growing system ensures the tomatoes are consistently high quality and produced without the use of pesticides, the production system meets increasingly stringent consumer expectations for fresh and natural foods.

This deal was also possible because Sundrop Farms does not have the volatility of electrical, fuel, and water costs to contend with. Unlike most farms, Sundrop Farms controls most of its input costs, thereby enabling it to price its production at a profitable level 10 years out.

Most importantly, Sundrop Farms has minimized its requirements for fossil fuels and grid-supplied electricity, which are the major costs of competing, conventional greenhouses. (Sundrop Farms is still gridconnected in case of either a mechanical breakdown or a long stretch of inclement weather, which reduce electrical generations of the CSP. However, this connection is viewed more as an insurance expense to protect the millions of dollars of produce on the vines rather than as an operational expense.)

As a result, the 10-year contract is at a price that is competitive with conventionally grown tomatoes.

Perhaps the best way to judge the viability of this operation is the fact Sundrop

Farms is already constructing a second farm in Portugal, while a third farm is in the planning stages in Tennessee.

However, these farms, and any future Sundrop fruit and vegetable ventures, will all have to meet the triple bottom line people, planet, and profits!

For an in-depth look at Sundrop Farms, go to www.sundropfarms.com/.

Not only in Australia There will be readers who will likely argue that what is happening in Australia, or even Portugal or Tennessee is not applicable to our northern climate. However, there are on-farm investments currently being made in renewable energy in Canada as well.

One of the most impressive is the twomegawatt solar PV system recently installed at the Green Acre Hutterite Colony, as reported by Green Energy Futures, a project which documents and reports on green energy projects in Canada.

Green Energy Futures’ Episode 124, entitled “Green Acres, the largest solar farm in Western Canada” by David Dodge and Dylan Thompson, tells the story of the innovative colony near Bassano, Alta., and their decision to purchase and install 7,600 solar panels to meet the electrical needs of their entire colony including the power-hungry plastic recycling business which they operate alongside the typical livestock and grain operations found on most colonies and farms.

The cost of this solar PV project was $4.8 million but the colony was able to debt finance

the installation by showing banks the economics of generating their own solar power instead of purchasing electricity. At current electricity rates, the colony expects their investment to be fully paid back in 15 years.

Further information and a short video about this Alberta solar-powered farm operation can be found on the Green Energy Futures website by searching “Hutterite solar Western Canada.”

The problem is not with solar power, or any renewable energy source; it is with our definition of farming. No longer can we only look at farming as the mechanical production of fields of wheat or canola, or any other crop. Rather, farming must be economically, sustainably and viably producing a product the consumer wants. And that includes looking at reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

Farmers have always been front-runners in the production of renewable energy. Every farmer, whether grains or livestock or speciality crops, is in fact doing the same thing.

We are harvesters of solar energy by turning sunshine into crops, fibre and fuel. So instead of looking at solar power as a fool’s errand, farmers need to see it as what it truly is, the most basic input of every farm.

It is only with this change in attitude that we can then start to look at other ways to utilize this resource on our farms.

Because if we don’t, we will be left behind while the next generation of farms, like Sundrop Farms, is already embracing the technology of the future. CG

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

59

BUSINESS

Young and on board Innovative training programs are raising the leadership capabilities of Canada’s youngest farmers

By Amy Petherick / CG Contributing Editor

I

magine that tomorrow, you wake up and every commodity group and farm association you can think of needs to have an election. All their boards need entirely new directors, and there’s been a scramble to nominate the right people to fill those spots.

How many of the candidates would be in their early 30s? Or in their 20s?

And how many of those young directors would you vote for? Or would you dismiss them all as “untested,” and refuse to vote for anyone without grey hair?

What makes the question so interesting is that it’s the same issue many farmers are wrestling with at home.

Can we trust the young generation to make more of the decisions around here?

Can we trust them to be leaders?

It turns out, however, that some farm organizations are refusing to look at it as a simple yes-or-no question. They’re asking: What can we do to grow the capability of young directors?

And there may be lessons for all of us in how they’re trying to do it.

Boards once dominated by the old boys club are seeking new, young candidates on purpose, with perhaps no better example of how they’re doing it than the Future Leaders Development program that emerged in Ontario three years ago as a collaboration supported by Holstein Canada, Dairy Farmers of Ontario, CanWest DHI, and EastGen. Last year the program expanded to Western Canada too.

Participants get three intensive days of instruction on the roles and responsibilities of being a board director. And already, participants have gone on to fill three positions on the DHI board, as well as another three positions at EastGen. The results are better than anyone had originally hoped, says Neil Petreny, general manager for CanWest DHI. “Personally, I’m surprised with how 60

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

quickly we’ve gotten payback,” he admits. “I think that’s just fantastic they’re willing to contribute. That’s telling me that at least the people that were selected up front really did have the interest.”

You have to wonder, if these individuals were the sort who should have been pursuing board positions all along, why was there a need for a recruitment and training program? Petreny answers by tellimg me many young people seem to have misconceptions about what it means to sit on a board.

“For young people, without the experience or exposure, it sounds fancy, it’s threatening, ‘I don’t know as much as others or what is policy about’ … but those are things that you don’t learn in school, you only learn through experience,” he says.

Young farmers are signalling their interest, and Petreny reports that he is detecting a drop in average delegate age when he attends Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario meetings.

It’s fortunate timing. “We’ve got fewer and fewer people all the time,” Petreny says.

Too often directors are selected because they’ve got spare time on their hands, and Petreny says he’s also seen people end up on boards just because they bred a good cow once, or their grandfather made a name for the family, not because that individual was the best person for the job.

“If you want future leaders that have skills and ability,” he insists, “you don’t want to just teach people who have time now.”

At CanWest DHI, they’ve recently gone so far as to develop a director succession policy to define what getting the best person for the job really looks like. It specifies how vacancies will be advertised, how applications will be solicited, and what the requirements will be for candidate screening. It will include a skills matrix of the existing board so they can express a preference for candidates who strengthen collective weaknesses.

Endorsed candidates will still be required

to run in a general election, but it’s their best strategy for getting the best individuals on board, not just people who have a surplus of free time.

“You don’t want a whole board of 70-year-olds, and you don’t want a whole board of 20-year-olds either,” he says. “It takes a blend of both experience, and to some degree, inexperience. You want a variety of skillsets and personalities, because that interpersonal dynamic is so important in what makes an organization successful, not just the knowledge and experience.”

Getting that right blend to include young directors isn’t so easily done in every organization, according to Jason Reid. He’s been looking for company on the younger side of the table at Beef Farmers of Ontario, the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, and the Young Cattlemen’s Council. And regularly, he gets the “don’t have time” response.

It isn’t that Reid doesn’t understand how many demands a young farmer is likely to have on their time. He and his wife, Trudy, have roughly 300 acres in Thunder Bay, Ont., where they raise roughly 40 cow-calf pairs, 50 to 70 backgrounding cattle and 300 ewes along with two young daughters.

He also works as a relief milker, transports livestock, and helps out at the local abattoir.

But he can’t really fathom how so many young farmers bow out of positions he’s flying nearly everywhere to fill, because he believes he owes that to the industry.

“When we were starting out in 2003, we couldn’t afford anything; we worked 200 acres, I had a 30-horse tractor, and when the hay needed cutting, somebody cut it, when the hay needed baling, they dropped a baler off. We have a rake that somebody just left here. At the end of the year, there was no custom-work bill,” he recalls. “I can never, ever, afford to pay back my community for what they have done to get us started. So we made a decision that, we can’t pay them back, but we can help build the community better… and when the next young person comes along, we are morally obligated to help them.”

Granted, folks aren’t waiving bills for young farmers who are just getting started all over the place. But Reid’s point is everyone has been given something. It may have been just a small scholarship, or even a retail discount that you get as a perk for some farm association membership you have.

“And if you really think of what the industry

We would be 100 times more successful if we went to politicians with 20- to 30-year-old directors,” says Reid has given to you, aren’t we all kind of obligated a little to put a bit back into it?”

For those who don’t want to do the job because they feel no moral obligation, then consider doing it for an important lesson in business, he says.

If you’re so busy working that you truly don’t have time for anything else, or if no one else is willing to work for as little money as you are to get the job done, then consider it a warning sign for your business, Reid urges.

“Farmers and farm families should not be subsidizing the food that we eat by their spouses’ off-farm income,” Reid says. “We need to get our heads wrapped around the idea that you need to be able to pay somebody to do the work that you’re doing while you’re gone.”

Reid believes in the theory that any truly successful farm business should be capable of running for a year without any one key individual physically being there to do the work required. He doesn’t personally know any farmers who would even want to go on a year-long vacation like that, and he acknowl-

edges that his farm certainly isn’t there, but he believes it’s a goal worth aspiring to.

“You shouldn’t be tied to the farm to the point where you are the only one who can do it,” Reid says. “Sitting on a board and going to Guelph for two or four or eight days a month, whatever it might be, shouldn’t be an issue.”

Clearly, Reid doesn’t buy the argument that maybe folks who truly are that strapped for time are best left off the board.

He’s really enthusiastic about the results of the Cattlemen’s Young Leaders (CYL) Mentorship Program that was launched by the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association in July 2010. The young people coming to the Young Cattlemen’s Council are individuals to really keep an eye on, he assures me, and he predicts that the way our industry currently tackles issues would be very different if these folks were running our lobby organizations.

“I think we would be 100 times more successful if we came to politicians with 20to 30-year-old directors, than with 60- to 70-year-old directors,” Reid says.

If it were up to him, every farm organization in the country would have a sunset clause. But Rob Scott, the current chair of the Ontario Sheep Marketing Association (OSMA) and someone admired by Jason Reid for having proven himself to be good at what he does, isn’t sure he’d go that far.

Of course, no one wants to discourage the next generation from getting involved, Scott explains, but he agrees with Petreny that there is a lot about the job which can only be learned through experience. Scott says it would have been extremely difficult for him at a younger age to have operated his farm successfully, helped by his wife Joanne and son Matt, and still managed to do what he felt was necessary for the OSMA this past year.

Their family farm near Brantford, Ont., is a 300-ewe flock which expanded to include a large feedlot operation not long ago. Meanwhile, since Scott became chair in 2015, the OSMA has withdrawn from the Canadian Sheep Federation and then collaborated with the Alberta Lamb Producers and the Federation des producteurs d’agneaux et moutons du Quebec to form the National Sheep Network.

“Obviously, you want to see younger people getting involved, but if I look back on my life there is a reason why there are older people at the political advocacy level,”

he says. “I’m away 100 to 120 days a year because that’s what it takes. The biggest factor in my case is that I have my son working on the farm with me, so that I can get away to do this stuff.”

Which is an important distinction Scott insists is worth repeating, both within the industry but also outside of the industry. As Reid pointed out, politicians need to see a future in farming. So when you’re applauding the merits of a new risk management program, you could be the one to say it’s made you more confident in pursuing your future farm career or you can explain how it has allowed you to bring your son on to the family farm full-time now.

“I often tell people, I’m not a chairman, I’m a farmer,” Scott says. “But more importantly, I’m not just a producer; I’m the father of a producer. That’s my biggest drive.”

There was nothing wrong with being young, pigheaded, working two jobs, and waking up every morning excited about this farm you were building, he chuckles, but that’s also when marketing boards and governments were just things that were getting in your way. “As you get older, you realize, the world is run by people who show up,” Scott says. “I remember one time being so excited about an issue, I was so worked up that when I got the opportunity to stand up in front of a crowd, I froze. I kicked myself for weeks, and that carried on until someone taught me how to breathe.”

Young people who want to lead have to prove they can be effective. With all of the young politicians currently in office, Scott believes young farmers have opportunities to build a role in bridging with governments. Good social skills will carry them a long way, he says.

“I went right from high school, to working in a blue-collar, off-farm job where I ran a crew, to all of a sudden sitting at a board table, and I tell you, that was hard,” he admits.

Scott has often wondered if public speaking and financial reporting would have come easier to him if he’d gone to university. “I learned to compensate because, although I didn’t have the academic skills behind me, I did have the social skills from the trade field to delegate.”

If experience has taught him anything, he says, it’s that learning to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone will produce the most rewarding changes in your life. CG COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

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life

Meditating on the farm Work better, sleep better, and bring some calm to your world

W Meditation to get you started (From Tamina Miller, certified meditation instructor (taminamillermeditation.ca/) Miller’s guided meditations are available on the SoundCloud app.

In less than a minute you can feel the stress leave your body and feel ease in your mind.

Sitting comfortably, close your eyes.

Take three long slow deep breaths.

Slowly scan your body from the top of your head all the way to your toes.

Name each body part silently and let go of any tension you find.

Relax your scalp, your face, your jaw, your mouth.

Relax your neck, your shoulders, your chest.

Relax both arms all the way to your finger tips.

Relax your entire back and soften your belly.

Relax each leg all the way to your toes.

Now ease yourself slowly back into activity, holding onto this relaxed state for as long as possible.

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MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

ith 5,000 acres of crops to seed and harvest, Tamina Miller used to be so anxious, she could only sleep three hours a night. Miller, who farms with her family near Alliance, Alta., was suffering from stress overload.

Then seven years ago, Miller started meditating 10 minutes a day, and it changed her life.

Before long, she began seeing the benefits of meditating five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night, and not only does she sleep eight hours a night now, she is also more focused and productive during the day.

Like Miller, many farmers suffer from the effects of stress, and it takes a toll on their mental health.

A survey of Canadian farmers conducted by Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton at the University of Guelph last year showed that Canadian farmers are affected by high levels of stress, anxiety, depression and burnout.

Fortunately, more farmers are recognizing the importance of looking after their mental health. Two-thirds of the farmers in Jones-Bitton’s survey reported that seeing a mental health professional can be helpful, and that seeking professional help did not make them a weak person.

Meditation is one of the tools that can help farmers combat the effects of stress on a daily basis. With more than 30 years of scientific studies that verify its benefits, meditation is being used increasingly by people in all walks of life and at all ages.

Even schools are using meditation in the classroom, and they report improved academic performance and reduced conflict in the school yard as a result.

Dictionaries define the practice of meditation as the concentrated focus upon a sound, object, visualization, or breath, in order to increase awareness of the present moment, reduce stress, pro-

By Helen Lammers-Helps

mote relaxation and enhance personal and spiritual growth.

While meditation can conjure images of people sitting cross-legged on the floor chanting “om,” there are actually dozens of ways to practice meditation and it can be done sitting in a chair, laying down, standing or walking. The important thing is to find a style of meditation that you like and will stick with.

It’s best to make it a daily habit, even if it’s only for a few minutes, says Miller, who is now a certified meditation teacher. She warns people not to expect immediate results, explaining that the impact of meditation is very individual. Some people will feel the effects instantly, but for others it may take up to eight weeks to feel the difference.

While 10 minutes of meditation a day was life-changing for Miller, she has seen even more benefit to her sense of wellbeing from the 40 minutes a day, including 20 minutes each morning and night, as required during her training to teach meditation.

While meditation has its roots in an ancient spiritual practice, there are many secular versions available today. Miller says the meditation she teaches can be a good add-on to existing spiritual practices.

“It doesn’t contradict any religion,” she explains.

Although some people object that they can’t make time to meditate, Miller finds meditation saves her time. When she’s busy, her meditation practice makes her more mindful of what she’s doing and more efficient with her time. By slowing down, she says, she remembers all the things she needs to do, in the order she needs to do them and, as a result, she gets things done faster.

Her relationships with others have also benefited, she says. “Meditation makes you less likely to react with an angry outburst. Instead, you pause and give the wise answer.”

Guided visualizatin exercise Miller has seen meditation have a similar impact on her husband Norman, who has also taken up meditation. “He responds more evenly when there is a breakdown. He doesn’t get as agitated.”

Pat Katz, a wellness strategist in Sask­atoon, says the research also shows improved physical health and improved immunity for those who meditate. She likes to start her day with 10 minutes of meditation. She simply closes her eyes and notices her thoughts coming and going without getting caught up in the drama. “It’s a peacefulness before my day starts.”

Enhanced creativity is another perk for Katz. “At least once a week a good idea pops into my head during my meditation time,” she says.

In summer, Katz likes to practise mindfulness while walking. “Mindfulness, paying attention to my surroundings, makes me more patient; I’m not as easily rattled,” she says.

Katz says some people have the misperception that meditation is about emptying your mind of thoughts and then they think, “There is no way I can do that.”

“That’s not the case,” Katz insists.

“It’s about noticing the thought but then letting it go.” CG

RESOURCES GUIDED MEDITATIONS: • U CLA

SAMPLE GUIDED VISUALIZATION EXERCISE From the Sleepless in Manitoba booklet

by Manitoba Farm and Rural Support available at ruralsupport.ca.

marc.ucla.edu/mindful-meditations

• H eadspace, free trial available www.headspace.com

Here’s how to get started with guided imagery:

• F ragrant Heart

1. Get into a comfortable position. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, focusing on breathing in feelings of peace and breathing out feelings of stress.

• M editation Oasis, available as podcasts and an app.

Guided sleep meditation podcast.

www.fragrantheart.com

BOOKS Pat Katz’s favourite books on meditation and mindfulness: • T he Miracle of Mindfulness

by Thich Nhat Hahn • C oming to Our Senses by Jon Kabat Zinn • D on’t Just Do Something Sit There

by Sylvia Boorstein • After the Ecstasy, The Laundry

by Jack Kornfield

2. Once you get into a relaxed state, begin to envision yourself in the midst of the most relaxing environment you can imagine. As you imagine your scene, try to involve all of your senses. What does it look like? What does it feel like on your skin? What special scents are involved?

What is around you? Who is there or not there with you? What sounds do you hear? Do you feel any other sensations?

3. Stay here for as long as you like. Enjoy your surroundings and let yourself be far from what stresses you. When you’re ready to come back to reality, count back from 10 or 20 and tell yourself that when you get to number one, you’ll feel more calm and refreshed, like returning from a vacation.

But you won’t even have left the room.

MORE INFORMATION ON METHODS AND THE SCIENCE BEHIND THEM • liveanddare.com/benefits-of-meditation • liveanddare.com/types-of-meditation

• C BC Radio Quirks and Quarks Podcast www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/thescience-of-mindfulness-1.3934579

FOR SCHOOLS • M indUp Mindfulness program for schools mindup.org/thehawnfoundation/

8th Annual CFGA Conference Next Generation Forage Cropping Systems:

Profit Above, Wealth Below

Canada’s forage sector is a $5 billion industry.

It also provides a significant contribution to carbon sequestration.

The overall theme of this year’s conference is

Next Generation Forage Cropping Systems: Profit Above, Wealth Below in recognition of the profit that can be achieved from high quality forage production, and the wealth that is the carbon legacy from having forages on the landscape.

Save the Dates

November 14-16, 2017

Delta Guelph Hotel & Conference Centre, Guelph, ON

For information go to www.canadianfga.ca or contact conference@canadianfga.ca

GUIDE LIFE health

By Marie Berry / lawyer & pharmacist

head lice — More common than you think

F

rom time to time, head lice infestations become news stories, especially when treatment “failures” occur. You probably feel itchy right now just thinking about them!

Head lice, scientifically known as Pediculus humanus capitis, have been around as long human beings have existed. After all, lice need human blood to live.

Head lice also exist worldwide, and they can affect anyone. Actress Jennifer Garner and model Heidi Klum tell stories of their children being infested.

diseases, although they are still considered undesirable and unpleasant.

Children are more often affected because they experience the close contact needed for the person-toperson transmission, and they more often share headwear and hair clips.

Adults are less at risk because they don’t necessarily have the close personal contact needed for the spread, except for adults who live in the same household as affected children.

It’s an important point worth repeating: head lice don’t mean that a home is unclean, they mean that

It’s an important point worth repeating: head lice don’t mean that a home is unclean, they mean that this is a home where children play together Head lice are parasites that feed on blood and leave itchy spots around the back and side of your child’s scalp. Once the adult female louse has fed, she lays eggs attached at the scalp to hairs. These eggs, or “nits,” will eventually hatch into new lice.

As well, because your hair continues to grow after the eggs are laid, the height of the nits above the scalp gives you an idea of the length of time of the infestation.

At one time, head lice were considered a normal part of life, but by the 1800s the first reports of remedies for treating these parasites started to appear. Unlike body lice, head lice do not carry other

this is a home where children play together.

While you may think head lice are common, only about one to three per cent of school children are affected annually.

Lice are tiny, about the size of a sesame seed and you may need a magnifying glass and bright light to see them. The nits are more visible especially against darker hair.

Lice treatments include permethrin, pyrethrins with piperonyl butoxide, and isopropyl myristate/ cyclomethicone, all of which are considered effective and non-toxic.

Treatment failures can occur, but are not usually caused by resistance to the treatment. While resistance

has been reported in some countries where pediculicides are heavily used, there has not been a reported occurence in Canada.

More often, the failure can be explained by improper application; for example, the treatment not being applied completely from the roots to the hair ends, not being left on the hair for the required time, not being reapplied in seven to 10 days, or being reapplied sooner than seven to 10 days.

Treatment needs to include manual removal of nits. A finetoothed nit comb is ideal for this.

Nits are attached to hair with glue, so soaking the hair with white vinegar for about half an hour will loosen the nits and make removal easier. Not removing the nits or even a reinfestation may be mistaken for a treatment failure.

Perseverance and patience are both needed, along with nit removal and careful following of treatment instructions.

Home remedies are numerous, but few are successful. Olive oil, mayonnaise, and petroleum jelly are supposed to smother lice, but this is difficult to achieve while being very messy. CG

Marie Berry is a lawyer/pharmacist interested in health and education.

Next Issue Medical marijuana is not coming to a pharmacy near you, but it is available with an appropriate order through authorized suppliers. Next issue, we will look at its effects in terms of your health.

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GUIDE LIFE Hanson Acres

By Leeann Minogue

D

onna was sorry to hear about her aunt Evelyn’s death.

“Even when she had to live in that nursing home, Aunt Evelyn always had something good to say,” Donna said to her mother over the phone.

“She had a lot of lemons to make lemonade with,” Donna’s mother said. “But remember, she was 93. We knew this day would come.”

“I suppose,” Donna said, knowing her mother was only a few years younger.

“Make sure you’re here on time,” Donna’s mother said. “We’ll meet at my house so we can go in to the front pews together.”

Next, Donna called her daughter-in-law. Elaine was sorry to hear the news too.

“We all liked Evelyn,” Elaine said.

“She was so patient with the kids.”

The two women made plans for Donna and her husband Dale and Elaine and her husband Jeff to travel to Melville for the Saturday funeral.

“Will you bring the kids?” Donna said.

Elaine thought about it. Connor was old enough to understand a funeral, but two-year-old Jenny would probably be a distraction.

And neither of the kids would enjoy the five-hour round-trip drive.

“I think I’ll look for a sitter,” Elaine said.

“Good idea,” Donna answered.

They both knew Dale’s father Ed and his partner Helen would take the kids willingly, but a whole day with both Connor and Jenny would be a lot for them to handle.

It had been a while since Elaine had hired a babysitter. Dale or Donna usually watched the kids. But Madison Hunter, who lived a few miles to the west of the Hansons, was an enthusiastic 15-year-old.

“Sure,” Madison’s mother, Tara, said. “Madison will be thrilled. But can I ask a favour?”

“Sure,” Elaine said.

“Can Madison bring her sister

Hanson Acres

All dressed up, and someplace to go The first fine day of a Canadian spring can only mean one thing Allie along? Allie’s only 12, but she took the babysitting course and now she needs some practical time with kids to get her certificate.”

Elaine agreed, and made plans to pick the girls up on Saturday morning.

Jeff was happy to go to Melville and see his relatives, but not happy about the dress code.

“Seriously, Mom?” he’d said to Donna. “Lots of people wear jeans to funerals.”

“They don’t have to sit in a pew with my mother,” Donna said. “Just make it easy for everyone and put on a suit.”

So on Saturday morning the four Hansons waved goodbye to Connor, Jenny and their two young babysitters and headed north, dressed in their best.

some pizza, the Hansons were ready to head home.

When they stepped outside they realized the temperature was falling and the sky had clouded over.

“It could rain,” Dale said, as the first drops hit the windshield.

“Might get icy,” Jeff said. “We should’ve left sooner.”

By the time the Hansons travelled 30 miles south on Highway 47 the rain had turned to wet snow and was piling up.

Soon Dale couldn’t see the highway. “If there aren’t any curves, I can keep us going straight,” he said.

The windshield wipers were coated in ice. “Let me clean those off,” Jeff said.

“In your suit?” Dale said. “Elaine?

Do you have an emergency kit back there?”

At least we don’t have to spend a lot of time unpacking,” Donna said “There’s almost no traffic,” Jeff said.

“That’s everyone else’s loss,” Dale said, enjoying his spot in the driver’s seat. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“Finally, after this long winter,” Jeff said.

The funeral went as planned, and after eating egg salad sandwiches and Nanaimo bars in the church basement, Aunt Evelyn’s close relatives gathered at Donna’s mother’s house for a few hours.

“You should have planned to stay the night,” Donna’s mother said. “I have room.”

But after they’d looked through the old photo albums and eaten

She had snow boots, mitts, toques, blankets, a flashlight and some candy bars in the back of the SUV. Dale pulled over and Elaine passed the boots and mitts up to Jeff.

“Who would’ve thought I’d be out in a storm without decent pants?” Jeff muttered.

Elaine and Donna looked at each other’s high-heeled shoes. It hadn’t occurred to them to bring boots.

“Be careful, Jeff,” Dale said. “It would be just our luck if there’s traffic now.”

Jeff stepped out and used the Continued ON page 66

COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA / MARCH 28, 2017

65

GUIDE LIFE

Reflections

by Rod Andrews retired Anglican bishop

mitts to clean the wipers. “At least it’s not cold,” he said when he got in.

“No, but you’re soaked!” Elaine said. “We’ll have to get that suit dry cleaned.”

Visibility got worse. After taking almost 30 minutes to travel the next 10 miles, the Hansons were almost relieved to see the RCMP roadblock near Grenfell.

“We’ve closed the road,” the young officer said when Dale rolled down his window. “There’s rooms at the motel.”

Elaine called Tara Hunter, who quickly volunteered to drive over and spend the night at Jeff and Elaine’s house.

“Your kids don’t know me, but we’ll be fine,” Tara said.

It was 9 p.m. when they got to the motel, just in time for Dale to book the last vacant room. Elaine and Donna made their way through the snow to the door to room 6. Inside, the room was cramped with two small, sagging double beds covered in faded red bedspreads.

“At least we don’t have to spend a lot of time unpacking,” Donna said. Then she put on the emergency snow boots Jeff had used earlier and walked back outside.

Elaine was close to tears. “My babies are at home with strangers. My phone’s dead, so I can’t even look at their pictures. And I didn’t bring my contact lens solution.” She laid down on the bed by the door and covered her face with her hands.

Jeff was phoning the farmer who’d planned to bring seed to their cleaning plant on Sunday. Maybe he could reschedule to the afternoon. Dale was wondering if the babysitter would feed the dog.

The mood in the room was at a low ebb.

Then Donna came back. “Put your coats on,” she said.

“Just because we can’t go home doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. We’re only a block from the bar.” She looked at Elaine.

“We’ll take turns wearing the boots. I’ll wear them over, then Dale can bring them back for you.”

None of the three of them really wanted to go, but nobody had the energy to argue with Donna. They headed down the street through the swirling snow in shifts, the women taking turns with the boots.

Twenty minutes later, they were around a table, drinking beer. Elaine had borrowed the bartender’s charger and found a plug-in near the beer cooler. “Let’s try a game,” Donna said, looking over at the pool table. “I haven’t played in years.”

Before Elaine and Donna were finished beating the men for the third time, Tara called to report that Connor and Jenny were both asleep. The girls had braided Jenny’s hair, and promised Connor pancakes for breakfast. “Allie figures she can get most of her 30 practical hours on this one job,” Tara joked. Elaine brightened, and nailed her last shot.

When they got back to the hotel room, Jeff and Elaine both thanked Donna for taking them out. Dale chimed in too.

“We were here,” Donna said. “We might as well make the most of it.”

“Aunt Evelyn would have approved,” Elaine answered.

Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews, a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan.

66

MARCH 28, 2017 / COUNTRY-GUIDE.CA

I’m in a hurry to get things done I rush and rush until life’s no fun All I really gotta do is live and die But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why

C

ountry music group Alabama describes life for many of us. “Too much to do and too little time,” and “not enough hours in a day” are familiar refrains.

Sir Sandford Fleming, chief engineer for construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway and designer of Canada’s first postage stamp, is generally credited with “inventing time.” His 190th birthday passed on January 7 this year.

For most of the earth’s history, each region used solar time to set their own clocks. The position of the sun in the sky determined the time of day. Calculating time was not an exact science.

When Sandford Fleming missed a train in Ireland in 1876 he decided to do something about standardizing time. Train travel demanded a workable system for determining the time of day.

Fleming advocated dividing the world into 24 time zones beginning at the meridian passing through Greenwich, near London, England. Circling the earth once along the equator covers 360 degrees.

Fleming proposed spacing time zones at 15 degree intervals, with some exceptions to accommodate geography. His proposal, international standard time, was adopted in 1884 at a conference attended by 25 nations. Fleming, of course, did not invent time. He came up with a systematic approach to patching different time zones together.

Bill Keane created the “Family Circus” comic strip. He is credited with the saying, “Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” With the gift of time comes responsibility. Each day is given to us by God as a grant or trust. Time is a precious resource. It is perishable and irreplaceable. The quality, joy, and usefulness of our lives are determined by wise use of time.

Most of us approach time from an attitude of scarcity. “I only have so much time and my time is currently used up doing X and Y, therefore I do not have time for Z.” The issue is not how much time we have. It is about what we do with it. Suppose there is a crisis in your family. Someone dies, someone has a serious heart attack, or a crime is committed against somebody. You find a way to get there.

When your mom calls to say your dad may be dying, do you tell her you don’t have time to come to the hospital? No matter what it takes, you’ll be there. You find time when you need to.

Jesus did not rush. He was busy, often followed by crowds, but he found time to pray. He played with children, took a nap during a boat ride, rested at noon beside a well, and attended a wedding reception.

There is not enough time for everything, but there is enough time for the most important things. There is time to explore back roads, to teach a boy to fly a kite, to doze in a hammock, and to scratch the ears of an old dog. But there is not enough time for gossip, plotting revenge, bad-mouthing competitors, or crying over past mistakes.

Take time to think — it is the source of wisdom Take time to read — it is the source of knowledge Take time to love — it is the source of happiness Take time to play — it is the secret of staying young Suggested Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Ephesians. 5:15-20 Rod Andrews is a retired Anglican bishop. He lives in Saskatoon.

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