The Rural Voice, 2002-02, Page 27Z
0
a
quarter would be identified as
coming from the traditional Canadian
background. There were 17
languages represented.
"Last year for the first time in the
Vancouver school division an Asian
language was number 1 among all
the kids entering grade one. You
think they were raised on meat and
potatoes? No way. But they are a
market you want to look at."
To free the mind to be able to
consider new markets, farmers need
to get away from standard thinking,
he said. For instance people who
keep cattle for the sale of beef
traditionally think of themselves as
beef producers.
Rather than beef producers they
are really producers of protein, he
said, competing against other sources
of protein whether poultry or
vegetable.
To take that further, farmers
take water, sunlight and soil
nutrients to produce and
market biomass. The biomass might
be in the form of beef or barley, but it
could also be corn or plant material
for producing ethanol or hay and
forage for animals.
Because water is so precious in
their area of Alberta, the Churches
have redefined themselves as being
water managers and fiscal risk
managers.
"We're not in crop production,
we're in water management." As a
result the cropping operation has
been designed to conserve what little
moisture they by using minimum and
no -till. The added benefit is they now
use 70 per cent less fuel than when
they were doing what he calls
"entertainment" tillage.
Value added can come not just
from finding new markets but by
cutting costs. Fertilizer costs were
slashed about two-thirds on the
Church by using GPS.
Using information from their GPS
and GIS systems, they realized last
year they had so little moisture
they'd be best served not to even
plant 3,000 acres of their land, so
they didn't.
And in this day and age of
concern over global warming, value
added may come to farmers from
using their land as a carbon sink.
Using no -till deposits four to eight
tonnes a year of carbon into the soil,
he said.0
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FEBRUARY 2002 23