Bruce farmers come under attack

In May, Dutch immigrant farmers Gys and Anne Geene were ordered to halt construction of two 2,000-hog feeding barns in Huron-Kinloss, the most southwesterly part of the county. Then, in June, nearby father and son dairy farmers Murray and Jim Wilkin learned that a proposal in the new county plan to restrict livestock operations near Lake Huron could be extended to cover their 85-90 cow dairy operation. Another four farms will be affected as well.

While the Wilkins have been told that existing operations will not be covered, it's unclear whether the will come into effect if farms changes hands, such as from father to son. The Wilkins figure that farm succession is already difficult enough. "It makes it tougher and tougher for a younger person to get started," says Murray Wilkin, who adds that news of a proposal to restrict livestock operation in the zoned area to 40 cows "spoiled my breakfast."

Meanwhile, the Geenes expected to be in court in September to fight the stop order. They had received permission to build the barn from all the necessary authorities, but their right to build is being challenged by a local cottage owners group, Concerned Citizens of Huron-Kinloss, who cite alleged errors by the building inspector. The group wants an expensive environmental assessment to be conducted before the barns are built. The construction site is located several miles from the lake, east of Highway 21.

Through locally based-crop consultant Michael Hunter, the Geenes refused requests to be photographed, but allowed Better Farming to take pictures of the overgrown building site. The controversial Geenes live just across the county line in Huron's Ashfield Township, but can shop in Amberley without being recognized and they'd like to keep it that way, Hunter told us. "They can still go to the Amberley store and people (who don't know they are there) will talk about them behind their back."BF

PETA poops on dairy consumption

Credible nutritional scientists already deny any connection between dairy and disease. But PETA is known for going to extremes to get its views across. Two years ago, the group linked New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani's prostrate cancer to milk consumption. Illness took Giuliani out of the race against former First Lady Hillary Clinton in the battle for a senate seat last year. Last year, in another tasteless campaign, PETA advocated drinking beer instead of milk, raising the hackles of anti-drunk driving campaigners.

PETA may not be getting far on the milk issue, but it seems to have the fast food folks on the run. Last month, USA Today announced that PETA was ending its two-month campaign against Ohio-based Wendy's International Inc. after the fast-food chain promised to toughen the oversight of its suppliers and improve the treatment of animals before and during slaughter.BF

More than just bacteria and chlorine

As of mid-September, Health Canada began insisting that newly approved and imported products must be assessed under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The new regulations won't generally take effect for two years.

The drug residues find their way into sewage plants both by being excreted by their users and also by being dumped when they are no longer needed. Interestingly, while sewage plant effluent was tested for these chemicals, no testing has yet been done of drinking water, media reports indicate.

Is Ontario's Ministry of the Environment considering stepping up treatment of sewage plant effluent? No, says communications officer John Steele. It's not the ministry's mandate to deal with the matter, just as the MOE didn't deal with phosphorus coming from detergents in the 1960s and '70s. The problem will be dealt with at its source and, since the products in question cross provincial borders, it is a federal matter.

Earlier in the year, a study of Quebec sewage plants suggested that toxic substances were being put into waterways because of the careless way that consumers dispose of them. However, the study said that sewage from outside Quebec was worse than in La Belle Province, because most Quebec treatment plants use ultraviolet light or aeration in settling ponds to kill bacteria, while Ontario plants continue to treat sewage with chlorine.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, a recreational boating organization is taking cottagers to task for polluting waterways. The Hamilton-based Ontario Boating Forum collected information on septic system inspections from seven municipalities in cottage country, ranging from Georgian Bay through the Muskokas and north to Trout Lake at North Bay. Some of the information was gathered using provincial Freedom of Information laws. The organization's conclusion is that, of 3,626 households inspected since 1994, 36 per cent had visual deficiencies and required action to prevent pollution of nearby water bodies. BF

Cleaner is cheaper, too

The first of UPI's "EnviroStations" (a trademarked spelling) was opened at the Waterloo-Oxford Co-op, just outside Woodstock, in August. "Not one litre of gas, not one inch of pipe is underground," said UPI president Robert Sicard. The 65,000-litre tank has a double steel wall filled with porous concrete and a two-hour fire rating. "You can drive into it with a truck," Sicard boasted.

The advantages to the above-ground tank are more than cosmetic, he says. When an in-ground tank is removed there is a substantial cost involved in "remediation" - that is, moving tonnes of petroleum-contaminated soil to an approved landfill site for safe disposal. Cleanup costs between $70,000 and $100,000 a site. Furthermore, Sicard points out, the tank can't be reused and must be discarded.

The new envirostation can be taken down and moved easily to another location for about $10,000. "We can take it down in a day and put it up in a day," says the tank's designer, Phil Andres, president of Trillium Fuelling Systems in Kitchener.

Sicard explains that the flexibility the tank lets UPI be more aggressive in selecting locations to sell its fuels, which are 9.8 per cent ethanol by volume, the maximum ethanol content allowed by auto makers' warranties. "We know that when the price is competitive, customers will make the environmental choice," he says.

UPI Inc. has been in the ethanol business since 1992, with 68 outlets across the province, and is the number two player in the ethanol business behind Sunoco, which owns half of UPI in a joint venture with farm co-operative Growmark. UPI plans to convert as many as six of its existing stations to the above-ground units annually. BF

GMO labelling issues nearer to resolution

Mainstream grocery stores won't let them advertise that their products are "Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) free", at least until the Canadian Standards Board approves a meaning and definition of the term.

All Canadian grocers agreed to order their suppliers to remove labels referring to GMOs until the definitions are approved, says the Food and Consumer Products Manufacturers Association. Laurie Curry, its vice-president of public policy and scientific affairs, says the ban on GMO-free labels has been in place for several years for mainstream food products. It is only recently, she says, that GMO-free labels appeared on "a dozen or so" organic products in supermarkets. Curry says the 90 food manufacturers represented by the association represent 80 per cent of the grocery products sold in stores in Canada.

Organic products have their own standards, but there is no labelling component in those standards, she points out. Currently there is no clear definition in Canada of what constitutes a GMO, or a GMO-free product for that matter.

The committee hammering out organic labeling standards is close to completing its work, says Gord Surgeoner, president, Ontario Agri-Food Technologies. Some important issues remain outstanding as of late June, he said. One is what constitutes a GMO. Is it all so-called "novel foods" as defined by federal regulation, or does the term GMO exempt foods that weren't transformed by using recombinant DNA (rDNA) technologies. There's also the issue of dealing with foods that don't contain protein but are derived from plants that are genetically modified. Example: canola oil from a Roundup Ready crop.

A completed document from the labelling committee is due in early autumn. Then it will go to the Canadian Standards Board. Reaching a consensus among 55 groups hasn't been easy. The organic industry took nearly a decade to create its standards. "It wasn't under the same pressure this (committee) is," Surgeoner points out. He believes Canada will have the best standards in the world when this process is finished.

Laurie Curry agrees. She says the European certification "is smoke and mirrors" because there is no test available to determine if the one per cent threshold on GMOs in foods has been exceeded.

A host of other technologies don't use rDNA but still result in novel traits, says Ken Hough, director of research and market development for the Ontario Corn Producers Association, who also sits on the panel. At press time, there was still a major discussion underway on what techniques would be included as producing GMOs. Hough says one group wants only "transgenic," or rDNA transfers of genes from one species to another, to be included as GMO. This includes a company that has developed a novel trait in wheat for the Western Canada market using a process called mutogenesis. A wider group, which includes the Ontario corn producers, the soybean board and AgCare, favours including all products that must be reviewed under the novel foods regulations.

"The average consumer is not going to distinguish between rDNA or artificial mutogenisis or self-fusion or any of these techniques that could produce a novel trait," Hough says. They are concerned about environmental safety and food safety. To do otherwise is to "split hairs" and "mislead consumers."

Furthermore, Hough says it isn't scientifically defensible, and the Europeans and Australians have had to create loopholes and exceptions in their regulations in order to allow these techniques to have clearance. BF

Meat alternatives take off

In June, U.S.-based natural foods giant Hain Celestial Group Inc. bought Yves Veggie Cuisine Inc. of Vancouver, which bills itself as the "leading fresh meat analogue company." The terms of the sale were not made public, but Yves Veggie had revenues last year of more than $50 million -- not bad for a privately held company.

It's not clear how a manufacturer of a meat substitute (or meat analogue if you prefer) like veggie burgers or veggie hot dogs gets labelled as a "natural food" company. Certainly, Yves Veggie is on to a trend. It grew at a rate of 50 per cent annually for its first 10 years and 25-30 per cent annually for the last six. Yves Veggie sells 85 per cent of the meat alternative foods in Canada and half of the U.S. market, says research firm A.C. Nielson. The meat substitute business is worth an estimated $51.8 billion Cdn worldwide, annually with growth expected at 25-30 per cent per year.

Hain, based in Uniondale, NY, has gobbled up a variety of other companies recently, doubling its sales in 2000 to $400 million US. Hain has also built a plant in Amsterdam. It's likely that Yves Veggie products will soon be sold into the growing market in Europe for alternatives to meat, now that foot-and-mouth disease and BSE have taken their toll on consumer confidence. BF

Norfolk farm charged in eaglet death

The charges were laid after a baby bald eaglet was found dead in its nest in Norfolk County two months before. The eagle nest was in the only tree left standing in a grove which had recently been cleared.

The penalties for breaching the act include fines of up to $50,000 and as much as two years in jail for each count. The penalties haven't changed since the Act was passed in Queen's Park in 1971.

Daryl Smith, Aylmer-based information officer for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources says the ministry doesn't keep score on the number of times that the act is used. "It's not one of the acts that we have used very often for charging purposes," he says. "We use the act to support recovery programs." MNR officers have powers to lay charges under 25 separate provincial acts.

The bald eagle has been on the endangered list in southern Ontario for years, but populations have been growing recently. In 2000, the Prothonotary Warbler and the King Rail were added to the list of endangered species in Ontario. Earlier this year, three plant species were added -- the few-flowered club-rush, horsetail spike-rush and slender bush clover, all found in only a few locations in southern Ontario. Species are declared endangered based upon recommendations from the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario, made up mostly of naturalists. BF

National Post's double-digit dairy beef

Energy costs (up nearly 50 per cent in the last year) took most of the blame in the Post article published in early May, but some foods were fingered along the way because of rapid increases in costs, including dairy, beef, pork and vegetables. Beef costs were credited with being up 18.8 per cent from this time last year, with pork up 9.8 per cent and vegetables up 23.5 per cent.

The "double digit" reference to dairy's 3.7 per cent increase was peculiar in that it was made in the caption under a photograph of milk bottles (when is the last time you saw milk sold in bottles?), calling March the "third month in a row of double-digit year-over-year rises."

It should be noted that, generally, editors prepare captions, not the reporters who write the stories. Editors at Hollinger Inc publications (which owns the National Post) have sometimes been perceived to write headlines that did not reflect what was in the story, in particular where in the dairy industry is concerned. A series of articles written about the Canadian dairy industry and published in the Ottawa Citizen about this time last year comes to mind. (The Citizen was a Hollinger publication until media mogul Conrad Black sold it to Canwest Global July 31 last year.)

No one at Dairy Farmers of Canada office was available to comment on the Post's digs at higher dairy prices, which are mandated by a federal body.

As for beef, there was no reference in the Post story to the source of the information, and the 18.8 per cent figure comes as a surprise to Glenn Brand, director of marketing for the Beef Information Centre in Calgary.

Beef prices certainly are on the rise, and the Post story referred to seasonal factors as being behind the increased cost of meat. Another factor is generally good times in the beef industry, where price levels sometimes hover barely above profitable levels. "I don't hear too many producers complaining at this point," says Brand.

A rather arcane measure of the beef industry called "demand" has risen three per cent from this time last year, says Brand. Demand is an economic measure combining price and consumption. While prices are generally up six per cent, the amount of beef sold is actually down. Fewer calves are available for finishing because more heifers are being held back for breeding rather than going to market. A tough winter in the United States reduced the weight gains on cattle in feedlots there, slowing their arrival at markets and ratcheting up the price further. With the barbecue season coming up, the higher-end cuts are making more of an impact on prices. Brand says the so called "middle meats," such as short loin ribs and top butts, make up 27 per cent of the weight of the carcass, and a full 67 per cent of its value. BF

Much ado about Bové

The questions, asked during a media scrum, went roughly like this.

Reporter: "Haven't you ever eaten at a McDonald's restaurant?"
José Bové: "No."
Reporter: "Not even when you were a kid?"
José Bové: "No."

To put this into perspective, Bov‚ was clearly identified in the story as being 60 years old. When the first McDonald's franchise (on this planet anyway) was opened in Des Plaines, Ill., in 1955, Bov‚ was already 15 years old. By the time the first McDonald's restaurant in France opened its doors in 1979, Bové was 39.

The point was lost upon this presumably youthful reporter. In less than 45 years, a North American phenomenon fuelled by heavy media advertising has made its way into the lexicon of 130 nations across the world. The formula was simple: Line up at the counter, make your choice quickly from a homogenous selection and eat fast. Twenty minute maximum, no loitering.

Better still, eat in the car. There's more dollars generated per square footage of restaurant that way. BF

Britain's patience wearing thin

"In saving farming, a minor and unprofitable activity, we have contrived to ruin a large, profitable industry -- tourism."

"Never again should a single footpath, national park, tourist attraction or any other rural facility be closed because of an agricultural crisis which poses no risk to the population. Nor should any sporting events be postponed or canceled. To date, just 1,500 cattle have actually been diagnosed as having the disease. It is for this trifling outbreak that much of the United Kingdom has been declared a no-go area. Can there ever have been a worse example of over-reaction?"

"Never again should agriculture be given a higher priority than tourism and leisure activities. Holidaymakers are more important to the nation than farmers. Tourism adds to the nation's wealth. Farming doesn't; it is largely a loss-making enterprise that the taxpayer makes good. The greater part of the cost of dealing with the foot-and-mouth crisis has fallen not on agriculture itself, but on hotels and guest houses, visitor attractions, holiday transport, the souvenir trade, sporting venues and so on. The loss in foreign exchange from absent tourists will be far greater than the loss from agricultural export markets."

"Never again should elections, local or otherwise, be postponed because of agricultural events. Perhaps this is the most incredible aspect of the crisis. Until now, the rule has been that only war provides sufficient reason for interfering with our settled constitutional arrangements. The blitz has been equated with 1,500 cattle becoming mildly ill."

"Never again should agriculture have its own department. It represents no overwhelming national interest. Important issues of food safety and protection of the environment are handled elsewhere in Whitehall, or can be. If we are going to have a ministry of rural affairs, why not a ministry of urban affairs? There is no more reason to have a Department of Agriculture, or rural affairs, than there is to have a department of gardening."

"Hey, you on the tractor, don't block the street onto Parliament Hill. You'll make me late. Quit waving that sign, you're blocking the view."

"Hate to say this, but we don't really need you. We can get our chicken from contract farms in Mississippi, our dairy products from New Zealand, and our soybeans, wheat and corn from Brazil. They grow it cheaper down there, don't you know."

"By the way, we still want to drive past your farm and watch your cows graze placidly on Sunday afternoons."

"So don't forget to cut the grass." BF