July 2009 Archives
Federal and provincial governments have all sorts of incentives to get people to make their homes, their vehicles and their businesses more energy efficient. Start your search at the website for National Office for Energy Efficiency. The federal government's ecoEnergy Retrofit Program has up to $5,000 to offset costs of improving the energy efficiency of your home. Anyone installing a geothermal (or water-source) heating system, for example, can qualify for grants up to $4,375.
At the OEE site, you can also find links to provincial grants. That includes Saskatchewan's EnerGuide for Houses. Click here for its list of eligible improvements. And in Manitoba, a home insulation program says it will pay up to 100 per cent of the insulation costs to re-insulate your home.
Have you applied for these or any other efficiency upgrade grants? I'd like to know whether it was worth the investment in time and money to make these upgrades — with or without the grants. Email me or post a comment on this blog.
You've probably heard about carbon credits, carbon sequestering and the global push to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. It sounds like the push is getting more serious, and that farmers are not immune to the pressure.
BBC Radio’s “Farming Today” had a series last week about the U.K.’s plan to cut carbon emissions from agriculture by six per cent by 2020. The two key ways to do this, based on comments on the program, are through increased fertilizer-use efficiency in grain crops and, on the livestock side, through more efficient use of feed and by capturing the biogas output from manure. (Apparently Germany already has 4,000 anaerobic digesters to generate burnable biogas from manure.)
The challenge for farmers, as the world population continues to rise in that time, is how to increase production and reduce carbon at the same time. One thought raised in the program is that thicker, denser crops actually sequester more carbon. Could that mean that more fertilizer use could actually reduce carbon because the crops are that much thicker and suck up that much more carbon dioxide?
Where to start?
We’ve got many unanswered questions when it comes to carbon. Farmers responding to the program noted, quite rightly, that farmers have no idea what their current carbon footprint is, so how can they tell if they’re using practices that reduce it. “What you can’t measure, you can’t manage,” said Allan Buckwell of the County Lands and Business Association. The association has a calculator on its website where farmers can enter data and then get an estimate of their farm’s carbon emissions.
But even then, farmers don’t know what practices provide the greatest carbon benefit for the least cost. Buckwell suggests that the U.K. set up model farms that test various techniques for their costs per tonne of carbon reduced. It sounds like a good idea for Canada.
Grainews will be looking into the carbon issue in more detail this winter, digging up carbon sequestering techniques that work and keeping you up to date on policies in Canada and abroad. Let me know what questions you'd like answered.
I attended last week’s grand opening of Bayer CropScience’s new Canola Breeding Centre of Innovation just outside Saskatoon. We got to tour the new molecular breeding labs and greenhouses where Bayer scientists and researchers will develop canola varieties with higher and higher yields and to suit a wider array of markets.
Garth Hodges, general manager of canola seed for Bayer CropScience, says the long-term sustainability of canola depends on higher yields and adaptability to a greater geographic area, more end uses (nutrition, health, industrial and biofuel), and on-farm storage. “On-farm storage allows farmers to segregate different types of canola for their specific end uses,” Hodges says. “Farmers don’t appreciate how valuable that is.”
On a tour of the hybrid canola field test plots, Jeff Mansiere, Bayer CropScience assistant breeder, explained some of the ways Bayer can achieve higher-yielding canola hybrids. Step one is general genetic improvement to develop parent lines that provide greater heterosis — a.k.a. “hybrid vigour.” The new lab will help speed this process. Next is to convert winter canola, the higher-yielding European crop, and breed out the need for vernalization — making it a suitable parent in spring canola hybrids. And pod-shatter resistance will make it easier to straight combine canola. By letting the plant ripen off while standing, seeds fill out more and pods on secondary branches are more likely to mature.
During the tour, we learned that Bayer is working on, or has plans to develop, sclerotinia- and clubroot-resistant InVigor hybrids, high-erucic acid rapeseed (HEAR), high-oil canola and lower saturated-fat canola.
Daytime fireworks
The ribbon cutting was a little different. Seven dignitaries pushed a detonator that set off a series of day-time fireworks. As you know, fireworks are usually shot off at night not at noon, but this concept actually works. If someone invented fireworks with coloured smoke, it would be even better.
The ribbon pushers in the photo are, from the left, Rudiger Scheitza, head of Bayer CropScience AG's global portfolio management; Garth Hodges, general manager of canola seed for Bayer CropScience; Kamel Beliazi, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience Canada; Lynne Yelich, MP and minister of state for Western Economic Diversification; Ed Hobday, reeve for the R.M. of Corman Park; Friedrich Berschauer, chairman of the board of management for Bayer CropScience AG; and Bob Bjornerud, minister of agriculture for Saskatchewan.
Friedrich Berschauer, chairman of the board of management for Bayer CropScience AG in Germany, spoke at the grand opening of Bayer’s Canola Breeding Centre of Innovation July 22 in Saskatoon. He made some positive comments about canola, then went on to add that Bayer has an agreement to work with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia's wheat breeding program, to develop new wheat varieties.
This is a whole new focus for Bayer, whose seed business currently concentrates on canola, rice, cotton and vegetables. In a press release issued last week out of its HQ in Monheim, Germany, Bayer CropScience says the CSIRO alliance establishes a far-reaching joint research and development program "aimed at improving the productivity and sustainability of cereal production utilizing modern techniques."
Bayer and CSIRO "will set up a number of research and development projects in the area of traits and their introgression into cereal germplasm, the goal being to develop cereal varieties with higher yield, more efficient nutrient utilization and tolerance against abiotic stress such as drought.
"One of the initial projects of this collaboration is dedicated to the development of wheat lines with improved yield potential and stress tolerance, while another focuses on wheat lines with improved utilization of phosphorus."
The first new varieties to come out of this alliance are expected in 2015.
Robert Hornford gave me a tour last Friday of the BASF plot site west of Portage la Prairie, Man. Robert is the senior technology development specialist for BASF Canada. He’s based in Winnipeg. BASF has a number of new product formulations and active ingredients for Western Canada that will be available for 2010. I asked Robert to list the three most important announcements. They are:
1. Heat. This not-yet-registered pre-seed or pre-emergence herbicide combines glyphosate with group-14 Kixor, another new BASF product. “Kixor provides a much faster kill of broadleafs,” Robert says. It also helps improve control of weeds that glyphosate has a harder time controlling on its own. These include wild buckwheat, kochia and, of course, Roundup Ready volunteers. Heat can be used ahead of pulses and cereals and on chemfallow.
2. Caramba. This new systemic triazole fungicide has shown to be very effective on fusarium head blight as well as on leaf diseases septoria, tan spot, rust, scald, net blotch, spot blotch and crown rust. It will work on wheat, durum, barley, oats and rye, but the first label — expected in time for 2010 — may not have all these crops.
3. Plant Health. This is an added benefit you get from some strobilurin-class fungicides, including BASF’s Headline. These products have shown to improve yield even when you don’t see obvious signs of disease damage. The U.S. is actually looking to approve a “plant health” label for products that show this effect. BASF says the plant health effect from Headline on peas, for example, means less disease, higher yields, increased seed size and an easier harvest.
Other notables:
—Tensile is a new product for use on Clearfield canola. It combines Solo (straight imazamox) with a lower rate of Lontrel (half the amount contained in Absolute) for “rotational freedom.”
—BASF has applied for a Headline label update to include rust on sunflowers, and could be available for emergence use in Manitoba if sunflower growers and the Manitoba government reps push for it.
Barb Isman, chief operating officer for Canadian Bioenergy Corporation, spoke at PMG’s AgProgress Conference in Kananaskis, Alta., in July. (For my complete coverage of the conference, click here.) Isman presented an update on biodiesel production in Canada, noting that her company is working with ADM to built a 265-million-litre biodiesel production facility on site at ADM’s canola crush plant in Lloydminster, Alta. With mandates coming on stream in B.C. and Alberta in 2010 and Canada as a whole in 2011, Canada will need 700 million litres of biodiesel just to meet these mandates, she said. Current capacity, spread over a number of smaller plants, is 220 million litres or so.
In her talk, Isman talked about second and third generation source materials for biodiesel. Canola is a first generation material. Algae, which contains 46 per cent oil and doesn’t tie up farmland, is a second or third generation source, she says. She also noted that large petroleum companies are getting involved in these later generation products, and they’re also working on more efficient methods to convert the oil into useable energy.
As if on queue, that day Exxon Mobil announced it will invest US$600 million in a project to develop production and harvest techniques for high-oil algae. The research partner is Synthetic Genomics. In a Dow Jones Newswire article, which appeared in The Globe and Mail, Emil Jacobs, VP of research and development for Exxon Research, is quoted saying the company looked “at all fuel options” and algae made the cut.
The article says, “Commercially-viable algae biofuel is definitely in the realm of the future. Algae is rich in fat, which can be processed into fuel, and can reproduce much faster than corn and other land-hungry agricultural crops, all while living in brackish water.”
It will be many years, if ever, before algae goes commercial — so canola biodiesel will remain a strong market outlook for Canadian canola growers for a good while yet.
Gary Pike, president of PMG and host of the AgProgress Conference in Kananaskis, Alta. this week, says it was one of Jim Carroll’s recent blog entries that inspired Pike to bring Carroll to the conference. (In the photo, Pike is on right, Carroll on the left.) Carroll wrote a fictional report, called “Canada announces end of economic relationship with U.S. and a bold new strategy to 2020,” where he invents a seven-point plan to broaden Canada’s trade vision.
Carroll is a trends watcher, author and keynote speaker. He likes to talk about the importance of innovation, but every once in awhile he'll branch out — as he did with this blog.
While the seven-point plan is Carroll's creation, it does raise some important discussion points for a nation that depends so much on one trade partner.
You can read the whole entry at http://www.jimcarroll.com/blog/canada-2020.html, but here are a few key paragraphs lifted verbatim from the blog:
—Canada announced a significant 10-year, seven-point plan, branded "Canada Transformed!" that will re-orient its economy away from the United States to the AEA (Asia, Europe and Africa) markets by 2020 with a number of key goals:
—Energy & oil: Canada will invest in a massive infrastructure project that will allow it to deliver the bulk of it's significant energy/oil resources to Asia, Europe and Africa within five to seven years. The infrastructure project will consist of a number of significant pipeline projects that will direct Canadian oil, natural gas and other energy sources to east and west coast ports, as well as shipping and marine infrastructure, that will provide for a "ocean railway of energy" destined to the AEA countries.
— Food and agriculture: Global food production must double to meet world population growth, and Canadian grain, beef, pork and other producers will work to achieve an AEA target market of 90 per cent by 2020. "The Canadian agricultural system has been held hostage to the interests of protectionist agricultural interests in its worst form in the U.S.," noted Canada. "We intend to end this abuse. Most recently, the implementation of country-of-origin-labeling rules by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that have had a devastating impact on Canadian pork and beef producers. The U.S. has not played an honest game with Canadian agricultural trade for quite some time, and we have come to the realization that they will never do so."
"Quite simply, the rest of the world beyond the U.S. needs a stable, reliable food supplier, and Canada intends to become the leading global brand in that regard."
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I'll be covering PMG's AgProgress Conference in Kananaskis, Alta., next week. One of the keynote speakers is an American futurist and author named Jim Carroll. He will speaking about the U.S. economy, the new Obama administration, and what this might mean for trade with Canada. I poked around his website today, and while he's probably pretty good at sticking to the topic, Carroll could easily go on a tangent about innovation. That seems to be an important theme in his talks and books.
I pulled the following two lists off his website. You can use these to test your farm business team's openness to new ideas:
10 signs that you've got an innovation dysfunction
1. People laugh at new ideas
2. Someone who identifies a problem is shunned
3. Innovation is the privileged practice of a special group
4. The phrase, "you can't do that because we've always done it this way" is used for every new idea
5. No one can remember the last time anyone did anything really cool
6. People think innovation is about R&D
7. People have convinced themselves that competing on price is normal
8. The organization is focused more on process than success
9 There are lots of baby boomers about, and few people younger than 25
10. After any type of surprise -- product, market, industry or organizational change -- everyone sits back and asks, "Wow, where did that come from?"
Carroll also has this list called "How do innovative organizations differ?"
—Ideas flow freely throughout the organization
—Subversion is a virtue
—Success and failure are championed
—There are many, many leaders who encourage innovative thinking, rather than managers who run a bureacracy
—There are creative champions throughout the organization -- people who thrive on thinking about how to do things differently
—Ideas get approval and endorsement
—Rather than stating "it can't be done," people ask, "how could we do this?"
—People know that in addition to R&D, innovation is also about ideas about to "run the business better, grow the business and transform the business"
—The word "innovation" is found in most job descriptions as a primary area of responsibility, and a percentage of annual renumeration is based upon achievement of explicitly defined innovation goals.
My aunt from Minnesota mailed me a clipping from the Twin Cities Star Tribune newspaper. The article, called "Farmers trying to cultivate new image," by Matt McKinney told about the conventional ag industry's fight to win back respectability in the U.S. The latest straw is a new movie and book called Food, Inc., that talks about how massive global businesses control a great percentage of the food available in supermarkets.
It's worth watching the movie trailer at the Food Inc. website, then read McKinney's article. He has lots of links to websites that counter the Food, Inc. message.
Here are the first three paragraphs from McKinney's article:
Are farmers the new villains? Cast as uncaring louts in a major food documentary that opened nationwide Friday, conventional farmers already have seen their public persona trashed by bestselling depictions of conventional farms as places that abuse the land and the animals while producing food of low nutritional quality.
Weary of their standing among consumers, farmers, farm organ- izations and agribusinesses have begun spinning back with websites and YouTube videos, some done with slick narration and lighting. Field trips and speaking campaigns have been organized to "educate" urban media reporters and diners alike.
"They don't seem to believe anything we tell them," said Andy Quinn, a corn farmer and ethanol plant member in Litchfield, Minn.
Brad Crammond from Austin, Man., has been having a problem with 13-lined ground squirrels (striped gophers) eating his crop. “It started in one field two years ago in a small patch, and they have now spread to almost every field. We have been on top of it from the start using the grain-mixed rodenticides, but the population continues to grow. During this spring's direct seeding I was amazed how they have spread,” he says.
Crammond says Rozol, a grain-based poison bait, takes up to three baitings before he can notice any drop in activity. With the poison, he has also seen dead gophers lying on top of the ground. “Badgers and hawks could come along and eat them getting poisoned themselves." He didn't want that.
When he noticed hundreds and hundreds of holes in one quarter-section of canola again this spring, he knew he had to do something different. After hearing about NH3 being used as a rodenticide, he and his father, Lorne, set out to make something on their own. He borrowed a 1,200-gallon NH3 tank from a neighbour with only 15 per cent left in the tank “You need barely any product,” he says. He towed the tank around the field with a mid-sized tractor with duals. He didn’t want to damage the young canola plants, so he went with the big-wheeled tractor. “A few days later we couldn’t tell where we’d been,” he says.
He got 30-feet of NH3 hose and put a 3/8-inch stainless steel ball valve on the end and a length of threaded pipe for his injector. He stuck the pipe through a eight-inch rubber cup. This sealed the hole, keeping the NH3 inside. He stuck the pipe in the hole, cracked the valve for five to 10 seconds, then moved on to the next hole. “With the tank pressurized to 100 or 110 pounds, you just need to crack the valve a quarter turn,” he says. He stresses that everything must be compatible with NH3.
For protective gear, he wore a full-face snowmobile helment, NH3-grade rubber gloves and a three-quarter length lined rain coat. He also made sure he stayed upwind of the target holes. “It’s nice to do the job when there’s a slight breeze in case any product escapes.”
With one round of NH3, Crammond figures he got 95 per cent control. "It's not a fun job, but it works," he says.
Do you have problems with 13-lined grounds squirrels, Richardson ground squirrels or pocket gophers? What techniques work best for you? Post a comment by clicking “comment” under the headline of this blog, or send me an email and I’ll share it with Grainews readers. (Photo credit: Wisconsin government extension and images.google.ca.)
Yep, it's a great headline. Unfortunately it's just a work in progress for now. I want to put together a series of articles over the fall, winter and spring that feature repair jobs you can do yourself AND that will save you the most money over the years.
The idea came from my conversation in April with U of S ag economist Bill Brown. Being able to keep older machinery going is important for a small farm to survive, he says. So I want to know which repair skills and which specific repair jobs provide the biggest payoff.
I have one suggestion so far: How to keep a clutch working longer and how to repair a clutch when the time comes. Another important skill is welding, but are some welding skills more important than others? Basic tips for tire maintenance and repair, given the price of tires these days, should probably be on the list. What else?
Please email your tips and article suggestions.
