Last week at the coffee shop, I was asked, “How are the farmers dealing with these tariff wars?” That’s how this conversation began.
Through the past years, Canadian farmers have been working to produce the safest, best quality food in the world and now it is being recognized. Since Mr. Trump started this trade war, Canadians have been standing “elbows up” and demanding only Canadian food products on the shelf. The store owners found out that it was not that hard, because most of the food on the shelves was already Canadian because it is the best. Through buyouts and takeovers, some large USA companies gobbled up some of Canada’s good brands. In some cases, when they moved manufacturing south of the border, quality dropped (my favourite soup was one of those). This just gave some newer, smaller Canadian companies a chance to break into a market left with a hole to fill.
I spent many years representing our farmers at various farm groups, and one of the most interesting was the Quebec milk board.
The board paid a bonus for milk that had superior quality: lower bacteria, no added water, no antibiotics detected in the past year, no plant rejections because of quality for the past year, installation of a TTR (time temperature recorder on the bulk milk tank that recorded how hot the wash water was for cleaning), continuous recording of milk temperature in the tank from the moment it was first put in the tank until it was picked up by the big stainless steel milk truck (most bulk milk tanks are maintained at three degrees centigrade).
The Canadian Quality Milk (CQM) program trains dairy farmers and employees about recording every bit of antibiotic used in the herd: how and where antibiotics are kept, every treatment of every animal with the date, the reason, who approved it, and even any medicated calf-grower that is used to help keep calves healthy (kind of like your kids getting vitamins every day). All this required an investment (that was sometimes subsidised) and extra hours of the farmer’s time to do the recording and paperwork. Some farms have used a computer program that has everything recorded, even breeding dates of cows, date of birth, the sire and dam, the date that their feet were trimmed, the date sold, to whom and why, even the date the animal died! Some dairy farmers thought that this was too much red tape and extra work, and just retired from dairying. Today, this CQM program is recognized worldwide, and Canadian dairy products are accepted as the best worldwide.
So, what about beef or hogs? They also adhere to very strict rules of movement and compulsory tagging just like dairy. All animals that end up in an abattoir must have had an antibiotic withdrawal period, and some markets require that meat must be hormone free or even grass fed. All animals must be humanely treated, whether it’s a chicken or a big bull. A presenter at a dairy symposium once said that maximum efficiency of any animal demands that all stress be eliminated (wouldn’t it be great if we treated people like that). Canadian beef and pork have already replaced some of what the USA lost.
How about our grain farmers? For many years, the fertilizer companies, pharmaceutical companies, and seed companies (and even universities partially-funded by the above), have been directing farmers to grow the biggest, most weed-free crops with little or no mention of nutrient density of the crop, or how those practices affect the biological life in the soil that produces free plant food. Asians were the first to look at nutrient density of food and any residual toxic chemical in food. Do you remember when a director of Huawei, a telecommunications company from China, was detained in Vancouver because the U.S. government believed that Huawei phones could be used for espionage and were a security risk? China retaliated by refusing to import canola oil from Canada. Then, when the U.S. placed a very large tariff on automobiles coming from China, China retaliated by stopping imports of soybeans and maybe some corn or wheat from the U.S.. There was also a shipload of soybeans sent to Japan that was not unloaded but returned to our side of the pond because they found some GMO grains in the load. Did you notice that in each case it was either GMO grains or a product made from GMO grain, or wheat that had been sprayed with glyphosate. For several years now, Russia has banned all GMO grain (importing, growing, selling, or using for anything) with the promise of imprisonment if found guilty. There are now more than nineteen countries that will not accept any GMO grain. The most-wanted and famous Kentucky bourbon has not been sold in Ireland for several years because the company that makes it could no longer get enough non-GMO corn to make the mash.
There can be a huge worldwide market for non-GMO grain now that most of the U.S.A. grain is and will be excluded. Unfortunately for Canada, our farmers were guided by big pharmaceuticals, and grain suppliers owned by pharmaceutical companies, to go for huge yields with little thought to nutrient density of the grain. Many of our farmers have forgotten about timed cultivation, or the less dangerous chemicals that our grandfathers used only a few years ago. The countries with the most profitable yields are those that don’t use GMO grain (this was shown at the UPA convention in Quebec City a decade ago). I can think of several old farmers I knew when I was a kid; if they were alive today would say, “I told you so!”
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
