IFMA Congress, Canada 2015
During July, Robert Patterson attended the 20th IFMA (International Farm Management Association) Congress in Quebec City, Canada, as well as participating in both the Pre and Post Congress tours in Ontario and the Maritimes respectively. Following this, he toured through the farming areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta during early August, observing and discussing their farming systems.
Some observations from this Canadian trip are as follows:
Eggs, chicken meat, cows’ milk and potatoes operate under supply management in Canada, meaning that quotas are required to produce these products. This has the effect of reducing the price risk to producers considerably, but imposes significant barriers to entry or expansion, due to the high capital cost of quotas.
Many of the farms visited in the eastern, more urbanised parts of Canada, were highly diversified, requiring very comprehensive management skills. This possibly helps to explain why the young entrants to farming in these areas, appeared to have Business degrees from university rather than Agricultural based degrees.
Vertically integrated co-operatives are common, to allow greater control of the food supply chain.
Management transition/succession, particularly to the third generation, is of major concern to successful farming entrepreneurs. Many farmers spoken with expressed their concerns that this transition of management was the major risk to their business. They considered that their offspring were not well prepared for the inevitable tough times ahead, as they had enjoyed the spoils of good times for agriculture in recent years.
Most farms visited appeared on first impression to be over capitalised with machinery. However, they do have very narrow windows of opportunity to carry out major operations such as, seeding and harvesting.
Wages for farmhands are expensive in Alberta, due to competition for labour from mining and oil, while wages in the eastern areas are much lower, because the alternative employment is fishing, which does not pay highly.
Effluent from housed-animals is a valuable resource for spreading on both pastures and cropping land. However, there is increasing regulation with regards to its use, to ensure that nutrient loads are not exceeded, ie: one has to show that the nutrients added by effluent are removed in the products sold from the farm. This trend towards regulation of nutrients applied to land, is expected to be seen in Australia too.
A considerable area of crops are being desiccated or swathed prior to harvest, both to control weed growth and reduce grain moisture content for harvesting. Feed barley was witnessed being harvested at 16% moisture, prior to drying by aeration down to 14% which was considered satisfactory for storage.
There appears to be an increasing trend for on-farm storage of the major grains (canola, wheat and barley), for road transport direct to end-users during the winter. This maximises marketing opportunities and provides work for farmhands during the winter.
There doesn’t appear to be warehousing of grain at harvest for later sale, as the elevators are owned by the grain marketers. Once delivered into an elevator, there is no marketing option other than through that particular merchant. This is a trend also observed in Australia, where new grain storage infrastructure is being built by multi-national grain merchants, to accumulate grain which they have purchased.
Australia is very fortunate that metrication is almost universal, especially in the marketing of grain and other produce. Due to Canada’s large reliance on USA’s marketing instruments and markets, Canada in line with the USA, has a very complex system which employs some metric measurements, but mostly imperial measurements. In a single conversation regarding crop yields, one could be quoted bushels/acre, pounds/acre, hundredweight/acre, plus short, long and metric tons/acre. Occasionally a yield would be expressed in tonnes/ha!
All-Perils crop insurance which insures 70% of grain income (except hail damage which is separate cover at an additional cost), has taken considerable risk out of crop production. However, it is not hard to think that this benefit (which is universal to all farmers and subsidised by government), has become capitalised into the price of cropping land, which in turn is expensive by Australian standards.
Roundup Ready (RR) corn and RR soybeans, are now being grown on the better soils having higher temperatures, in southern and eastern Canada. While continuous RR crops would on first impression seem to be a fast-track towards Glyphosate resistance in weeds, the fact that the ground is covered with snow for much of the time period between crops, delays the onset of resistance, because less spraying of stubbles with Roundup is required.
Volunteer RR crops however are major weeds in other RR crops, such as RR corn and RR canola in RR soybeans. Glyphosate resistance in broadleaf weeds is also an emerging problem. As a result, Monsanto are working on Glyphosate plus Dicamba genes for soybeans, while Dow are working on Glyphosate plus 2,4-D genes for crops.
As well as helping to control weeds between crops, the snow cover also reduces the ability of many pests and diseases such as Heliothis and rusts to survive between crops. This is due to the lack of host plants growing during this period.
Canada is a large producer of canola, with the result that significant resources have been committed to breeding varieties suitable for spring canola in that environment. Their varieties are all hybrids, with mostly RR followed by Liberty Link (LL) technology being employed for herbicide tolerance. The most striking feature of their canola crops is the shortness of plants with high pod density. As the growing season is so short between snowmelt in spring and snowfall in autumn, plant breeders have selected for short plant height, to maximise pod development rather than vegetative growth. Canadian RR and LL canola varieties appear to be very resilient with quite stable yields over a range of growing conditions.
The use of technology in agriculture is predicted to continue to increase rapidly, with a trend towards the use of real-time digital data rather than historical data. It was predicted that eighty percent of new companies in future will be software companies.
This greater collection and availability of data, will facilitate the traceability and Quality Assurance (QA) demands which consumers will inevitably continue to place on food producers, as consumers become increasingly risk averse with regards the food they eat.