Jury's out on sterile seed
When entomologist and biotechnology guru GordonSurgeoner took the stage last month at an Ontario Federation of Agriculture meeting, farmers were hoping to get some answers. Surgeoner was to present views on germination-inhibiting technology - what's commonly known as the terminator gene. On this day, farmers would be bothjudge and jury.
Surgeoner's report revealed that the terminator was patented in 1995 by Delta and Pine Land Company - before the company became a takeover target of Monsanto, which is now being swallowed up by consumer giant American Home Products.
The gene is "in the works," said Surgeoner, workable in tobacco in a year and in cotton within two years.
For Ontario farmers, the obvious crop to target would be soybeans, since corn hybrids are already duds. Still, Surgeoner suspects soybean terminator technology is five to seven years away at the earliest: "It will have to go through a zillion degrees of regulation." The fact that an antibiotic is applied to the seed to render it sterile is a stumbling block, he said, adding, "I don't think that'll sell."
His thoughts were echoed by Monsanto public affairs specialist Adele Pelland. "It's still not proven technology," Pelland told Farm & Country. But there's no doubt why agribusiness wants the terminator: "The corporate world is looking to protect its investment," Surgeoner said.
At the meeting, Surgeoner asked farmers to distinguish between the product and the process when it comes to considering terminator technology. He said biotechnology has much to offer Ontario farmers, including greater cold tolerance for crops, disease resistance and new varieties of soybeans that produce better oil and more protein.
If farmers want seed to bin run, they can turn to public varieties, Surgeoner said. "As long as farmers are willing to buy it, there will always be product you can bin run."
But are farmers willing to forgo the extra yield that biotech's crop protection qualities tout? Biotechnology, Surgeoner said, is available on a small scale. Any grower in Ontario can pay the $5 or $10 premium for the technology and gain the benefits. What farmers have to do, he said, is pencil it out. "Does this provide value to me as a farmer?" Surgeoner asked. If the answer is no, he said, don't buy it.
Companies touting terminator technology have alternatives, argued Elgin's Graham Warwick. "Companies don't have to procreate into this world dead seeds to protect patents," he said, referring to technology-use agreements that use the legal system to protect patents, and which many producers have already signed.
Agreed, said, Surgeoner.
But if you talk to officials at the United States Department of Agriculture, where the terminator technology research is taking place, you'll hear that while technology agreements are an option in law-and-order North America, elsewhere they may not be worth the paper they're printed on.
The use of pirated biotechnology by countries that have tended to ignore international protocal and law is precisely the reason the terminator technology is being developed. Unlike Ontario, in the global court, there may be no judge or jury. - Bernard Tobin
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Brazil's biotech binge
In South America, Brazilian and Argentinian producers are eagerly jumping into GMOs, according to a German survey of 2,900 farmers in South America, the U.S. and Europe. Bulletin des agriculteurs reports that 52 per cent of Argentinian producers plant GMO crops, and two-thirds plan to by the year 2000. U.S. farmers are more cautious, with less than one-third planting GMOs, and half forecasting to do so by 2000. One in three French producers said they were opposed to any move to GMOs.
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Shopping for farmland
Prime crop land sells for C$31,000 an acre. Land required for a new 200-sow hog operation is legislated at 200 acres. In some regions expansion of farming operations has been embargoed. Little wonder then, that some 40 Belgian farmers felt ponying up $1,500 for a whirlwind two-and-half-day visit to central Ontario farmland late-September was a worthwhile investment.Environmental controls and public antipathy toward agriculture, says Andre Aerts, who currently works on a Belgian government poultry research farm, will eventually spell the death of the family farm in the country. Aerts sold his fourth-generation dairy and hog operation in the Flanders region four years ago when farmexpansion in the area was halted. Coming over, his intent was to seek work on an Ontario farm before deciding what commodity to invest in. After a morning of seminars on subjects such as the Ontario dairying system, provincial real estate basics and immigration regulations - followed by afternoon tours of a Wellesley broiler operation and a new Wartburg sow barn - he was leaning toward jumping right into his own hog operation.
Hendrik and Veronique Allemeersch, who farm between Ghent and Brugge, were thinking the same way. They're stymied in growing the four-acre, 200-sow operation they bought seven years ago, by diminishing returns and high land prices. Their rights to spread manure on neighbouring farms costs about C$14,000 annually.
Mike Brown - associate broker with Land Market real estate group, a co-sponsor of the tour - says Belgians represent a growing segment of the province's farm sales market. They get a good dollar for their land when they sell to bigger operators or the government, he says, and see Ontario as reasonable on the environment and price. Curiously, he adds, most want to purchase land close to major urban centres. He says he has to remind them that they may be buying into the eventual situation they're leaving. -Richard Charteris
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Status quo for world trade
The prospect of next year's round of world trade talks keeping you up nights? Don't lose any sleep over it, says a leading agricultural economist."The United States still protects its sugar and dairy products much the way it did before GATT," Purdue University chief agricultural economist Wallace Tyner told a gathering of world farm writers attending a Purdue-New Holland conference at the university's West Lafayette, Ind., campus late September.
Tyner said that by and large it's business as usual for the world's trading countries following the eight-year Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): "Countries did not offer reduction of tariffs and substantial opening up of markets through the last GATT round." The European Union still uses "variable levies" by another name. Countries still protect their farm sectors through "dirty tariffication," tariff rate quotas and state trading practices, Tyner said.
As for the coming round due to start next year in Geneva, Tyner said he is "not optimistic about global trade agreements having any impact in the decade ahead," as practices such as biotechnology and child labour come under the microscope. "It's not just what you produce, it's how it's produced," he said.
Countries will continue to "strive to isolate their producers from fluctuations in world markets," he said.
Nor have chronic volatile commodity price cycles simmered down, as expected in GATT's wake, Tyner said: "GATT has not achieved the promise of increased price stability for agricultural commodities [because] the United States no longer plays the role of price stabilizer and buffer stockholder for the world...The United States is no longer paying farmers not to cultivate their land in exchange for support policies for income maintenance and price stability."
Still, Tyler said it was an achievement even to get agriculture "to the negotiating table" in the last round. He added that despite current low commodity prices, it's unlikely the U.S. will return to the price stabilization and farm income policies of the time prior to the "Freedom to Farm" legislation of 1996.
He was also "optimistic" about the expansion and harmonization of regional trade agreements such as NAFTA and Mercosur.
On the European farm trade front, New Holland CEO Umberto Quadrino urged a go-slow approach. Agenda 2000, the recently announced reforms of the 40-year-old Common Agricultural Policy, is a blueprint to "wean" farmers in the 15-nation European Union off guaranteed prices in return for partial compensation through the tax structure, said Quadrino.
Arousing "much controversy and political debate," the agreement allows member states to fund compensation above EU levels, he said. The result will be a further reduction in the difference between EU and world commodity prices, allowing the EU to be able to afford to admit six new members from Eastern Europe, he said.
The financial impact of CAP reform on European farmers will be "progressive and not revolutionary," stopping short of abandoning farmers to the marketplace entirely, Quadrino said. - John Muggeridge
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Retail appetites fuel farming
The consumer may always come first, but for farmers in today's high-volume food business, the big grocery distributors have a lot bigger appetite, says a U.S. consumer trend watcher."Producers must...match the scale of the fewer, larger buyers," University of California-Davis agricultural marketing economist Roberta Cook told farm writers at a Purdue University-New Holland conference at Purdue's West Lafayette, Ind., campus late September.
Keeping one eye on consumer trends, producers have to keep the other on an increasingly consolidating retail sector across the world, Cook said. In the U.S., the top 10 integrated food wholesale-retailers account for 60 per cent of food sales. With fewer and larger buyers, suppliers must grow, she said: "It erects barriers to entry."
Producers and retailers will more closely co-ordinate supply and demand in what Cook called "supply chain management."
While retailers sit atop the U.K. food industry heap, controlling it via powerful private labels, in North America manufacturers dominate, she said. But that may be changing as patterns of foreign investment change, she said. Dutch food retailer Ahold is now the fourth largest in the U.S.
On the food service side, meanwhile, brands such as McDonalds and Pizza Hut are going global.
One way to meet big volume orders is to sell as a group, said Cook, citing grape growers in California who survive in the fragmented world table grape market by "managing the supply chain." Growing grapes in several regions, including a joint venture with Chilean producers, they provide "consistency of supply over extended seasons."
Identify trends early on, Cook advised: "Innovators tend to capitalize." Dutch greenhouse growers, for instance, pioneered selling packaged tomatoes left on the vine; and California growers market washed and peeled baby carrots in school lunch packs. - John Muggeridge
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Cool sales halt production
Slumping farm equipment sales - purchases of four-wheel drive tractors and combines are down 53 and 35 per cent respectively over last year, according to Canadian Farm and Industrial Equipment Institute president Brent Hamre - have led to assembly line closures at Agco, John Deere and New Holland.Agco's Independence, Mo., combine line, which makes between five and six units a day, will be silenced throughout November and December; Deere will halt production of tractors and combines for up to four weeks in second half 1998; and New Holland suspended production of self-propelled combines early October at its Grand Island, Neb., facility for at least three months, reports industry journal Stark's Truck & Off-Highway Ledger. New Holland also plans to slash production and work force at its Winnipeg tractor plant. - Staff
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Vision's future still cloudy
The Ontario Federation of Agriculture has put the brakes on a proposal to restructure the organization."We're going to have to take a slower path," OFA president Ed Segsworth told reporters last month after directors debated the merits of the restructuring plan for more than two hours behind closed doors.
"We're looking at restructuring an organization that's been in existence for 60 years; we don't want to do it in 60 days," Segsworth said. "We want to take our time and make sure we're doing the right thing for the organization and for the members. "If it takes until convention 1999, so be it."
In August, directors got their first look at a report tabled by the organization's vision team, which was asked to recommend the best administrative fit for a more efficient OFA.
The vision team proposed that the current 124-member OFA board be broken into two administrative bodies: a 20-member board of directors and a 124-member general council that would serve as an advisory body to OFA and make recommendations to the board of directors.
When the report was unveiled, many directors questioned whether the proposal would limit grassroots input in the organization, create a top-heavy organization and limit its flexibility to deal quickly with emerging issues.
"They've had a month to look at it and talk it over," said Segsworth, noting that there was a lot of constructive debate. "Last month, was more of a knee-jerk reaction because [directors] had no information, no background."
But there are still many issues on the table: The number of directors, the make-up of the board and the power and accountability of the General Council were some of the concerns directors addressed during the closed door session.
When the doors were flung open, directors had voted to strike an implementation committee that would study the vision proposal and entertain amendments or suggestions from the counties, directors, members or commodity boards and help determine how "we can put it all together to make a stronger organization," Segsworth said. - Bernard Tobin
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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OSI steps back on lawsuit
Henry deWolde, newly elected chairman of Ontario Swine Improvement, has announced that OSI will not go ahead with a planned lawsuit against the provincial government over a recent $400,000 funding cut.The decision came, deWolde explains, after directors met last month with Agriculture Minister Noble Villeneuve, who made it clear he wasn't backing down on this year's funding levels.
The matter would have taken "five or six years in the courts and generated animosity," deWolde says. "We want to build relationships." - Robert Irwin
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Rural royalty
Farm & Country congratulates Andrea Wills of Middlesex county, 1998 Ontario Queen of the Furrow. Andrea, from a 150-acre dairy farm at Thorndale, was crowned at a banquet during last month's International Plowing Match in Sunbury, Frontenac county. First runner-up was Kathy Lupton of Oxford, followed by Jennifer Thompson of Hastings, Susan Dunlop of Simcoe (North) and Christine Baes of Simcoe (South). Farm & Country sponsored $100 scholarships for the five finalists, as well as two luncheons for the 35 young people chosen to represent their counties.
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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Farm writing kudos
At Farm & Country, we operate on the basis that an outstanding agricultural industry deserves to be served by magazine journalism to match. Independent judging confirmed that notion earlier this month when the Canadian Farm Writers' Federation handed out its 1998 awards.Farm & Country staffers took home awards in every eligible category. Executive editor John Muggeridge won gold awards for Press Feature (Europe Braces for Biotech) and Technical Feature (High Hopes for Hemp), and silver for Monthly Press Reporting (Co-ops Can). Gold in the latter category went to Tom Button (Farming the Monsanto Way). Don Stoneman's Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble was awarded silver in the Press Editorial category.
In addition, long-time Ottawa-based contributor Barry Wilson was awarded the Press Column gold for Farmers Should Be Told What's at Stake in the Talks, which appeared in Western Producer. Congratulations to all the winners, our thanks to the award sponsors, and last but not least our appreciation to our readers, to whom our efforts are directed. -Richard Charteris
© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.
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