Raceway slots run into opposition

The track was as good as its word and has permission to move to Elora, to the dismay of many Elora residents, who fought the move tooth and nail. In late March, a crowd of 1,500 residents attended a council meeting, booing councilors as the motion to approve the raceway was passed. The local daily newspaper, The Record, reported that the mayor exited council chambers via a back door amidst citizen's threats that he didn't stand a chance of being re-elected.

While horses will run in about 50 events on the raceway annually, the slots will be open for 15 hours, most days of the year, and are expected to put more than $1 million into town coffers.

Slots have been a big success elsewhere. Hanover Raceway is preparing to put in 100 slot machines in September to bolster its sulky racing, after two years of navigating the proposal through provincial and municipal approvals. The project will cost $4 million.

Some municipalities are already rolling in the dough. Mohawk Raceway, located in the town of Milton, got $2.1 million as their share of the first five months of revenue from 750 slot machines. Mohawk drew an estimated $40 million, with the big winner being the provincial treasury via the Ontario Lottery Corporation.

Municipalities get five per cent of the gross receipts of slot machine revenues to help offset infrastructure costs. Milton is reported to have spent several hundred thousand dollars on policing to handle the increased traffic, but doesn't see more crime as a result of gambling.

Prairie hog expansion under watch

Hogwatch Manitoba wants the province to initiate a full-scale review of the hog industry through a revamped Clean Environment Commission, restore single-desk selling of hogs, and introduce anti-corporate farming legislation.

It seems pressures on livestock production are every bit as great as here in Ontario.

Corn spray confusion

Dunlop notes that the post-emergent application of Novartis products has been widely used by corn growers, and is approved on product labels and recommended in the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture's Guide to Weed Control 2000, Publication 75. "Growers can rely on these tank mixes despite the way it is depicted in this advertising. Two years of ads on this kind of stuff and maybe people will start thinking it's not a recommended use for Dual and Primextra." Banvel II is a registered trademark of BASF which also markets Frontier for post-emergent use.

Bob McAuley, manager of business development for BASF, says, "Our point of view is that it's our product and our label. We can promote our product as we want and the tank mixes that we promote with it. We've run this ad for two years and Novartis has never contacted us about it."

A plea to the Queen

In a plea sent to Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, Summerhayes complained that damage from new subdivisions uphill from his farm property continues unabated despite his complaints. He is already suing because a drain under a roadway takes water onto his farm, not away from it. His fields have been coated with heavy clay washed from the subdivisions, and he asserts in the letter that there is other pollution related to construction as well.

Summerhayes has joined with up the Six Nations

Round Table on the Environment to decry the runoff. The Six Nations Indian reserve uses the water downstream from where Fairchild Creek, which drains Summerhayes' property, flows into the Grand River from which the reserve gets its drinking water. The properties involved are a subject of a native land claim.

Summerhayes is also complaining about what he terms the "desecration" of a pioneer cemetery during construction. The letter went off to the Governor General, the Queen's representative in Canada, in early April.

Slow off the disease mark

It took the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) another four days to issue a similar announcement in Canada, even though news reports had been carrying the distressing news of outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in Korea and Japan for weeks. The outbreaks there happened almost simultaneously. There were widespread reports that the disease may have been spread on straw imported from China.

Canadian pork producers are being warned to watch for visitors from affected countries, and travelers can expect to see stepped up surveillance in airports as they return from overseas trips. Sniffer dogs used by the CFIA and the Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency will be working overtime.

It's only three years ago that foot and mouth devastated the pork industry on the island of Taiwan. More than 80 per cent of the pigs there were either slaughtered or died as officials tried to contain the disease.

Both Canada and the United States are particularly susceptible to foot and mouth disease, animal health officials in North America note. Shipping of livestock long distances is routine. Animals are co-mingled in sales yards. And as yet there is no program in place to track animals back to their farm of origin.

Canada plans to implement a mandatory eartag program next year. The launch date has been put back to the middle of the year from Jan. 1, 2001. If the disease did break out, a wildlife population of hoofed animals such as deer would serve as a reservoir for the disease for years. It is expected to be a decade before Taiwan is rid of the disease and able to export pork again.

Hoof and mouth disease can be spread by respiration, on clothing, hides or mucus from infected animals. The United States has been free of the disease since 1929. Canada has been clear since 1952, when an immigrant labourer carried the disease with him from farm to farm, causing millions of dollars of damage.

Export policy headaches

Earlier John Core, chairman of both Dairy Farmers of Ontario and Dairy Farmers of Canada, was warm to the idea of these contracts, but his enthusiasm has cooled. Core was adamant that all contracts must be offered up to all producers on a kind of electronic bulletin board where all prices and contracts would be made public before deals were made. The national processor organization is miffed.

"They intend to remove the part (of the agreement) that made it agreeable," said Kempton Matte, president and chief executive officer of the National Dairy Council.

That isn't acceptable, said Matte. "When you have an agreement in principle, you don't change the colour of your horse."

Core disagrees, noting that other provinces were also troubled by the concept of allowing contracts to take place off of the bulletin board and of producers not being aware or eligible to take part in all the contracts that are available. He adds that failing to offer contracts to all producers may put a strain on other elements of supply management, such as the transportation system, where milk-trucking costs are pooled and shared by all producers. "Quebec is greatly concerned concern about it," Core said.

Adding to this conflict was a series of producer meetings in March held by a broker determined to get a piece of a potential new export business. David Tyer of Oakville wants Milk Trade, a new brokerage firm of which he is a principle, to act as an agent between farmers and processors, taking a marketing fee to find a home for milk produced outside of domestic requirements. He says the DFO's bulletin board system will fail and asserts that milk deals must be negotiated in private.

Some farmers were enthusiastic while others weren't. "You cost me a lot of money," said a farmer in Victoria County, citing Tyer's role as an importer in another firm which brought butteroil/sugar blends into Canada couple of years ago. Tyers replied that the imports were all legal and within international trade rules, a test that contested cheese exports to the United States failed to pass last year. BF

The survey was reported to have found that 19 companies had adopted strategies to avoid GM foods. Two companies were Canadian. In Europe, Burger King, Wimpey's McDonald's and Domino Pizza in Europe were withdrawing GM food ingredients, as was Burger King in the United States. There was no word on Canadian fast food companies.

Seagram won't distill GM grain anymore. Beer makers don't want it either. Canadian grain handlers were silent (other than the Canadian Wheat Board), but in the United States Archer Daniel Midland has called for segregation of GM and non-GM grains.

Rural Canada in retreat?

While there is a growing number of rural landowners in the upper crust who use platinum credit cards and sell to international markets, Apedaile says there is a burgeoning underclass as well. He distinguishes this group by its lack of access to credit. This underclass, with large subgroups of young people, aboriginals, seniors and women, may be either unemployed or work at low-paying jobs, and fuels an "informal" economy where goods and services are bartered. Apedaile says this group continues to grow.

The upshot of this is the breakdown of rural institutions, pressure on the environment and a minimum wage rural economy. "One evil of freer trade is the breakdown of rural institutions," Apedaile says. He notes that the solid middle-income group of farmers and small storekeepers which keep the rural infrastructure running is losing ground. He counts himself among their number.

"We own land and shop with debit cards," Apedaile says. These people are locally oriented in their businesses, have rural roots and volunteers to sit on the boards which run local libraries, curling rinks and churches.

Price plan comes from grassroots

Last March, Sebringville producer Jack De Groot took a proposal for a formula-based feeder pig pricing system to the Ontario Pork annual meeting. In January, after months of work with partners, the Ontario Feeder Pig Formula was released. It is designed to provide market information publicly for sellers of 25 kg feeder pigs, and those who buy them to raise to market weight.

De Groot worked with a team of representatives from Ridgetown College, University of Guelph, Ontario Pork, Quality Swine Cooperative, M+F Livestock, Ontario Livestock Exchange and Grand Valley Fortifiers to develop the formula. The Ontario Industry Feeder Pig Formula price considers finishing feed costs, death loss, historical margins, forward market prices and basis.

The new formula price will enable Ontario farmers to compare feeder pig prices to other regions. "It will allow pork producers to relate the futures value of the market hog to the initial feeder pig cost," says Will Nap, Chairman of Ontario Pork.

Contracts for dairy exports

It's not going to matter if producers are one or two per cent over quota, but farmers who produce 5-20 per cent over quota will have to sign export quotas with processors to export the milk. Dairy Farmers of Ontario will administer the contracts, says chairman John Core. A handful of farmers with the legal minimum of five kg of quota are milking as many as 35 cows, Core says. Those farmers really took a hit when world prices fell recently. Core says they were getting only C$18 a hl for their milk, as compared to $56 for within-quota production. C$18 a hl is equal to about US$6 a cwt. for export milk. At press time, the details on how these contracts would be administered had yet to be worked out.

Shamrock pulls new herd out of evaluation scheme

In December, Shedden-based Quality Swine Co-operative transferred ownership of its research and development herd to Shamrock Swine Genetics Inc. Last month Shamrock seemed certain to pull the newly acquired herd out of the national genetic evaluation program.

"We don't think that program drives much value back into our program," says Murray Markle, general manager of Shamrock Swine Genetics in London. "We have our own genetic evaluation program." The Quality Swine herd was a showcase for the Estimated Breeding Value (EBV) system developed by the late Dr. Brian Kennedy at the University of Guelph. "It showed you got results using these methods," says Jacques Chesnais, general manager for the Canadian Centre for swine Improvement. Though some breeders criticized the pigs that came out as 'paper pigs' with emphasis only on backfat and not on conformation, Chesnais says "it was a good herd, no question about it."

The withdrawal of the former Quality research herd won't have a big impact on the national programs, Chesnais said.

'Cheap' soy gets lean facelift in U.S.

Lean was last century's fad, but Washington hasn't caught on yet. The Associated Press quotes the USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services as saying "Soy's time has come."

Soy had its run at school lunches before. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration tried to introduce soy as a cost-cutting ingredient for school lunches. But the soy proposal died back then, at least partly because it was associated with the same administration's insistence that ketchup was a vegetable and would fill one of the spots in the four food groups on kids plates.

Soy is associated with cheap. A current regulation requires that soy products be used only as additives in school cafeterias, making up 30 per cent or less of a food product. The USDA is expected to issue a final ruling in March or earlier on whether to repeal the 30 per cent cap. If the rule is revoked, school lunchrooms using federal funds would be permitted to freely substitute soyburgers for beef or other meats.

There's the Beef!

Consumers are buying beef at steady to slightly higher prices despite record-high beef supplies. In addition to increased consumer spending, per capita beef consumption from January through September 1999 is up 0.9 pounds from a year ago. Industry analysts estimate year-end per capita consumption will jump to 69.2 pounds per person, a 1.6 per cent increase from 1998 figures.

U.S. consumer spending on beef from January through September 1999 totaled $36.7 billion, up four per cent compared to the year-ago period. For all of 1999, consumer beef spending is projected to reach $48.56 billion, nearly $2 billion above 1998.

U.S. Agriculture Department data was cited as showing average retail beef prices were up four cents per pound in 1999 from the previous year. At the same time, the beef supply for 1999 was expected to reach nearly 27 billion pounds, 2.5 per cent above the 1998 level.

Other factors such as improved exports during the first half of 1999 helped boost U.S. beef demand. Japan and Korea have begun to increase imports of American beef as their respective economies start to recover, and Mexico is expected to remain a strong import customer.

Country-of-origin labels get the boot

In mid January, the U.S. Agriculture Department was quoted as saying that requiring imports of beef and lamb sold in U.S. grocery stores to carry a label stating where the meat came from is unnecessary and could harm U.S farm trade.

The stories noted that in a long-awaited report mandated by Congress in 1998, the department said that there was no proof that the labels would help U.S. producers. "There is no direct or empirical evidence to suggest that a price premium engendered by country-of-origin labeling will be large or persist over the long term. Indeed, if consumers do distinguish goods depending on their country of origin, strong incentives exist for industries to act without government intervention, i.e., on a voluntary basis." U.S. cattle and sheep producers support country-of-origin labeling because they think shoppers would support U.S. farmers and would choose U.S. meat over imports. But meatpackers and the food industry were reported as saying country-of-origin labeling would greatly increase costs without providing any real benefits for consumers, since the Agriculture Department strongly enforces food safety standards for all imports. Discontent over the outcome of the report is likely to be muted because of current strong beef markets.

Congress had set an April 1999 deadline for the study's release. USDA spokesman Andy Solomon said, "We took the time to produce a thorough report that discusses the key factors and the key issues."

U.S. pork promotions hit producer wall

The Campaign for Family Farms says the $48-million campaign has done little to stimulate pork consumption and mostly benefits meat processors and large, corporate farm operations. They've submitted to the federal government a petition with 16,500 signatures calling for a nation-wide producer vote on the checkoff by March. Defenders of the program were cited as saying that many of the signatures on the petitions may be invalid.

Kathleen Merrigan, administrator of USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, said that she hopes to finish reviewing the petitions this month. A telemarketing firm hired to contact a sample of 1,400 people whose signatures appeared on the petitions met a stone wall. Some refused to co-operate with the callers. Others denied signing the petitions.

Of every $100 in animal sales, 45 cents goes to the National Pork Board, which contracts promotional services through the National Pork Producers Council. Iowa farmer John McNutt, president of the producers council, says that, if the fees are abolished, only the largest pig producers will benefit because they will promote their own brands.

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman is considering requiring all producer checkoff funding programs to be submitted to a vote every five years.