The Rural Voice, 2003-08, Page 12WANTED
2003-2004
Contestants for the
BRUCE COUNTY
Queen of the Furrow Competition
Must be: between 16 and 25 years old
a resident of Bruce County
and in attendance at the Plowing Match
August 29th near Paisley.
CaII Cheryl Leifso at (519) 363-6212
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Competition includes:
2-3 minute speech interview
Plowing (Tractor and Coaching Provided)
Bus Trip to
CAN PLOW
Visit the
50th Anniversary
Plowing Match of the
World Plowing
Organization
at the
Elora Research Station
international event
includes:
• 50 years of plowing
demonstrations
• Antique Agricultural Exhibit
• Entertainment
• Food Court
Bus leaves Tara/Paisley
Friday, August 22
arrives at CAN PLOW
9:00 a.m. for the
Plowing Competitors
Procession to the Fields
$10.00 bus fare
$10.00 admission
Call Roger and Bonnie Thorne
519-934-2202
before August 15
Sponsored by
Bruce County Plowmen's Association
CAN PLOW website
canplow.com
8 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Is something brewing in food too?
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth, ON.
Canada's food industry seems to
be on exactly the opposite course to
Canada's beer industry. Are the
industries so different, or is one just
ahead of the other.
The beer and food industries
started out from the same position:
lots of little entrepreneurial oper-
ations across the country. For a long
time they stayed on the same path:
the giants of the brewing industry
bought out smaller competitors and
the giants of the food industry did the
same. Perhaps because there were
fewer breweries than cheese and
butter producers and packing plants,
consolidation was more rapid in that
field. By 20 years ago beer in Canada
was pretty well in the hands of two
huge breweries: Labatt's and
Molson's. Even that didn't seem to
be big enough: Labatt's was sold to a
Belgian brewing giant.
Our food industry has been
following the brewers' lead. We have
two food chains controlling most of
the retailing and a handful of packers
controlling beef, pork, chicken and
turkey processing. Hundreds of little
cheese plants have been consolidated
into a tiny cluster of giants.
But while consolidation and
commodification of food continues,
something interesting has been
happening in brewing. Last year sales
of imported beers such as Corona and
Heinekin surged 13.8 per cent to
$712.3 million. In 2002 imports held
10 per cent of the Canadian beer
market, double their share in 1996.
The imported beer trend, fueled
by young professionals who want to
seem sophisticated by drinking
something other than the big
Canadian labels, follows an earlier
trend toward small Canadian
breweries. More than a decade ago
little craft breweries began gaining
popularity and local pubs even started
their own in-house breweries.
"People are experimenting more,"
a Toronto beer writer commented.
"There are more flavours out there
now and (customers) want to try
different things."
While this is going on, uniformity
is the watchword in food. As packing
companies get larger, they want
cookie -cutter hogs and cattle —
they've long had it in poultry. For the
most part, all our milk just gets
dumped into the bulk tanks and
mixed up so it will be homogeneous
even before it's homogenized.
Do consumers want something
different in food than they want in
beer, or are the trends in beer just
ahead of food trends? Will customers
be content to continue to have a
handful of types of cheese in our
Canadian stores when in Europe they
have hundreds of different -flavoured
cheeses in each country?
Compare our "one taste suits all"
philosophy with that expressed
recently by Margaret Morris, an
internationally -recognized Eastern
Ontario cheese expert who's planning
her own small-scale cheese plant. She
wants to source milk from specific
farms with cattle of a specific breed,
where the cattle are grass-fed and get
less corn. There's one cheese, for
instance, that must be made only
from Ayrshire milk.
But we have concentrated so
much on efficient, large-scale
production, we don't have the
infrastructure or government
regulations for small, unique, cottage -
style food operations. We can't make
the raw -milk cheeses many people
like to eat because it's against the law
to make cheese from unpasteurized
milk in Ontario. As our government
regulations are tightened, driving
small abattoirs out of business, we're
losing the ability to fill niche markets
for elk or buffalo or pheasants.
What if beer really is ahead of the
trend and consumers turn to a differ-
ent taste than the mass-produced
system our food industry is follow-
ing? Will we have to fill the demand
with imported food and lose out on
the market?0