Behind The Lines

A good news story about farmers overcoming hardship and carving out new markets for their products seems hard to come by these days. We are doubly pleased to bring you this month’s cover story about the Elmira Produce Co-operative Auction. First, the story is written by award-winning farm writer Mary Baxter, the newest member of the Better Farming team. Mary, who is known to many of our readers in the London/ Chatham area, heads up our newly-created London bureau.

For her first Better Farming cover story, Mary has focused on family farmers devastated by BSE, who have turned the crisis around and begun new lives on the farm. They are growing produce that is being snapped up by wholesale buyers in a competitive auction, possibly replacing imports and offering a prospect of more growth in the future. This story starts on page 16.

Some questions remain, though. Can this co-operative market, based upon a model from the United States and largely run by Mennonites in a tightly-knit community, be replicated elsewhere in the province? And can the auction, and others of its type, attract a large wholesale buyer? That is something that the Elmira co-op hasn’t been able to do yet.
Certainly the Ontario agriculture ministry hopes the answer is “yes” to both questions. Staff is looking at showcasing the auction at a conference later this fall. It fills in part of the demand by consumers to eat food that is produced locally.
In our regular Short Takes feature, which starts on page 10, we have some hard figures on what it costs to deal with specified risk materials from the slaughter of cattle over 30 months of age. These costs will become more critical to our processing industry, and ultimately to producers, when the border opens up to exports to the United States this month.

Some issues of our magazine trigger a strong reader response. Since we began our special reports on the environment back in the fall of 2000, we’ve been flooded with requests for extra copies every time a new installment appears. These copies get circulated at environmental planning meetings of a variety of organizations and at all levels of government. Some readers personally deliver these reports to urban media in the hope that city-dwellers will gain another perspective.

In April 2006, we experienced a similar reader reaction when we began combing through an array of allegations showing that animal welfare legislation and enforcement were woefully in adequate. One of the cases we reported on involved Mel Musson, an elderly Owen Sound-area sheep farmer who surrendered his sheep during a raid on his farm. Last month, Musson received a measure of justice in a local small claims court. See our summary of the decision on page 14.

In our October issue, in The Hill column, quotation marks were inadvertently removed from a statement critical of former Federal Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl. Columnist Barry Wilson was actually quoting from a statement produced by grain and oilseeds organizations. BF

ROBERT IRWIN & DON STONEMAN