Concentrates squeeze prices
Imports push Ontario juice apple prices below four cents a poundThe price of Ontario juice apples hit an all-time low last year. Ian MacKenzie, general manager of the Ontario Apple Marketing Commission, says the culprit is offshore concentrate, mainly from China, undercutting Canadian product.
MacKenzie says juice apple prices fell to 3.75 cents a pound and estimates that it costs producers between two and three cents a pound to get apples to processors.
MacKenzie also believes that consumers have the right to know that a tin of concentrated apple juice sporting a "Made in Canada" label can still be made from imported concentrate.
Under the Canada Agricultural Products Act, 51 per cent of a finished product's value must be domestic, including further processing, packaging and labelling. Cheap imports can account for a fraction of the total cost of the canned product, so meeting the act's criteria is not difficult, says MacKenzie.
One advantage that apple producers have is that processors of single-strength juice make extensive use of Canadian-grown apples, but MacKenzie is concerned that inexpensive concentrated product is cutting into the sale of fresh juice.
A lack of concentrators in Canada isn't helping the situation, he says. There are only three concentrators in Canada - one in B.C., one in Quebec and the third in Ontario. MacKenzie estimates there are about 50 plants in China alone.
Imported product can only enter Canada when there is a shortage here, he says. Because the Ontario concentrator, QualiTech Foods Inc. in Tiverton, can't meet processors' needs for concentrate, the CFIA gave concentrate importers a regulatory exemption last summer that has opened the floodgates for cheap product, says MacKenzie.
The U.S. apple industry is also feeling the pinch and is looking into an anti-dumping action against countries that supply cheap concentrate. The U.S Apple Association says imports from China have increased by 997 per cent over the last three years, during which time the price for Chinese concentrate has decreased by 51 per cent. Hungary, Argentina and Chile have cut their prices by 53, 39 and 22 per cent, respectively.
MacKenzie met with CFIA reps in late November to discuss the option of country-of-origin labelling: Juice made from imported concentrate would have to be labelled as such. But he says CFIA doesn't feel the situation warrants such a move at this time.
MacKenzie says that an anti-dumping action is a very expensive process, "so we'll have to wait and see if the U.S. association is successful."
But processors also have to accept their share of responsibility
in this
price debacle. MacKenzie, who used to work for CFIA, says rules
put in
place to protect producers are being "whittled away" by
processors. "They
are being unravelled slowly to the advantage of only one segment
of the
industry," he says. - Christina Selby
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An apple a day the HACCP way
Golden Town Apple Products Ltd., Thornbury, is the first fruit
and
vegetable processor in Canada to get Hazard Analysis Critical
Control
Points (HACCP) certification from the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency.
"We already had quality control systems in place," says Doug Johnson, technical director, but the company wanted to "formalize" those systems. Still, meeting HACCP requirements was a six-month process for the family-owned business, located in the heart of the Georgian Bay apple growing region.
Golden Town is the largest user of peeler and juice apples in Ontario, says Johnson. Their pure, single-strength juice, apple slices and whole peeled apples are shipped in bulk to manufacturers of Minute Maid, Nantucket Nectars and other customers in Canada and the U.S.
HACCP certification will just mean business as usual for Golden Town's 200 area growers, says Jennifer Rear, HACCP co-ordinator. CFIA's only concern was about pesticide residues, but the plant had been checking products for years, she says. Growers are already doing all the right things, says Rear, and tracking of fruit was already in place. "Each bin can be traced to each grower," she says.
The processor wants to be "proactive rather than reactive" when it comes to food safety, says Johnson. Juice is not pasteurized at the Thornbury plant; that's left up to further processors.
While admitting that there is always a potential for food safety
problems,
Johnson says HACCP is beneficial because the process required
input from
all 40 employees. "Now everyone understands the risks and how
each of them
contributes to food safety," he says. "Even in terms of basic
sanitation,
everyone has a better idea of possible consequences." - Christina
Selby
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UNDER THE HOOD
By Keith Berglind
Hidden rad rot restricts air flow
It's not often that I get fooled as badly as I did on this engine overheating complaint, but these things can happen.The car - a 1990 Chrysler product with a 2.5 litre four-cylinder engine - had quite a few kilometers on it when the overheating was noticed. The first owner ran up about 125,000 kms with no trouble, and the current owner didn't notice anything for the next 25,000 kms.
Then it started to run a bit hot at highway speeds only.
We did the usual - changed thermostats and checked the rad fins for debris. Since the car had air conditioning, we couldn't see the front side of the radiator, because of the condenser coil right in front.
I assumed at first that the rad was clear because there wasn't anything blocking the front of the air conditioning coil.
Problem worsens
The overheating problem worsened over subsequent years. I checked
further.
It was easy to tell the owner not to worry because it never
boiled - only
the needle kept working higher and higher. I'll bet that if the
car had had
an idiot light only, nothing would have shown up. But the heat
gauge needle
kept rising.
A common radiator problem these days is scale build-up inside the radiator. This rad was clean inside. There was no scale to be seen, looking down into the tank.
The rad was flushed several times, and new antifreeze put in every year, just like we're told to do. Several times I put a trouble light behind the rad and tried to look through the grill. There are only a few spots where you can see through the grill, so this is not a very useful test, but I did see some light spots and thought everything was clear.
Finally, last July, the owner wanted action, so a decision was made to tear the car apart until something was found.
It didn't take long - less than a half-hour, in fact.
The first thing I removed was the radiator. It looked good, and I almost set it aside. But I happened to hold it up to the sunlight and was shocked at how little light came through the fins.
Simple fault
If you look at the picture, you'll see where I easily wiped away
a lot of
cooling fins. These fins were hardly more than rust dust. The
remaining
fins are rotted by salt corrosion.
I could see a bit of light through nearly every cooling space, but the air passage was mostly restricted by a build-up of salt corrosion, swelling up under the paint.
The heat transfer capability was restricted by lack of air flow and by the lack of fin contact to the radiator tubes. As you can imagine from the picture, gently touching the fins resulted in their falling out in dust and small fin particles.
I changed the rad and it worked perfectly all summer. The air conditioning even works better. I suspect this is because the restricted air flow through the old radiator kept the front condenser coil from cooling properly also.
Every mechanic I've shown this to claims it's the worst case they've seen. I like to show them the back side first and ask if they think it's clean. After they say it looks good, I turn the rad around to show the front side, as you see it in the picture.
I don't expect you'll ever have a tractor or combine rad rot away like this, but I'd be sure to check out any high mileage trucks that are showing any signs of overheating. Take the rad right out of the frame and check it properly.
Note: The item laying on the rad, in the picture, is a fin comb,
used to
straighten out radiator, oil cooler and air conditioner coil
fins. This is
a handy tool to use after someone has "wiped the fins clean" and
bent over
too many fins.
Keith Berglind is a licensed heavy-duty mechanic based in
Manitoba
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Heard the one about the weatherman who...?
Canadians, and particularly Canadian farmers, seems to have a
love/hate
relationship with weather forecasts. They consistently grumble
about the
inaccuracy of daily predictions, making wisecracks about
forecasters and
their dart boards and crystal balls. Meanwhile, though, most
religiously
listen to these forecasts every day.
This apparent contradiction isn't so hard to understand. Almost every aspect of our lives - our culture, leisure activity, travel, field work, clothes - is influenced by the weather we experience. We depend more and more on weather information. Yet despite the tremendous increase in understanding of the behaviour of weather and climate, the process of predicting detailed future weather for a specific location remains an inexact science.
Winds and weather do not recognize national borders. Hence, such predictions require constant global weather monitoring at the surface and within the atmosphere, and the rapid exchange of this information among countries - an activity co-ordinated by the UN's World Meteorological Organization. There are still significant gaps in such information gathering, and in the understanding of some of the processes that control changes in weather. Furthermore, the intricate simulations of weather behaviour for the next few hours, days and even weeks are limited by the ability of contemporary computers to handle and process the volume of data necessary.
Many of the physical and chemical processes that control climate take place over scales of years and decades, rather than hours and days. Hence, some of the physical and mathematical equations used in weather models can be ignored, while others - such as changes in Arctic ice cover, in ocean circulation and in land ecosystems - need to be included.
Some of these linkages cause responses that help to reduce the original change (a negative feedback), while others increase it (a positive feedback). For example, warmer temperatures in snow-covered regions will tend to melt the snow. Once the snow is removed, much more sunlight is absorbed by the darker surface below, causing a positive feedback that further increases local temperatures. Climate models build a simulation of this system from scratch, using basic laws of physics and relationships like the above as building blocks.
The first climate models were developed more than a hundred years ago. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, for example, published a scientific paper in 1896 in which he described a simple model of how small changes in the balance between the incoming sun's radiation (which heats Earth) and the outgoing infrared radiation to space (which cools Earth) can affect the average temperature at the earth's surface.
During more recent decades, major improvements in understanding of the many processes that influence climate and the development of increasingly powerful computers have allowed the construction of more complex models. The most advanced of these now interactively connect all the key components of the climate system in their calculations. For example, the Canadian climate model, recognized internationally as one of the best in the world, uses more than 200,000 lines of computer code to describe these linkages and the processes that control them, and uses a computer capable of more than two billion operations every second to conduct experiments.
These advanced models are first tested to see whether they can properly describe current climate and its day-to-day changes. They must also be able to adequately describe past climates when different conditions influenced the climate processes. Once a model has passed these tests, it can be used with some confidence to project future climates in response to changes such as dust from volcanic eruptions, El Nino events and longer-term factors like increased concentrations of greenhouse gases or changes in sunspot activity.
These advances do not mean that bad weather forecasts are a thing of the past, or that we have achieved near-perfection in our climate models. Given the chaotic behaviour within the global atmosphere, that would be arrogant and foolish.
However, next time you see a cartoon of a forecaster and his dart
board,
remind yourself that behind that image is a complex interplay
among
millions of bits of data, thousands of scientific and
mathematical
equations, international co-operation unheard of elsewhere in the
global
community, and the whirring of supercomputers. You might also
note that the
world of economic forecasting makes the world of weather
forecasting look
awfully good!
Henry Hengeveld is a science adviser on climate change,
Environment Canada
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