On Wednesday, around 10 people gathered, at the Little Red Wagon Winery in Clarendon for an agricultural seminar and training session on how to assess marketing strategies in the grain industry.

The presentation, spearheaded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPAQ), was intended to provide grain producers with secrets in marketing their products to yield higher efficiency in business.

Conveying the information was Jean-Philippe Boucher, a University of McGill graduate and an expert in the grain market, with over 10 years of experience in the field.

After a successful appearance around the same time last year, Boucher said he was invited by MAPAQ to do another training session. This time, it was a more in-depth demonstration showing producers how to put together marketing plans tailored for their business and how to implement them, as soon as the next day.

“The goal is that once you’ve completed your training, you should start working differently in terms of marketing,” said Boucher.

“We talked about how to calculate one’s base [cost] and from there figure out how to conceive commercial strategies around that, get some flesh on the bone, and eventually be able to sell grain at a higher price.”

According to Boucher, success in the agricultural industry is the lifeblood of rural communities like the Pontiac, stating that the healthier the farming community, the more it permeates throughout the rest of the community.

Christine Rieux, a field crops advisor with MAPAQ, says she was satisfied with the turnout, despite the low number of attendees.

“To me, it’s not the quantity that counts,” said Rieux. “But it’s producers that I know will use the information in the future.”

She says that she expected the amount of people to drop from the usual 20 to 40 people, considering this seminar was planned to be more elaborate than at the last one.

Cole Smiley, a grain farmer from Clarendon, said he found the information useful, as far as discovering new ways to market his products. He says he looks forward to implementing his newly acquired knowledge to his marketing plan to expand on how it currently stands.

“There’s so many different ways that you can do it, to capitalize on the markets,” said Smiley. “You just need to know how to do it. So, just everything I’ve seen so far, has been really good.”

For Stephane Alary, a farmer and operator of Ferme Stepido in Luskville, events like these are important as they don’t come around often. Having not attended a training seminar about grain marketing in about 10 years, he said it was important for him to attend this one.

“There’s always something to learn, in marketing,” said Alary. “It moves, it’s never constant.”

Satisfied with the meeting as a whole, Alary said he wished more grain producers had attended, stating that to acquire knowledge about marketing grain, one must constantly make efforts to keep up with the latest information.

“School is every day,” said Alary. “Just because you’ve gone to school, it doesn’t mean you know everything.”

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