Issue: January 2005 Behind the Lines Cover Letters Coming Events Short Takes Stories Crops Business Letter From Europe Rural Roots   Contact Us Archive

BEHINDTHELINES At one point in his farming career, beef marketer Carl Cosack owned a full array of farm machinery worth $400,000 and put up 20,000 tonnes of corn silage to grow out the cattle in his feedlot. Growing this crop was a formidable challenge on his, high, rolling season area north of Shelburne. As Cosack relates, his epiphany came one day when he read that shareholders were getting a dividend from a major petrochemical company that made inputs for his farm, and he was struggling to pay his bills. That's when Cosack changed direction. He seeded most of his family farm company's 1,200 acres to hay and pasture. He runs his tractors as little as he can and he spends a lot of time marketing and listening to the customers who buy his beef. You might say that alternative marketing is really the theme of this month's cover story. Some of these stories we sought out. Others, such as that of Kathryn and John Gorzo, who farm in the Bradford Marsh, fell in our laps. The Gorzos are an example of an enthusiastic young couple facing the challenges of a changing retail market head on using the resources that they have. We hope that these stories will be of some inspiration to our readers as a troubled year in the farm economy ends and a new year begins. In his monthly column from the U.S. cornbelt, Stateside writer Alan Guebert reports the startling news that the United States is about to become a net food importer for the first time in nearly half a century and that Bush administration economic policies have turned a $13.6 billion surplus in 2001 into a flat line in four short years - despite the dramatic fall in the U.S. dollar and a border closed to Canadian beef. That gives particular poignancy to an item in our Short Takes section, which reports on a University of Arizona anthropologist who has spent 10 years measuring food loss at everything from farms and orchards, to warehouses, retail outlets and dining rooms. He estimates that no less than half of the food produced in the United States is wasted and that households throw away 14 per cent of their purchases. Nationwide, the bill for food waste is $34 billion. There is no reason to believe that Canadians are any different - or any more appreciative of the cheap and plentiful food we take for granted.BF ROBERT IRWIN & DON STONEMAN "In Quotes" "Let nature take its course." -- Wildlife enforcement supervisor, Steve Aubry, explaining why the Ministry of Natural Resources killed a moose and left it in a roadside ditch to rot . © copyright 2005 AgMedia Inc.. top back