Innovative system helps Canadian hort industry to compete

Friday, January 2, 2009

by SUSAN MANN

The Canadian horticultural industry is developing a markets information collection system that’s unlike anywhere else in the world.

Parts of the system will involve collecting information electronically. Even the United States Department of Agriculture still gathers market information manually. “They do it with a large army of market reporters,” says Ian MacKenzie, a spokesman for the Fresh Produce Alliance, which is spearheading the initiative.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) collected market information for decades, MacKenzie says. But recently, as the CFIA shifted its priorities to human, animal and plant health and safety, the information became out-of-date and sometimes erroneous.   

Both the old and new reports can be found on Agriculture Canada’s web site – Infohort. There are: storage holdings for apples and potatoes, wholesale and retail prices on the terminal markets, the shipping point prices of commodities from packing plants, plus the tracking of weekly shipments.

The Alliance hired consultants to work with the industry to build different collection mechanisms. For example, apple and potato grower organizations throughout the country collect the storage holding numbers each month from November to the marketing season’s end and post it on the Infohort web site.

The organizations “see a benefit for their growers if they’re able to collect this information and record it,” MacKenzie says.

The Ontario Apple Growers compile comparisons of storage holdings in Ontario to other provinces and countries. “They can monitor the usage of apples in places that compete with them at the same time,” he says.

Other grower organizations are generating graphs and studies so their farmers have a better idea of market trends.

The new system started in November 2007. Including fresh vegetables is the next step. This is the last crop year CFIA plans to do the information collection for fresh vegetables, MacKenzie says.

The Alliance is lobbying Agriculture Canada to share the costs of maintaining the collection system. The government benefits from having storage holdings information, MacKenzie says. So far, it has obtained $1.3 million through the federal Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food program and in-kind donations of staff time from industry organizations.

To collect wholesale market prices, the Alliance has built a database that’s compatible with participating wholesales’ computer systems. The new system should be in place for the Toronto market by the end of January followed later by the other terminal markets, such as Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

The software extracts sales data from the wholesales’ invoicing systems and streams it to products and package sizes the industry wants reported. An average weighted price for commodities will be made available to the wholesaler participants. Only the high and low prices are to be posted on the Infohort site.

Another phase of the project involves developing an electronic collection system of shipping point prices of commodities at the packing plant and weekly shipments. Software for this phase is still being developed with the goal to have a new system working by the end of March. BF