Grain industry is changing constantly

For the first eight years of life, home was a three-room row-house with no running water in a village in northern England. Our living standard improved as agricultural productivity increased. My agricultural labourer father was industrious, but he was no match for mechanized herbicide application.

Although I railed against the dislocation from the freedom of a rural environment, my parents set about serving the needs of Britain's reinvigorated nationalized steel industry

Some 20 years later when the steelworks manpower was emasculated by the Iron Lady, I had to seek student jobs in agriculture not in manufacturing.

I bring these stories up to emphasize that people and places undergo frequent transformations. Even though the transitions are painful, they are unavoidable.

Given this inevitability, the other half of Bill Redekop's article on the Canadian Wheat Board (The man who killed the family farm) needs telling.

At the outset, I need to declare my biases. I am a wheat board supporter for a few reasons, one of which is that my research projects on wheat quality have benefited tremendously from the CWB and the broad knowledge and expertise of CWB staff.

Students and staff in the University of Manitoba faculty of agricultural and food sciences will also regret the loss of CWB scholarships that have started many successful careers in academia and the agricultural industries.

So, I won't propose arguments on behalf of the government or those that want to end the wheat board's monopoly. But, it is important to understand why changes in the grain industry have occurred, and why there is plenty of optimism about agriculture in a post-CWB world.

Firstly, and perhaps foremost, agriculture is a tremendous wealth generator, and many want a piece of that wealth. It's not just speculators, the pension funds of many reading this article grow on corn futures and agricultural investments.

For example, money in agricultural commodity index funds rose to $240 billion from $13 billion in just six years (2003 to 2009).

Further outside interest in Prairie agriculture is a certainty in a hungry world.

Agriculture is now a high-tech, high-throughput industry. StatsCan reported that labour productivity in agriculture rose by more than six per cent annually between 2002 and 2007, eclipsing the productivity strides of high-tech manufacturing giants in southern Ontario. One example illustrates this well for the grains industry.

Canada built its reputation for wheat quality on protein content. Sophisticated grading and blending systems were developed to assure off-shore millers of the protein content of western Canadian wheat. All of this was backed up by legions of technicians conducting environmentally noxious chemical determinations of protein content.

In the 1980s, pioneering work by Canadian Grain Commission scientists here in Winnipeg transformed this tiresome but essential task into a rapid spectroscopic method (only light, software and some electronics needed).

The transformation cost many technicians their jobs, but the new means of measuring nitrogen opened up brilliant new options for grain quality assessments.

The technology has spread to combines. Now, real-time grain quality measurements allow farmers to decide on marketing strategies for the grain they are harvesting on a specific field.

The technology also moved to manure injectors linked to GPS-monitored maps of soil fertility. Hog manure is then no longer an environmental issue, but is a resource administered precisely to match the nutrient needs of every patch in the field.

Thirdly, it's a customer's world. The retention of a rigid system built on selling grain overseas for beer and white bread is no longer fully in synch with Canadian consumers demanding a variety of healthy, safe and nutritious foods.

In this customer-oriented planet, the farmer in Alberta who sees a penalty of $11 per tonne imposed on his high-quality winter wheat crop because it is 0.2 per cent short on protein has a legitimate complaint against a system that stops him selling it to a Chinese noodle manufacturer who will pay him handsomely for it because it serves his own customers' needs.

Educational institutions have a number of roles to play in this brave new world. Research is important. We must develop grains that will grow sustainably, develop policies that protect producers from speculative capital outflows, and devise technologies that deliver nutrients to at-risk segments of the population.

But more importantly, we must prepare our students well. Not just in agricultural sciences, but in agribusiness and technology, and also in soft skills.

Perhaps the most important of these soft skills is effective communication so an increasingly urbanized population hears why certain agricultural and environmental stewardship practices are pursued.

If we succeed, these students will have no fear of the transformations imposed on them by outside forces.

Martin Scanlon is the acting associate dean (research), faculty of agricultural and food sciences, University of Manitoba.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 7, 2012 A10