Short Takes

Modular loading favoured for Ontario chicken farms

Ontario is looking at the cost of catching up to other jurisdictions when it comes to chicken catching.

Ontario and Quebec, the largest chicken-producing provinces in Canada, don’t use “modular systems” for catching chickens. Yet they have been widely used in Western Canada for some time and in Nova Scotia, not to mention in the southern United States, where they have been accepted for 30-40 years. An industry-wide committee studying the feasibility of implementing a modular loading and handling system is examining the costs for Ontario farms and processing plants.

What’s organic and what’s ‘natural’?

Organic milk producers in the United States, already under financial stress as sales flattened, went ballistic in the summer when word got out that the largest organic milk processor, Dean Foods Inc., based in Dallas, intended to set up a new, lower-priced category called “natural dairy.” Organic producers charge it is attempting to pirate away organic consumers who can’t tell the difference between regulated “organic” brands and unregulated “natural.”

Greenpeace scores big in Brazil


If you don’t think environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has clout south of the Equator, think again. In June, Brazilian meat and poultry processor Marfrig Alimentos S.A. said it would no longer buy cattle or sell beef from cattle raised in the deforested area of the Amazon region. Major Brazilian retailers quickly followed suit.

The reason? Greenpeace published a three-year study charging that the cattle sector in the Brazilian Amazon is the largest cause of deforestation in the world.

Ginseng a remedy for Type 2 diabetes?

Denton Hoffman, general manager of the Ontario Ginseng Growers’ Association, thinks it’s just a matter of time before there’s a ginseng solution for Type 2 diabetes.

For the past 10 years, the ginseng industry has been supplying Dr. Vladimir Vuksan of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, who is exploring the glucose-lowering effects of ginseng.

Now scientists are beginning to grow ginseng developed with beneficial attributes specific to Type 2 diabetes. “They’re doing micro-propagation,” Hoffman notes, adding that the ginseng industry and the University of Western Ontario in London received funding from the provincial government last year to develop solutions.

Quebec study shows ‘local’ label works

Consumers buy into local food labels, at least in Quebec, according to a doctoral student in marketing at Sherbrooke University.

Francine Rodier found a 2.8 per cent increase in sales across 16 food items in four grocery stores when they carried a “Product of Quebec” label. It doesn’t sound like much, but the provincial government, which has put $14 million into a campaign to buy more home-grown food, says that, if every Quebecer ate just $30 worth extra of provincially produced food, it would generate $1 billion in sales and create 1,800 jobs.

If you divide $14 million by 1,800, that is $7,777 per job. That’s better than governments did to preserve jobs at General Motors Canada, isn’t it?
 

BSE not linked to farmed fish

A Canadian prion expert says that humans have nothing to be worried about when they eat farmed fish, contradicting a report published in mid-June in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Diseases. Neurologist Robert P. Friedland of the University of Louisville warned that farmed fish, eating byproducts rendered from cows and contaminated with the prions associated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, may spread Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans.

“It is a fish story,” says Neil Cashman, scientific director of PrioNet Canada. Cashman, Canada Research Chair in Neurodegeneration and Protein Misfolding Diseases at the University of British Columbia, says he has “worked in the prion field for 20 years” and fish do not contract the BSE prion.

How do you say ‘milk the cows’ in Spanish?

Immigrant workers aren’t only found on dairy farms in the southern and western United States. A couple of years ago agricultural services in New York state were offering farmers seminars on how to communicate with Hispanic workers.

A recently released survey of more than 5,000 U.S. dairy farms reveals that immigrant labour is a key contributor to running those businesses. Conducted by the National Milk Producers Federation last year, the study says that immigrant labour, mostly from Mexico, accounted for 41 per cent of an estimated 138,000 full-time employees on dairy farms. They were paid an average of $10 an hour – about the same as cashiers in stores, and better than fast food workers, but less than workers on ranches, landscape companies and in slaughterhouses.

A pig for adoption

Wiggles, the baby weaner pig found injured at the side of Highway 401 by a motorist and spirited to the offices of Toronto Humane Society, was big news last spring – at least until that office was caught up in a scandal after a newspaper investigation alleged that animals there weren’t well cared for and the overseeing Ontario SPCA yanked the society’s powers to investigate.

Ian McConachie, spokes-person for the Humane Society, did not immediately return telephone calls about the current state of the piglet. A television news clip on the society’s website shows the piglet, two weeks after she underwent extensive surgery for a badly broken back right leg, enjoying a scratch from a society worker.

Red Fife returns to its Otonabee roots

Red Fife wheat, the cultivar of choice on the newly-plowed Canadian Prairies in the middle to late 1800s, was developed in the “Otonabee” area of Ontario, near Peterborough. Now Red Fife is back there – or at least nearby, in Hastings County. Organic grower and miller Patricia Hastings started with one 25-kilogram bag of Red Fife five years ago and multiplied it for four seasons before beginning milling a year ago, harvesting eight tonnes and grinding it with her own stone mill.

Hastings says her flour is in demand. “I had no idea there were so many artisan bakeries in Ottawa and Toronto,” she says.

“I expected it to be a very small market.”