September 2008 Archives

My young son and I made a pumpkin pie this morning. He was a big help with the pumpkin and with the pastry. I used the pastry recipe that Helen Sandsbraaten of Naicam, Sask., shared with me in January of this year. Look on page 14 of the January 14 Grainews for her recipe. If not, see below.

As my son and I were making the pie, I was thinking about how tough it must have been to be a farm wife. This is back when mothers had a half-dozen kids or more to look after, and had to keep the house neat, the garden tended, cook meals (without a microwave, etc.) AND bake pies. I thought I did well this morning making one pie with one kid. Some mothers still go through this ordeal every day.

This Thanksgiving, don't forget to give thanks to your dear ol' ma!

Here is Helen's recipe:

Having cooked for over 40 years, first for my family and presently for the local Meals-on-Wheels program at the seniors’ lodge in our town, I can tell you I have made hundreds of pies over the years. I use my grandmother’s recipe, which probably came from her mother and so on. It has never failed me yet. I never use anything but lard, even rendering my own up to a few years ago. There really is nothing hard about making a good pastry, and no special products or flour either.

Yes the water should be cold, but the rest doesn’t matter. For a never-fail crust the secret ingredient is an egg. Plus if you give your finished pie an egg wash with a sprinkling of sugar before baking, you will have a beautiful golden brown, crispy texture to your pie. Try it. You will see a difference.

I have included by recipe:

—Combine 4-1/2 cups all-purpose flour (any brand), 1 tsp. baking powder and 1 tsp. salt. Then cut in 2 cups of lard with a pastry blender.

—In a measuring cup, beat one egg. Add 1 Tbsp vinegar and enough ice water to make 3/4 cup. Add this to the dry ingredients and mix ‘til dough forms a ball.

—Roll out on a lightly floured surface. Use your favourite filling. Vent as usual.

—Before baking: In a small bowl, beat one egg white with 1 Tbsp of water. Brush top crust with some of this. Sprinkle lightly with granulated sugar. Bake at 350 F ‘til golden brown and filling is done. Cool on wire rack and enjoy!

You can make your election predictions at predictor.hillandknowlton.ca. Click on "make a prediction" and you can enter how you think the vote will split nationally or regionally. I put the national vote at 38.5 per cent Conservative (up from 36.5 per cent in 2006), 29 per cent for the Liberals (down from 30.1), 16 per cent for the NDP (17.5), 9.9 for the Bloc (10.3), 5.5 for Green (4.5) and 1.1 (1.1) for other. The computer took these numbers and spit out a result of 136 seats for the Conservatives — up from 126 in 2006 but still a minority government.

        The site is also useful for showing which ridings are currently held by which party. It's amazing the diversity everywhere but on the Prairies. Ontario, for all the grief it gets from Alberta for being locked in Liberal mode, is strikingly divided with 54 Liberal, 40 Conservative and 12 NDP seats.

While at the election predictor site, I read a blog that led me to CTV's "Pick your party" game. It's a fun exercise. The game has eight election topics from crime to abortion to the carbon tax, and has a quote from each leader explaining their position on these topics. You pick the quote that best represents your thoughts on the matter. Here's the fun part: It doesn't say who said the quotes. Your choice therefore is not jaded by your impression of the leader. When you've made your eight choices, the game tells you which party — actually which leader — is most in line with your way of thinking. 

Thanks Stephanie

Thanks to my friend Stephanie Trudeau for telling me about the predictor website. Stephanie is VP public affairs with Labatt in Montreal. She and I and five other young Canadians traveled together in the U.S. for three weeks in January. For more on this trip read my archived blog entries from January.

Based on a recent record-breaking combine performance in England, as reported in Farmers Weekly's online magazine, I would say the average combine in Western Canada could be pushed to work a little harder.

A farm in Lincolnshire, England, harvested 532 tonnes of wheat in eight hours with one Lexion 580 combine. That's an average of 66.5 tonnes — or 2,500 bushels — per hour.

To give you an idea of just how thick European wheat crops can be, these 532 tonnes were from only 47.7 hectares (118 acres). Average yield was just over 11 tonnes per hectare (or 165 bushels per acre.) Also interesting, crop height was only 61 to 63 cm — just a hair over two feet. These varieties are pouring their energy into grain yield, not  green matter.

Thanks to Scott Day of Manitoba Agriculture for bringing this article to my attention, and thanks to Farmers Weekly for the photo.

Edward Cook was finishing up a 130-bushel-per-acre field of oats when I stopped by his farm on Friday. Cook farms 2,600 acres near Dugald, Man., just east of Winnipeg. He has enjoyed a good harvest.

His overall average oat yield will be around 105. His Falcon winter wheat yielded in the 80s and 90s. And his Cargill special oil canola — v2018 — yielded 48 bushels per acre based on how much bin space it filled. The final yield won't be quite that high, but it's still his "best canola yield ever," Edward says. His InVigor hybrids did not yield as well, but parts of those fields had to be reseeded this spring due to excess water.

He still has 700 acres of row crops to harvest, including 580 acres of sunflowers. He lost a large chunk of one sunflower field to corn seed maggot and cutworms. The corn seed maggots actually chewed right into the planted seed and ate it before it germinated. The field had been planted onto winter wheat stubble, which had been worked twice before planting — including once in the fall. Turns out the maggots and cutworms love a field environment with decaying crop matter and good moisture.

Farmers in Eastern Manitoba often use tillage to reduce crop moisture and deal with heavy stubble. Zero tillage hasn't worked very well for them. But since working up the stubble seems to promote insect damage, many farmers are stuck with burning the stubble to get rid of it. Plus, Edward says he got a 20-bushel yield advantage for oats on burned stubble. He says he'll probably burn all his winter wheat stubble this fall.

Cory and I are back home after our two days in Toronto. On day two we met first with the ad agencies representing Ford trucks and Dodge trucks. (Photo one shows Cory on Bloor Street arranging meetings. I took a bunch of photos of Cory and he got tired of my camera in his face. I won't show you the photo where he's giving me the one finger salute.)

At noon or so we met with Honda's ad agency, called Grip. Its office is near the intersection of John and Queen Streets, location of the MuchMusic building. Grip creates the advertisements and ad strategies for Honda as well as for Kokanee beer. The "does the Ranger live or die?" concept for Kokanee is their work. But Cory wasn't there to get beer ads in Grainews. He was there to remind them that farmers buy ATVs, generators and trucks — things that Honda produces.

Toronto ad agencies use their offices to express their creativee potential, and Grip's office was my favourite. The receptionist's desk on the sixth floor looked a bit like a big tire, and beside the "tire" was a long orange slide — yes, a slide — to the meeting rooms on the fifth floor. They also had stairs for people who think slides are lame. Cory took the stairs. I took the slide.

After lunch at Tabaq halal restaurant we visited Quarry Integrated Communications, the Mississauga-based agency for BASF. Then we drove a few kilometres down the 401 to Dupont's Canadian headquarters where we met with Joanne Hewitson and Travis Schoonbaert.

Travis and I both went to school in Deloraine, Man., and it's good to see him doing so well with Dupont. (Travis is on the right in photo two. I'm on the left.) I asked him what is new and exciting with the company. Precison Pac is one thing. He's meeting with our man Lee Hart in Alberta in October to demonstrate the Precision Pac system for blending herbicides to suit the weed spectrum and exact acreage in a field. But Travis is also excited about the prospects for rynaxypyr, the new insecticide active ingredient that is already registered as Coragen for potatoes and Altacor for apples and grapes. Travis expects registration for use on canola and forage crops within the next couple of years.

Cory Bourdeaud'hui, the Grainews ad sales manager, asked me along for one of his business trips — this time to Toronto. Today and tomorrow we'll be hooking up with company and ad agency reps for Toyota, Syngenta, Yamaha ATV, Dupont, BASF, Dodge and some others. I asked Cory why he wants to have me on these trips. His first response: "To drive the car." I did drive today. We had a GPS navigation system, which — for a person like me who prefers a good old map — can make a mess of simple common sense.

When pressed for a serious response, Cory gave four reasons:  1) I provide the editorial perspective "because I don't know what you're doing and thinking in terms of content," he says. 2) I help carry the conversation in the meetings. 3) We're like a team, he says. "I don't think anyone else does that, which makes Grainews stand apart." 4) I provide companionship...someone to travel with, eat with, and smell his gas in the hotel room. (Cory told me to say that. He said my blog was too serious.)

I eat beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas all the time. One of my favourite lunches is a simple Jamie Oliver recipe: Mix chickpeas or white kidney beans (out of the can) in a bowl with a can of tuna and chopped up celery. Add two or three tablespoons of olive oil or canola oil (I use a bit of both) and salt and pepper. That's it. You eat it cold. Oliver says it's a common working-class Italian lunch.

Today for lunch I made a lentil dish I found in Saskatchewan Pulse Growers' Pulse Point magazine. The dish is called vegetarian lentil delight mujaddara, and it's originally from a cookbook by Habeeb Salloum. Salloum is 80 years old and lives in Toronto, but he grew up in Saskatchewan. The cookbook is called "Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead."

Here is the recipe, step by step:

1. Put one cup of rinsed red lentils in a pot. Add 5 cups of water and bring to a boil. Cover and cook over medium heat for 15 minutes or until lentils are half cooked. I e-mailed Salloum to see if I should use split or whole red lentils. He didn't get back to me, so I used the only thing my Safeway sold: split. Turns out that split red lentils get very soft — I'd say "fully cooked" not half cooked — in 15 minutes. They also lose all their colour.

2. Add a quarter-cup of rice to the lentils and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn to low, cover, and cook another 20 minutes. (My lentils turned to total mush in that time, but I wanted to make sure my rice was cooked.)

3. Meanwhile put six tablespoons of butter or margarine in a frying pan and fry three medium onions, chopped. (I reduced the margarine to only two tablespoons and used one large sweet onion.) Saute onions until they're golden brown.

4. Add all contents of the frying pan — onions and melted margarine — to the cooked rice and lentil mixture.

5. Then add one teaspoon of salt (I used half that), half a teaspoon of pepper, half a teaspoon of cumin, and a quarter-teaspoon of chili powder. Stir it all together and cook another three or four minutes.

I didn't really know what to expect. What I got was a delicious and hearty SOUP! It had the consistency and colour of French Canadian pea soup (made with yellow peas.) I am a big fan of pea soup with ham, and this mujaddara lentil soup was every bit as good. The photo shows my finished product.

It's easy to support Western Canadian pulse growers when the results are always so good — and good for you.

Allan Dubyts has an article in the upcoming October 9 Grainews on the benefits of high-speed Internet. One benefit I've been rather slow to discover is listening to radio podcasts from other countries. Today I listened for the first time to BBC's Farming Today radio show. Here is what I learned:

1. The UK is getting drenched with rain, with harvest held up for weeks. Kernels are starting to sprout. What's more, seeding, which follows right behind harvest for many crops, keeps getting pushed back. UK farmers are looking at a large, but low quality crop, which is bad news because there is "a very good world harvest of wheat" coming off. Milling wheat prices in the UK were 200 pounds (the currency) per tonne last year and have sunk to 150 pounds per tonne currently.

2. The EU commission has proposed regulations to restrict the pesticides that can be used on farms. One expert — Sean Rickard of Cranfield School of Management — interviewed says "what is maddest of all" is that while the world needs to increase output, Europe seems to be "hellbent" on lowering its output and productivity. If the regulations are imposed, Rickard says the results will be falling yields and rising cost of production, which means farmers will need a massive rise in farmgate prices to maintain margins.

I found Farming Today while poking around at BBC's Open University website. It's a wealth of current information on just about anything, and has links to every BBC program. I love it.

The October issue of Bon Appetit magazine has an article called “America’s foodiest small town” that could inspire you to lead your community to new heights — and help local farmers at the same time. The author, a New Yorker named Andrew Knowlton, chose Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This "town" actually has a population of 300,000, but to someone from New York City, I guess that’s small. And what makes this the foodiest small town could apply anywhere.

Knowlton’s quest was to find a place where urban and rural were closely linked — in that people in town actually bought a lot of food direct from farmers and where many restaurants actually cooked with local ingredients. I’ve been to a lot of small town restaurants in the Prairies and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single one that makes a point of serving locally-grown food. If they do, they certainly don’t boast the fact.

The Bon Appetit article featured quite a few farmers, including a young couple, Alice and Stuart White, who grew up in cities but found their calling on the farm. They grow strawberries, carrots, tomatoes and radishes on 30 acres. Stuart is quoted saying this about Durham-Chapel Hill: “In other places, farming is more of a quaint thing. Here, farmers are more respected. We both love how people here feel about food and the farmers who grow it.”

The article also quoted a local restaurant owner who said, “Great food starts with farms and farmers, and this community realizes that.”

If this reminds you of any town on the Prairies, I'd like to know about it. That's the kind of town I'd like to visit. 

I talked this morning with Bruno Osterwalder who farms near Fort St. John, B.C. with his wife, Ruth. The farm had two inches of rain in total from May 1 to July 31, and most of it was a tenth at a time. Then they had about an inch and a half in August and a bit more in September -- just enough to slow harvest. "The lawn is green again and the fescue is recovering," he says. But it was too late to help his annual crops. 

Bruno is finished his peas and almost finished his wheat. Yields for both are around 50 per cent of the 10-year average for his farm. Quality is very good, so that's at least one positive. As for the whole area, he says it is "incredibly variable." In some places, farmers are getting 80 per cent of a crop. In others, farmers will harvest "absolutely nothing," he says.

Bruno still has barley, oats and canola to combine. He expects half a crop of canola, but hopes for slightly better results from his oats and barley.

Ross Ravelli expects similar yields

Ross Ravelli, president of the Grain Growers of Canada, farms near Dawson Creek, B.C., about 80 km down the road from Fort St. John. He is 70 per cent done harvest, which is ahead of most farms in the area. His hard red spring yielded 18 bushels per acre, compared to the crop insurance average of 45. His barley yielded 45 bushels per acre, compared to his insurance average of 75. And he hopes to get 15 to 17 bushels for his canola, which he has not combined. The insurance average is 36.

Thanks to Marianne Stamm

Marianne Stamm from Westlock, Alta., is a regular reader of my blog. She called this week to offer her services as a writer. She pitched some great article ideas, so you'll hopefully see her byline in Grainews a few times in the coming months. She also reminded me of the dry conditions in the B.C. Peace region and gave me Bruno's phone number. Thank you Marianne.

The Prairies are dotted with old bridges that were never built to handle the weight of modern farm equipment, especially loaded grain carts. This bridge over the Souris River in southwest Manitoba was built in 1923, and as you can see, it gave up trying to cope with backbreaking weights.

Scott Day, diversification specialist with Manitoba Agriculture in Melita, says that "if it wasn’t for the front end loader that is holding the unit in place, the situation could have been much worse."

No one was hurt and the tractor and trailor have been lifted out, but farmers in the area who depended on the bridge will have to take the long route.

Thanks to Scott Day for sending in the photo, Andy Elliot for taking the photo, and to the Manitoba Co-operator for first bringing this to my attention.

I had a quick chat this afternoon with Mark Overbye who farms near Lake Alma in southern Saskatchewan. Mark had phoned a couple of months ago offering to write an article on his experiences converting pick up trucks from gas to diesel. I tried to hook up with him around that time, but didn't get through. I found his phone number today while cleaning my desk so I called him again. He was in the shop tinkering with his combine during a rain delay. He had harvest a quarter of peas and a quarter of Kamute durum before it started to rain four days ago.

Mark agreed to write the article for Grainews sometime over the next couple of months. (Probably after harvest.)

We then got talking about his farm. He has 1,500 acres in organic production plus 180 cows. I asked if he was interesting in writing articles about organic practices that could be useful for conventional farmers. One idea is green manure, given the price of fertilizer. Other ideas could deal with tips to  keep down weed populations. Herbicides are an important tool for conventional farmers, but maybe Mark and other organic farmers have effective management practices — over and above cultivation — that you could use in tandem with herbicides. We'll see.

If you have any ideas that you'd like to share or questions you might have for Mark or other organic growers, please send me an e-mail.