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CONTENTS

NOVEMBER 2014

BUSINESS 10

A SLICE OF FOODSHARE

A NEW FARM IN JAPAN

BOOM OR BUST

THE CHOICE

GREEN HECTARES

WHAT THEY’LL NEED TO SUCCEED

A WOMAN’S PLACE

THE LAND QUESTION

SHARPEN YOUR PENCILS

OPENING UP

A NEW CREDIT MODEL

CAUTIOUSLY AGGRESSIVE

GUIDE HR — HOW TO BECOME MORE PROACTIVE

GUIDE LIFE — NEED TO GET MORE DONE?

This left-leaning Toronto foodbank gets farm groups as allies. Japanese farmers are modernizing, but still have miles to go. If land prices go bust, our Gerald Pilger will blame farm debt. It takes a different skill set to be a young farmer today. Here’s a new approach to learning from your neighbours. We ask educators, what are today’s kids good at, and not. Women now exceed 60 per cent of university ag programs. Can a farm built on rented acres actually survive lean times? With lower grain prices, last year’s rental rates may be too high.

NEW FARMS, NEW SKILLS Getting into farming is different today. So is staying in farming. Both require new skill sets and an ongoing commitment to education and training. Fortunately, that’s getting easier to achieve.

Canada’s hemp growers aren’t worried by U.S. crop. Here’s why. It’s called streaming capital, and it may be in your future. How do you get nominated to a business hall of fame? Yes, you can teach yourself to have a positive attitude. You may think you’re too busy to think about how to save time. In fact, though, that’s the first sign that you need to give it a try.

CROPS GUIDE EVERY ISSUE 6 68 70

MACHINERY GUIDE

Small tractors aren’t so small anymore, at least in capability.

MOVING TO MARKET

OUR BIGGEST RISK

GOING SHOPPING

GUIDE HEALTH

Is that headache just a headache, or is it a migraine?

HANSON ACRES Working with family is great, until is isn’t so great anymore.

Farmers and truckers are still trying to figure out how they can work together so both sides win. Here’s help.

There’s no reason the West should become a weed-control basket case like Arkansas, but that’s where we’re heading.

In a tough market, everyone says, “Shop your grain around.” But what exactly is the best way to do that?

Our commitment to your privacy At Farm Business Communications we have a firm commitment to protecting your privacy and security as our customer. Farm Business Communications will only collect personal information if it is required for the proper functioning of our business. As part of our commitment to enhance customer service, we may share this personal information with other strategic business partners. For more information regarding our Customer Information Privacy Policy, write to: Information Protection Officer, Farm Business Communications, 1666 Dublin Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3H 0H1. Occasionally we make our list of subscribers available to other reputable firms whose products and services might be of interest to you. If you would prefer not to receive such offers, please contact us at the address in the preceding paragraph, or call 1-800-665-1362.

NOVEMBER 2014

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desk EDITORIAL STAFF Editor: Tom Button 12827 Klondyke Line, Ridgetown, ON N0P 2C0 (519) 674-1449 Fax (519) 674-5229 Email: tom.button@fbcpublishing.com Associate Editors: Gord Gilmour Cell: (204) 294-9195 (204) 453-7624 Fax (204) 942-8463 Email: gord.gilmour@fbcpublishing.com Maggie Van Camp (905) 986-5342 Fax (905) 986-9991 Email: mvancamp@fbcpublishing.com Production Editor: Ralph Pearce (226) 448-4351 Email: ralph.pearce@fbcpublishing.com ADVERTISING SALES Dan Kuchma (204) 944-5560 Cell (204) 290-5419 Email: dan.kuchma@fbcpublishing.com Lillie Ann Morris (905) 838-2826 Email: lamorris@xplornet.com

Tom Button is editor of Country Guide magazine

One boy at a time As associate editor Gord Gilmour reports in this issue, more women than men now attend our ag universities. I’m not being alarmist — at least, I hope I’m not — and I’m not a zealot for absolute gender equality in every job or every outcome. I note the irony too that when we first contacted Mary Buhr, the University of Saskatchewan’s dean of agriculture, she was at a university-industry meeting in North Carolina where only five of the 50 participants were women. And I hope I appreciate at least superficially that women face myriad barriers on the farm as well, including pressures within the family. Still, there’s a point that needs sharing, even if we can’t make it with as much scientific rigour as we’d like. Too many farms may be giving up too early on their boys. Whatever the reason, our schools are better at educating girls than boys. Across the board, over 60 per cent of university entrants are women, which means that if you take a boy and a girl and enrol them in Grade 9, there’s a 50 per cent better chance that the girl will go to university than the boy. I can’t help thinking there’s something biological about this. I have a side interest in local history, and when I pour over local school records from the early 1900s, the girls quite consistently outperformed the boys on high school tests. It’s just that the girls weren’t allowed to translate those results into careers. 4 country-guide.ca

Whether this aspect is biological or not, the truth does seem to be that it’s something of a vicious circle, not least because with fewer upper-school boys excelling in their studies these days, younger boys have fewer role models. My own experience too is that girls are often raised with more of a sense of expectation, and that this encourages achievement. Either way, our boys are left to find their own terms for what success looks like. At 16, 17 and 18, is it any surprise that this looks like a pickup truck and an open road on Saturday night? Undoubtedly, there is something biological that hits the male brain in the teenage years, making their time too valuable to do anything with it but play the video games that have been designed to cynically exploit this particular weakness. Higher function returns, but often not until the boys reach their early 20s. If we give up on them too early, how much potential do we waste? Farm parents can help by placing more responsibility and more expectation on their boys. But they can also help by realizing that if their boys seem listless, it’s an entire generation that’s showing the symptoms, not just their own kids. I suspect it’s partly why a few years of off-farm employment can work wonders. Are we getting it right? Let me know at tom.button@fbcpublishing.com.

Head Office: 1666 Dublin Ave., Winnipeg, MB R3H 0H1 (204) 944-5765 Fax (204) 944-5562 Advertising Services Co-ordinator: Sharon Komoski Fax (204) 944-5562 (204) 944-5758 Email: ads@fbcpublishing.com Designer: Jenelle Jensen Publisher: Lynda Tityk Email: lynda.tityk@fbcpublishing.com Associate Publisher/Editorial Director: John Morriss Email: john.morriss@fbcpublishing.com Production Director: Shawna Gibson Email: shawna@fbcpublishing.com Circulation Manager: Heather Anderson Email: heather@fbcpublishing.com President: Bob Willcox Glacier FarmMedia Email: bwillcox@farmmedia.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 Farm Business Communications. Head office: Winnipeg, Manitoba. Printed by Transcontinental LGMC. C o u n t r y G u i d e is published 13 times per year by Farm Business Communications. Subscription rates in Canada — Farmer $39 for one year, $58 for 2 years, $83 for 3 years. (Prices include GST) U.S. subscription rate — $35 (U.S. funds). Subscription rate outside Canada and U.S. — $50 per year. Single copies: $3.50. Publications Mail Agreement Number 40069240. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Canadian Postmaster: Return undeliverable Canadian addresses (covers only) to: Circulation Dept., PO Box 9800, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 3K7. U.S. Postmaster: Send address changes and undeliverable addresses (covers only) to: Circulation Dept., PO Box 9800, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 3K7. Subscription inquiries:

Call toll-free 1-800-665-1362 or email: subscription@fbcpublishing.com U.S. subscribers call 1-204-944-5766 Country Guide is printed with linseed oil-based inks PRINTED IN CANADA Vol. 133 No. 12 Internet address: www.agcanada.com

ISSN 0847-9178 The editors and journalists who write, contribute and provide opinions to Country Guide and Farm Business Communications attempt to provide accurate and useful opinions, information and analysis. However, the editors, journalists, Country Guide and Farm Business Communications, cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and the editors as well as Country Guide and Farm Business Communications assume no responsibility for any actions or decisions taken by any reader for this publication based on any and all information provided.

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Machinery

By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor

The word “small” can be very misleading, especially when it comes to farm tractors, so shift your thinking with a look at today's compact and utility tractors. We’re hoping you’ll see that when it comes to performance, you can’t let yourself be fooled by appearances. These five manufacturers are touting designs and specifications that have it all where it counts — from the agility to get around in tight quarters, or engine sizes that fall into the “just right” classification. After all, there are times when “bigger” isn’t necessarily better. As always, however, be prepared to do some serious homework before you make your choice. It’s a competitive field, with top-notch engineering.

 John Deere 5M Utility Tractors Another company that is enhancing its lineup is John Deere, with its latest refinements to its high-spec 5M series. Ranging from 75 to 115 horsepower, the 5075M is a three-cylinder model with Deere’s diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC) and diesel particulate filter (DPF) solution. The four-cylinder 5085M, 5100M and 5115M have similar designs but with a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system that makes them Tier 4 final compliant. There’s also a new sloped hood that’s expected to increase efficiency when it comes to loader applications. The John Deere PowerTech engines also add an increased power level of as much as four per cent, and a 30 per cent torque rise.

www.deere.com

Case IH Farmall 100A Series  Just before Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show in September, Case IH rolled out its complete lineup for 2015, including the Farmall 100A Series. With models from 110- to 140-engine horsepower, this class of compact tractor boasts toughness, reliability and versatility, all rolled up into one design that is engineered for value. The 100A series is also Tier 4B/final compliant, joining Case’s high-horsepower equipment models in environmental accountability. Added to that is a new roof design featuring improved lighting, plus easy-touse controls that provide greater operator comfort to help take some of the strain out of the day’s work.

www.caseih.com

Valtra A HiTech  Valtra marks a growing trend of European equipment imports into North America with its A83 and A93 HiTech series of tractors. A sturdy design with AGCO’s Sisu Power Common Rail engines and Valtra’s electronic Autocontrol front linkage, the A HiTech lineup provides excellent front-loader capabilities and a heavy-duty front axle, along with greater stability. There are also the user-friendly features such as Autotraction and Autocontrol, plus greater comforts, from adjustments to the steering wheel and seat to additional legroom, in front and in back.

www.valtra.com

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N ovember 2 0 1 4

New Holland T4 Series 

MTZ 920 and 952 

Can a small tractor behave like something much larger? That’s the challenge that New Holland’s engineers were given, and they believe they’ve met it with the Dual Command transmission system now found in New Holland T4 series tractors. The Dual Command transmission provides quick shifting capabilities, reducing stress and fatigue on the operator while increasing productivity. The PowerClutch also means on-the-go shifting, without putting a foot to the clutch pedal. New Holland has also added a tilt and telescopic steering column, as well as its command arm console for enhanced operator efficiency and comfort.

This manufacturer has been around for years, although most would recognize it under the name Belarus. Now the brand has come to Canada under the MTZ (M-TZed) banner, and counts the 920 and 952 as its workhorses. At 85- and 105-engine horsepower, respectively, the MTZ 920 and 952 offer a four-wheel-drive system, so they fit very nicely into a wide range of on-farm applications. Both models also operate with a dual-range standard transmission and front-wheel manual engagement.

www.mtzequipment.com

www.newholland.na

N o v e mb e r 2 0 1 4

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The Value of Research and Development in the Forage and Grasslands Industry By Ron Pidskalny, Executive Director — Canadian Forage and Grassland Association

One is AC Mountainview sainfoin, selected from populations grown in mixed stands with alfalfa under a multicut system. Sainfoin, when grown with

CANADIAN FORAGE & GRASSLAND ASSOCIATION www.canadianfga.ca Ph: 780-430-3020

The second is cold-adapted rhizobia suitable for temperate regions such as Canada,where cooler temperatures limit the function of symbiosis between forage legumes and rhizobia. For example, soil temperatures in the Québec City region range from 10 to 15 C in the spring, resulting in poor regrowth in clover after overwintering – and inhibiting the performance of both the rhizobia and the legume. AAFC’s “Arctic” rhizobia, however, are psychrotrophs, meaning they grow well even at temperatures as low as 0 C. While Arctic strains may inoculate an array of legumes, the most efficient symbiotic association for nitrogen fixation has been with sainfoin. Another strain, adapted to alfalfa, improved spring regrowth after overwintering under stressful conditions. Investment in genetic improvement generates striking rates of return. A new disease-resistant forage variety, grown under well-researched management practices, including producer experimentation and innovation, can provide incremental increases in yield (Figure 1). Older varieties, especially under disease pressure, yield less and reduce potential returns. The benefits of using Arctic inoculants in forage legumes may also increase forage yields (Figure 2). Combining new varieties with Arctic inoculants could produce even greater benefits for forage producers and end-users.

Canadian forage production is suffering due to the lack of commercial availability of inoculants for smaller acreage legumes. In discussions with industry stakeholders such as inoculant manufacturers, forage seed wholesalers and retailers and a number of public and private sector institutions, the CFGA is taking a leadership role in restoring the availability of smaller-acreage legume inoculants. Figure 1. Yield Gains in New Forages with Optimized Use of Inputs

RELATIVE YIELD

The importance of productive forages and grasslands for the Canadian livestock and dairy sectors is clear. Unfortunately, Canada has seen a substantial decline in investment and expertise in forage research. Between 1985 and 1998, research expenditures declined by 55 per cent, research capacity has continued to decline, funding has been inadequate and sporadic, goals have been shortterm, and there has been no long-term commitment to building or maintaining infrastructure. Despite reduced support for innovative research, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s (AAFC) forage scientists have continued to develop new forage technologies.In spite of the odds, two have piqued the interest of forage and grassland sector stakeholders.

the correct proportion of alfalfa, mitigates the risk of bloat associated with alfalfa, permitting safe grazing of high-quality, highly productive forage stands.

New resistant variety Old variety without disease pressure Old variety with disease pressure

YEARS AFTER VARIETY INTRODUCTION

Figure 2. Yield Gains in New Forages with | Arctic and Temperate Inoculants

RELATIVE YIELD

Livestock producers’ marketing plans sometimes focus on capturing more value from lower animal supplies, rather than moving more finished product. Given the current low Canadian cattle inventory, this may be particularly relevant for beef producers. The dairy industry also appreciates the concept of value capture, where providing an appropriate, high-quality diet ensures proper rumen function and optimizes milk production. For many dairy producers, the lowest-cost source of nutrients is high-quality forage. These sectors are the largest forage users in Canada, with 80 per cent of Canada’s beef production and 60 per cent of a dairy cow diet dependant on forages.

Without inoculant With temperate inoculant With ”Arctic“ inoculant

YEARS AFTER INOCULANT INTRODUCTION

Join the discussion at CFGA’s Fifth Annual Forage and Grassland Conference. Nov. 17-19 in Bromont, Québec. For more information visit: www.canadianfga.ca/events/current-events

learn more about how peter farms smart at nhsmart.com/peterJ ÂŠ2014 CNH Industrial America LLC. All rights reserved. New Holland is a trademark registered in the United States and many other countries, owned by or licensed to CNH Industrial N.V., its subsidiaries or affiliates. NHM04148906L

business

A slice of FoodShare Farm groups are getting on the inside with Toronto’s world-class food outreach program By Steven Biggs, CG Contributing Editor

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promoting and increasing the consumption of fresh produce by marketing the idea of good food. More than that, these boxes also show how FoodShare is forging alliances with farmers.

Good Food Box Field is an icon in Canadian food circles, although little known on most farms. She freely calls herself an activist, and her bio points to decades of proof that she deserves the label, starting with her joining three other women in 1979 to launch a successful human rights case against the male-only hiring practices of steel-maker Stelco, just about the biggest manufacturer in Canada at the time. Since then, Field has participated in countless campaigns, including a long list that stem from strong left-of-centre political connections. But since 1992, when she joined FoodShare, her main focus has been to tackle society’s ills through food. Clearly, this is a job she excels at, and her energy is considerable, as just about any of the numbers that spill out of FoodShare will attest. Formed in 1985 as a fledgling non-profit with a vague mission to provide food security, FoodShare got its start just one year after the first modern-era Daily Bread Food Bank opened in the city in 1984, based on an Edmonton food bank opened in 1983. Make no mistake. FoodShare does believe in what it calls food security, and in what it defines as every citizen’s right to food. But FoodShare also believes that consumers — especially children — need to know more about how to make the best food choices. Field also sees larger social gains. Food isn’t only healthy, she likes to say. It can also be healing. By 1996, Field was being haled by inflential NOW magazine as one of Toronto’s 10 best organizers, and the accolades have continued non-stop ever since. Today, FoodShare defines itself as “Canada’s largest food security organization,” with a $6.4 million budget that comes in roughly equal measures from sales and from donations from foundations and individuals, plus 13 per cent from municipal and federal grants.

November 2014

Photography: www.greenfusephotos.com

Last year alone, FoodShare’s 5,000 volunteers reached out to over 200,000 Torontonians.

hen I fire off a last-minute email to confirm the details of my scheduled visit, I mention that I have never before seen a food bank. Debbie Field, executive director of FoodShare, politely responds, “We are not a food bank,” she tells me. “We’re a community food hub.” Food bank, food hub. But the next day, as my tour gets underway, I’m quickly humbled into the realization that there is a big difference after all. As we leave the brightly painted green and yellow office and walk down a hallway in this former school building, Field talks about the many FoodShare programs. She tells me too that she suggested today for my visit because today is packing day for the Good Food Boxes, which I also come to see is the right place to start, because Good Food Boxes are such a powerful symbol of how this urban, non-profit organization is

business

Her politics are definitely left of centre, but Debbie Field’s leadership at FoodShare is praised by many farm voices

FoodShare’s many touchpoints

More phenomenal are its other numbers. In 2013, FoodShare had 54 staff — plus 5,133 volunteers, and together they reached out to 223,316 children and adults in all 140 Toronto neighbourhoods through their almost incredibly wide variety of programs (see “Touchpoints” sidebar).

Good Food Boxing As we continue our tour, Field delivers me to a cavernous room made brighter by two open loading doors. This is the room where the Good Food Boxes are packed. The lines of people pack food boxes with a wide variety of fruit and vegetables. The boxes are a non-profit produce distribution system, not unlike a buying club. People place box orders with a neighbourhood volunteer co-ordinator, and receive a box weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Field hands me the slip of paper listing the contents of today’s boxes: a half bag of apples, one cabbage, four ears of corn, one lettuce, one bag of onions, one kale, one basket of peaches, a half container of plums, 1.5 pounds sweet potatoes, one pound of tomatoes, and one zucchini. “Look at that value for $18,” says Field as she points towards a completed box, because that $18 is exactly what a consumer pays for this box. While the value is excellent, this food box is not subsidized by food donations. “They (farmers) are not donating to us. We’re paying full price,” says Field, explaining that FoodShare purchases directly from local farms and from the Ontario Food Terminal. “These are gorgeous,” declares a volunteer, pulling out a beautiful, red leaf lettuce from a box stamped with the name of a farm

The mission of FoodShare is to increase access to and knowledge of good healthy food. Some of its many programs include: • Mobile Good Food Market: Market trucks sell fresh produce in Toronto neighbourhoods where it might not be otherwise available. • Field to Table Schools: Teaches students food literacy, including food systems, cooking, nutrition, food gardens, and composting. • Wellness Boxes: Delivered by Meals on Wheels to seniors, a box contains 35 servings of ready-to-use produce such as cut-up vegetables. • Composting: FoodShare produces a large amount of organic waste, which is composted on site, an excellent teaching opportunity. In 2013, 55,115 pounds of organic waste was composted to create 27,557 pounds of compost. • Bulk Produce Program: Delivers fresh produce weekly to approximately 260 schools, 20 non-profit child care centres, 75 parenting centres, and 15 non-profit agencies across Toronto. • Growing Food: FoodShare has a greenhouse and demonstration garden, and also facilitates school gardens in partnership with the Toronto District School Board. • Good Food Café: a model for a healthy, affordable school cafeteria, this kitchen at the FoodShare headquarters prepares healthy, affordable food for staff, volunteers, and visitors.

Continued on page 12

November 2014

country-guide.ca 11

business

Teaching children healthy eating habits will make them good farm customers all their lives, Farmshare believes.

Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association Visits FoodShare In August, 2014 the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association (OFVGA) visited FoodShare as part of its annual summer tour and barbecue. Alison Robertson, OFVGA program manager, explains this annual event brings together 80 to 90 people including farm leaders from a wide variety of commodities, along with industry stakeholders and agricultural extension personnel. Until this year the tour visited farms and processors. “We had never done Toronto,” Robertson says. “We decided to take everybody out of what they know.” The tour started with the Ontario Food Terminal, a distribution hub for fresh produce. The next destination was a processor. The final stop was FoodShare. “I was worried,” says Robertson, as she describes how this tour was different from past tours. She’s pleased with the feedback, however, adding, “Some people said it was the best tour ever.” “Sometimes you’re in your own world of growing or packaging,” she says of the need to see other players in the food system. She says there were good connections made. “It’s amazing what a bunch of very passionate people are doing in an old school.”

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Continued from page 11 in Quebec. The volunteer explains to me that these lettuces are not seconds. Nor are they the picked-through produce that one might expect at a food bank. These are top-grade vegetables, and she is the first person to handle it since it was packed at the farm. Field says that with the exception of two employees, all of the dozen or so people in the room are volunteers — both low-income and corporate. The low-income volunteers receive lunch at the FoodShare cafeteria and a food box on the day they volunteer. In deciding what goes into the boxes, Field says the top priorities are that the contents be healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate. Second to these are that the produce is local and seasonal.

She picks up a small, yellow plum and explains that at this time of year, they are locally grown, which she considers a good thing. But because this sort of plum is a very good snacking fruit — a way to encourage a child to eat fruit — it is something FoodShare might buy out of season even if not locally produced. Field says FoodShare buys organic produce only if it is the same price as non-organic produce, explaining, “We don’t think it’s fair to burden them (shoppers) with a food system problem beyond their control.” In 2013, through its various programs, FoodShare distributed 2,240,000 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables. It bought $1,442,073 worth of fresh produce, $456,558 directly from local family farms. For an organization with a mission to increase access to and knowledge of good healthy food, that is good marketing. CG

FoodShare and Norfolk Fruit Growers’ Association Growing the next generation of apple consumers

During the interview, Debbie Field chomps on a good-looking apple from a nearby bin while touring the area where the Good Food Boxes are packed. “This is an apple that would normally have gone to export or juice,” Field sayss, noting its small size. It’s a size rarely seen on Canadian shelves. But the small, Ontario-grown apples are a great fit for FoodShare. Their size makes them snackfriendly and suitable for the Good Food Boxes, while the price is lower than top-grade apples. The small apples come from the Norfolk Fruit Growers’ Association. Tom O’Neill from Norfolk Fruit Growers’ later tells me some industry people ask him, “Why would you bother to do that?” wondering why he spends time on a relatively small-volume program. His response: “The sooner you get kids to eat an apple, the sooner you get kids to eat them the rest of their lives.” “If you go in the store you might think apples come from Washington State,” O’Neill says. Not only does he want people to get used to apples — he wants them to get used to Ontario apples. Field says what O’Neill is doing here at FoodShare is getting apples into the mouths of a wide variety of people, many from countries where apples aren’t a traditional food.

November 2014

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A new farm in Japan Farmers like Yoshiaki Shimazaki are modernizing Japanese agriculture, but he knows they have a long way to go By Richard Smith

n a country where agricultural self-sufficiency is low, and where the farming population is old, with few young people seeing a future for themselves on the farm, Yoshiaki Shimazaki decided that agriculture could actually be a great and rewarding opportunity. From a family operation of 80 dairy cows, 70 calves and 300 beef cows in 2007, he has now grown the business into a 550-head operation comprising cow-calf, milking, slaughtering, hamburger patty producing and restaurant operations, as well as growing corn for feed, plus renting an 18-head dairy farm a day’s drive to the south. And he isn’t done yet. So while most Japanese farmers see the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) multinational trade agreement as a threat to their livelihood, Shimazaki sees it as an opportunity for export. “I am trying to revitalize farming here,” says the 61-year-old president of J-Farm Shimazaki. Shimazaki’s father started the farm with a single Holstein cow in 1954 and grew it steadily, if not exponentially. But it wasn’t until the son took over and bought another dairy farm in 2007 that it was incorporated. Shimazaki has since bought three more farms, all from farmers who were quitting farming for economic reasons. “The farms had no other takers, Shimazaki says. J-Farm Shimazaki now owns 300 acres and rents another 450. On an experimental basis since last May, the company also rents a 10-acre, 18-head dairy farm with two employees in the town of Nasukarasuyama in Tochigi Prefecture on Japan’s central big island of Honshu. The farm lies 860 kilometres south of the main operation at Betsukai where J-Farm Shimazaki is based, but it’s also in the region of Kanto that includes Tokyo. Nor is that the only recent change. The company’s strategy has been to grow into what is called in 14 country-guide.ca

Japan a “senary” industry (i.e. sixth industry) where primary producers become involved in food processing and sales. Senary has become the key word for the “Abenomic” revival of agriculture, named after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. For J-Farm Shimazaki, that means raising dairy cows, milking them, selling the milk as well as calves and old milking cows, the latter to be turned mostly into hamburger and sausages. For feed use, the company also grows enough corn to make the operation 70 per cent self-sufficient. And it doesn’t stop there. J-Farm Shimazaki has also rented a former grocery store in the nearby town of Teshikaga, converting half the building into a small beef-processing plant called Midori (Green) at one end, and a hamburger steak and yakiniku (Korean-style barbecue) 43-seat restaurant called Kuro (Black) at the other. “I chose this building because it has many refrigerating units,” Shimazaki says. Midori processes some of the company’s cows, usually crossbreeds aged 25 to 30 months, producing yakiniku beef for the restaurant and hamburger patties sold at highend department stores as far away as Tokyo. The company sells the five-ounce patties at 800 yen ($8.44) for premium and 400 yen ($4.22) for regular. The plant also makes six-ounce patties solely for its own restaurant. At its dairy operation in Betsukai, J-Farm Shimazaki employs two local farmhands, plus five trainees from China, and the processing plant and the restaurant each have a staff of two. But as much as possible, the company keeps things in the family. Shimazaki’s eldest son, 32-year-old Yosuke, who also runs a farming contracting firm, now works as managing director and will succeed his father as president while the other son, 28-year-old Kohei, manages the restaurant. Shimazaki’s youngest brother, 45-year-old Yasuaki, works for the company as farm manager. November 2014

business [Shimazaki’s other brother, Akio, 59, married a daughter from another dairy farm family, and since her family had no sons, he changed his last name to their’s (Endoh) and now is considered a full member of the family, not an uncommon practice in Japan.] According to Japanese government figures, Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate hovers at only 39 per cent on a calorie basis. The average age of farmers, meanwhile, is slightly over 65. In a way, that high age isn’t surprising. Succession has fallen off in Japan, with the children headed for better-paying careers in industry. Many farmers don’t actually begin their farming careers until they retire from non-agricultural work. In such insecure circumstances, most Japanese farmers find themselves on the defensive against cheaper food imports, which they consider a threat to their livelihood. It’s an attitude that plainly shows in the TPP negotiations. A pact that started in 2005 with Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, the TPP called for its signatories to begin reducing all tariffs on imports from other member countries by January 1, 2006, and to phase them out completely by 2015. In the past few years, Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the U.S. and Vietnam have been clamouring to join. But Japanese negotiators are constrained by a resolution adopted by the Diet (Japanese parliament). The resolution says sensitive agricultural products — rice, wheat and barley, sugar, dairy products, beef and pork — need to be either excluded outright or subject to renegotiation.

Meanwhile, J-Farm Shimazaki will continue to evolve. A major focus now is to improve pasture and feed production while reducing inputs, but this too relates to the business plan. “We need to do 100 per cent organic farming,” Shimazaki says. “Then we will be globally competitive.” Financing is another major concern, since J-Farm Shimazaki does not get credit from banks, borrowing instead from the banking service of the Japan Agricultural (JA) Group, a national farmers’ organization. The credit has financed land and the construction of facilities, and the company is currently carrying a debt of 140 million yen ($1.5 million). Shimazaki says it’s a debt load he can manage. “But if JA stops lending us money, it’s the end.” In a Japanese context, Shimazaki isn’t unique, but it’s clear that he is exceptional. Only a small percentage of other farmers seem prepared to embrace a senary business model. Shimazaki can understand why. Many are older, and it simply hasn’t been in their background to learn

Understanding Betsukai In Betsukai, home of J-Farm Shimazaki, anti-TPP signs line the roadside, and anti-TPP tracts can be picked up at local town halls, or along the streets on shelves next to posters that denounce the deal. Betsukai itself is the largest municipality in Japan, with 1,320 square kilometres on the northern island Hokkaido (population 5.5 million). But the municipality’s population is small, numbering only 15,640. Agriculture is locally important, however, with 778 dairy-farming and 31 beef-farming households, which own 102,880 and 8,216 head respectively. Despite the concerns of some of his neighbours, and despite Japan’s low self-sufficiency in food, Shimazaki sees the TPP as an opportunity to open up new exports markets. He is particularly looking toward Asian economies such as Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam and especially China. “China is an attractive market,” Shimazaki says. “We are thinking about exporting our beef patties there. But the country’s current import rules make business difficult.” On the dairy side, Shimazaki trusts his business will be successful in the long run, since the world suffers a milk shortage amid increasing demand, and Hokkaido milk is recognized as safe and clean. “I am confident we can compete against milk from Australia, New Zealand and other countries,” Shimozaki says. November 2014

Food self-sufficiency in Japan is only 40 per cent, but farmers must value add to survive. advanced marketing, or to explore value adding and to develop contacts throughout the country. “I have been doing this since age 19, when I started managing the family farm, so I know how to do it,” Shimazaki says. J-Farm Shimazaki’s revenue last year amounted to 200 million yen ($2,110,000), 70 per cent from milk sales, 20 per cent from beef/calf sales, and five per cent from government subsidies for manure treatment facilities and equipment that processes raw milk into drinking milk. The restaurant brought in a separate revenue of 40 million yen ($421,000). The company is making a strong go of it, and is committed to building a diverse agricultural business, but in such a capital-intensive industry, it will take patience and determination. His daughter, 31-year-old Ayumi, works as a pharmacist, Shimazaki points out. “She makes more money than I do.” CG country-guide.ca 15

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Boom or bust Will history repeat itself, with a sell-off fuelled by farm debt? By Gerald Pilger re we heading into another bust in agriculture, as happened in the late 1920s and in the 1980s? This is the fear of some farmers, and of some agricultural economists too. George Brinkman, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, believes Canadian farmers are seriously over-leveraged and that there simply is not enough farm income to pay off the debt farmers have accumulated. “Farmers in Canada are overcapitalized, and they are much more vulnerable than U.S. farmers to rising interest rates, low commodity prices, poor production, and falling land values,” Brinkman says. “If prices enter a down cycle or interest rates go up, Canadian farmers will be squeezed.” Canadian farm debt has increased greatly over the past few years. Statistics Canada data shows Canadian farm debt had climbed to $77.98 billion by the end of 2013, an increase of more than $12 billion since 2010. Canada isn’t alone in this trend. Farm debt in Australia is up by 75 per cent over the past decade and is currently estimated at more than A$70 billion. Even more alarming is that 70 per cent of Aussie debt is held by just 12 per cent of its farms.

What is driving farmland values? Factors contributing to the value of farmland 80 Per cent of responses

70 60 50 40

30 9

20 10

Ranked #1 Ranked #2 Ranked #3

0 Interest rate environment

20 13 22

7 13

Overall wealth level Lack of alternative of farm sector investment options

Expectation of Expectation of net net farm income farm income for for 2013 2014 or later

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Agriculture Credit Survey

7 4 6 Land-lease revenue from mineral rights

1 2 3

Real estate tax policies

American farmers have also increased borrowing, although not nearly to the same extent as Canadian farmers. Total U.S. farm debt grew by roughly five per cent a year from 2003 to 2009, a pace that is very similar to the rate at which debt increased during the boom years of the 1970s. Brinkman provides a startling comparison of Canadian U.S. farm debt. A few years ago, he calculated the ratio of farm debt to income in Canada and found that in 1972, that ratio was two to one. In other words, it took $2 of debt to produce $1 of income. By 2007, that ratio had jumped to 23 to one. In 2007 in the U.S., however, their debt-to-income ratio was only 2.9 to one. Numbers like these remind me of the huge government debts that many countries have accumulated, and how the ratio of government debt to GDP has gone up in recent years, putting countries and their economies at risk. I wanted to know how the ratio of farm debt to total agricultural income compares to the ratio of sovereign debt to a country’s GDP. It turns out that statistics are readily available. In Canada, total government debt as a percentage of GDP in 2013 was 86.30 per cent. The U.S. public debt/GDP was 71.80 per cent (CIA World Fact Book numbers). Taking the $77.979 billion that Canadian farmers owed in 2013 and dividing it by $53.890 billion (the total cash receipts which Statistic Canada reported Canadian farmers received that year) we get a ratio of 144.7 per cent. Only the debt/GDP ratios of Japan (226.10), Zimbabwe (202.40), and Greece (175.00) were higher in 2013. The reality is, Canadian farmers’ ratio of debt to economic production is higher than some of the world’s worst economic basket cases, including Italy, Iceland and Portugal. By the way, the U.S. ratio of farm debt to total farm receipts is much lower at 69.4 per cent, which puts their debt-to-income ratio lower than their public debt/GDP ratio, and less than half of the corresponding Canadian farm ratio. Continued on page 20

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November 2014

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Continued from page 18 Without question, comparing Canadian farm debt against sovereign debt is like comparing apples to oranges. It has little direct economic significance. As a visual of just how huge the farm debt is in Canada, however, it is eye opening.

Land value bubble In Australia, Canada, and the U.S., land purchases have been a driver of rising farm debt, but Brinkman warns these land prices may be a bubble, and in time we may see that bubble burst. In Australia, 44 per cent of new debt in 2012 was for land purchase. The average price of farmland has jumped from A$279/ha in 2004 to A$470/ha in 2014.

We have reached a point, especially in Canada, where it seems there is no land price that is too high. After all, when land values are rising faster than inflation and interest, borrowing to buy land can be justified through important financial ratios like debt to asset and equity to asset. So given that interest rates are low, and that cash flow positions are good due to years of high prices, there are strong motivations to borrow to buy land. Unfortunately, farmland values now far exceed productive value, and we may be seeing many farmers ignore the risk of interest rate increases or declining revenues, and continue to borrow to purchase land based on the belief that the trends of the last few years are likely to continue. You have to wonder how speculative these land purchases really are. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City — Omaha Branch surveyed farmers to find out why farmers were buying land. The results of this survey were surprising. See chart, page 18.

Risk of the bubble bursting

Rapidly rising prices have made land seem a safe investment. In truth, it’s more speculative than that In Canada, the overall average increase in the price of land likely has less significance due to the vast differences in agriculture, crops, type of farms and land quality across this country. However, according to the 2013 FCC Farmland Values report, the average increase in farmland value in 2011 was 14.8 per cent, followed by increases of 19.5 per cent in 2012 and 22.1 per cent in 2013. Likewise, although the U.S. also has differences between states and types of farms, the USDA estimates the average increase of land values from 2012 to 2013 at 13 per cent. If you compare 2013 U.S. farmland values to 2003 values, land has increased by 240 per cent. The real estate debt load of U.S. farmers is now estimated at US$182 billion.

20 country-guide.ca

While in the 1980s the crash in agriculture was precipitated by high interest rates, Brinkman feels the next crash could be caused by high farm debt. Brinkman is not the only one warning of a potential agricultural bust. In February, 2014 the Wall Street Journal was already reporting falling farm property values in the U.S. Corn Belt. Michael Duffy, agricultural economist at Iowa State University has projected land prices could fall from 20 to 25 per cent over the next few years if corn prices fall. In a conversation with Bloomberg News in December 2013, Gary Ash, CEO of 1st Farm Credit Services predicted that a drop in corn prices could result in land prices dropping by up to 30 per cent. Jason Henderson and Nathan Kauffman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City have written a number of research papers warning of a drop in commodity prices which may result in some farms not being able to service the debt they have accumulated. Some of their analysis and research is available online, including the paper “Farm Investment and Leverage Cycles: Will This Time Be Different?” Unfortunately, the fall in commodity prices is no longer just a vague fear. We are experiencing those declining prices right now, so every farmer must take a close look at their debt and make sure it can be serviced at current and worst-case commodity prices. There is a saying in banking: “Most bad loans are made during good times.” Without question we have enjoyed a run of good prices and for most producers, we have experienced good yields as well. Time will tell if those good times have enticed farmers into too much debt. CG

November 2014

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The choice Getting into farming today is different, Kerry Froese believes. It demands whole new sets of skills

n the one hand, farming is what it’s always been, a profession with generous portions of independence, autonomy, and pride. It’s a lifestyle most farmers can’t imagine giving up, (even farmers who say they aren’t in it for the lifestyle). There’s space, freedom, physical exertion, honest value, and let’s not underrate the sense of authenticity. It’s real life, with dirt, sweat, manure and rain. But there’s also the sobering reality of the other hand. Risks of failure in the farming game are as high as they’ve ever been. Maybe, because of the financial stakes in today’s agriculture, they’re actually higher than ever, if the land and equipment costs don’t snuff out the dreams of would-be farmers before they even start. But even if you have the dedication and the dollars to jump in, there’s still market volatility, interest rate uncertainty, stiff global production competition, high stakes anti-ag lobbying, and the reality of unrelentingly hard work all conspiring to push you back out. What does it really take to get started and — much more importantly — to make it as a young farmer today? Since it often takes one to know one, we went to an expert source. Kerry Froese has run Triple F Enterprises in Abbotsford, B.C., for over two decades, which is no small thing considering he’s only 37 years old. The fact that Froese took over the family farm’s management at 16 is a fairly good indicator of his go-getter work ethic. Today, he has expanded the business into a 150,000-head broiler chicken operation. On the side (said ironically, since chicken barns on their own take as much effort as many town jobs), Froese sits

22 country-guide.ca

on the board of a half-dozen or more agricultural organizations and associations. “You can’t get stuff done sitting on the sidelines,” Froese says over the hum of the chicken barn fans. “A lot of people like to complain, but you don’t have any right to complain if you’re not involved.” Particularly near and dear to his heart are the B.C. Young Farmers Association — which he helped found in 2008 — and the Canadian Young Farmers Association — which he has chaired since 2012. These associations are designed to allow farmers and want-to-be farmers, aged 18 through 40, to learn and network in order to become, as Froese says, “smarter farmers.” From learning how to develop a farm business plan to outlining a succession plan, and from understanding how to read a set of books to connecting with others who have walked a similar path before, the Young Farmers associations offer a wide variety of opportunities for people entering agriculture to gain the skills they need for success. Above all, says Froese, the associations foster peer-to-peer learning, teaching young farmers that they can’t go it alone. “If you put your nose down and think you can farm on your own, all by yourself, you’re not going to survive long,” Froese says. “Collaborating with others is pretty vital, especially for farmers just starting out. You’re going to make some mistakes, go backwards sometimes, and learn from it. But networking lets you learn from others’ mistakes, which is always easier and cheaper than learning from your own.” The push for networking and learning from others is something of a new concept in an industry that has long been full of independent, self-sufficient types. Yes, the agriculture industry is more com-

November 2014

Photography: Quinn Myrtle Photography

By Madeleine Baerg

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Farmers still need strong bonds to great neighbours, Froese says, but now those neighbours need to be from one side of the country to the other petitive than ever. But it is also more technical, more expensive, and bigger than in past generations. For reasons both old and new, collaboration is the only way to survive. “If you’re always thinking of your neighbour as competition, who is going to come pull you out when your plow gets stuck? It’s better to be friends with others in the industry; definitely better to take advantage of each other’s strengths and learn from them,” Froese says. Today, of course, that doesn’t just mean on the other side of the farm fence, or even across the room at your association’s networking event. The power of technology lets us connect around the globe. Froese, for example, is delighted to be new friends with and somewhat of a mentor for a young farmer who is in the process of setting up a new poultry operation… in New Brunswick. Via social media and email, the two can swap information and suggestions even more easily than across the back fence.

But not everything comes from outside support. To be successful as a young farmer, a whole lot needs to come from within, including tons of willpower and a dedication to buckle down and work harder when the going gets rough. “I had this conversation with my seven- and nineyear-old sons at the dinner table last night, actually. The older son, he wants to be a farmer, but the little one, he’s still at the stage of thinking he wants to be an astronaut. I told both of them that if they actually want to get where they say they want to go, it takes the will. Sure, you can be a farmer or an astronaut. It’s the same thing for either: you’ve got to be willing to work.” If one or more of Froese’s four children decide to follow their dad and grandfather into agriculture, they’ll have a major advantage over kids from nonfarming families, and it isn’t just financial, because the first-hand experience with the inevitable pitfalls of agriculture can be equally valuable.

After taking over the farm’s chicken production at age 16, Froese turned his focus to farm groups.

Continued on page 24

November 2014

country-guide.ca 23

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Continued from page 23

Agriculture has a responsibility to get much more active on social media, Froese believes..

“It’s not all rainbows and puppy dog tails, but until you get your hands dirty, you don’t really know,” Froese says. There are, of course, ways for non-farm kids to get real farm experience prior to making a move into agriculture. Post-secondary agriculture programs and formal or informal internships are an excellent start for any would-be farmer. Advanced education is now an increasing priority for anyone entering agriculture, Froese’s children included. Whereas academic professions — medicine, law, education — used to skim the cream of the crop off any group of students as they left high-school, today’s agricultural reality demands top notch, welleducated thinkers.

“You better bring something to the table,” Froese says. “I told my older son, if you really want to come back to the farm, you’ll need to get an education that will help the farm — an ag degree or an accounting degree, something that will make the farm better. “We are being told by consumers that they want inexpensive, high-quality food. We can’t do that without the most educated people being the producers. You can have idealistic ideas about how to feed the world, but if you’re not realistic and you don’t have the education to back up your ideas, it’s not going to happen.”

24 country-guide.ca

That realism extends to a producer’s business planning, the most important but often hardest area for new farmers to maintain a firm grasp on. Step one on the new farm to-do list? Create a business plan including an inventory of current assets and liabilities, a business strategy, a financial plan for short and long term, a production and marketing plan and an HR plan. These, by the way, are plans that are written down — that’s non-negotiable. They are also plans that are discussed with relevant partners, and they are updated regularly, which is a responsibility that must not be shirked. Second is to develop and maintain a detailed and very realistic understanding of your costs of production. “If you’re growing something that costs more to produce than you can sell it for, you’re not going to be around for very long,” says Froese. Third is that a brand new farmer better be willing to share his or her business with the world. As the urbanization of the western world continues, a majority of consumers is now without any real understanding of where their food comes from. Unless farmers educate consumers on the realities — the pride, the care, the effort — of agriculture, consumers are likely to be “informed” by the loudest voices, which often belong to antiagriculture lobbyists who, Froese believes, may have a vested interest in damaging our strong, healthy and vital industry. “We are farmers because we love it. We really do want to feed the world. But, it’s sickening to see negative campaigns about agriculture,” Froese says. “I’m tired of being told what to do on my farm by someone who’s never been on a farm. The only way to counter that is to get the real information out. I take pictures. I show them exactly what I do on my farm. I’m on Twitter — I’ve got 2,400 followers — saying the real story of what we do here. “I see social media as a responsibility that agriculture needs to be doing more of.” Froese has three years left of fitting the “under40, young farmer” demographic. By then, his oldest son will be 12, just a few years shy of the age Froese was when he took over management of his dad’s farm. Does Froese hope this son or one of the three younger children follow him into agriculture? “Our farm name is Triple F Enterprises, which stands for Froese Family Farm. My dad started it in 1978 and I carried it on so, of course, my sense of pride says I’d want them to. But I don’t want to force my kids into something they don’t want,” Froese says. “And I’d want them to come into this profession with their eyes open. You’re going to have good years, you’re going to have bad years. It’s the pitfalls of owning the business. “But for me, I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” CG

November 2014

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Green Hectares

For young farmers, here’s a new model in education through networking and mentoring By Yvonne Dick atthew Gould apologizes for taking a second while telling me about Green Hectares to check if his post digger has gotten clogged with mud again. “It’s still a little wet in places out here,” he explains, although I quickly come to see that nothing could be more fitting. After all, he isn’t just vice-chair of Green Hectares, he’s the owner and manager of Gould Ranching Ltd. too. Green Hectares is a new model in “school” for farmers. It’s a little bit education centre, a little bit networking, and a little bit of business promotion — all mixed together in a non-profit company that puts its emphasis on learning, technology, and efficiency for better and more profitable farming. In other words, it’s a different enough model that it takes some explaining. But Gould himself is convinced that it works, and he firmly believes Green Hectares has taught him more about his own personal potential in business than he has learned any other way, and it has also provided valuable information to move forward in this new age of farming. The website also makes a clear promise, right at the top of its opening page: “At Green Hectares, we help develop opportunities for people to connect, collaborate and learn so they can be a thriving part of the agriculture industry, or a contributing force in their rural community.” Green Hectares was launched in 2007 after a series of focus groups where early-career farmers

Layers of programs and resources are online at www.greenhectaresonline.com.

and other rural youth identified a networking and mentoring organization as one of their key needs. Organizers also studied the results of youth surveys (ages 18 to 25) in Alberta and Saskatchewan that included two key questions: “Why are young people leaving the areas they grew up in?” and, “How can we make it easier for them to stay or return and have success?” Executive director Wendy Schneider says Green Hectares has an enabling mindset. Says Schneider: “We want to change the world, to help be a part of the change in the world and agriculture.” Schneider has been involved with Green Hectares since before its inception, working first as a volunteer leader. True to form, Schneider also farms herself at Northline Angus at Ardrossan, Alta. “Everything really is collaboration, we are big on that,” Schneider says about Green Hectares. “Decisions to be made and new things to introduce are talked about.” In the beginning the plan was to have an actual demonstration farm to showcase and teach innovations in farming. As the project evolved, it became apparent to the group that being able to connect face to face and via the Internet was far more important. Organizers also came to see the value of networking and mentorship, says Schneider. “One thing that we didn’t fully realize at the beginning was the importance and benefit of having in-depth, intense conversations, talking and collaborating and truly getting the whole picture of an idea or concern.” Additional benefits come from another innovation, one that Gould, for instance, rates as one of his favourite resources. It’s The Hopper, an aggregator service that pulls together insights into education courses, useful websites and myriad other learning opportunities and resources. “The Hopper is great for looking things up and for connecting with people including experts we might have met at conferences,” Gould says. “It’s like a personalized and interactive search engine.” The Hopper is a web page add-on which farmers can put on their own websites or log into through Green Hectares. Gould has created a web presence for Gould Ranching Ltd. which includes Twitter, Facebook, and a website about his own ranch that Continued on page 28

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November 2014

Planting Scholars. Harvesting Leaders Nufﬁeld Canada Agricultural Scholarships expand the horizons of innovative Canadian agriculturalists. Nufﬁeld scholars travel internationally to gather information, build relationships and learn best practices to be disseminated in their home countries. The Program has sent nearly 1600 scholars from the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Holland and Ireland around the world looking for the best in agricultural technologies, policies and networks.

Reports

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2015 SCHOLARS

Scholars’ research reports are highly intelligent and well used by their industries. Below are two short summaries of recent research reports:

In Canada, up to three scholarships of $15,000 each are awarded annually. The 2015 recipients are:

Energy-dense Forages: A Canadian Opportunity Clayton Robbins, 2013 Scholar, Rivers, Manitoba The grass-finished beef model in Canada has historically been challenged with inconsistencies in carcass qualities and long periods of time on feed to reach slaughter targets. The purpose of my study topic was to investigate the potential for an alternative strategy including the use of alternative forages at key points in the beef production cycle to address these challenges. Following travels to, and interviews with experts in Argentina, Britain, Sweden, Finland, USA, Australia and New Zealand, my recommended strategy involves using annual plants. An overstory cereal crop cut at an immature stage, stored in the field and eventually ‘swath-grazed’ from Aug-Oct as small square bales and/or small, individually-wrapped silage bales is the key to addressing the cost of annual establishment. The regrowth of an understory blend of tetraploid Italian ryegrasses, festuloleums, chicory, narrow-leafed plantain and clovers/vetches is the key to increasing the intake of metabolizable energy to the grazing animals. Based on evidence from around the world, this strategy may reduce time to slaughter; improve gain, marbling, and feed efficiency; positively address all three greenhouse gases, regenerate soil organic matter; improve the energetic efficiency of finished beef; and improve lipid profiles in the beef carcass.

The Future of Grain Research: Maximizing Productivity Growth through Partnerships Crosby Devitt, 2012 Scholar, Guelph, Ontario The overall goal of my study project was to explore research partnerships and develop strategic recommendations to optimize return on investment in research by farmers. In my report, I provide a perspective on how Australia and the United Kingdom organize and fund research of interest to farmers.These countries were chosen because their production systems share many similarities with Canada, yet their approaches to research are quite different. 1. Research has led to our ability to feed the world and will be even more important in the future – reinvestment is critical. • By 2050, global cereal demand will increase from 2.1 to 3.0 billion tonnes but a reasonable probability exists that global grain production will increase faster than global demand through research and advancement.

Becky Parker, a Project and Partnership Manager with Ontario Agri-Food Education, will research models of agriculture career education and the collaborative relationships between industry groups, youth development organizations and the formal school system. Becky’s scholarship is sponsored by Glacier FarmMedia. Follow Becky at @becky_ parker_2 Greg Donald is the General Manager of the PEI Potato Board. Greg’s Nufﬁeld project will investigate strategic plans implemented by potato industries in other countries in order to gain a greater knowledge of their long term critical success factors. Follow Greg’s travels @1spudman Colin Hudon and his family own and operate F&F Hudon Farms in Rosser Manitoba. He is also the managing partner of Strategic Agricultural Management Co. He will be looking at the evolution of farmland ownership and farm business models around the world with the intent of helping Canadian producers capture opportunities and negate threats. Follow Colin @samc_colin

2. Canadian farmers have the opportunity to lead in creating a vision, developing partnerships and ensuring research results accrue to investors (including farmers) • Farmers beneﬁt from both ‘public good’ type research that isn’t easily monetized AND research that leads directly to new products and services and can play a key role in building new partnerships 3. International research linkages provide a signiﬁcant opportunity for Canada and should be expanded. • Organizations such as CIMMYT and initiatives such as the Global Wheat Initiative are examples that provide opportunity for Canada to expand international research collaboration.

@NufﬁeldCanada

For full copies of these and many other reports, please visit www.nufﬁeld.ca

www.nufﬁeld.ca

business Continued from page 26 raises heritage Angus that is Halal certified and hormone and antibiotic free. Green Hectares hopes through its programs and educational workshops to help make agriculture more sustainable, and it believes this can best be done by creating chances for people to meet and network, collaborate on projects, and learn new things. Gould says the chance to meet people who are successful in farming and have specific knowledge about agriculture is another of the greater tools.

I’m proud to say that we developed them in Alberta, and the test communities we were in have all continued to use our services since. We are now spreading the programs across Canada online and face to face.” Some programming is free while other services are fee based. For instance, The Hopper is free. As an entrepreneur you can participate in the Entrepreneur Exchange for free and you can get advice and connections from a facilitator in the Community Connecter program for free. If an organization wants to put on an Entrepreneur Exchange there is a cost, as there is if a municipality, school board or industry wants to support a Community Connector program, says Schneider. Everything isn’t always smooth sailing in the world of the not for profit. There were times when communication was difficult, says Schneider. “It wasn’t always so easy to get people to understand and buy into it until we had our legs under us.” A corner seems to have been turned, however. Farm numbers are difficult to cite, since many Green Hectares programs appeal to rural youth, not only farmers. Still, the program’s RuralTech videos have been watched over 10,000 times, its labs are used on average 17 days a month, and its Community Connector program meets with an average 12 groups a month. As well, the Entrepreneur Exchange has helped 127 youth businesses, engaging 94 high-level professionals as panellists and sharing over 1,700 connections and 1,200 business ideas. Plus, The Hopper hub that Gould values so highly offers over 150,000 resources through some 3,380 unique websites. Meanwhile, as Schneider and I talk, in the background I hear the sounds of farm equipment grunting and growling, backing up and beeping. Keeping an eye on her own business and steering the way for Green Hectares is something Schneider understands, and she sees Green Hectares in the same terms. “We have moved out of the development stage and are now relying on our programs to be profitable,” Schneider says. “We are just transitioning. We are a lean machine.” CG

The Green Hectares concept started with focus groups asking, how can we help? “It has taught me about my own personal potential and enhanced my leadership skills,” Gould says. “I don’t feel as restricted as farmers normally might — I can see that farming and the potential of it is all a matter of perception. Where before you might decide at a certain stage that you’ve done all you can with the farm, now you can see where all the new technology and ideas can take you.” Green Hectares offerings are diverse and multi-layered. Current areas of focus include technology via RuralTech programs, as well as networking and creation through The Exchange where entrepreneurs and young farmers can talk about current issues and solutions in a speaker and panel format. Through their site, participants can also access services through RuralVoices, RuralSpaces (which tells where public meeting areas are available and acts as a sort of reservation system for the gathering of events) and Community Connector (which sends mentor/facilitators into communities for hands-on learning and evaluation). “We wanted to create an environment where anyone with an interest in agriculture and food could thrive and prosper, no matter where they live,” says Schneider. “We are a virtual organization, using technology to connect as a team. Our programs work anywhere,

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What they’ll need to succeed Top ag educators tell us the good and the not so good they see in Canada’s next generation of farm hopefuls By Maggie Van Camp, CG Associate Editor he future stretches and sways like a Prairie grain field, endless and heavy with possibilities. Like storm clouds, though, threats and risks also gather. What strengths and skills will farmers need to succeed in the future we’re rushing toward? With the turnover between generations accelerating, it’s a question that is coming squarely into play on a growing number of farms. Do your kids have what it takes? Or, if you’re a young wannabe farmer reading this, how do you make yourself into a person who has those skills? Country Guide asked some of Canada’s most respected agricultural educators if they see trends in knowlege or skills gaps among today’s farm hopefuls. Then we asked how their schools are filling those gaps. Two are on the front lines of the future of agriculture, including Mark Fournier, instructor at Olds College and Ken McEwan, director of the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown Campus, the lead collegelevel program for Ontario agriculture. They hear and see — and test — the next generation before our sons and daughters get back to the farm. First up though is Larry Martin, former professor at the University of Guelph and currently partner and instructor at Agri-Food Management Excellence. Over 200 farmers have graduated from the Canadian Total Excellence in Agricultural Management (CTEAM) program that he has facilitated and instructed since 1998. These are farmers who believe they have the aptitude to succeed, which is why they invest the $7,500

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to take CTEAM, and compared to when Martin first starting teaching the program, they’re getting younger, and also more intense about growth. Participants want to expand and push further, and CTEAM is designed to help them look at how their farm fits into the industry and to discuss it with others who have a bigger-picture perspective and hands-on experience. Increasingly, they tend not only to be younger, but also to be growing their operations both in size and in complexity, says Martin. And they’re highly self-motivated to improve. They also tend to be good at turning what they learn into action, and using it to build success. “They’re willing to take risks, but only take measured risks,” Martin says. “And they’re always looking for new or different things.” Typically the people signing up for CTEAM enter it needing to better understand strategic planning and execution, he says. Often they don’t even see that they need help with planning until they start into the program. Before they enrol, only about one in seven have a formal written plan. As part of the two-year program administered in four, four-day sessions across Canada, participants develop a three- to five-year business plan. Almost all implement these plans, and equally impressively, over half update their plans to accommodate changes they’ve made along the way. “They have a higher appreciation for financial management, and can now build on the knowledge and apply it to their farms,” says Martin.

November 2014

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Farming will take more than knowledge, insists Ridgetown director Ken McEwan. It needs vision, people skills, and perhaps most important, energy

The HR hurdle That doesn’t mean it’s all easy. In fact, there’s one skill set in particular that Martin sees many students needing to work on. A major limitation to growth on these farms is that farmers lack knowledge in human resources management, and the CTEAM process is designed to enhance their knowledge of how to delegate and have the systems in place to manage people. One of the first insights, then, is that to succeed, tomorrow’s farmers need to understand that they will have to get better at HR. “To grow, you’ve got to manage managers,” says Martin. “This can be difficult if you’re accustomed to doing things for yourself.” During after-class get-togethers, CTEAM participants share their problems, plans and dreams with others who understand. Discussing their businesses with similar-minded farmers enables them to find the holes in their plans, as well as gaps in how they manage. Within this group they can freely discuss risk, marketing and expansion plans, and, says Martin, they tend to caution each other. At each of the four sessions, the participants must verbally present their updated and improved business plan, and get feedback from other members of the class. They’re able to share their numbers and plans freely because their neighbours aren’t there. The small-group dynamic also means the farmer-students tend to put extra effort into their presentations because they don’t want to embarrass themselves. That brings in the second insight about today’s successful young farmers. The reality is that the world is changing rapidly, so they commit to continual learning, and Martin has revamped the course material many times over the years, especially the strategic planning portion. Today the students want more feedback and guidance. “There’s a higher appreciation for what’s needed to succeed,” says Martin. “And higher expectations of what they want to get out of the program.”

November 2014

A passion to succeed Mark Fournier, instructor at Olds College in Alberta, thinks the No. 1 requirement for success in farming is passion — followed by planning, perseverance and profits. “They’re going to be doing this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so they need to be motivated,” he says. Fournier says this level of farming passion quickly shows itself at the college level. If the students are forced to go, or are simply not committed enough, they don’t do well and are usually culled out by Christmas. Although they’re a small percentage, this group is just not ready to dig into farming every day using real money or to deal with real risk. They also need an appreciation for financial skills. Wanting to farm and having the resources and skills are completely different. Fournier says knowing how to budget and forecast is imperative. His class does a 12-month rolling cash flow, so they know their position at quarterly and one-year intervals and can take needed corrective measures right away. The most important ratio his students will need is current ratio. “Cash is king, if you want to keep operating,” says Fournier. “Profits don’t put food on the table; money in the bank does.” Fournier also shows students how scale and specialization can impact revenues. He tells his students that they either have to be as big as possible or go for a niche. To illustrate, he shows them on paper how to expand quickly, and then they run cash flows, current ratios to see the vivid impact of interest rates on returns in black and white. Continued on page 32

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“ They need to know how to sharpen their iPads,” says Olds’ Mike Fournier

Don’t sugar coat it

Continued from page 31

The Facebook challenge Generally the students from farms understand there will be good and bad years, says Fournier. However, from what he hears, the students don’t talk a lot about risk. They’re more concerned about what their roles will be when they go home, and about their time frames for succession. “They need to interject risk analysis into their thinking,” says Fournier. “If you have five generations behind you, you’re less likely to want to take on higher risk levels,” says Fournier, who is also a huge believer in ensuring his students can calculate their break-even prices. Knowing what your costs are per bushel and what you need to get out of that bushel to live is powerful. He asks them: “If you need five or 10 per cent to live, and then prices drop, what discretionary costs can you cut?” They also need to understand leveraging. These students are going to be taking on long term 20- or 30-year mortgages and we don’t know what interest rates are going to do that far ahead. “This generation is used to low interest rates, so I make them look at debt servicing at seven or eight per cent,” says Fournier, who also asks lenders to come to Olds to explain debt management and their young farmer loan programs. “They need to know how to sharpen their iPads,” says Fournier. At Olds, all students have iPads with spreadsheets. The idea is to train them to do realtime financial management in the tractor as they make decisions on the fly. Ironically a great challenge for the Facebook generation going through college now is they don’t know how to connect with real humans, face to face. Fournier suggests to his students when they go home to the farm that they take some time to join the crew at the local coffee shop. Just listen at first and eventually you’ll be asked to join in. “Not only do you learn from the older generation, it is a way to be a part of the marketplace,” says Fournier. “Be collaborative.”

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In Ontario, Ken McEwan, professor and now director at University of Guelph’s Ridgetown Campus sees many of the same trends, and the same opportunities and challenges. Historically, successful farmers were able to do many things well, especially in production and business areas and in working with people. However, now it takes more than just knowledge, McEwan says. To succeed now, farmers also need to have a vision, know how to manage a staff, and have the necessary energy to take on the many challenges associated with primary production. The curriculum for the associate diploma in agriculture at Ridgetown College tries to expose students to the many different components of operating a viable farm business, including production, business management and human resource management. Many of the production courses can be taken as electives to suit the interests of the individual student, such as precision agriculture, dairy production, and greenhouse management. Over the years, McEwan has seen success and failure come from all sorts of skill and personal traits. “Student optimism might be modestly improved with the higher commodity prices,” he says. “But most young people pursuing a career in primary production do so because they enjoy the challenges.” Today McEwan also sees the importance of adapting to and adopting technology, including everything from auto steer to plant genetics. New farmers now need to understand the global marketplace too, he adds. “Historically, a lot of emphasis was placed on U.S. farm policy but now one needs to have a working knowledge of global trade and foreign government policy.” McEwan doesn’t sugar coat the real impact that issues of scale and the startup costs for a competitive farming operation have on the likelihood of success. “Students who possess a farm background and have supportive parents often do well because of the capital intensity associated with operating a commercialscale farm,” says McEwan. But that isn’t a guarantee. McEwan has also seen such farms fail when there’s a lack of planning or motivation, or an inability to change. Says McEwan: “It is very important to have a workable succession plan and realize it is a process that takes time.” CG

November 2014

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place By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor

t the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture, Dean Mary Buhr doesn’t spend much time fretting over whether women are being accepted in the agriculture industry. Long gone are the days when female students were seen as a novelty or as brave trailblazers. These days, they’re just students, and Buhr is surrounded every day by a cohort of smart young women. In almost every class, in fact, they’re in the majority. “We’re not just seeing this in certain areas, or certain disciplines,” Buhr says. “It’s across the board, including things like our bachelor of science in agriculture, where more than 60 per cent of the students are female.” It’s actually the numbers of this core science-based program that paint the most interesting picture of the evolving role of women in agriculture, Buhr says. Back in the early ’70s, about five per cent of the students were women. By the late ’70s and early ’80s, that had grown to about a third of the students, increasing through the years until it reached parity in the late 1990s. Then around the turn of the millennium, women entered the majority, and over the last five years, their numbers have remained largely constant at 60 to 63 per cent. In no small part, this evolution in the agriculture colleges has mirrored societal developments that have seen more young women pursuing better education and opportunities. “In many of the other degree programs within the college, the numbers are even higher,” Buhr says. “For example, our renewable resource management program has a higher percentage of female students. Veterinary medicine is usually between 80 and 90 per cent female, which is typical for any of the caring professions like medicine or nursing as well. Even agriculture economics, which tends to be more male, has about 40 per cent female students.” For an industry that’s quietly still thought of as an old boys’ network, this is likely going to mean significant changes going forward, says one early trailblazer for women in agriculture. Alberta-based farmer, author, and mentor Brenda 34 country-guide.ca

Agriculture used to be a man’s world, at least in North America. But visit any agriculture college across the country and you’ll see that the times have already changed Schoepp, a 2012 Nuffield agricultural scholar, has studied the role of gender in agriculture around the world and here at home. She says women are taking their place as farmers in their own right, and she’s glad to say it’s not just a marginal activity anymore. “I think the most important thing to realize is that this is something we are doing,” Schoepp says. “We’re not getting there in agriculture. We’re already here. Now we’re seeking the information and support to grow our businesses and farms.”

Back to the farm? What’s driving this flood of women into agriculture? In most cases it’s rational decision-making by the young women coming into the programs, though it may not be something they put in words. “We’re talking about young adults, so I’m not sure how carefully any young person thinks about these things,” Buhr says. “But I do think that when they look around at their peers, young women quickly realize that if they want opportunities, they’re going to have to get an education. For young men, there are alternatives, but most young women won’t be going to the oil industry and earning $30 right out of high school. They see their peers working in a clothing store for minimum wage.” One of the most interesting questions is where these young women will find themselves after their education. In recent years, women have become a more and more common sight in almost every facet of the industry, from chemical reps to extension agents. But back on the farm, you have to wonder if their progress has been as strong. A recent Statistics Canada snapshot publication delved into gender balance on Canadian farms and found that women still lag behind. The numbers have been increasing since the agency started tracking them in 1991, but even so only 27.8 per cent of all farm operators are women, and even that number masks the true picture. “… women continue to be rare as sole operators, even though they made up about 40 per cent of operators on multiple-operator farms,” the report read in part. November 2014

Photography: DAVID STOBBE

A woman’s

BUSINESS

The conclusion would seem to be, that yes, women do farm — but often only if there is also a man in the picture. Is this permanent, or will these numbers slowly shift as well? Buhr is convinced they will. More and more she’s seeing women coming into the program, studying agricultural science, and returning to the farm. “They’re going back to the farm to work with their parents — actually in a lot of cases, to work with their dads,” Buhr says. In a lot of ways, that’s just bringing Canadian agriculture back into alignment with trends around the globe, says Schoepp. “Most of the food produced around the world is produced by women,” Schoepp says. “For whatever reason, it’s a very North American thing for agriculture to be so male.” Schoepp says women bring a lot to

the table, including different ways of looking at and solving problems, and there is hard economic data suggesting any industry, including agriculture, is best served when both men and women sit around the table working on decisions. “When you reach gender balance, you generally see about a 40 per cent increase in return on investment,” Schoepp says. “Men and women problem solve in different ways, and it’s just better if you have all viewpoints.” In some business areas, Schoepp says, women globally seem to have particular strengths, such as in value adding. That means a huge chunk of Canada's farm future could have a female face. Buhr, who grew up in Manitoba, then worked in Ontario before coming to Saskatchewan, says this move of women in agriculture could, at least partly, mirror the unique farm culture.

“We’re not telling our children ‘You’re a boy,’ or, ‘You’re a girl,’” Buhr says. “We’re saying, ‘You’re a kid. And it’s time to do your chores.’”

REMAINING CHALLENGES It’s not a perfect world, of course. Serious challenges remain for women in agriculture, although Buhr says the industry generally gets a passing grade. The major challenges it does have when trying to make the ag workplace work for women are challenges almost every industry is grappling with. “There are issues around things like work-life balance and having both a family and a career,” Buhr says. “Those aren’t issues unique to agriculture.” Schoepp agrees the world has opened up for women in agriculture, but says Continued on page 38

“They’re going back to the farm to work with their parents — actually in a lot of cases to work with their dads.” — Mary Buhr, Dean, College of Agriculture, University of Saskatchewan

NOVEMBER 2014

country-guide.ca 35

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business Continued from page 35 there are some remaining structural issues that must be addressed. “There is an issue of availability of credit to grow our farms and businesses,” Schoepp says. “I do think we still have some challenges there.” She cites a recent U.S. study that showed when men and women applied for farm loans, if the loan criteria — things like cash flow and available security — were equal, male farmers were still about 20 per cent more likely to get the loan than female farmers. “This is something that is well documented around the world, whether you’re talking about a major bank or a village credit system,” Schoepp says. There’s also the question of getting access to technical support for female farm operations, which tend to be smaller in scale, and therefore of less interest to agribusinesses that are more concerned about catering to the largest operators. “That’s not necessarily strictly a female issue,” Schoepp says. “I think it’s an issue for smaller farmers, men and women alike.” Buhr says if she’s concerned about a gender group these days, it’s actually young men, not young women, since the gender balance numbers suggest they’re being left behind in terms of higher education. “You would think that what would happen is we would reach a point of parity, where numbers were more or less even,” Buhr says. “But that’s not what’s happening. In almost every case, young women are going to school more than young men. We as the ‘intelligensia’ are, somehow, failing to attract young men to higher education.” This trend cuts a wide swath across the country and impacts everything from medicine to business, with just a few exceptions, like engineering and IT, where men remain in the majority. Some speculate this is because young men, especially in the resource-driven western economy, simply have other options that pay well without all that schooling. “That might be true in Western Canada, but I’m not sure it is true of Eastern Canada, and this is something we’re seeing happen everywhere,” Buhr says. Buhr says any trend that sees any group’s participation in higher education drop is a troubling one, not just for the group in question. “If we’re not attracting all the best candidates from all backgrounds into higher education, it’s a loss for society as a whole.” 38 country-guide.ca

“ The most important thing to realize is that this is something we (women) are doing. We’re not getting there in agriculture. We’re already here.”

— Brenda Schoepp, farmer and author

Shared solutions In 2012, when Brenda Schoepp attended the annual conference for that year’s Nuffield Scholar agriculture program, her mandate was to look at women in agriculture and how mentorship programs could serve them. The event was primarily male, and they were a bit skeptical. “They asked me a lot of tough questions,” Schoepp says. “But in the end, what I realized is that they weren’t hostile toward the idea at all — they were just wondering, ‘What about us? Couldn’t we benefit from this too?’” This is perhaps the central challenge of building equitable sex roles in Canadian agriculture — preventing it from devolving into an unwinnable us-and-them, hesays she-says battle, when instead the best solution will lay in working together and finding solutions that are better for everyone. Schoepp says nobody wants to see women confined to a pink ghetto. “I don’t think women want to be seen as a special-interest group, or to be isolated in any way, or segregated as a population,” Schoepp says. “We want equal recognition and access to the information we need to take our farms and businesses to the next step.” In fact, in many cases, some of the strongest supporters of the changing role of women in agriculture are the men who farm, Schoepp says. That’s because they’re not frozen in amber in some sort of 1950s sitcom world, but have evolved themselves, often at a pace that would surprise many from outside of agriculture, who view the industry as quaint and somehow outdated. “There are men in agriculture now who are also caregivers and struggle

with feeling divided and pulled in many different directions,” Schoepp says. “These are no longer women’s issues and men’s issues. They’re human issues.” Schoepp added that her ongoing exposure to young farmers of both sexes has been especially heartening, because they’re proving to be an innovating group who are interested in doing things a bit differently both personally and professionally. “They’re very passionate about farming, their communities, and their industry,” Schoepp says.

Loud and proud If Canadian women in agriculture suffer from any serious shortfall, it’s being overly modest. Even as more and more of them have entered the business and assumed more senior roles, they hesitate before stepping into the spotlight and claiming the glory, no matter how well deserved. At times that’s modesty and at other times, it’s a struggle to get credit for their ideas and work. “I’m sometimes reminded of the old cartoon where the chairman of the board is addressing a woman and says, ‘That’s a great idea Ms. Jones. Perhaps one of the men would like to suggest it,’” she says. “If that’s happened to me once, it’s happened a thousand times, and I’ve found myself wondering, ‘Did I say that right?’” That won’t change unless women are willing to be equally proud and unapologetic about their presence in the industry, Schoepp says. “Sometimes I think it’s a Canadian problem,” Schoepp says. “We’re a bit too polite and a bit to unassuming.” CG November 2014

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The land question Can you build a sustainable farm on rented land?

By Lisa Guenther, CG Field Editor

Competing with the world for farmland For 18 years, Jeff Kwochka was a full-time dairy farmer near the Saskatchewan village of Clavet, a short drive down the Yellowhead Highway southeast of Saskatoon. But for the last year and a half Kwochka has worked as a real estate agent with Realty Executives Saskatoon while winding down the dairy business. Kwochka had expected he’d mainly sell city houses, but finds there’s demand for realtors who have a good understanding of the business side of modern farming. The market for farmland has changed, Kwochka explains, and increasingly, farmers have new competitors, including developers, speculators and investors. “When somebody puts land up for sale now, basically the whole world is looking at it,” says Kwochka. “The foreign investors, they’re not outrageous,” Kwochka adds. “They’re not expecting huge returns. They’re happy with three or four per cent returns on investment.” Farmers around Saskatoon aren’t the only ones facing competition for farmland, of course. For instance, there’s Melissa Leischner, who returned to the family farm about half an hour east of Olds, Alta. last fall after earning

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her agricultural science degree and minoring in business agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan and spending seven years in Saskatchewan, working in the agriculture industry. Along with farming with her father, she holds down a full-time job with Cervus Equipment, Leischner says. “I can farm and I can still be an agronomist. I never wanted to do anything else.” Leischner and her dad currently own about 70 per cent of the land they farm, renting the balance. As a young farmer, Leischner needs to expand if she wants to stay in the farming game long term. But expansion is easier said than done. Even though it’s an hour to Calgary, commuters are buying, Leischner says, and others want land for ATVs or horses. Leischner puts the average cash rent in her area at about $75 per acre. But six miles west of her farm, she says rent hits $120 per acre. Of course, acreage owners, investors, and developers aren’t the only ones boosting farmland values. The siren song of high grain prices over the last few years has lured more young farmers back to the land, and this new generation of farmers means more competition for the same piece of ground, says farmer Lee Markert. Continued on page 42

Photography: DAVID STOBBE

t’s hard to acquire new dirt. Even if you can convince yourself that today’s spiking land prices are still affordable, competition from other farmers, developers and investors adds up to a red-hot real estate market. And retiring farmers aren’t necessarily selling their acres either, which leaves many young farmers counting themselves very, very lucky if they’re able to rent the acres they need to expand their farming operations. But is renting most of your acres financially sustainable in the long run? For that matter, if the only other option is purchase, is that sustainable either? To find out how farmers are expanding their land bases in a fiercely competitive farmland market, we went directly to those farmers, along with a farmer-turned-realtor.

N o ve m be r 2 0 1 4

BUSINESS

For Saskatoon-area realtor Jeff Kwochka, as for realtors across the country, when a Canadian farm goes on sale today, the market is the world

NOVEMBER 2014

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business

Quick to sell Continued from page 40 “It’s so competitive, especially in a time when there’s enough unreserved capital floating around bank accounts that producers can afford to make those down payments,” says Markert. “It might almost break them when they do it, but they can do it. And there’s enough competition that you kind of have to be in the right place at the right time.” Markert earned a management degree from the University of Lethbridge and interned with DuPont Canada before returning to the farm. Today he runs a seed retail business, Markert Seeds, with his parents, near Vulcan, which sits between Calgary and Lethbridge. He also farms his own land, most of which is currently rented. “Gone are the days where a neighbour from down the road who’s retiring decides to phone you up one day and say, ‘I’m selling that piece of land for this amount of money. Do you want to buy it?’” Markert says.

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Even finding out about land coming on to the market can be tricky. Leischner says people in her area are very hushhush about land sales. “It’s quick to sell. You’ll hear something’s on the market on a Wednesday. It’ll be off the market by Friday,” she says. Markert says farmers need a longterm perspective when looking for land. “You kind of have to identify who might be getting out of business in the next five years, or wanting to slow down, and sort of start to court them ahead of time in anticipation of when they’ll be renting it,” says Markert. Both Markert and Leischner believe finding more farmland depends partly on building goodwill in the community. Leischner says it’s good to keep neighbours happy with you: “If they’re getting behind, I’ll send a combine over.” Markert works with other farmers through the seed business, talking everything from varieties to disease. The

end goal is to build a solid business, not endear himself to farmers on the hope that they might rent land to him in future. But if the opportunity comes up,“at least they might think of me.” Both the Leischner and Markert families have long-term rental agreements with extended family and former neighbours. But they don’t take those relationships for granted either, and both have offered to pay more in cash rent before their landlords asked. While some might shake their heads at the idea of offering more than a landlord is asking for, Markert and Leischner have sound reasoning. “You want to stay competitive, too, so someone else doesn’t come rent it out from under you,” says Leischner. “You never know, right? Money drives a lot of things.” When prices picked up, the Markerts also decided to offer more to their landlords. He says it helped build trust and assure the landlords they’re being taken care of. “And they kind of know you’re not trying to take advantage of them.”

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Sharpen

your pencils Rent or buy? Kwochka says land is always a good investment. “But if it stresses your cash flow, then it’s not, because you do need 25 per cent down to purchase land, or be able to use 25 per cent equity from someplace else to put towards that.” In today’s market, cash flow can be a worrisome consideration. For his part, Markert says he’d love to own the land his family started renting last year. He’s at a relatively early point in his farming career, though, and he says he doesn’t have to flow to purchase a lot of land right now. But he knows his costs, and knows he can afford the cash rent. Leischner isn’t necessarily willing to cough up the money to purchase farmland either. If a nearby piece of land comes up, she’s keen to buy. But otherwise, “at $4,500 an acre, I think I’m going to rent,” she says. But renting most of one’s farmland isn’t necessarily financially sustainable, either. Kwochka says renting provides an easy exit for farmers planning to retire in 10 years. But farmers in it for the long haul need to build their owned-land base every year, he says. That equity provides stability in the rough years, he adds. Nor does Markert think leaning heavily on rented land is financially sustainable in the long run. “At the same time, you’ll probably need less actual physical land to make up that equity because the price of land has exploded the way it has,” he says. Leischner is on the same page when it comes to rented land. “Honestly, no. I don’t think a lot of rented land is sustainable,” Leischner says. But she adds the rental rate makes a difference whether it’s even sustainable in the short term. “When you’re netting a whole 10 bucks an acre on a canola field at $120 an acre, that’s not sustainable,” she says. “You’re just farming it to farm it, not to make money off of it.” Markert doesn’t jump at renting everything that comes on the market either. Along with price, he looks at the land’s productivity, whether it’s a block or lone quarter and how far it is from his current operation. He also tries to keep the emotion out of business decisions. “And sometimes you decide, because it’s available, I don’t care what I have to pay but I’ll make it work,” he says. “And I think those are the situations where you end up having regrets in the end.” Kwochka has noticed fewer farmers buying land, which he attributes to both sinking prices and grain movement problems. But that doesn’t mean land prices have dropped, Kwochka says. And Kwochka thinks the prospect of more good years ahead is enough to entice farmers back into the market. “They’re actually very optimistic. They do put seed in the ground every year and you’d better be optimistic if you’re doing that,” says Kwochka. “They’re probably the most hopeful people out there.” CG

November 2014

It’s time for a hard look at your rental land. How much does it make sense to pay? By Maggie Van Camp, CG Associate Editor know I’m not alone. The squeeze is on all across Canada, and everyone can point to sets of numbers like the ones I’m looking at in Ontario, with a short 2014 growing season and with off-the-combine corn well below $4 per bushel. So Country Guide asked the Ontario ag ministry’s farm business analyst John Molenhuis to recalculate his closely watched annual crop budgets. The results are a slap to the face: $3.20 per bushel corn with an average yield of 150 bushels per acre crunches out to NEGATIVE $78 per acre, even before you add in land costs. Molenhuis’s spreadsheet does use average custom rates, costs and yields, and includes a $30 overhead (about five per cent of total expenses) but it’s still ugly, and even with 200 bushel corn, it leaves only $18 per acre for land. That’s not even close to enough to cover the rent in most of Ontario, where Molenhuis says rent ranges up to $350 per acre for top-quality land. Nor are Molenhuis and I the only ones taking a second look at rental rates. Ryan Parker, a farm appraiser with Valco Consultants Inc. in London, Ont., sums up the situation in southwestern Ontario in a few succinct words: “Rental deals are still shockingly competitive.” Parker agrees with Molenhuis that top-end rates have been pushed way up over the last four years. They have also spread beyond the notoriously high-priced dairy areas. Recently Parker heard of $300 per acre even in Bruce County, adding, “There’s a lot of $350 per acre to $400 per acre for corn and soybean land in southwestern Ontario.” But there’s also the beginnings of a shift in how rents are formulated. Before you sign any agreement, review it in detail and know your options. Maybe it’s time to consider a joint venture working with someone who has more equipment or land, a flex rental agreement, or even share cropping with landowners. In Ontario, where about 80 per cent of contracts are cash and 18 per cent are sharecrop, only about 26 per cent of agreements are actually written down. In Manitoba, almost 90 per cent are cash ceals, with about half in writing. The higher-cost deals tend to be written, says Parker. If it’s written, you likely can’t back out, although the agreement might be transferable. “Generally you gotta live and die by it,” Parker says. Continued on page 44

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business Continued from page 43 The rental market is evolving, however. More open rent processes are creeping into the market in Ontario, as is tendering, says Parker. But so are trends such as paying up front for multiple years. For example, in 2011, 2012 and 2013 some farmers paid $1,000 an acre for three years, in cash, at the start of the contract, he says. All in all, it’s a sign of the competitiveness of the rental market.

Cash averaging Spreading out total rent as an average over the whole farm over multiple years hides those really expensive pieces on cash flow statements. Efficiency also plays into how much farmers will pay for rent. If the piece is in the middle of their 2,000 acres, the efficiency gains can be very real, although hard to quantify exactly. Also playing into the rise of rental rates are operating loan interest rates that are low, and lending institutions that are competing for farm business. “With slumping commodity prices, producers are getting creative with their financing,” says Parker.

Sometime in the last seven years, land prices and rental rates got seriously decoupled That takes us to the fundamental reason rental rates continue to rise — optimism that prices are going to bounce back. However, those emotions aren’t continuing to play out in farmland purchases. According to Parker, land prices have stabilized with pieces staying on the market longer this year. Yet rental rates continue to be competitive and move up. Historically land has leased for about three per cent return on investment of its present value. Somewhere in the last seven years, however, the link between rental values and land prices got distorted. Federal U.S. statistics show U.S. cropland values soared more than 40 per cent since 2004, outstripping the 17 per cent gains in cash rents. Nor did it happen only south of the border. In southern Ontario, urban centres encroached on areas intense with livestock, resulting in reports of land prices breaching the $20,000-per-acre mark. Throughout the Prairies, farmers’ pockets have become heavy with crop returns in historically high price years, and farmland investment and management companies spurred on land prices. This decoupling of rent and land prices is partly due to a shift in the perception around buying farmland. Some farmers and landowners have moved toward investment-type thinking and away from productive value, and want the same return as a GIC

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plus one per cent for risk factor, says Molenhuis. “They don’t expect farming commodities to pay for it,” he says. “Buying land is sometimes viewed as a separate enterprise from farming.”

Sharper minds prevail Improved farmer financial knowledge is also impacting rental rates, according to The Illinois Society of Professional Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers. Their mid-year survey showed cash rents on professionally managed farmland decreased between 2013 and 2014. However, according to National Agricultural Statistics Service, the average rent across the state of Illinois increased from $224 per acre in 2013 to $234 per acre in 2014. In other words, professionally managed farms were more likely to drop rates when crop prices fell. This group’s rent also increased faster than average cash rents between 2006 and 2013, when returns rose as a result of higher prices. “Crunch your numbers, before you talk to the landlord,” says Rob Hannam, founder and president of Guelph-based Synthesis and instructor at Advanced Farm Management Program. He says it’s imperative to know your cost of production, not only for your whole farm or the provincial average but for each piece of ground you work. Look at each individual rental agreement and question if you should let it go or keep farming it. Sometimes you have to focus on limiting losses. Maybe it’s time to pull back; why put that extra 100 acres in if it’s only going to cost you? Before you buy inputs this fall and winter, take a hard look at application rates and where you can cut back in fertility this year, suggests Hannam. “It’s important in tight margins to really know your machinery costs,” adds Molenhuis. You should be keenly aware of sizing your land base to your equipment, says Hannam. He estimates 1,500 acres per equipment group for an average Ontario wheat, corn, soybean cropping operation. Other regions will have their own ratios, but there will be a ratio for each. If you expand beyond the limit for one equipment set, you effectively need to double your acres and double your equipment, says Hannam.“Avoid the mushy middle between scales of economy.” It’s also time to do a whole-farm cash flow with conservative forecasting for 2015, with quarterly cash flow projections. “Having an annual COP budget is good but knowing when and how much money you will need through the year is a key planning question,” says Molenhuis. This cash flow and COP can help you develop and implement a strong marketing plan so you know when to lock in to cover costs this winter, Molenhuis says. “Whether they market themselves or hire someone to market for them, even a 10 per cent gain in the average market price they receive has big impacts on the bottom line.” CG

November 2014

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

The face and voice of soil conservation in Canada

On the World stage

he Soil Conservation Council of Canada (SCCC) in partnership with the U.S. Conservation Technology Information Centre (CTIC), organized and delivered the 6th World Congress on Conservation Agriculture (WCCA) in Winnipeg, Canada. About 400 people from forty-nine countries participated. This was the first time the WCCA was held in North America and it was a supreme showcase of conservation agriculture from around the world. It was amazing to see a man-pulled one-row no-till seeder from India featured in the same forum as North American 48-row no-till planters. We saw presentations from scientists and farmers successfully using conservation agriculture (CA) in tropical Africa, near desert conditions in Australia and Asia and in the more favourable conditions of France, Argentina and the United States. No-till was generally referenced as the means to achieving conservation agriculture. The successes and benefits of conservation agriculture are found in all conditions and in almost every part of the world. The Congress provided an opportunity to examine the agronomy, technical, social and political challenges associated with both the adoption and promotion of CA through presentations and participant networking. Feature speakers included Dr. David Montgomery, a geomorphology scientist, and author of “Dirt – A Case for Global Restoration”, Howard Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Howard Buffett Foundation, philanthropist and proclaimed no-till farmer who has promoted and shared conservation technology around the world, and Dr. Duane Beck, Manager of the Dakota Lakes Research Farm of the University of South Dakota and internationally acclaimed tillage system and agronomy expert. Chair of the Congress was Dr. Jerry Hatfield of the U.S. National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, a world renowned scientist.

WCCA MANITOBA FARM TOUR: DR. DAVID LOBB, DEPT. OF SOIL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA DISCUSSING INNOVATIVE ON-FARM SURFACE WATER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ON CARL CLASSEN’S FARM.

Collectively, this brought focus to the need for soil protection, soil care, soil health, and the benefit of responsible soil management. The next Congress will be held in Rosario, Argentina, in 2017.

Executive Director, led the planning committee that collaborated with the U.S. partner through the monumental effort required to organize and deliver this international event.

This Congress was not only a huge success but was also a remarkable demonstration of how two very different organizations from two countries can work together toward a common cause – the need to make sustainability the priority in soil use.

Through membership, support and participation in SCCC, organizations, business, government and individuals have collectively advanced the cause of conservation agriculture on the world stage. This is another SCCC activity that all Canadians can be proud of. New members and collaborators are welcome as we move forward to share in SCCC causes. The legacy and vision continues.

The SCCC shone as President Don McCabe led the movement to host a North American Congress and Glen Shaw, SCCC

Dec 2-4, GrowCanada Conference, Ottawa SCCC is co-hosting the “Sustainability at Sunrise” breakfast with Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Canadian Fertilizer Institute. This will help to underscore the importance of soil care and soil health amongst Canada’s farm and corporate leaders. Dec 4, 2014, SCCC Special Meeting, Ottawa, 1:30 PM For more information contact Sue Hubbs, 306-695-2231 or info@soilcc.ca Dec 5, 2014 World Soil Day United Nations General Assembly declared 2015 the International Year of Soils to raise awareness of the importance of soils for food security and the essential role of soils in healthy ecosystems: http://www.fao.org/globalsoilpartnership/iys-2015/en/

www.soilcc.ca

BUSINESS

OPENING UP

U.S. farmers are about to get into the hemp game — but longtime players here in Canada have a business plan to win the day By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor

anada is the big player in the North American hemp business. In fact until very recently, it was the only player. That’s because of the controversial history of the crop, which had been banned north and south of the border since the 1930s because it was lumped together with its psychoactive cousin, marijuana. In Canada, however, that changed on March 12, 1998 when, after years of lobbying, Health Canada began issuing the first licences for commercial hemp production. That kicked off a flurry of would-be entrepreneurs rushing to fill what they perceived as an opportunity. Many failed. But a few did succeed, and today hemp production is a small but growing portion of Canada’s agriculture industry.

They started in health food stores, but today Hemp Hearts are in Costco and Kroeger’s.

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A major market for almost all of these hemp producers has been the U.S., where Canadian suppliers have been the beneficiaries of some regulatory foot-dragging. It’s only this year, thanks to provisions in the new U.S. Farm Bill, that American farmers are allowed to grow the crop. Through those intervening 16 years, however, Canadian farmers and processors were able to grow the crops and ship processed hemp products — but not viable seed — south of the line. Essentially they had a large, wealthy, nearby market to ship to, where there was no domestic competition. With this situation disappearing, you might expect that industry players would be getting nervous. Instead, many seem to sense new opportunities.

DOUBLING DOWN One person who is excited about these changes is Winnipeg’s Mike Fata, who heads up hemp processor Manitoba Harvest. The venture began in 1998 with a simple oil press based at the provincially funded Food Development Centre, a food industry incubator. Today it produces a handful of branded products, including the world’s only all-hemp protein powder, and what Fata calls its flagship product, Hemp Hearts, a hulled hemp seed. “We think U.S. legalization is going to mean new opportunities and new interest,” Fata says. “We’ve seen this time and time again over the past 15 years — any time there’s anything that gets people thinking and talking about hemp, it has meant increased sales for us.” This isn’t just idle speculation. This past summer Manitoba Harvest’s plant in the northwest sector of the city has been abuzz with the sound of construction as it dramatically expands its processing capacity to nearly double, following several years of growing sales. At least in part, the company’s confidence stems from the work it has done over the past 15 years developing its brand and creating relationships with a large and growing book of retailers. Fata says those initiatives have succeeded in making it less vulnerable to new entrants.

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“ That’s always been our strategy — to build a brand,” says Manitoba Harvest’s Mike Fata In many ways, brand building has been easier because Manitoba Harvest was working within the natural and health foods sector, Fata believess. Mainstream food and grocery products can come with some awfully high barriers to entry, he explains, especially since most food is sold through a handful of major retailers that aren’t interested in filling their shelves with a little bit of this or that product. They only want to talk to you if you’ve got enough to supply all their stores all the time. But the health food sector, is different. “In the health food market, there are still a lot of independent stores and small chains,” Fata points out. “Working with them allowed us to get our start, and to grow slowly and cautiously. In fact, the very first store that ever sold our products was an independent health food store right across the street from my mother’s house.” Getting that start put the company on a firm footing and allowed it to create a solid foundation for trying to crack major retailers — a move that coincided with rapidly growing interest in healthy functional foods. Today the company’s products can be found

in Costco and Loblaws here in Canada and Safeway and Kroeger’s in the U.S., to name just a few. “We’re extremely fortunate to have literally thousands of retail partners,” Fata says. So it raises the question: is the next Coca-Cola brewing in the industrial suburbs of Winnipeg? When I put the question to Fata, the hesitation is palpable. As a true believer in the power of better nutrition, Fata has no interest in that link. Instead he proposes another one. “We really like Clif Bar,” Fata says. “It’s a very well-known brand, the first baked energy bar, and is well on the way to being a billion-dollar company.” Whether that desire to build the next great natural food brand succeeds, Fata is further down this road than most, and one observer thinks the business model is a good one. Anndrea Hermann likely has better insight into the hemp industry on both sides of the border than anyone else alive. She’s a transplanted Missourian who now makes her home in Winnipeg, where she studied hemp agronomy at the University of Manitoba. Continued on page 48

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AgCanada.com Network Search Search news. Read stories. Find insight. November 2014

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business Continued from page 47 Today she’s the owner of The Ridge International Cannabis Consulting, is president of the U.S.’s Hemp Industry Association and lectures on industrial hemp at Oregon State University. “I think companies like Manitoba Harvest are really well positioned,” Hermann says. “It’s built a brand, and I think that’s important, because most of the processing we’re talking about, it isn’t rocket science. For example, we shell sunflowers in Missouri — that equipment could likely be adapted to hulling hemp. So having a brand moves you outside of that bulk commodity market.” Hermann says she expects the U.S. industry to take some time to develop, much like the Canadian one did. After all it’s a new crop, complete with a learning curve, and it’s going to take time for farmers to adopt it and learn it. However, she also believes there’s an area where American competitors might benefit from the already developed Canadian industry.

“I think we’ll see Canadian processors working with U.S. growers,” Hermann said. “It’ll be similar to what’s happened in the pulse industry, where Canada had a head start. They’ll either contract with nearby U.S. growers or they’ll go to the U.S. and build a turnkey plant.” Fata confirms that processors would likely be interested in moving into the U.S. in some fashion. “Just over the border, in North Dakota, there’s some prime hemp-growing land and some pretty good farmers,” Fata says. Hermann also suggests other facets of the industry — such as the crop research and breeding establishment — could also benefit, much as they have in the pulse industry. “This will mean a new market for these great Canadian varieties,” Hermann says. But branding will be essential here too, Hermann says. Americans would need to be educated to understand and respect plant breeder rights. CG

What’s on the horizon in agriculture? Watch This Country Called Agriculture and be informed. This Country Called Agriculture is a new on-demand video series that delivers relevant news & information on the agriculture industry. Host Rob Eirich interviews ag pioneers, professionals and academics that offer insight into today’s trends and what the future holds for agriculture – on and off the farm. Video topics include:  Sustainability

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TCCA CURRENT EPISODES Consumer Benefits from Genomics Rob Eirich talking with Tom Lynch-Staunton of Livestock Gentec, and Colin Coros of Delta Genomics, about the benefits of animal genomics for consumers.

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November 2014

business

A new credit model Input Capital makes farm loans, but only if you promise them a share of what you produce By Andrea Hilderman

photo: inputcapital.com

nput Capital is a Saskatchewan-based, TSXtraded, public company that is introducing commodity streaming to farmers to finance new and growing operations or even to achieve production goals or yield potential. Streaming-financing isn’t brand new as a concept, but it is quite new to agriculture. It is more often seen in the mining industry where production is capital intensive, and where much of that capital is required long before the first pound of ore is dug. In mining, not surprisingly, sources of operating capital can be hard to find, and even if you can find credit, the interest rates can be very high. Streamingfinancing addresses that by providing up-front funds in exchange for the right to purchase some portion of the mine’s output at a predetermined price.

With an extra $40 million this year, Input Capital’s Nystuen says the company’s streaming fund now tops $100 million Input Capital grew out of another Saskatchewan company — Assiniboia Farmland Limited Partnership (AFLP). As AFLP acquired farmland and rented it to farmers to operate, it attracted a lot of young farmers. “These were under-45-year-old farmers who saw the opportunity to expand their farming operations,” says Gord Nystuen, vice-president of market development. “It was not easy to get the financing or working capital to operate the farm to its full potential.” It was from that observation that a pilot was tested in 2009 to determine if there was a way to provide capital that would work for farmers as well as for the financing company and its investors. “That pilot led to the creation of Input Capital,” says Nystuen. “We found a way to access financing from public investors in a framework that would work for the farmer at the one end, and the investor at the other by permitting the investor to exit if they wanted to without interrupting the farm business.”

November 2014

The goal of Input Capital is to provide working capital to farm operations outside the normal bank and input-supplier systems. “When farms have sufficient cash on the balance sheet, farm managers can make business decisions that will improve margins,” says Nystuen. They might pre-buy nitrogen at lower prices, for instance, or they might buy seed earlier in order to assure access to the best varieties. It’s when farm operations have insufficient cash reserves that trade-offs have to be made, says Nystuen, like having to sell grain to pay bills as opposed to marketing in an orderly fashion with a deliberate strategy. “Another advantage that is more challenging to see is in the planning and budgeting process,” says Nystuen. “If there is a very tight ratio of working capital to farm size, the working capital gets allocated across all acres versus formulating a strategy to optimize returns.” An example Nystuen uses is that rather than capitalize on good wheat and canola prices by boosting fertilizer rates accordingly, a grower will put on only enough N to grow a decent crop. “The grower tends to budget from a scarcity of working capital, as opposed to looking at crop potential based on his analysis of the markets, prices and weather. And these two approaches result in very different outcomes.” An interesting requirement in the contract with Input Capital is the farmer must work with a consulting agrologist. “This is our way of ensuring the farm and the working capital we supply is put to the best possible use,” says Nystuen. “We don’t hand over the cash and walk away; rather, we are invested in optimizing the operation.” For older, typically well-capitalized farmers this is the norm. But for newer or younger farmers who don’t have the cash reserves, it’s much more difficult, especially if they are trying to expand the farm year over year. Any increase in margins is just getting spread over a larger land base, and it hinders the optimization of the farm. “It puts guys in a quandary,” says Nystuen. Do you stop growing the farm for a period, he asks, recognizing that sometimes you need to be ready to expand when the opportunity presents itself. Input Capital raised $65 million in capital from investors in its first campaign and has canolaContinued on page 51

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BUSINESS

DOES STREAMING PASS THE FARM TEST? Darin Pedersen, his wife Sheri and children Brooke and Kristie farm 4,800 acres north of Nokomis, Sask. The Pedersen’s were introduced to Gord Nystuen of Input Capital a few years before Input Capital was created and became part of the pilot testing that led to the formation of the company and have continued to use the streaming-financing model. “Gord has always wanted to see our farm succeed, first and foremost,” says Pedersen. “This financing has lifted a lot of pressure off us. We don’t have to worry about loan amounts, payment dates and interest rates. We just produce canola and Input Capital gets their agreed volume to market.” With the financing, he says, he has been able to do a better job of sourcing the right inputs at the right price. “We’ve been able to focus on making earlier purchases to get much better pricing,” says Pedersen. “As well, we’ve hired local agronomists and now Agri-Trend, and we are starting to really hone our nutrient programs, as well as help with the in-season scouting.” Pederson also believes such a structure helps him apply his skills where they make the greatest difference. The puzzle pieces start to fall into place once sufficient working capital is in place, Pedersen has found. “These guys come to the farm regularly, work with you and push you to farm better and smarter. And no surprise, that’s an easier way to farm and we see the results.”

Darin Pedersen believes streaming-financing could help more producers focus more of their efforts on producing the best crop in the field

L c W y s l

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Photography: DELLA DESROCHERS

Continued from page 49 streaming contracts in place for a six year period with about 26 growers. Now it has raised an additional $40 million in 2014. “The contract we devised creates a vehicle for us to provide the upfront working capital without taking an ownership position in real estate or assets,” explains Nystuen. “Farmers told us clearly that that was not how they wanted to partner with us. So, we invest for a share of the production, a specified number of tonnes of canola over a specified number of years.” This differs from a term loan because the streaming partner, in this case Input Capital, takes on the price risk for the commodity in each year. “If we can sell at higher prices, our investors do better,” explains Nystuen. “And if we can’t or we do worse, then their returns are lower. We also won’t accept tonnes ahead of the contract, nor would we come in and ask for more production if prices were high, for instance.” The goal is to have Input Capital and the farmers’ interests aligned with both focused on keeping the business viable over the period of the contract. Input Capital takes on prospective clients only after extensive discussions. “We meet with growers,

conduct a financial assessment to ensure the farm is viable, the right equipment is available to farm, the business strategy is in place and the farmland assets are sufficient for the tenure of the contract,” says Nystuen. “This is far more than checking your credit score,” Nystuen insists. “We want to become a partner. The success of our business depends on the success of our relationship with the farmer.” To that end, Input Capital has seasoned ag experts and farmers working on business development. “Some of these guys are long-term farmers themselves, all very capable and successful. For the most part, they’ve lived this story — starting with limited resources and struggling in those first years to build up their operations. When they sit down at the kitchen table with a prospective client, they know exactly what it’s like to be on the other side of that table.” 2013-14 was Input Capital’s first year of operations and they are planning on significant growth in the next season with more of a presence over the winter months to promote their innovative approach to working capital financing. More about Input Capital is online at www.inputcapital.com. The company’s shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol “INP.” CG

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business

Cautiously aggressive What does it take to be inducted into a business hall of fame? CG asked Gavin Semple, the first inductee into the new Saskatchewan Manufacturing Hall of Fame By Scott Garvey, CG Machinery Editor t first, the comment seemed counterintuitive. I was sitting across a small table from Gavin Semple, chair of the Saskatchewan-based Brandt Group of Companies, during Canada’s Farm Progress Show in Regina in June. Semple had just been recognized as the first-ever inductee into the newly created Saskatchewan Manufacturing Hall of Fame, and I wanted to find out from him what it takes to garner professional recognition on that scale. Semple’s surprising statement was this: “I view myself as just one of 1,800 employees (in his company). We have a lot of people in the company that are a lot smarter than I am that do the heavy lifting every day.” But after thinking about it, the idea is entirely logical. The recognition that every employee is a potential source of insight or knowledge equal to or better than his own has allowed Semple to leverage their skills and abilities with his own, propelling the company forward.

Gavin Semple is chair of the Brandt Group of Companies. Photo: Brandt

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In the process, they have also helped vault him to prominence among his peers and secure his induction into the hall of fame. “The success of any business is never due to the efforts of just one person,” Semple went on. “It’s due to the efforts of many. I’m fortunate to have a lot of employees and managers that have been with us for a long time. So this award I received last night, I received on their behalf.” Today, the Brandt Group of Companies is a diversified manufacturing and equipment retailing business that has an annual turnover of $1.4 billion. But that wasn’t how Semple found it. Less than four decades ago the company was grossing only about $1 million a year. “I started with the company as a salesman in 1972,” Semple recalled. “I travelled a territory, then became a sales manager the year after, in ’73. And in 1976 I became the president and general manager. At that time we were a small company; we had 25 employees doing about $1 million in sales. We were selling grain augers and machine shop services.” Growing Brandt beyond its one-product, regionalmanufacturer status first required expanding the variety of equipment rolling out the factory door. Diversification is essential in Semple’s view. “Over time we expanded our product line and entered new markets, in Canada, the U.S. and around the world,” Semple said. “We (now) have five main companies. We also manufacture rail equipment, pipe handling and testing equipment, and mining. So we’re quite diversified, and that’s stood us in good stead over many years because, as you know, all business cycles. We’re like a farmer who’s growing a variety of crops. You hope the price of crops on average will give you a good return.” That allowed his organization to cash in on opportunities well beyond its original focus on agricultural machinery manufacturing, including taking on John Deere construction equipment dealerships. “Brandt Tractor is our largest company and we sell the yellow John Deere equipment — construction and forestry. In 1992 we started with two very small, modest dealerships. The sales and marketing went

November 2014

business

very well for us, so John Deere gave us the opportunity to acquire other dealerships. So we bought Winnipeg, Calgary and Red Deer in 1995. We (now) have 27 locations.” Of course, over time inflation and global economic growth have helped fuel increases in the company’s net worth. “When we bought some of those dealerships in Alberta, oil was $12 a barrel,” Semple said. But he thinks the most critical aspect in the company’s success has been to find ways to create growth within the organization. Simply relying on takeovers to increase revenues doesn’t cut it. And growth, according to Semple, can only happen when a manager has surrounded himself with the right employees. “The growth has not only come from the acquisitions,” he says, “but from the organic growth after the acquisitions, which is really what’s important to growing a company. And that’s all based around the fundamental belief we have about the importance of people. It’s easy to buy assets like buildings, machinery and so on, but that doesn’t do it for you unless you have a great team of motivated, smart people.” However, growth involves risk. Why bother? According to the Bank of Canada, a business such as Brandt that did $1 million in sales in 1973 and continued to operate at the same level would be generating more than $5.23 million today. There’s likely ample revenue in there to keep a pretty nice car parked in the driveway with far fewer headaches. “No, I don’t think it’s an option,” Semple said, shaking his head. “You’re either growing or dying in my view, because the market is dynamic. It’s changing all the time. Every sector we participate in, we have very good competitors, all of whom want more business.” “This is my view: If you take the approach of saying I’m comfortable, I don’t want to expand, I don’t want to hire more people, I don’t want to build more buildings or whatever, and if you don’t participate in the market in a competitive way, your competitors will. So they will consume the market and we will shrink.” Financing the kinds of major acquisitions like those Brandt has swallowed and not exposing the company to excess risk requires a financial strategy, too. “We did it all through retaining profits,” explained Semple. “We also have some minority partners on the Brandt Tractor side. It’s cautious growth, conservative but aggressive. Conservative and aggressive don’t seem to go together. We watch our balance sheet so as not to take on more debt than we can handle, yet you have to take risks; and you have to take on debt if you’re going to take advantage of opportunities.” To help create the organic growth that Semple thinks a firm needs to complement its acquisitions, his management approach revolves around four core principles. “Innovation is very important, but not just inno-

November 2014

vation in products, although our engineering people focus on that heavily. It’s innovation in the way we do business,” he said. “Innovation is one of our four core values. It’s innovation in everything we do.” “Quality is our second. Again, that’s quality in everything we do, not just quality in the products. Quality in the people. Quality in the facilities. Quality in our business systems. A focus on quality, so everyone is thinking quality all the time and they won’t compromise when they are making decisions. You have a lot managers when you have 1,800 people, so they’ve got to have some guiding principles.” “Commitment is another core value. And that’s not only commitment on the part of the employees, we ask them to do whatever it takes to satisfy customers. But it’s also commitment on the part of the shareholders, the owners, my son and I, to continue to invest, to give them the tools, training and technology they need in order to perform at a high level.” “The final one is customer focus. That’s probably the number one core value that any company needs. It’s to realize all your success comes from your customers, so you better focus on what customers need, what they want, and then be a participant in helping them be successful.” Achieving hall-of-fame status apparently isn’t luring Semple away from those core values or lulling him into a sense of corporate complacency. “We’re continuing to expand,” Semple said. “We continue to look for opportunities, both here and elsewhere to grow the business. And we look for synergy — in other words, businesses or products or markets that complement what we’re doing. So when we add one and one we get three. There is a lot of opportunity out there. It’s a matter of choosing the right opportunities.” And then there is that team of 1,800 employees Semple relies on: “They’re also out there looking for opportunities.” CG

Award: (l to r) Minister Bill Boyd, Sask Ministry of the Economy, Gavin Semple, Lynette Gillen — RBC Royal Bank, Grant Demery — RCAP Leasing, Melissa Fiacco — Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters. Photo: Inspiration Photography

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How to become more proactive A positive attitude will help you lead a better farm business By Pierrette Desrosiers, M.Ps. roactive people are healthier and happier, and they enjoy better relationships. Studies prove it. Proactive people also know themselves well, and they know their values and their mission. They have life plans, and they set goals for themselves in all life areas. Perhaps most important, they also have a sense of control over their lives. Their motivation, standards and values come from within. They invest in their relationships, and they are better able to prevent conflicts. Proactive people come up with solutions to problems without creating additional unintended consequences. They will pass over opportunities that are not compatible with their overall life vision, and they spend most of their time dealing with non-urgent but important matters. Reactive people, by contrast, are often affected by their physical environment. When things are going well, they see life through rose-coloured glasses, but difficult times give them the blues. Trends and the opinions of others influence them tremendously. Their emotional state is greatly affected by how the people around them behave. To a large extent, reactive people blame others for their mental state. For example, a reactive person might say, “I’m in a bad mood because my employee left,” or, “My crop isn’t doing well; it really gets me down.” Reactive people respond to requests and crisis situations but they do not foresee problems. For example, they may react only when their associate or spouse threatens to leave them. Their motivations come primarily from external sources. They invest their time in urgent but unimportant matters. Passive people, on the other hand, have never reacted, or they have given it up. They do not have goals or life projects. They see themselves as victims, without motivation or support. These people complain about their neighbour, the government, the weather, the past and their spouses, but do absolutely nothing to improve their lives. They invest the vast majority of their time in non‑urgent and unimportant matters. Proactive language

Reactive language

Passive language

I will

I am being controlled

I don’t know

I believe

It is their fault

If you want

I choose

I was forced to

Someday

I commit myself

I can’t help myself

I’d really like to, but

I decide to

I am ashamed of her

I really wish that I could, but

I don’t want to

I cannot be happy because

I don’t have a choice, I have to

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So which are you, proactive, reactive or passive? It turns out we can make ourselves more proactive, and it can not only help us endure extreme pressure during trying times, we can address business issues in better ways too. If it’s time to change your attitude, start with these five tips:

1. Evaluate your core beliefs. Whether you’re aware of your core beliefs or not, they influence your thoughts, behaviour and emotions, which in turn impact your results. They become self-fulfilling prophecies. Listen to your internal dialogue.

2. Replace negativity with productive thoughts. Be aware of your thinking habits. This will help you build resilience and solve problems so you reach your goals. Instead of saying, “I will never be able to survive that change,” you could think, “It will be hard for a while, but I will find a way through.”

3. D on’t waste your mental energy. Wasting your time and energy to ruminate on or complain about things you can’t control makes you miserable. It also demotivates others and drains mental energy.

4. Learn to tolerate discomfort, and become psychologically flexible. Being mentally strong doesn’t mean you don’t experience negative emotions or that you should deny those emotions. Mental strength is about accepting your feelings without being controlled by them. It’s about choosing the right way to act according to the situation.

5. R eflect on your progress daily. Create time to think about your thoughts, actions and reactions, with questions like: Did it help me reach my goals? Did I act according to my values? What could I change now? Although it is true that some incidents can affect us physically or financially and cause us harm, we should never let them influence our personality and identity. We need to consider our problems from a different perspective, and we need to focus our energy on appropriate solutions. It’s critical that we accept the things we cannot change, change the things we can, and cultivate the wisdom to know the difference. CG Pierrette Desrosiers, MPS, CRHA is a work psychologist, professional speaker, coach and author who specializes in the agricultural industry. She comes from a family of farmers and she and her husband have farmed for more than 25 years (www.pierrettedesrosiers.com). Contact her at pierrette@pierrettedesrosiers.com. November 2014

guide

Moving to market Truckers and farmers are still figuring each other out following a massive move to hired transport By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor he 2014 crop is in the bin, and farmers now face their two perennial post-harvest challenges. They must market their grains and oilseeds amid a challenging world scene, and they must move those harvests efficiently off the farm. Over the past 20 years, the way they’ve done that second job has changed dramatically. Back when there were 4,000 primary elevators dotting the Prairies, most grain moved just a few miles, and there were lots of delivery options right in their hometowns for many farmers. Grain moved mainly on farmer-owned trucks, usually either a small three-ton single-axle job, a slightly larger tandem-axle model, or just here and there a highway tractor with super-b grain trailer. Today that’s all changed. Now there are fewer than 300 elevators covering a region that’s three-quarters of a million square miles. Just delivering to the nearest elevator is often a 40- or 50-mile trip each way, but grain can also be trucked hundreds of miles to end-users.

“ Call it growing pains or a learning curve, or whatever you will, it’s really about developing a mutual understanding of what the trucker and the farmer want and need.” — Terry Shaw, Manitoba Trucking Association It’s all led to incentives to load grain onto larger, often hired, trucks, and on the surface it looks like the perfect solution. It works for farmers because the volumes and distances have grown. It works for elevators because larger deliveries are more efficiently processed and transaction costs fall. And it obviously works for trucking companies, who like the volume and income from another major industry. But at times this new way of doing business isn’t so smoothly executed. One observer in the trucking industry says that’s not entirely surprising, considering how new the November 2014

relationship is. Terry Shaw is the executive director of the Manitoba Trucking Association, and he confirms that the trucker-farmer interface is definitely a relationship that’s still in its formative stages. There’s a learning curve that runs both ways, Shaw says. He believes the trucking industry has at least as much to learn as the farmers they’re now hauling for. Truckers, for example, must respect that farmers are busy people who can’t sit in the yard all day, which means truckers need to get better at communicating when they’ll arrive, and then stick to that schedule. Likewise, farmers need to understand that unforeseen delays in loading can dramatically affect both the trucker and whether the load gets there in time. “We’re heavily regulated in the trucking industry,” Shaw says. “We’re not anti-regulation, but it is a fact of life. So, for example, if a driver shows up and what he thinks will take 20 minutes to load actually takes three hours, that can put them over the allowable hours in their log book, so what should be a 12-hour trip for them becomes a 24-hour one.” In the end, the key is better two-way communication, and again Shaw says the improvement needs to come on both ends. Farmers need to get better at understanding what they’re asking for, and they need to see limitations of the equipment and the locations they’re asking the trucking industry to load from. “We do sometimes see situations where a truck will go out and won’t fit,” Shaw says. It adds up to expensive delays for both parties, and for the trucker, it can mean time on the clock they’re not necessarily getting paid for. Yet on the trucking side, there’s also room to do a better job of ensuring everyone gets the information they need. “We are, I’m afraid, notorious for not passing information along, especially to our drivers,” Shaw says. So when you’re talking to the trucking company, make sure you flag anything unusual, Shaw says, and if you’re talking directly to the trucker later, let them know too. Speak up if the road is a seasonal one, or if there are tight turns or anything out of the ordinary, like nearby power lines. If they know about it, they can plan for it. As the working relationship evolves between the two industries, Shaw says the problems generally begin to iron themselves out. “If you deal regularly with one company and Continued on page 56 country-guide.ca 55

guide Continued from page 55 their drivers, this understanding begins to emerge,” Shaw says. “I think there are a lot of truckers and farmers who have begun to work very well together.” Technology also helps, especially thanks to cellphones. “It’s getting a lot easier,” Shaw says. “Back when I was working in the industry, you used to have to book an appointment just to make a call.” Today drivers and farmers can connect directly and fine tune their interactions, with the potential to eliminate a lot of problems. Shaw also notes that the total elimination of these challenges will likely prove impossible, since they continue to exist in other businesses and locations served by the trucking industry. “It doesn’t matter if you’re picking up a load in rural Manitoba or Saskatchewan or delivering a load to downtown Chicago — there are always going to be challenges,” Shaw says.

Better infrastructure One key to smoothing out this interaction has been better farm-level infrastructure, according to grain storage expert Blaine Timlick of the Canadian Grain Commission in Winnipeg. Timlick says the most progressive growers are already well aware of the challenges they face with this new shipping paradigm, and they’re already on top of it. “I think a lot of farmers have adapted and are thinking about what they’re doing and making investments to build better infrastructure on the farm,” Timlick says. That’s meant newer and larger bins, more careful design of bin yards, and attention to things like beds of compacted gravel for both bins and trucks and turning radius of larger highway units, Timlick says. “There are a lot of yards out there now with largecapacity bins and handling equipment that are well laid out and easy to get a super-b in,” Timlick says. A University of Manitoba grain storage specialist echoes these thoughts, saying farmers have clearly realized there’s a compelling economic case for streamlining their storage and handling systems. Digvir Jayas is a senior administrator at that university today, but previously he held a Canada Research Chair studying stored grain technology. “Planning your grain storage and handling system to make it more efficient to get grain in and out reduces costs,” Jayas says. “It also pays other dividends by freeing up time for other farm activities.” The basic design considerations are relatively well understood, Jayas says. A bin yard needs to be laid out so large trucks can easily move in and out. The base of the yard should be firm enough to support the weight of loaded trucks. It should allow easy transfer of grain from bin to hot air dryer and back again, and incorporate aeration fans on the bins. However, the reality is that most farm grain-handling systems fall somewhere short of perfect, and a lot of them are works in progress that tend to be added to periodically throughout the life of the farm. 56 country-guide.ca

It’s not uncommon to visit a farm and see bins from multiple decades, some placed in locations where they’d never be put today, Timlick says. One option is to move the bins, but it’s rarely a first choice. “You can do it, but you have to build a compacted gravel base to take the weight of the bin, and of course pour new concrete,” Timlick says. “It’s not cheap or easy.” Jayas agrees it’s not a common practice, but says like any infrastructure, bins can wear out and reach the end of their useful life cycle. This is when the changes tend to occur, he says. “When it is time to replace that bin, spend some time thinking how to make grain handling more efficient,” he says. “Don’t just plunk a bin back down in the same spot because it’s always been there.” Among the toughest problems to deal with are the remote bins. Almost every farm has some, and they tend to be on fields a long way from the yard site because it’s too far to carry crops from the field during the busy harvest season. That saves hassle for the farmer during that critical period, but arguably what’s really happening is that the trouble is just being deferred until later. “The issue becomes one of accessibility,” Timlick says. “You’ll have to clear snow, for example. And how easy will it be to get in and out of the site?” Then there’s also the nature of the remote bins themselves. Almost always there’s no power to these sites and therefore no aeration. They can be tough to monitor, and sometimes get overlooked or checked less than is optimal just because they can be hard to access regularly. It makes for a two-pronged management challenge for growers, Timlick says. “You really want to be sure the grain going into these bins is dry, especially if it’s likely you’ll be holding it until later in the year,” Timlick says. Then there’s the question of how to manage deliveries out of these less-than-ideal locations. Some farmers purposely schedule their marketing from these locations around this challenge. They either ship early in the marketing cycle — late fall or early winter — when the bins are easier to access. Or they close the bin up for the winter and won’t make deliveries until spring or the following summer. “Those really are your two best options,” Timlick says. Of course that won’t always be possible either, so when deliveries are coming out of these sites in mid-winter, advanced planning becomes important. Snow needs to be cleared, backup plans in case equipment fails or trucks get stuck need to be in place, and generally there needs to be a higher level of management. Terry Shaw of the MTA stresses that ultimately, anything that smooths out this on-farm interaction between shipper and hauler will pay dividends to both. “Everyone wants that shipment to go smoothly and efficiently,” Shaw says. “If we do it right, you’ll put a few dollars in our jeans pocket and we’ll return the favour with good and efficient service.” CG November 2014

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guide

Our biggest risk There’s no reason why the West must become an Arkansas-style nightmare because of weed resistance, but we may be heading there anyway By Jay Whetter

A crew hand-weeds Palmer amaranth in Arkansas, where Roundup Ready has plunged to just 15 per cent of the state’s cotton acres.

eil Harker calls herbicide-resistant weeds the biggest threat to sustainable crop production in Western Canada. “We’ve been the grim reaper talking about this for ages, but this is a watershed moment,” says the research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lacombe, Alta. “There are places in North America going back to the plow and hand-weeding because herbicides are not working as they had been. We’re not there yet in Western Canada, but we’re getting closer.” Jason Norsworthy, weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, knows where we’re heading. Arkansas is among the most severely affected states with crop rotations that often include Roundup Ready cotton, Roundup Ready soybeans and Roundup Ready corn, creating intense selection pressure for glyphosateresistant weeds. “Glyphosate is now completely lost for much of the southern U.S.,” Norsworthy says. Today, only about 15 per cent of the cotton is Roundup Ready, down from nearly 100 per cent.

Growers have adapted, but at a price. “We have a really clean crop this year,” Norsworthy says. “But weed management costs have basically tripled.” Growers use various pre-seed products to make sure the field is completely clean before seeding, and then use soil-applied residual herbicides in crop. Cotton, for example, often gets seven in-crop applications per season. Growers then hire hand-weeders to get any escapes. The most threatening glyphosate-resistant weed by far is Palmer amaranth, which Norsworthy calls “redroot pigweed on steroids.” Literally billions of Palmer amaranth plants will emerge per acre, with emergence continuing all season long. The weeds can grow six to seven feet tall, and each plant can produce up to 1.5 million seeds. Even if soil-applied herbicides are 99 per cent effective, those escapes can quickly rebuild the seed bank. “In Arkansas alone, we had at least 750,000 acres hand-weeded this year, and it would have been much higher if we had the labour to do it,” says Norsworthy.

Why Arkansas matters here The fact that a single weed is causing so much trouble in Arkansas is an important message to growers in Western Canada. North America has at least 15 glyphosate-resistant weeds, but just one is enough to upset the balance. One glyphosate-resistant weed — kochia — is now confirmed in all three Prairie provinces, and for growers with a kochia problem, this is a serious concern. The second important message from the southern U.S. experience is that no new herbicide has come along to rescue the situation. This is a huge market opportunity for crop protection companies to extract premium value for a new mode of action. “Yet there is absolutely no new mode of action in the pipeline,” Norsworthy says. So Arkansas growers are back to 50-year-old products like 2,4-D and dicamba (although weed resistance to dicamba is showing up), and they have drastically stepped up their tillage too. The third important message from the U.S. experience is that herbicide-resistant weeds don’t have to develop on your farm to become a problem. Resistant weeds are on the move. Glyphosate-resistant

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Palmer amaranth was first discovered in Georgia — which makes sense given the selection pressure of the typical southern crop rotation and that Palmer amaranth is a heat-loving weed suited to Georgia’s arid conditions, Norsworthy says. “However, it is now found in 28 states, including northern states of Michigan, Wisconsin and possibly Minnesota.” Weed seeds spread far and wide in custom combines, to give one example. Cotton hulls — and weed seeds in the dockage — are also trucked around the U.S. for dairy feed. Dairy cow manure spread on fields is a simple way to introduce seeds from resistant weeds. Then there’s the more natural method — wind — that blows seeds and seed-shedding plants all over the place. Think tumbling kochia and its 30,000 seeds per plant.

The Prairie situation Hugh Beckie, weed scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Saskatoon, has been tracking herbicide-resistant weeds for the past 15 to 20 years. He is in the middle of another two-year survey of Saskatchewan. In the early 2000s, Beckie estimated the number of Prairie acres with at least one species of herbicide-resistant weed at 10.9 million. By end of that decade, Beckie’s estimate had increased to 24.4 million.

This year, Beckie revised the total to 38.0 million. The population of resistant weeds within those acres has likely also increased significantly. Group 1-resistant wild oats are the most common. As of 2009, an estimated nine million acres were infested with Group 1-resistant wild oats. Wild oats have been found with resistance to Group 2 and Group 8 herbicides as well. More than 300,000 acres have wild oat plants with resistance to all three of these groups. Group 1-resistant green foxtail is widespread, as are many Group 2-resistant broadleaf weeds, including cleavers and kochia. In fact, weed management specialists assume that most kochia is Group 2 resistant. Glyphosate resistance is an add-on feature. Beckie estimates the cost of herbicide-resistant weeds at $1.1 billion to $1.5 billion per year on the Prairies. The cost is from a combination of related factors, according to grower surveys. These include added herbicide cost due to increased tank mixing required, added overall weed management (cost of tillage or crop rotation, for example) and lost yield due to increased weed competition.

Continued on page 60

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Continued from page 59

So what do we do? Gregory Sekulic is an agronomy specialist with the Canola Council of Canada and he spends a lot of time thinking ahead about sustainability challenges to canola production on the Prairies. “With resistant weeds, the first step is to think about weed management as a whole,” Sekulic says. “Herbicides alone are not the solution. “Herbicide-resistant canola has saved growers a lot of time and effort when it comes to weed management, but we are at risk of losing that tool,” Sekulic says. “Best practices for weed management need to be applied to save these tools for the long term.” This includes immediate action and long-term prevention. Scout for escapes and suspicious patches and then act quickly to contain them. Cut those patches before the weeds set seed — use a mower or perhaps take that part of the crop for silage — or spot spray with a different mode of action. To reduce the selection pressure for resistant weeds, look at rotating herbicide-tolerant canola systems, especially if you’re in a two-year canola rotation, Sekulic says. Use product tank mixes in the pre-seed, in-crop and harvest windows. And take steps that increase efficacy — such as hitting weeds when they’re small, when they’re actively growing, and at label rates and water volumes. Then adopt practices that aren’t just about herbicides, Sekulic adds. Winter cereals are a great rotation crop because they’re highly competitive and provide this competition at different times of the year (i.e. fall and early spring) than spring-seeded crops. Also winter cereals are harvested earlier, which means many weeds are cut off before they set seed.

Scout for escapes, urges the Canola Council’s Greg Sekulic. Then act quickly to contain them before they build up a seed bank Perennial alfalfa and clover are dynamite. Neil Harker led a five-year study, concluding in 2014, into integrated crop management systems for wild oats. He found that three years of alfalfa took wild oat populations down to almost nothing with no herbicides required after the crop was established. “What we need to do better,” Harker says, “is to apply economics to these rotations to see how they can work into a grower’s profitability objectives.” He concedes that with the move away from mixed farms, these crops don’t seem to make economic sense for all growers. He’d like to have numbers to show how these crops could work into an integrated long-term approach to weed management, especially on fields where resistant weeds are at critical numbers and the higher investment required for herbicides has changed the economic picture. Sekulic would much prefer growers look at rotation and diversity before tillage. “I don’t see a widespread return to tillage as the solution,” he says. Norsworthy encourages growers to get in front of the issue. He gives the example of one Arkansas grower who noticed a few Palmer amaranth escapes back in 2004. Numbers were low — about one escape per acre — but the grower still felt it worthwhile to pay $2 to $3 per acre to have people walk fields and hand-pull these escapes. As a result, he kept his soil’s seed bank of Palmer amaranth very low. Now, while neighbours pay $150 per

acre for hand-weeding, his costs are more reasonable and his profits are healthier, Norsworthy says. “He still has Palmer amaranth, but he can still effectively control it with glyphosate and his handweeding costs are only $4 to $5 per acre.” Arkansas is researching harvest strategies, including weed mills that destroy seeds that pass through the combine, and windrow burning. These tools will reduce the seed bank and reduce selection pressure on herbicides. Communities have also taken on the job of managing weed escapes near ditches, creeks and bridges. Necessity has forced them. “We’ve had folks go bankrupt over herbicideresistant weeds,” Norsworthy says. That said, it’s not a complete writeoff. “I’m seeing the cleanest crops I’ve seen in seven or eight years, and soybeans achieved a state record for yield last year,” Norsworthy says. “But every acre will have glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth, and every grower wishes he had been proactive to prevent this problem in the first place.” CG Jay Whetter is a communications manager with the Canola Council of Canada. For more on Neil Harker’s wild oat study, enter this website www.canolacouncil.org/media/546908/science2013/ index.html and read study 6.1. For much more on herbicide-resistant weeds around the world, try this site: www. weedscience.com/summary/home.aspx.

ID problem weeds early This photo shows bands of glyphosate-resistant kochia in a field. Mature resistant plants had tumbled through, shedding seed along the way. The following season all other kochia plants were controlled by an application of glyphosate, but not these ones. This is a clear sign of resistance. Any weed patches that should have been controlled by a herbicide, but were not, suggest a potential resistance situation. Live weeds beside dead weeds of the same species is another indicator. Early detection followed by spot spraying or even hand-weeding will keep these resistant patches contained. Labs in Western Canada can test weeds for resistance if you want to be sure. A list of them can be found at www.canolawatch.org/2013/01/31/agriculture-labs/#6. Photo: Eric Johnson

60 country-guide.ca

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GUIDE

Going shopping In a tough market, ever yone says “shop your grain around.” But what’s the best way to do that?

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By Gord Gilmour, CG Associate Editor

ith strong grain prices over the past few years, marketing has been relatively easy. Sure, there’s been the perennial question of whether the market will go higher or lower. But finding profitable prices wasn’t exactly searching for a needle in a haystack. As long as they got the yield in the field, profits were largely there for the taking for the astute farm manager. This season the landscape has shifted. Now, finding a profit is a lot harder, and grain marketers are looking at a few dimes and nickles per bushel making the difference between red and black ink on the balance sheet, says one marketing expert. David Drozd heads up Winnipeg-based Ag-Chieve Corporation, a grain-marketing advisory firm. He’s telling his farming clients that discipline and knowledge will be the winning tactics this crop year. That means taking a fresh look at some foundational marketing and management concepts. The first couple of steps are no surprise. “It’s all going to start with the farmer’s cost of production. They need to know what it actually was,” Drozd says. “Everyone does their estimates before the start of the growing season, but they need to revisit this now, after the season has wrapped up, and figure out what their actual cost of production was. From that, they can then start looking for profitable pricing opportunities.” The next step is determining exactly what’s in the bin — amounts, grades and other quality factors like protein levels or issues such as fusarium in wheat or green seed in canola. One idea, Drozd says, is to consider contacting your short list of potential buyers and have the grain pre-graded, using a representative harvest sample. Once you have amassed this knowledge, the marketing game really begins in earnest, and it’s very much a game that’s been evolving over the past couple of decades. During that time grain companies consolidated, they closed elevators and they centralized operations mainly in highthroughput concrete elevators and inland terminals. The talk has been that farmers were losing market power to these ever-larger grain companies, but it’s also led to an interesting dynamic where there are opportunities throughout the marketing year when the scale of these operations works against the grain companies, providing growers with short-term pricing windows that can prove to be profitable, Drozd says. For example an elevator agent may suddenly find themselves a few thousand tonnes short of a very specific product required to fill a 100-car unit train that just arrived. This causes them to offer what’s essentially a “same-day-special” to pull this specific grain in very quickly. “We’re regularly seeing these sorts of offers in the market,” Drozd says. “For example, I’m aware of one situation recently where for a very short period of time, two elevators that were seven miles apart were almost $1 a bushel different in price for wheat.”

NOVEMBER 2014

GUIDE

Those opportunities crop up because the grain delivery system these days is very much a just-intime model, where large facilities need to be regularly turned over to ensure profitability, and where trains and boats need to run on time, or charges start to stack up fast. For example, leaving a boat waiting at the Port of Vancouver can run between $15,000 and $25,000 a day, making a few extra cents a bushel to a few farmers pale in comparison. The challenge for farmers is to identify where opportunities like this may emerge, and then make sure you’re positioned to take advantage of them, says Frank Letkeman, a front-line market adviser for Ag-Chieve with a long career in the grain industry, including a stint as an elevator manager.

“I really do believe that it’s in markets like this one that you get paid for your market intelligence and the knowledge of the market that you gather,” Letkeman says. “Frankly, I think it’s in markets like these where services like ours deliver their best value.” Letkeman cites one well-known quality attribute that’s going to be in short supply this year — higherprotein wheat. This will likely lead to the emergence of short-term pull pricing at elevators throughout the marketing year. If a grower has some of this grain available, they’re probably going to be best served by letting their list of potential buyers know. Continued on page 64

We’re used to other varieties bowing down to us

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guide Continued from page 63 “These pricing opportunities last a very short time, and you need to be in position to take advantage of them,” Letkeman says. “I know from my days as an elevator agent, I had a lot of time constraints, and the first calls would be to the people I knew had the grain I needed.” That means growers should talk to their short list of buyers and give them some indication of the quality and quantity of grain they have on hand, especially the grades that are likely to be in demand, Drozd says, although he acknowledges that for most farmers it’s a difficult balancing act between providing enough information to potential buyers and too much. “I think most growers hesitate a bit about how much information to share,” Drozd says.

Says Frank Letkeman: “It’s in markets like this one that you get paid for your market intelligence.” Another grain-marketing expert echoes that theme. Mike Jubinville of ProFarmer Canada, agrees it’s all a question of positioning yourself to take advantage of such opportunities, and that’s doubly true this season. “In a year with a wide variety of available grades and protein, it will be helpful to potential buyers to have some idea of where the grain they need will be,” Jubinville says. If the buyers know, Jubinville says, the sellers will find out, and it’s an example of the evolution of the buyer-seller interaction to one where for farmers having a relationship with their buyers becomes very important.

“I can appreciate and understand a farmer’s desire to keep their cards close to their chest,” Jubinville says. “But I think the more information we share, the more the system moves fluidly. That’s becoming more and more important to everyone, companies and farmers included.” Another strategy Jubinville says some growers might consider is thinking a bit outside the box on marketing and looking for new outlets for their grain. For example, U.S. delivery points might be worth shopping to for growers on the southern Prairies, along with smaller specialty merchandisers who tend to offer better premiums than the big guys. “But know your merchandiser,” Jubinville cautions. “Feel confident you will get paid on time and feel confident your agreed delivery period will be acted upon.” Otherwise, Jubinville says the main thing farmers are doing when shopping their grain is looking for a better cash basis opportunity. At times, those chances may come when the futures aren’t as attractive, so some growers may want to separate their basis and futures portions of their marketing. “This lets you sell the grain for cash, and then reacquire the paper to look for any gain in the futures,” Jubinville says. There are basically two ways to do this. You can do it yourself, taking a DIY approach and having your broker purchase the paper. Or you can enter into a contract with most grain companies, locking in the basis but deferring pricing the futures portion until a later date. Ag-Chieve’s Drozd suggests growers also consider any other external factors that might ultimately affect the bottom line, even if they’re not immediately obvious. For example he’s aware of one case where two elevators are close together, but are serviced by different rail lines and one regularly has lower freight rates. “These are the sort of incremental things marketers need to be looking for in this kind of market,” Drozd says. “We’re not going to be hitting home runs this year. It’s about consistently hitting singles.” CG

Trait Stewardship Responsibilities Notice to Farmers Monsanto Company is a member of Excellence Through Stewardship® (ETS). Monsanto products are commercialized in accordance with ETS Product Launch Stewardship Guidance, and in compliance with Monsanto’s Policy for Commercialization of Biotechnology-Derived Plant Products in Commodity Crops. Commercialized products have been approved for import into key export markets with functioning regulatory systems. Any crop or material produced from this product can only be exported to, or used, processed or sold in countries where all necessary regulatory approvals have been granted. It is a violation of national and international law to move material containing biotech traits across boundaries into nations where import is not permitted. Growers should talk to their grain handler or product purchaser to confirm their buying position for this product. Excellence Through Stewardship® is a registered trademark of Excellence Through Stewardship. ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW PESTICIDE LABEL DIRECTIONS. Roundup Ready® crops contain genes that confer tolerance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup® brand agricultural herbicides. Roundup® brand agricultural herbicides will kill crops that are not tolerant to glyphosate. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for canola contains the active ingredients difenoconazole, metalaxyl (M and S isomers), fludioxonil, and thiamethoxam. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for soybeans (fungicides only) is a combination of three separate individually registered products, which together contain the active ingredients fluxapyroxad, pyraclostrobin and metalaxyl. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for soybeans (fungicides and insecticide) is a combination of four separate individually registered products, which together contain the active ingredients fluxapyroxad, pyraclostrobin, metalaxyl and imidacloprid. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for corn (fungicides only) is a combination of three separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients metalaxyl, trifloxystrobin and ipconazole. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for corn (fungicides and insecticide) is a combination of four separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients metalaxyl, trifloxystrobin, ipconazole, and clothianidin. Acceleron® seed treatment technology for corn with Poncho®/VoTivo™ (fungicides, insecticide and nematicide) is a combination of five separate individually-registered products, which together contain the active ingredients metalaxyl, trifloxystrobin, ipconazole, clothianidin and Bacillus firmus strain I-5821. Acceleron®, Acceleron and Design®, DEKALB and Design®, DEKALB®, Genuity and Design®, Genuity®, RIB Complete and Design®, RIB Complete®, Roundup Ready 2 Technology and Design®, Roundup Ready 2 Yield®, Roundup Ready®, Roundup Transorb®, Roundup WeatherMAX®, Roundup®, SmartStax and Design®, SmartStax®, Transorb®, VT Double PRO® and VT Triple PRO® are trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC. Used under license. LibertyLink® and the Water Droplet Design are trademarks of Bayer. Used under license. Herculex® is a registered trademark of Dow AgroSciences LLC. Used under license. Poncho® and Votivo™ are trademarks of Bayer. Used under license. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

64 country-guide.ca

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November 2014

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BRITISH COLUMBIA

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NEAR-NORMAL TEMPERATURES AND PRECIPITATION

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chinooks and a risk of rain in the southwest. Fair with periodic snow on a couple of days.

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NEAR NORMAL

times bringing blowing snow to southern areas. Often fair but scattered snow, heavy in places. Dec. 7-13: Expect variable temperatures from cold to occasionally milder. Windy at times. Fair in the south except for heavier snow and blowing snow on a couple of days. Clear and very cold in the north.

November 16 to December 13, 2014

Nov. 16-22: Mild spells on the coast will be accompanied by several dull, wet periods. Inland, expect temperatures on the mild side with periodic snow, heavy in a few areas. Nov. 23-29: Temperatures vary but trend to the mild side. Windy at times. Occasional coastal rain changing to scattered snow in the Interior, possibly heavy in a few areas. Nov. 30-Dec. 6: Expect temperatures to fluctuate this week from mild to colder under blustery winds. Fair skies alternate with coastal rain changing to snow inland and at higher levels. Dec. 7-13: Windy on several days this week with fluctuating temperatures. Fair weather interchanges with snow, mixed with rain southwest. Some lows near zero on the coast.

ALBERTA Nov. 16-22: Windy on several days this week with temperatures varying from mild to cold. Fair but expect snow on a few occasions, heavy in some regions. Chance of rain in the southwest. Nov. 23-29: Unsettled as disturbances race by bringing occasional snow and some blowing snow to many regions. Colder temperatures result in higher windchills on a few days. Nov. 30-Dec. 6: Colder outbreaks interchange with a few milder days. Blustery at times with high windchills. Snow on a couple of days with blowing snow in southern regions. Dec. 7-13: Temperatures vary and occasionally trend to the mild side. Possible November 2014

SASKATCHEWAN Nov. 16-22: Colder air and gusty winds move in bringing higher windchills at times. Minor warming brings on snow and drifting. Chance of heavy snow in a few regions. Nov. 23-29: Look for changeable weather as strong winds and occasional snow combine to bring inclement conditions on two or three days this week. Higher windchills and heavier snow at times. Nov. 30-Dec. 6: Expect variable temperatures frequently leaning to the cold side with higher windchills. Fair apart from scattered snow on a couple of days. Occasional blowing snow in the south. Dec. 7-13: Temperatures fluctuate from cold to mild. Windy at times with drifting or blowing snow. Fair overall but snowfalls on a couple of days possibly heavy in a few regions.

MANITOBA Nov. 16-22: Cold air dominates most of the week as colder outbreaks combine with gusty winds to bring higher windchills. Fair but snowfalls on a few days this week, heavy in a few regions. Nov. 23-29: Unsettled on a couple of days as fair skies interchange with occasional snow and drifting snow. Heavy snow in a few areas, especially near larger lakes. Seasonal to cold. Nov. 30-Dec. 6: Seasonal to occasionally cold with higher windchills. Gusty winds at

November 16 to December 13, 2014 NATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS The onset of winter will dominate the weather in many parts of the country in this four-week period. Indeed, as we get further into the season, weather disturbances will tend to become more vigorous, bringing snow and storminess to many areas. From the Prairies eastward to Quebec, expect cold spells to alternate with a few milder periods resulting in near-normal temperatures overall. Snowfall and precipitation should also average close to normal despite a few heavy snowfall events. British Columbians are likely to escape much of the harshness of winter due to a milder circulation off the Pacific and less snow than usual. We also expect a milder than usual start to winter in eastern Quebec and in Atlantic Canada, although a few stormy sessions will bring wet spells with heavy rain or snow from time to time.

Prepared by meteorologist Larry Romaniuk of Weatherite Services. Forecasts should be 80 per cent accurate for your area; expect variations by a day or two due to changeable speed of weather systems. country-guide.ca 65

life

Need to get more done? Fit more into your day with these time-management habits By Helen Lammers-Helps oo many of us spend our days frustrated because there is so much to do and so little time to do it in. That frustration can even make us impatient to the point where we dismiss the advice of time-management experts, and we say, ironically, “I just don’t have time to get better at using time.” Yet those time experts might be just the people we need to make time for. So, while it sounds simplistic to say that time is fixed and that all we can control is how we use it, it is one of the most important tenets of farm management. “It’s about self-management,” says Craig Ryan, an organizational change facilitator in Bowmanville, Ont., who also teaches professional development courses on time management at the University of Waterloo. “Our habits determine what we get done,” says Ryan, who helps his clients identify poor time-management practices and replace them with best-practice habits. “We need to be willing to change,” says Ryan. “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting the same results.” Laura Vanderkam, author of the book, 168 H ours : Y ou have more time than you think , says the first step to spending your time better is to know how you’re spending it now. “Keep track of your time for a week,” Vanderkam advises. “You’ll discover new things about your life, what takes too much of your time, and where there may be space for squeezing in more fun.” Goal setting for both our personal and work lives is one of the foundational good habits we want to adopt, says Ryan. “You want to be proactive with your time management, and not just be reacting to things,” he explains. “By setting clear and compelling goals, we create a road map for our lives.” One reason people feel that work has taken over their lives is because they don’t take the time to set goals for their personal lives. These goals must be specific and measurable, advises Ryan. It’s not enough to say, “I want to spend more time with my family” or “someday I want to go to Europe.”

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Ryan advises posting these goals where you will see them every day. In other words, write them down, and then stick them up in a prominent location on the refrigerator or other message board. And then, don’t let them get covered up. The key is keep them in your sight so they can motivate you to achieve what you want to achieve. The next step is to work backwards from longterm goals to near-term goals, planning and scheduling the steps that need to happen along the way. “What gets planned and scheduled gets done,” Ryan asserts. Such planning keeps the urgent but less important stuff from knocking the important stuff off our to-do lists. Both Vanderkam and Ryan recommend making a plan for your next day. Vanderkam suggests identifying three to five priorities for the following day while Ryan tends towards making a specific schedule for each hour of the day, so you will you take that kind of control of your time. Advance planning allows you to hit the ground running each day and not waste time trying to figure out what you should be working on. Then, at the end of the week, Ryan likes to make a plan for the following week. “There will have to be some flexibility to allow for changes,” he says. Activities that require the most focus should be scheduled for your peak productivity times, says Ryan. Save mundane jobs such as answering emails for off-peak times which are usually later in the day for most people. Vanderkam and Ryan also recommend using bits of time wisely. Don’t fall into the trap of using your odd gaps of as little as 10 or 15 minutes for email or social media, says Vanderkam. Instead she suggests having a list of things you can do that will bring you joy, such as looking at photos, doing stretching exercises or texting a loved one. Ryan agrees, and recommends keeping a list of smaller jobs such as making phone calls that can be done when you have a gap in your schedule. Vanderkam also recommends having a plan for

November 2014

LIFE

your downtime. Too many people waste more time than they realize watching TV, surfing the Internet or running errands, she explains. That time could be better used enjoying a hobby or spending time with a spouse. “Knowing what you’d like to do with your time increases the chances that fun and meaningful things will happen,” says Vanderkam. Learning to say no to things that don’t further your goals is another way to make better use of your time. Ask yourself if your volunteer commitments match your goals. It’s important not to be pressured into doing things by other people. “You have to live your own life,” says Vanderkam. Meetings can also be time wasters if they are not well run. “Make sure you have an agenda and stick to it,” says Vanderkam. You’ll be more productive if you take regular breaks, adds Vanderkam. “I don’t mean checking email or social media. Instead go outside and take a walk to disconnect and recharge,” she says. Another important step in using time more effectively is to identify the problems that keep us from getting our work done. Then problem solve for solutions. Ryan sees many clients who struggle with procrastination. Unfortunately, if you have things you know you should be doing but are not getting done it tends to weigh heavily on you, leading to a lot of stress, he says. Ryan recommends tackling the problem by analyzing the situation first. What is stopping you from getting it done? Is it unpleasant? Are you afraid of the consequences? For many people, the solution to procrastination is about taking the first step, says Ryan. Once you get started, momentum will keep you going. If that’s not the answer, then look for creative solutions. Will scheduling a time to do it help? Will it make it easier if you reward yourself for getting it done? Can you give the job to someone else who would like that job? Distractions are another stumbling block for many people. Having specific goals will help keep you on track, but here are other suggestions for dealing with interruptions. One option might be to schedule time in your day when you are available to be approached, suggests Ryan. This minimizes interruptions and leaves blocks of time for focusing on work that requires your attention. And forget about multi-tasking, says Ryan. Research has shown it doesn’t work. Trying to do two things at once or jumping back and forth between tasks is not effective, he says. “It’s better to focus on one thing at a time.” Some people find they get a lot done by starting

NOVEMBER 2014

an hour before everyone else, says Vanderkam. Or you can use the early morning for a fitness workout instead, she adds. Many of us think we are not morning people but the truth is we are staying up too late doing things that don’t matter to us, she says. “Turn the TV off, turn in, and turn unproductive evening hours into productive morning ones.” What does it take to make these good practices into habits? Good practices become habits when they are done repeatedly and when you decide you really want to do them, says Vanderkam. The reward of accomplishing your goals will motivate you to continue, she says. But it all starts with being clear on what we want to accomplish, both for work and in our personal lives. “If we are clear on what we want to accomplish, it drives the other things,” says Ryan. “We will find a way.” CG

Resources Laura Vanderkam’s website has information on time management and links to her books, 168 HOURS and WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO BEFORE BREAKFAST. lauravanderkam.com/ The Mind Tools website includes an online assessment to identify problem habits and information on best time management practices. www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_HTE.htm

country-guide.ca 67

h e a lt h

Is it, or isn’t it, a migraine headache? By Marie Berry igraines affect eight per cent of Canadians, but that estimate may be low because people don’t necessarily report them. They may just wait out the headache or they may self-treat with a non-prescription pain reliever, believing that nothing can really be done for their migraine. Headache itself is a common complaint, and sometimes it is a symptom of another condition such as a stroke, so it’s important to have any recurrent headache symptoms checked. Headaches are classified according to their cause. Tension headaches account for about 90 per cent of headaches and are attributed to stress, tension, fatigue, noise, or even glare. Relieving the cause solves tension headaches. But, headaches that happen after a head injury or as a result of a sinus or dental infection should always be evaluated. Migraine headaches usually occur on one side and are associated with a dull, throbbing or pulsating pain. Loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, light and sound sensitivity, and blurred vision are also common. They are considered a nervous system condition that results in the blood vessel symptoms of throbbing, pounding, pulsating. About 20 per cent of people experience an aura or warning symptoms of the migraine about half an hour before the headache starts. The symptoms can include dizziness, ringing in the ears, light flashes, numbness, or tingling. The acronym AUSTIN is a handy way to remember the characteristics of migraine headaches. It stands for: Aggravated by activity, Unilateral location, Sensitivity to light or sound, Throbbing, moderate or severe Intensity, and Nausea or vomiting. Obviously, if you experience the symptoms, you should have your headaches assessed. You might think that pain relievers are the only remedies for migraines, but this is not so. The group of drugs known as triptans or serotonin (5-HT) receptor agonists are the drugs of choice for treating migraine headaches. They are thought to work by mimicking the effects of serotonin in the nervous system. This in turn reduces the vascular symptoms

of pain. The idea is to take them as soon as you have symptoms to stop the migraine before it develops. Sumatriptan, zolmitriptan, rizatriptan, and naratriptan are examples, and if one triptan isn’t effective for you, switching to another often works. For some people, taking medication on a daily basis can actually prevent migraine symptoms. These drugs are normally meant for other conditions, but their actions on either blood vessels or in the nervous system help reduce the number and severity of migraines. Some people seem to be helped by beta blockers like propranolol, used for cardiovascular conditions. Tricyclic antidepressants like amitriptyline and some of the newer antidepressants like venlafaxine are able to help others. Ideally, you want to prevent migraines. To do that, recognizing and avoiding triggers is key, including activities or substances that increase your chances of experiencing a headache. Sometimes it’s skipping meals, changes in diet, changes in sleeping habits, not enough sleep, changes in weather, specific foods, odours like smoke or perfumes, stress, anxiety, or even flashing or strobe lights. A headache diary can help you identify your triggers. Some people have an increased risk and if you seem to have more headaches, consider checking if they might be migraines. There is family tendency and women are three times more likely to experience migraines. While children may be affected, migraines usually first occur in your 20s and 30s and first-time sufferers are rarely older than 40. If you are overweight, weight loss can reduce both severity and frequency. And, some conditions such as depression, anxiety, seizures, and high blood pressure seem to increase the risk. If you are a migraine sufferer, you have options for treatment, so don’t just take another pain reliever. While pain relievers like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or even codeine-containing medications will help stop the pain, you want to treat your migraine in order to carry on with your day-to-day life! Marie Berry is a lawyer/pharmacist interested in health and education.

You have certainly heard about overuse of antibiotics, “superbugs,” and even hospital-acquired infections, but you may not understand the chemistry of antibiotics. They are an amazing collection of drugs that are often taken for granted. Next issue, we’ll look at the history of antibiotics and some of the newer agents.

68 country-guide.ca

November 2014

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November 2014

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Rod Andrews is a retired Anglican bishop. He lives in Saskatoon.

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“What good is religion if it teaches people to chop off heads?” My friend, sitting across the table at Tim Hortons, does not go to church. Traditional religion does not motivate him. News of beheadings by so-called religious radicals offends his deep sense of right and wrong. How can anyone convince themselves that God wants them to kill another human? We get more hot chocolates, this time adding apple caramel fritters. I concur that I am likewise offended. Claims that God has directed someone to carry out horrific acts distress me. I don’t believe in that kind of God. That evening I fly over central Saskatchewan at 3,000 feet. Combines systematically comb golden fields. City lights sparkle in the distance. It is a peaceful scene. I wonder again how human beings can be incredibly cruel to other humans claiming, “God told me to do it.” Driving home, I tune in the CBC program “Ideas.” The speaker is Payam Akhavan, a civil rights lawyer and professor at McGill University. His family, followers of Bahai, suffered unspeakable religious persecution in Iran. He argues that “… the world needs more than laws and legal niceties. It needs to be built on empathy.” He admits there are real challenges to reconciling lofty ideals with grim realities. We listen to news of killings and maimings, then forget that “behind each victim there is a name and behind each name there is a mother, a father, a spouse and a child, a work colleague, a best friend.” A suicide bomber in a restaurant or on a bus destroys a universe of associations. Akhavan says the price of progress and modernity is disenchantment. We are so busy seeking to be entertained we have emptied ourselves of mystery and enchantment. “Until we learn to have a genuine conversation with ourselves we remain incomplete.” Akhavan has hope. He says we can find more meaning to life than any of us imagine. We carry, within us, an exceptional capacity for profound connections and different understandings. “There is a deeper journey of self-discovery which can never be complete until we engage in a deep connection with the lives of others.” I have been reflecting how people cry over fiction and do not cry over reality. It is amazing how people watch a movie, or hear a song, and weep, but see a destitute person and remain absolutely indifferent. We spend our emotions on fantasy, and have none left for reality. We have seen so many disasters portrayed on television we have emptied our emotions. Professor Akhavan reminds us that the world allowed the Rwanda genocide as bystanders and spectators: “… not because we lacked policy or words, but because nobody in a position of influence really cared.” Interdependence is not a naive hope. It is an inescapable necessity. Perhaps the root of our insensitivity is apathy. “I’ve got my own life to take care of. I cannot be responsible for everyone else — but I wish them well.” James, who wrote a book in the Bible, says it is not enough to say, “I hope you can find some food and clothing, my friend: go in peace, I hope it works out.” If there is no compassion, no meeting of real needs, no action, faith is dead. Professor Akhavan closed his lecture with a quote from the 14th-century Sufi poet Hafiz: “Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth ‘you owe me’. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” Suggested Scripture: Psalm 113, James 1:19-27

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ACRES

By Leeann Minogue

A family that farms together… “It’s good working with you people,” Ed said, “but it will be even better not to see you for the next six months.” he Hansons’ never-ending harvest finally finished on Friday afternoon. They could barely believe they were really done. They’d spent the last three days racing against the rain in the forecast to get to the north end of the soybean field before it got too wet. “I never thought we’d finish this year,” Jeff told his wife Elaine. For the past 2-1/2 months, it seemed like every time the sun came out long enough to dry up the fields, either the combine broke down or something needed replacing on one of the grain trucks. As the days got shorter and cooler, the Hansons’ tempers got shorter and hotter. Falling prices and poor-quality grain added to everyone’s stress levels. For the last few weeks, all of the Hansons had been on edge. Of course none of their disagreements had actually come to blows, but there had been a lot of emotional debates about the best way to replace the strawchopper belt and fix the feeder chain slot, and more than once, one or another of them had stormed away from the combine in a huff. “It’s great working with my family, don’t get me wrong,” Jeff said. “But if this harvest had gone on for one more day, at least one of us would have been arrested for homicide.” As soon as the last soybean was unloaded, Jeff’s grandfather Ed climbed down from the combine cab and limped toward his truck. “I’m headed south,” he announced. “I’ll stop

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off in Weyburn long enough to pick up Helen and some clean underwear, then we’re on our way to Yuma. It’s good working with you people, but it’ll be even better not to see you for the next six months.” Jeff and his father Dale watched Ed speed out of the yard. “Can’t say I blame him,” Dale said. “Enough is enough. Donna and I are heading out first thing in the morning too. We’ll drive to Yorkton and spend a day or two with Donna’s family.” Then it started to spit, so they rushed to get the combine into the shed before supper. Jeff and his wife Elaine were looking forward to a weekend alone on the farm. “Even your sister won’t be here,” Elaine said as she and Jeff cleaned up the kitchen after supper. Jeff’s sister Trina had driven home from Calgary almost every weekend since she’d started dating a local farmer. Her boyfriend lived on his parents’ farm and often worked weekends at the machinery dealership, so Trina was spending a lot of time at “home” on the Hanson farm. “Not that I haven’t loved having so much time to get to know her this summer,” Elaine said quickly. “But it will be nice for the four of us to have a weekend on our own.” “You’ve got that right,” Jeff said, looking over to where their one- and four-year-old kids were chasing each other in the living room. “We’d better get these two to bed soon,” Elaine said. “Connor has hockey practice first thing in the morning.”

NOVEMBER 2014

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Jeff was quick to volunteer. It was his turn. “I’ll take him in. You could use a break.” “I’ll come along,” Elaine said. “We’ll have the rest of the weekend at home.” Jeff and Elaine packed the kids and Connor’s hockey gear into the SUV and got on the road before 9 the next morning. The rain had turned to snow while they ate breakfast. “It’s terrible!” Elaine complained. “There wasn’t bad weather in the forecast.” “The worst storms never are,” Jeff said. “Especially this time of year.” By the time they got halfway to town Jeff could barely see the road. “Turn on the wipers,” Connor piped up from his car seat in the back. “Faster, Daddy!” Slowed down by the slippery highway, Jeff and Elaine got to the rink just in time to wedge Connor into all his hockey gear before practice. Then they drank hot chocolate and gossiped with the other parents while Jenny played in the bleachers until it was time to go home. But when they stepped out of the windowless rink, they realized the weather had gone downhill. “Take my hand, Connor,” Jeff said. “Let’s see if we can find the car.” Finding the road was the next challenge. The slush on the ground had turned to ice, and swirling snow was thick in the air. “Next year I’m putting the winter tires on at Halloween,” Jeff said, as they drove to McDonald’s for lunch instead of risking the drive back to the farm. With any luck, the storm would be over by the time the kids finished their Happy Meals. “So much for our weekend home alone,” Elaine said. The weather didn’t improve. They wandered the aisles of Canadian Tire until Jenny started crying. “These kids need naps,” Elaine said. Jeff looked at the ring of keys he was carrying. One was for his grandfather’s condo in town. “We can take refuge at Grandpa’s place,” Jeff said. “The kids can nap. We’ll watch movies. There’s not a lot of space at the condo, but there’s room for the four of us.” “OK,” Elaine agreed. “I’m sure the weather will clear up by late afternoon.” It took Jeff 20 minutes to make the five-minute drive across town. “Power’s out,” Jeff muttered, trying to figure out when it was his turn to skid through the intersection without the traffic lights. “Guess we won’t be watching movies,” Elaine said.

November 2014

“We should’ve stayed home today,” Jeff said. “The generator would’ve kicked in.” “At least we have a place to go,” Elaine said. Finally Jeff parked in front of Ed’s condo. The four of them piled out of the car and into the building. When they got to Ed’s door, Jeff got his key ready, but the door wasn’t locked. They could hear voices from inside the condo. “Do you think someone broke in?” Elaine whispered. “Hello?” Jeff called in to the room, hoping he was imagining the voices and the dark condo was empty. “Geez. It’s a damn reunion,” they heard Grandpa Ed shout from the living room. “Brought the whole family, Jeff?” As their eyes adjusted to the dark condo, Jeff and Elaine looked around, confused. Trina was on the couch. “I decided to come home from Calgary after all,” she said. “But this was as far as I got.”

When they got to Ed’s door, Jeff got his key ready, but the door wasn’t locked. “Do you think someone broke in?” Elaine asked “We’re stranded too,” said Dale. “It was too nasty to drive to Yorkton or even get home,” Donna called out from the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table with Helen. “We’ll appreciate Yuma even more after this,” said Ed’s girlfriend Helen. “At least we’re all safe here,” Donna said. “There’s no power, but we can order a pizza. Take off your coats.” The Hansons settled in to play cards, eat pizza and watch Jeff and Elaine’s kids. It was mid-afternoon on Sunday before the power came back on and the snow cleared enough for everyone to venture back onto the roads. “See you in the spring, Grandpa,” Jeff said to Ed as they left the condo. “Yep,” Ed said. “It’ll sure be quiet, down in Yuma.” CG Leeann Minogue is the editor of G r a i n e w s , a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan.

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