Welcome to the farmzone
BY JOHN MUGGERIDGE
Meteorologist Tom Moorehead sits in the 16th-floor nerve centre of the cable TV weather channel the Weather Network in a high-rise overlooking Mississauga's urban wasteland. Current weather conditions are presented on the computer screen in front of him: digital images of swirling clouds, converted by sophisticated software from signals captured by a dish on the roof from a geo-synchronous satellite 35,000 kilometres up. Failing that, he looks out the window.Weather forecasters are the first to admit their craft is part science, part sci-fi, but for farmers such as Parkhill cash cropper Rick Willemse, the day's weather forecast can mean the difference between a day's planting and three days' downtime. Willemse in general liked what he saw when running a free trial of the Weather Network's new web site farmzone.com.
Supplying 24-hour, short and long-range forecasts, farmzone.com is available to on-line farmers for a free month trial until April 15. For farmers who choose to subscribe, the cost will be $19.95 per month, plus $9.95 for each extra zone.
Using its own "Pelmorex Forecast Engine" to marry data from a number of sources, including Environment Canada, the service divides the province into 132 zones. Farmers get individual forecasts for their zone, including relative humidity, dew point, growing degree days, and crop heat units. There are also animated satellite images and Doppler radar maps, plus ag news from Reuters. Historical data is stored for the farmer's area.
Willemse, who records weather for the provincial government, subscribes to DTN satellite service for about $100 a month. He says farmzone.com is "fairly easy to navigate through." He likes the local five-day forecast and historical data, adding it's a decent service pricewise.
Any Internet service, however, takes time to use depending on the farmer's computer and phone lines. Willemse also uses DTN for market information. He has a 233 Pentium computer and 52K-speed modem.
While aware that many farmers still have inadequate phone lines
or
computer equipment, Weather Network manager of sales and
marketing Wayne
Myers says that by summer almost one-third of Canadian farmers
are expected
to be using the Internet.
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AGRI-BUSINESS
Nuts & bolts
|
Call 1-800-263-1228 or www.ontariocorn.org
Wilson Freelance, 1039-73 St., Edmonton, AB. T6K 3K7. (781) 463-2751, e-mail wilfree@compusmart.ab.ca |
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Picking stones
Farmers sweep away the stress at the Provincial Farmers' Curling
Championships
BY BERNARD TOBIN
"Hurry! Hard! Whoa!" All the curling commandments echo throughout the Listowel Curling Club on this cold February day.In a game of strategy and feel, playing a successful hit and roll or finding the right draw weight usually distinguishes the winners from the losers, whether at the Brier - Canada's national championship - or, in this case, the Provincial Farmers' Curling Championship.
"It's one of the most popular club events. Everybody has something in common," says Doug Bakes, promotion and development chairman for the Ontario Curling Association, who helps organize the tournament. The championship, sponsored this year by C&M Seeds, has been around for about 20 years.
"Farmers tend to be a lot more relaxed, but that doesn't mean the competition level is subpar," says Bakes. Stirling farmer Bob Ray, skip for the Land O'Lakes Curling Club team and 1994 farmer champion, played in the Labatt Tankard in 1996. The winner of the Tankard represents Ontario at the Brier. Kent county farmer and Ridgetown Curling Club member Jim Brackett played in the 1996 Brier.
But you don't have to have a provincial championship under your belt to throw rocks in "the Farmers." "Everybody wants to curl well, but you want to have a good time as well," says Margaret Mc-Knight, skip for the Uxbridge Curling Club rink. She and husband Roger have curled for 32 years. This year, the farmers' championship is a family affair for the McKnights, who do custom work and run a cash crop and beef operation north of Uxbridge. Roger throws third stones and daughter Ann Proctor and her husband Mark throw second and lead stones.
Mark Proctor took up the roaring game just five years ago. The family diplomat says he just tries to stay out of the way. "I can't screw up. I just lead and sweep."
To qualify, team members must be actively involved in farming. Teams contest area or "zone" playoffs - Ontario is divided into 16 zones - with zone winners playing for the championship each February.
For curlers like Steve Firth of the Woodville Club, the tournament provides an opportunity to get away from the farm, relax and have a little fun. Firth, clad in green work pants and plaid shirt, flashes a grin when he explains that he can't afford standard curling garb. His dairy farmer employers don't pay him enough, he laughs: "They spend all their money on quota....I'm still waiting for the Christmas bonus."
While today he's throwing stones, not hay bales, there's nothing positive he can say about his rink's first outing - a seventh-end loss. "The team just wasn't on. The ice was too quick, and the releases weren't good."
The tournament runs over a weekend, but dairy cows wait for no one. Brampton Curling Club team members Doug Dixon and Jim Moore milked the cows before heading off to Listowel for their 11 a.m. game, and Moore heads back to his Terra Cotta farm for the evening milking.
"We don't talk shop out here, but weather is the No.1 topic no matter what you do," says Dixon. Farmers will be farmers.
Debi Johnson has learned to relax and enjoy curling tournaments. You have to if you're going to watch your son play for provincial and national championships. Bryan Johnson throws third rocks for the Ayr Curling Club team.
In between school and milking cows at the family's dairy farm, Bryan has managed to be part of four provincial championship teams - two junior and two schoolboy. The University of Windsor student has twice represented Ontario at the national level.
The Johnson men have a passion for curling. Bryan's father, Doug, curls competitively, but Debi prefers a more relaxed approach, she says. "I curl socially.
"I've seen parents sitting reading their paper upside down. It can be nerve-racking, I just try to enjoy it."
Roger McKnight is also learning to take things in stride. After
losing a
4-3 squeaker in the opening draw, he's feeling philosophical:
"There's
always a winner and always a loser," he says. Besides, he adds,
in winter,
"if you don't curl, you don't see anybody." And it sure beats
custom work,
or what he sheepishly describes as "driving around for the fun of
it."
Whoa!
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"Getting out the vote"
The "goose question" hasn't settled many Ontario elections, but
it did
mark the turning point in at least one municipal campaign of the
late
1800s.
Reporter W.F. MacKenzie recorded the contest between candidates from the north and the south ends of the town of Mount Forest in the Guelph Weekly Mercury. He described the battle as being characterized by "a degree of animosity that to the outsider savoured of the absurd."
At one public meeting the north-end man "was so eloquently pressing his claims to the support of the electorate" that the south-end man began to panic. There was the prospect of the election slipping through his fingers if his opponent was allowed to continue unchallenged.
MacKenzie went on to describe that "with evident excitement, the south-end man bawled out, 'How are you on the goose question?' This had the desired effect at least for a time. The north-end man had to place himself right before the ratepayers on the important problem of whether geese were to enjoy the freedom of the town."
Ah, the good old days. The goose question elicited only serious debate and no lewd snickers.
Politics has changed a lot in the last 100 years. "Getting out the vote" was a gentle art back in the late 1800s. Back then, a few bucks and a bit of booze were the weapons of choice to lubricate sticky votes on the concessions.
G.L. Allen, a native of Arthur township, Wellington county, told how it worked during the particularly "hot" provincial election of 1872. In Wellington, the election brought two heavyweights into the ring: Guelph's Colonel Higginbotham versus Elora lawyer George Drew, grandfather of a future Ontario premier.
G.L. was about 85 years old in 1945 when he jotted down this story. There are still plenty of Allens in this part of the province, and one of G.L.'s descendants sent it along.
It was general practice in the elections of the late 1800s for each candidate to hire the services of canvassers and scrutineers. Their job on election day was to head out with horse and buggy to scour the concessions and side roads in search of pliable voters.
G.L. knew of which he spoke, because at the tender age of 12 he was one of those driving an election buggy.
He remembered: "The canvasser was supplied with a jug of whiskey and a few dollars as some of the voters had to have a stimulant and a couple of dollars before they could be induced to vote for your candidate. And as it was an open vote, the scrutineers saw that he voted right."
Those were the days when it was politically correct to refer to a voter as "he." It would be the next century before women got the vote.
G.L. recalled that he was canvassing on behalf of Drew, but doesn't record who won.
However, he does say that the voters were a fickle bunch, seeming to alternate each election between the Grits and Tories.
That much, at least, has changed little since 1872.
Campbell Cork lives and writes in Mount Forest
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UNEARTHED
Notes from All Over
Bugs, burgers and other byproducts
Fir timber is much-sought for its strength. Now, a byproduct of the tree is being touted as an ideal artificial sweetener. Simon Fraser University chemist Eberhard Kiehlmann has found a compound produced by the tree that is as sweet as honey and less fattening, according to the National Post. The agent, dihydroquercetin - dhq for short - has about 40 times the sweetening power of table sugar, says Kiehlmann. And it doesn't cause tooth decay, either. Kiehlmann says the forest industry seems uninterested in getting involved in the food chemistry business, despite simply burning the fir bark it considers waste, so he's financing the research out of his own pocket.
What do you get when you cross a spider with a pig? According to a Laval University scientist, you get a fabric strong enough to stop a bullet.
Spider silk produced from pig semen will be mixed with polymers to produce the ultra-strong, feather-light fabric, according to the Ottawa Citizen.
In a lab at the Quebec City university's animal science department, DNA cloned from a spider will be injected into a pig embryo. The pig will synthesize the silk as it matures and starts to produce semen.
Cheeseburgers can step aside. The flavour of the future is the cherry burger, according to the Fruit Growers News. Michigan State University researchers claim adding cherries to hamburger retards spoilage and reduces the formation of suspected cancer-causing compounds.
Beef patties containing 15-per cent fat and 11.5-per cent tart cherry tissue contained 69 to 78.5 per cent fewer carcinogens, less fat and were more moist than regular burgers, say the researchers.
Cherry burgers are a popular item on school cafeteria menus in 16 American states.
Ontario's legendary Publication 75 is nothing more than that - a legend - on thousands of the province's farms.
Through the mid-'90s, farmers snapped up all 40,000 copies of the weed control Bible printed and distributed free by OMAFRA. The ministry said it made sense to foot the bill because not only did Pub 75 help farmers make better weed control decisions, it also helped reduce health and environmental risks by making sure farmers had the best information on sprays and spray management.
That theory disappeared with the election of the Harris Conservatives: With the 1998 version, the province switched to cost-recovery pricing, charging $10 per copy.
Farmers aren't paying. Last year, 11,538 of 15,000 printed copies were sold.
A ministry spokesperson says this means cost recovery is working: There's a lot less waste. Instead of having a copy for the kitchen table, one for the pick-up and another for the barn, farmers are buying a single copy and keeping it where they need it.
Ontario, however, has 35,000 licensed farm sprayers. There's also no telling how many copies are on shelves at chemical companies - even magazine offices. No matter how you spin it up, fewer than one-third of Ontario farmers own a recent Pub 75.
© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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