“We use the same fundamental process as a lightning storm,” says Nicolas Pinkowski, co-founder and CEO of Nitricity Inc. In nature, lightning releases nitrogen from the air, and rain carries it to plants.

Instead of using the atmospheric discharge of electricity, the company creates “containerized lightning” using solar power. It extracts the nitrogen, adds it to irrigation water to produce nitric acid and neutralizes that with either limestone or potassium hydroxide to make fertilizer which is added to a high-frequency drip irrigation system.

“We started looking at these technologies as Stanford University students,” says Pinkowski, who holds a PhD in mechanical engineering, specializing in thermosciences. “Ultimately, we were looking for a way to reduce GHG emissions.”

He says that he took a class in which teams of students were investigating different technologies, and his team was looking at creating ammonia out of air, water and electricity. By the time San Francisco-based was founded in September 2018, the team had pivoted to making nitrate-based fertilizer.

Saving the environment

“Our business objective is to reduce GHG emissions from production of fertilizer, but also from soil-based nitrous oxide, which is primarily produced by nitrification,” Pinkowski says, adding that he and his colleagues found that on most farms fertilizers are not optimized for what’s best for the soil. “We think that the fertilizers can be improved using electricity.”

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Currently, fertilizer production is fuelled by either natural gas or coal — and a lot of it — and that means a lot of emissions. A report from Cornell University and the Environmental Defense Fund in 2019 said that methane emissions from fertilizer plants were 100 times higher than the industry reported. 

Besides the environmental damage from fertilizer production, costs have skyrocketed, especially during 2021 when China and Russia were restricting exports and Europe was cutting back production due to the high cost of natural gas. Hurricane Ida idled major fertilizer plants in Louisiana, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains throughout the industry.

In October 2021, using data from the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, University of Illinois agricultural economists reported that the average price of anhydrous ammonia was $1,135 per ton, up by $278 from two weeks earlier, the highest-ever increase.

Financing research

So far, Nitricity has performed trials on tomatoes, broccoli and yellow bell peppers, as well as initial trials on wheat.

“We are as scientific as possible about our research — conducting soil sampling, petiole analysis and Brix testing on the crop,” Pinkowski says, adding that they will also be working at a fertilizer laboratory, measuring GHG emissions and soil nitrate leaching.

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Results of a trial on tomatoes at the Center for Irrigation and Technology in Fresno, California, have been published in a report titled Solar on-farm fertilizer production for subsurface-irrigated tomatoes. Even though the Nitricity system got a late start and only produced 70 pounds of N per acre compared to the 200 pounds of traditional N per acre added to the control crop, yields and quality were similar.

Pinkowski and his team entered several pitch competitions for financing, and while they didn’t succeed the first time around, they did in subsequent years.

“These pitch competitions really help you grow — even when you fail — you watch other pitches and learn from them, and the feedback from the judges is great for the long term,” he says, adding that they competed in events put on by Stanford, CalTech and MIT, and won all of them.

The MIT Clean Energy Prize was lucrative — Nitricity won $100,000 that was used to finance its first commercial project.

“You have to put yourself out there — it shows that you’re competitive, and it really helps when you want to recruit investors,” Pinkowski says.

As of November, Nitricity had raised $7.5 million, of which $5 million came from a recent Series Seed investment round led by Energy Impact Partners, an investment platform that funds projects aimed at creating a new low-carbon economy.

“We’re well-capitalized,” Pinkowski says, adding that there has been quite a bit of interest in his company due to the crisis in the fertilizer industry.

The future

Pinkowski says the path hasn’t always been smooth. The production process was a challenge and field testing during California summers sometimes meant working at 110 F. Farm owners could be enthusiastic about the technology’s potential but farm managers and irrigation specialists were less convinced, and he had to learn how to explain the potential advantages of the Nitricity system. Rather than the traditional method of fertilizing at set times through the year, the Nitricity model involves more frequent application, which Pinkowski says is more efficient and reduces nitrate runoff and GHG emissions.

In 2022 the company will test production on 75 acres at Terra Nova Ranch in the central San Joaquin Valley of California, using the Nitricity system on 25 of those acres.

Pinkowski acknowledges the system can’t compete right away with traditional fertilizers, and will initially take on premium calcium nitrate fertilizers used mainly in greenhouses. But the recent increase in conventional N prices has increased interest.

“A lot of farmers are innovative and cutting edge and they really like us — right now, we just can’t compete on price. We will push towards eventually taking on the cheaper fertilizers — that’s the goal.”

The post Out of thin air appeared first on Country Guide.

“Farming on farmland is good in theory,” Formica recalls thinking.

He knows the “in theory” part of what he says comes as a bit of a shock. Is farming only good “in theory?”

But it makes more sense as Formica continues to explain it. “People see a huge opportunity in farmland beyond producing an agricultural output.

“People are searching out not just products, but experiences.”

In today’s agriculture, in other words, there are opportunities to do more than produce crops and livestock. There are business opportunities to reach out to consumers too.

It’s why Formica follows up on his quip about farming on farmland by saying: “Some people need and want more — and there’s a huge movement to develop farmland to help people better connect what’s grown on a farm and where it ends up.”

Willibald Farm Distillery and Brewery is situated on a 100-acre property in Ayr, just off the 401 about an hour west of Toronto. The company now comprises a distillery that produces gin and vodka, plus a restaurant and a brewery. There’s also 60 acres of the farm in hay production and 10 to 15 acres used as sustainable pasture land for the beef cattle that supply the restaurant.

And when there isn’t a pandemic lockdown, there are also people — a lot of people. Willibald is on a path for 30,000 a year.

In the beginning

It all started in 2013 when the three friends were looking for a business opportunity and began brainstorming how they could get into making whisky, which was becoming more popular. The van der Heyden family owned the property, which at the time was rented out for cash crops. 

“Canada has a very rich distilling history and we figured it was the right time to enter the industry,” Formica says, adding that theirs was only the second farm-based distillery to be built in the province. 

At first it seemed a long shot, especially because of their location. The town of Ayr, Formica says, was a place “people drove through on their way to someplace else.” But a trip to Scotland to study famous distilleries eliminated that fear. Glenlivet, for instance, is much more remote than Ayr, located in the highlands where there isn’t even public transit. 

There was a 100-year-old barn on the site already, and while they had to rebuild it from the ground up to make it structurally sound and to meet the building code, they used old boards and beams and other touches — including the silo — from the original space in keeping with its history.

Prime farmland versus diversification

Like most provinces, Ontario has guidelines that the project had to clear. Could it be classed as a farm activity, and be built on farmland?

The guidelines, as they’re currently written, say that on-farm diversified uses (OFDU) must be located on a farm, must be secondary to the principal agricultural use of the property, must be limited in area (two per cent of a farm parcel to a maximum of one hectare) and include, but are not limited to, home occupations, home industries, agri-tourism uses and uses that produce value-added agricultural products.

They also stipulate that the uses “shall be compatible with, and shall not hinder, surrounding agricultural operations.”

The Guidelines on Permitted Uses in Ontario’s Prime Agricultural Areas, in which they’re found were published in 2016 and set out the parameters around the kinds of changes that can and can’t be made on prime farmland, according to the Provincial Planning Statement (PPS), which guides all development in the province. 

Pam Duesling, a University of Guelph PhD student, and Emily Sousa, a master’s student, are undertaking research into whether the standards need change. They are students of Dr. Wayne Caldwell, at the university’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development. 

“We looked at the good, the bad and the ugly around the guidelines and are suggesting next steps for farmers, planners and OMAFRA (Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs), who hopefully will be updating them,” says Duesling.

But there’s also more to it than that. “We are showing farmers what they can do on their farms and (we’re showing) municipalities how they can help those farmers do those new uses, plus help set some limitations so we make sure we preserve our good Ontario soils.” 

Less than five per cent of land in Canada is designated prime agricultural land and more than half of that is in Ontario, where it is under constant pressure. According to Duesling and Sousa, almost 40 per cent was lost between 1951 and 2011.

Still, diversification is also an opportunity that increases farm and community sustainability. The Guelph research shows that when farmers and planners get involved in on-farm business diversification projects, the main reasons for taking the plunge are economic factors within agriculture, followed by local food production and job creation. 

Results so far

The researchers conducted surveys, interviews and focus groups. A total of 37 municipalities and planning boards and 146 farmers who have or had an OFDU or are in the middle of establishing one were involved. The sampling was from across Ontario. 

Nearly all the farms were family-owned, about 40 per cent of the owners relied on off-farm income and three-quarters of the farms were in prime agricultural areas.

Diversification definitely provides an economic boost to the local community, as evidenced by the jobs created by the participating farmers. An average of three jobs were created within the family, nine jobs outside the family, and altogether, the farmers surveyed created 1,551 jobs from their OFDUs. 

The farmers pointed out that their businesses provided first-time employment for young people and inspired some to go back to school and take courses so they could better contribute to the business. On the farm, the projects helped with succession planning too. 

While 70 per cent of the municipalities and planners regularly use the provincial guidelines, 10 per cent don’t because they already worked them into official plans and bylaws. Most concerning was the 20 per cent that never use the guidelines because they don’t have class one to three agricultural soils in their areas. The researchers say that this misconception needs clearing up, because it implies that the guidelines are only relevant to field or crop production and aren’t useful for, say, greenhouse operations.

“We’re not looking to make things easier to do on-farm diversification, it’s more about balancing the opportunities it presents with the preservation of agricultural lands,” Duesling explains. 

Duesling, who has a cash crop farm herself and works for the County of Brant, also says that getting rid of some of the red tape could open up more ways to diversify local economies. 

“Municipalities, if they don’t have as-of-right zoning, there’s a whole process farmers have to go through with planning applications and studies and so on — we’re suggesting opportunities for reducing those and be more user-friendly for the farmers,” she says. 

Most municipalities don’t have as-of-right zoning — which allows the property owner to develop without having to go through a public hearing process or a vote by municipal council, provided the project meets building codes and other criteria. 

While access to financial capital topped the list of challenges for farmers to get into OFDUs, site plan control, zoning issues and building permit approvals were the next most-mentioned barriers during the research. One farmer who was interviewed said, “We went to the political level and had public meetings about (the zoning bylaw amendment). It was excruciatingly difficult. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

Recommendations from the research project will be forwarded to the provincial government, municipalities and farmers, and a report is expected to be published before the end of the year. 

The Willibald experience

Formica says that the process with the local township wasn’t too painful, although initially, they were advised that they’d need to have the entire farm rezoned to industrial, which the partners knew had nearly no chance of success.

At the time, there was little in the way of precedents for what they wanted to do, and North Dumfries Township was reluctant to be a trailblazer, especially with three men who were aged 25 and younger. But the entrepreneurs were determined, and after the initial phone call and demonstrating their seriousness, the process went much more smoothly. 

“We wrote a plan that said because we’re using all agricultural inputs — 95 per cent Ontario-grown — that really all we’re doing is like a mill, only we’re making alcohol instead of flour,” Formica says. It worked.

Dealing with the municipal, provincial and federal governments for all their permits and licensing was not as hard for them as people think, he adds. 

“The unknown is always terrifying, but we filed all the paperwork for our applications and responded to all the questions ourselves,” he says, and credits their unrelenting drive to building the business and having their “ducks in a row” for their success. 

They started in July of 2013, and it took about a year and a half to get all the building permits and two years of construction — mostly because they decided to do a lot of the work themselves. The distillery opened in the spring of 2017 and the restaurant opened in late September, 2018.

Expansion and success

“We knew the distillery wasn’t enough — we had to make it into a destination like a winery, where people want to come and stay a while,” Formica says. “And because we weren’t in a specialty region, we had to create our own draw.”

The partners’ positive feelings for the village where they grew up was also part of their decision. “Ayr needed something,” Formica says. 

The next step was the brewery, although its building process was much different, mainly because there were now guidelines on what landowners can and can’t do with farmland. 

The brewery opened in late 2019, just before the pandemic forced the company to take all their sales online. That proved good news. Sales skyrocketed. 

“We went from shipping out five to 10 orders a month as of February (2020) to shipping 1,200 to 1,400 a month,” Formica says. They had started by delivering orders themselves, but now contracted delivery to logistics companies. 

The partners’ plans are to eventually grow their own grain for their businesses, but for now, they source from local farmers and mills. 

The company now ships to Quebec and Alberta, with exports to Japan, Singapore and South Korea, and via a distributor in Belgium as far as Russia and Finland. 

The three partners are still committed to their original idea, though. “As everything in life becomes more expensive, people will also be looking for things to do closer to home,” Formica says. “If you build a good enough experience, people are looking for things to do and they will drive to your business.

The post ‘Field of Dreams’ diversification appeared first on Country Guide.

Since then, the headlines have vanished. The spotlight has been turned off.

“Achieving greatness means that everyone has to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work,” says a disappointed Kathleen Sullivan, CEO of Food and Beverage Canada (FBC).

Like a growing chorus of industry watchers across the country, Sullivan says the hard work didn’t happen.

The council set out some excellent goals, she says, but it didn’t follow that up with a plan for achieving them. 

In a nutshell, the report said “this country could become an increasingly significant source of high-quality food to feed the world’s growing middle class, while ensuring accessibility to affordable, nutritious and healthy food at home.” 

It set lofty targets like increasing Canada’s share of global food exports to eight per cent from 5.7 per cent by 2027 and doubling its global market share in agri-food products to 5.6 per cent by the same time. The federal budget of 2017 set a target of $75 billion in agri-food exports by 2025, a figure that was bumped to $85 billion by the national Agri-Food Economic Strategy Table. 

And there has been progress. Since those heady days, there have been many more reports and recommendations on how to fix the current system and move forward written by the Senate and House of Commons as well as by think tanks like the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. And while the early days of the pandemic did make the food system wobble, it recovered somewhat, despite some perennial problems like labour shortages that were severely exacerbated.

But there are serious long-term hurdles too, including finding a way to build business on value adding.

“Profitability is a cornerstone of everything,” says CFA president and Prince Edward Island potato producer Mary Robinson, who adds “We have to ask, do I have enough people to come to work, can I get my product to market, is the government going to help me out or get in the way?”

Not only that, but Canada’s farmers are also at a competitive disadvantage because, instead of being compensated for the public environmental, health and social goods they provide, farmers must pay for them out of their own pockets.

It matters, Robinson says, because equitable treatment would see farmers build a foundation that would lift the competitiveness of the entire food chain.

Setting the stage

Value-added agriculture was defined in a 2019 Senate report about growing the country’s sector as “the production techniques and processes that add economic value to a raw agricultural product.” It also included a more wide-ranging definition from the U.S. that encompassed product differentiation, marketing, and generating energy on the farm from wind, solar or methane.

Canada’s agri-food system is already an economic engine. The federal government says that, in 2018, it generated $143 billion, accounted for 7.4 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) and provided one in eight jobs.

Food and beverage is the country’s largest manufacturing industry, accounting for 17 per cent of all manufacturing GDP and 18 per cent of all employment in that sector. 

In primary agriculture, 2018 hit an all-time high of $60 billion in farm market receipts, with an average annual growth of 4.2 per cent. The largest eight per cent of farms accounted for half of those receipts. 

The country’s food and beverage processing sector buys about 40 per cent of Canada’s agricultural output and sells 70 per cent of its production into Canadian retail and food-service markets. More than 90 per cent of these companies employ fewer than 100 people. 

“The appetite for Canadian products is significant — to take advantage of that, we need to invest more in innovation, developing new products, packaging and marketing approaches and more efficient means of production so we can feed the world,” says Senator Rob Black, who was on the committee that produced the report Made in Canada: Growing Canada’s Value-Added Food Sector, which was adopted in early 2020.

Persistent problems

So why hasn’t Canada done better in adding value to commodities and fueling the nation’s economy? Total agri-food and seafood exports according to Statistics Canada were $61 billion in 2020, up from $55.5 billion in 2019, and we remain the world’s fifth-largest agri-food exporter — a place that we’ve held since 2012.

We are also number 11 in the world in processed food exports, but exports have only inched up incrementally, increasing by less than one per cent per year for the last decade. That puts the country a long way from the target of $85 billion in three years.

International trade drives the nation’s agri-food industry. The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance says that 90 per cent of the nation’s farmers depend on exports, as does 40 per cent of its food processing sector. 

Chronic labour shortages

One of the biggest barriers to progress, which was present long before the pandemic, is not having a large enough labour force. That’s top of the list for Senator Black and also for Food and Beverage Canada’s Sullivan and Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) president Mary Robinson.

“I don’t know anyone in this industry who isn’t dealing with labour issues,” says Robinson. “People cannot make investments in their businesses to grow them because they don’t have the people to do the work.”

Research by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council says that by 2029 there will be a 123,000-person shortfall in the ag labour force, translating to billions in lost revenue. 

In primary agriculture alone, CAHRC estimated that revenue losses due to the lack of labour totalled $2.9 billion in 2019 — and that the impact will double every 10 years. 

“This is a massive issue that seems to be going mostly unaddressed — to the point where now, we’re having structural problems,” says Sullivan. “We need to identify actions on many different fronts — it can’t be fixed with a program here and a program there.”

Among the actions she cites are attracting employees domestically, addressing problems with foreign labour, ensuring employees get the skills they need, increasing the use of automation and technology to relieve the pressure, and having broadband services everywhere.

There have been government attempts to fix at least parts of the issue. The Agri-Food Pilot was introduced by the federal government in May 2020 and was supposed to alleviate shortages in year-round sectors like meat processing. The idea was to provide temporary foreign workers with a path to permanent residency, and it set a target of 2,750 migrant participants per year for three years. But applications got bogged down in the bureaucracy at the Department of Immigration, and, as of August, 2021, only 343 applications had been completed.

CAHRC, along with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and Food and Beverage Canada teamed up in the fall of 2021 to develop a strategy to try and finally make good on many of the recommendations that have been put forward. 

Red-tape woes

Robinson believes governments must do a better job of looking at regulations across all departments and agencies with an agricultural lens and a specific focus on how they may affect the competitiveness of the sector.

“We need to have a strong regulatory framework, but it needs to be outcome-based and flexible to enable innovation and competitiveness,” she says.

Sullivan says that, while the food and beverage industry supports environmentally friendly policies like the current government commitment to ban single-use plastics, there’s nothing planned out in terms of alternative packaging. 

“We want to help achieve policy goals, but government has to enable the industry to get there,” she says, adding that big new environmental policy initiatives don’t have the co-ordination that should be in place, especially between and among federal and provincial jurisdictions.

Losing global competitiveness

Nadia Theodore, senior vice-president for global government and industry relations with Maple Leaf Foods, cites Canada’s regulatory regime as one of the reasons the company recently bought a plant in Indianapolis, rather than locating it in Canada.

In her submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food in February 2021, she said that Canada is recognized by trading partners as having the highest standards in safe, quality, environmentally responsibly produced food. But she also said that a lot of regulations are outdated and focus too much on prescribing processes, rather than looking for positive outcomes. She said this approach not only stifles innovation, it also creates mistrust between the industry and regulators and prevents Canada from living up to its potential for both health and safety and global competitiveness.

The pickup of automation and robotics, digital technology, artificial intelligence and other advances in the food and beverage industry is lower than other countries and even lower than other manufacturing sectors in Canada.

“Access to capital is one big challenge,” Sullivan says. “When you think that we have 7,000 companies, the vast majority of which have 50 to 100 employees, and some operate seasonally, the return on investment just doesn’t make it feasible.”

Another challenge she says is that Canada doesn’t have a food processing equipment manufacturing sector. Essentially, all processing machinery is designed elsewhere and has to be imported. 

“We saw this magnified during COVID-19 — if you import equipment from Italy, they’ll want you to get it serviced by their technicians,” she says, adding that there are also problems with getting foreign equipment approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency because of discrepancies in approaches to food safety. 

She also notes that implementing more automation would reduce the need for labour but would increase the demand for skilled labour to service the equipment.

Not all doom and gloom

In early 2018, the federal government introduced five “Superclusters” to spur innovation across several sectors. A total of $153 million was invested in one called the Protein Industries Supercluster which is aimed at increasing the value of crops like wheat, canola and pulses by using innovative plant genomics, novel approaches to processing and digital technology.

The idea is to encourage collaboration among businesses and universities as well as to get industry to provide matching investments to boost innovation and supply global markets that are hungry for protein alternatives for both human food and livestock feed.

In its 2021 annual report, Protein Industries Canada — the non-profit organization that is carrying out the initiative — said that $352 million had been invested in 22 projects over two years. The goal is for Canada to capture 10 per cent of the projected $250 billion global plant-based market by 2035. 

There are also agri-food tech accelerators like Bioenterprise, which, for the last few years, has been building a national presence from its base in Guelph, Ontario. 

Another promising initiative is the Canadian Food Innovation Network, an organization aimed at boosting innovation by “stimulating connections, collaborations and investment” in the country’s food production system. 

As of November 2021, it had 500 members comprised of researchers, food manufacturers, grocers and other organizations involved in the food supply chain. It has launched two programs. One is cost-shared at 50 per cent and provides $1 million to $4 million to business collaborations that undertake innovative projects. The other is aimed earlier in the process — making $20,000 to $200,000 available to researchers and small- or medium-sized food manufacturers who want to bring innovations to market.

Also in November, the federal, provincial and territorial agriculture ministers issued the “Guelph Statement,” which committed the parties to five priorities, one of which was “building sector capacity and growth through realizing the potential of value-added agri-food and agri-products.” 

Processing capacity

The COVID-19 pandemic shone a light on Canada’s processing capacity problems, particularly in meat production. Only three federally regulated plants owned by two companies are responsible for processing 85 per cent of domestically consumed beef. 

When the pandemic struck the Cargill plant in High River, nearly half of its 2,000 employees tested positive. Three deaths were connected to the outbreak, which at the time was the largest workplace infection in North America.

The plant normally processes about 4,500 head of cattle a day, so when it shut down for two weeks in April 2020, it caused a huge backlog.

In his report to the House of Commons agricultural committee, Rob Lipsett, president of the Beef Farmers of Ontario, said some beef farmers had to wait anywhere from four months to a year to have their cattle processed. Lipsett quoted an estimate from Canfax, the Canadian Cattleman’s Association’s information service, that shortages in processing capacity meant $129 million in lost revenue in 2020 for eastern Canadian farmers.

The federal government announced the $77.5 million Emergency Processing Fund in May 2020 to help Canadian food processors with costs associated with keeping workers safe from COVID-19 and to upgrade their facilities. 

In Ontario, $14.2 million has been provided to meat processors to increase their capacity under the federal-provincial Canadian Agricultural Partnership. The initiative was delivered in two intakes, the second of which was announced on November 12, 2021. The program generated so much demand the first time around that the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs’ website warned applicants that it would close on December 22, and once the intake was fully subscribed, applications would no longer be reviewed, and the ones who didn’t make the cut would be notified.

In other words, there’s a lot of recognition across the country, as well as some serious political will to help Canada grow its value-adding sector.

Whether Canada uses its own model or takes lessons from elsewhere, many of the industry representatives interviewed for this story feel that the time is right — especially in a hungry world that’s demanding high-quality, sustainably produced food — to get serious about achieving the goals set by Barton back in 2017.

Maybe it’s the mindset

Dr. Simon Somogyi thinks that to understand value adding in agriculture, you must go way beyond food processing.

Somogyi holds the business chair at the Arrell Food Institute and is a professor in the Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics at the University of Guelph, and he says the ag industry needs to focus on the consumer, not the processor.

In other words, value adding is what happens when the consumer sees a reason to pay more. It doesn’t have to involve technology or new processing methods. Instead, it can be like branding and selling Angus beef burgers. 

“We need to focus on the consumer,” Somogyi says, adding that there is a perfect opportunity in southwestern Ontario to build a tofu plant and export a value-added product made from identity preserved soybeans, which are already in demand and sold in large quantities to the Asian market. 

Somogyi is from Australia, and cites his experiences in that country as well as in New Zealand and the U.K. where farmers don’t have business risk management programs.

“The way to reduce your risk of a bad season or low prices is to either collaborate through co-operatives or add value to your product and take that extra money in the chain as a way to diversify your business operation,” he says. 

The incentive to add value to products is high in these countries because it allows farmers to make money and helps them be less dependent on the vagaries of world prices.

“Having business risk management programs can lead to a little bit of complacency in the value-added space,” Somogyi says.

He believes that our system is very influenced by the U.S. and thinks that Canada is a cheap alternative for U.S. production.

“I think it’s a mindset issue, and about working with others — we need to do things differently,” Somogyi says, adding that farming everywhere is a 24/7 job in which people don’t have a lot of time to explore value-added opportunities. 

In Canada, he believes, industry associations focus more on commodities,and not so much on bringing together people from up and down the supply chain, unlike other countries. 

“Meat and Livestock Australia, for example, has farmers, processors and retailers who pay fees that can then be used as leverage for government programs,” he says. This association also funds things like market representation tours, trade missions and skills development. As a result of its makeup, it also has a lot of power to influence government decisions. 

Somogyi also says that relationships among producers, processors, the retail industry, the government and universities are a lot closer in Australia. 

Says Somogyi: “We love in Canada to come up with our own solutions — but it’s so much easier and quicker to copy them and learn from other places.”

Grocery gouging

Compared to many other countries, Canada’s food processors and farmers also start every day at an economic disadvantage, because their domestic market forces them to sell to the country’s small handful of powerful grocery retailers.

Just five companies control 80 per cent of Canada’s market share of groceries, and several of those were squeezing suppliers with seemingly arbitrary fees and penalties assessed during the pandemic. That’s on top of the higher listing and product placement fees that Canada’s value adders get charged.

As a result, in July 2021, Canada’s ministers of agriculture directed the industry to come up with a code of conduct to bring more fairness to the relationship with suppliers and to set a deadline of the end of the year. Similar codes are already in place in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Michael Medline, CEO of Empire Company Limited, which owns Sobeys, Safeway and FreshCo, has championed the idea, and several groups, including the CFA and the FCB are working on a proposal. But many in the industry, including the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, remain skeptical the code will be achieved within the time frame.

The post Missing the market appeared first on Country Guide.

“People were interested in what I was eating, and the fact that we had grown it,” Thatcher recalls. “That’s what gave me the insight into the fact that people want to connect to farms and farmers and know more.” 

It’s been almost 12 years since she left teaching to build the business, and now Thatcher Farms has a butcher shop, farm market, and a bakery and kitchen, in addition to the farm itself. It’s located east of Guelph and north of Fergus, Ont., where Dana and husband Adam own 140 acres of land and rent another 350 to grow crops. They raise and sell the meat from beef cattle, poultry and lamb and employ 20 local people. 

While the pandemic dampened the agri-tourism side of the business — the Thatchers usually offer pick-your-own strawberries in spring and pumpkins in the fall — they also have a number of other attractions like a corn maze and, in summer 2021, they developed a sunflower trail where visitors can cut their own bouquets. 

In 2022, they’re adding another business called Barn Swallow Fields that includes a new, barn-like venue that people can rent for weddings, live music shows, field dinners, reunions, corporate gatherings and other events. The website is already up and running. 

The Thatchers have three children ranging in age from 10 to 14. Thomas, William and Sophie all pitch in and help with the family businesses.

Building from nothing

When they started out, Thatcher says they had no money, and her teaching salary often went to buy things like hog feed at the time. Initially, Adam was finishing hogs and had a hay and straw business. 

“In the early 2000s, the commodity prices were so terrible, we knew we had to do something different,” she says. That’s when they started selling meat — beef, lamb, chicken and pork — as well as eggs out of the back of their house. Later, they added turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

They were also a bit naïve, and eager to please customers. So, they were open seven days a week, which, at the time, meant Dana would have to do things like interrupt feeding Sophie to deal with a customer who had come up the lane. 

In the early days, they grew and made everything themselves. Now, while they still supply the meat, they also source from 15 to 20 local suppliers who provide a range of items from jams and sauces to pickles and other preserves. 

Being a first-generation farm family, they’ve learned, has both its upsides and downsides. 

“We sometimes wish that we had family involved to share the workload and to provide some financial help,” she says. “But at the end of the day, the struggle is ours, the choices are ours, and Adam and I make the decisions with- out having to get approval from another family member.”

The couple have different skill sets — Adam loves agriculture and farming and graduated from the Ontario Agricultural College at the University of Guelph. Dana says she’s the “people person” and takes care of the retail side of the business. All of their marketing is done on social media — mostly Instagram and some Facebook. 

“It’s loads and loads of hard work, but the magical piece is that we’re working together toward our shared goals,” she says. 

Networking crucial

Thatcher attributes the farm’s success to their commitment to staying interested and curious about trends. Having patience and a willingness to network are two traits that she has also learned to highly value as a business person. 

“You have to be open to putting yourself out there,” she says, and if you’re new to value adding, you also need to recognize that you can’t possibly know it all. The decision to join the Ontario Farm Fresh Marketing Association, she stresses, was life changing. 

Any time issues that have come up in the business, whether about the sunflowers, fertilizer recommendations or getting a good accountant, the supportive people in the association are always willing to take their call and share advice and experience, she says. 

Another organization that they have relied on over the years is the Outstanding Young Farmers — a Canada-wide program that recognizes the best and brightest in the farming business. The Thatchers won in 2013 and received a lifetime membership to the organization. 

Being open to people also helps when there are no boundaries between the business and home life. In fact, Dana says that they have a sign at the road end of the lane that says “Welcome to our farm and our home.” 

They now keep regular business hours, but sometimes they get drop-ins. 

“People show up during our off-hours looking to buy our products — but then, we have to remind ourselves that we love what we do, and are grateful for our customers,” she says. 

Hire good people

Besides having a loyal staff that goes the extra kilometre for them, the Thatchers have excellent support from, and they work closely with, their accountant, lawyer and banker — who understand them and their goals. 

“We have a really great relationship with all of them — we worked at it over the years, and it means a lot, knowing we can ask for their support and guidance,” she says. 

When they started out, they didn’t have a business plan, and like many entrepreneurial startups, Thatcher Farms grew out of “passion and necessity.” 

But by 2014, as sales increased and they hired more staff, they decided to take CTEAM (Canadian Total Excellence in Agricultural Management), a two-year business program that helped them learn while developing their own strategic and operational business plans. The program helped them network with other farmers in taking courses, and the connection with the teachers made them more disciplined in their own thinking. 

“It really helped us home in on who we were and where we wanted to be,” Dana says, adding that having solid plans and greater knowledge gave her more confidence in dealing with the bank. 

“Our banker said I was the first person to ever ask about ratios,” she says. “It’s important to learn and understand ratios to be able to know where you stand in terms of profits and losses,” she says, adding that her banker now helps with the actual number crunching. 

Thriving through the pandemic

Thatcher says that business was booming through the COVID-19 pandemic, and she credits having an e-commerce platform up and running for the two years leading up to March 2020 for keeping them afloat. 

“We would not have successfully manoeuvred through it without that platform,” she says. The online shop offers products ranging from five-pound boxes of grilling steaks and garlic-seasoned lamb sausages to all kinds of jams and preserves to fruit and meat pies to ready-to-eat meals like chili and meatloaf. They even sell mitts and handbags from the hides of the cattle they have slaughtered. 

In November, they re-opened their farm market to in-store customers. During the pandemic, they used the market as a warehouse and put coolers on its porch so customers could order and pre-pay online, then safely pick up their purchases outdoors. 

“That was our strategy right from the beginning — we didn’t want to have any part of policing people coming into the store,” she says, adding that her customers were comfortable with the situation and grateful for the convenience. 

Given the amount of growth and diversification they’ve experienced over the past few years, the Thatchers now plan to take some time to stay the course. 

Says Dana, “We’re really happy with where we are — we’d like to take some time to enjoy it.”

The post Value adding, with a flourish appeared first on Country Guide.

“There are more and more people who recognize that local, social financing is a bit of a vaccination against what’s happening with the global food supply,” says Linda Best, a founder and managing director of Farmworks Investment Co-operative Ltd. 

Farmworks is based in Nova Scotia and currently has close to 130 loan clients, including farmers, food processors and restaurants. It’s a Community Economic Development Investment Fund (CEDIF), operating under a provincial program in which investments in local enterprises are RRSP-eligible and investors receive a 35 per cent provincial non-refundable tax credit with a five-year hold, and credits of 20 per cent and 10 per cent for subsequent five-year holds. 

“We’ve grown wholistically and organically — each year, we’ve had more money come in and more loan clients, and most of our directors are very involved in providing business advice and mentoring to those clients,” Best says, adding that this year, they made a small profit. 

Funds that are collected from investors are loaned to local businesses that must show at least a 10 per cent increase in output and productivity over three years, and there are strict guidelines for measuring and reporting outcomes. A total of $783,300 was invested last year, with the average individual investment at about $6,000. Best was hoping to get to $1 million this year. 

Loan repayments — which total about $50,000 to $60,000 a month — are plowed back into the pool for lending out to others. 

During the pandemic, loan payback terms were extended for some clients, and Farmworks only lost two businesses over the course of 2020-21.

Nova Scotia’s CEDIF model has proven successful. An economic impact study published this year by the Co-operative Enterprise Council of New Brunswick showed that, in 2019, an investment by the provincial government of less than $700,000 produced a $2 million investment by the province’s residents. The 116 businesses that were helped — most of which were in the food and beverage industry — maintained 1,200 full-time jobs, generated $52 million in wages and salaries and contributed $25 million in taxes. 

Ontario model

In Ontario, the Fair Finance Fund (FFF) was launched in 2018 under the auspices of the Local Food and Farm Co-operatives (LFFC) and subsequently spun off into its own non-profit social finance fund. FFF is now set to raise $2 million by the end of 2021. 

“Listening to members of LFFC, the thing that always came up was the need for access to capital,” says project manager Sally Miller.

A discussion paper was developed and circulated to members including the Ecological Farmers of Ontario, National Farmers Union, Sustain Ontario and others. They determined that the non-profit structure for the fund was the best fit.

Fair Finance Fund sells community bonds — currently at an interest rate of two per cent for $5,000 bonds and 2.95 per cent for $50,000 bonds — to individuals and institutions. Since 2019, the fund has invested $850,000 in farms, food and beverage processors, restaurants and others, resulting in more than $3 million in increased local food sales. 

“Every bit of capital we raise goes to clients,” Miller says, adding that last year, they were able to lift the cap on the amount they loan out to $200,000. 

Currently, the fund’s terms include $20,000 to $200,000 loans over five years at 5.25 per cent interest. There are no collateral requirements up to $100,000, an optional three-month grace period and no fees.

“It (the cap increase) is really a game changer, because now we can support underserved farmers and communities to buy land.” Loans are also available for equipment, working capital, buildings and other purposes like marketing and transportation. 

Many of the FFF loan recipients are people who have been in business for a few years and are looking to buy land or a piece of equipment, or to add processing capabilities to their farm business. 

“Because they’re diverse and sell direct to consumers, they don’t fit the traditional model and therefore can’t get access to capital,” Miller says. 

The other advantage she says of social financing is that her loan clients want to deal with FFF because they know that the money they pay back will go to someone else like them. 

Moving money to address social concerns

Growth in the social-impact investing sector is picking up speed.

“There have been huge developments in social finance funds in Canada in the last three years,” Miller says. “The federal government announced $755 million for the sector and there are many different organizations and structures — even within funds, targeting different investors.”

The Social Finance Fund was announced by the federal government in late 2018 as a 10-year program aimed at providing charitable, non-profit and social purpose organizations better access to financing via credit unions, private equity firms and community loan funds. In August 2021, Ottawa issued a call for expressions of interest for one to five social finance wholesalers to administer the fund. 

“We’re getting larger investors who want to move their RRSPs out of fossil fuels,” Best says, and she adds that the socially responsible investment sector is growing, and that people recognize they should invest in what’s going to support them down the road. 

“Early on it (social financing) was driven by renewable energy, affordable housing and real estate innovations,” says Miller, who calls Linda Best and Farmworks her inspiration for developing the Fair Finance Fund for the farm and food space. 

“A lot of our investors are new to purpose-focused investing — and they’re not big investors — but they’re concerned about climate change, so they want to contribute to fighting it and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and soil erosion and so on.”

Miller says that the typical FFF investor is a foundation that either has a policy to allocate money to mission-driven investments or is thinking about it. 

Both Farmworks and FFF also offer business mentorship and advisory services.

Many of Farmworks board of directors members provide one-on-one help to budding businesses, and FFF’s REAL Assist program links local farm and food enterprises with seasoned experts to provide them with hands-on help to reach their business, social and environmental goals. 

Future facing

Best says that she’s preparing to lobby the incoming Nova Scotia government about raising the current cap of $6 million under the CEDIF program to $10 million. 

“If you have a board of directors that’s working really well, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have to set up a whole new board to achieve the kind of results that we’re achieving,” she says. 

Miller, meanwhile, says the FFF will be holding regional and sector-specific information sessions across Ontario to get a feel for what needs to be addressed. 

It isn’t only farms, she says. “The future of the restaurant industry is especially uncertain, and we’re in a good place to help.” 

Both Best and Miller spend a lot of time talking to their social financing counterparts across the country about what works and what doesn’t and sharing ideas about development plans.

“It’s a really exciting sector to be in at this time,” Miller says. “People are generous with their time and their templates and their thoughts. We’re all trying to make this work together.” 

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“The technology is far, far more user friendly and there are really good desktop printers in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars,” says Joshua Pearce, professor at the Ivey School of Business and at the University of Western Ontario’s department of electrical and computer engineering.

“For a farmer trying to find a part that’s no longer being manufactured, using a combination of low-cost 3D printing and some fairly simple metal techniques will justify the cost of the printer,” he says. 

And let’s also get our time frames right. Yes, this is a technology that was only used by geeky hobbyists 10 years ago, but it’s increasingly mainstream now, and it has huge potential to be a game changer in the farm equipment industry.

Basically, 3D printing makes solid objects from a digital file. Using a computer aided design (CAD) file, the printer lays down micro-thin layers of material (plastic or steel), which eventually build up into the final product.

For farmers, Pearce says there are a couple of new directions that are of real interest.

Start with a smart phone

Computer vision is also a new technology that could be useful on the farm. Basically the idea is that you take pictures of the object with your smart phone and convert it to a mesh that can be 3D printed. 

“You can take a tractor part that’s broken, duct tape it together, take pictures of it and have it 3D printed,” Pearce says.

Steven Thorstad says his business stopped selling 3D scanners about five years ago because of the poor quality. Now, applications that can be loaded onto smart phones have better quality 3D imaging. 

Thorstad and his family own a computer store and run Thor3D.ca, an Outlook, Saskatchewan-based company that distributes Makerbots, a mid-level 3D printer that retails for $2,000 to $3,000. 

“Our biggest customers are schools, where they teach kids how to use the technology,” Thorstad says, adding they also sell into agriculture — right now, mostly machinery manufacturers who use the printers to develop prototypes. He says it’s quicker and cheaper than having to machine the prototypes that they can use to determine if the design will work. 

“You can make a design change in the middle of the day, have it printed overnight and test it the next day,” he says, and notes that having a 3D printer on hand keeps all the information in-house and confidential. 

Thorstad says a few local farmers have started to pick up on 3D printing — the printers that he sells only make plastic components.

“I think the big thing we’re going to see before the printers get on regular farms is a catalogue of designs for plastic and metal parts to make it really become standard,” he says. 

Right now, if a farmer has, say, a broken gear out of a combine, they have to bring it in to someone who knows CAD programs and knows what’s needed to make the part. It can take a half-hour for something simple, or several hours for something with complex geometry. 

Thorstad anticipates a manufacturing company like John Deere, for example, will be able to provide the design to the farmer for the part, and the farmer will take it to a local 3D printer. 

In fact, that company is looking at the possibility of having spare parts on demand at dealerships, which would cut down on downtime at the crucial times of planting and harvest. CNH Industrial, the owner of Case and New Holland, has also started making 3D spare parts for agricultural equipment. 

Thorstad says that makes sense. “You don’t have to stock parts and the cost savings would be great for the manufacturers.”

While he doesn’t have a lot of this kind of business, he says “every couple of months, a farmer comes in with a broken part and we will print him a new one.”

Or think further out

In plastic recycling, there’s Distributed Recycling for Additive Manufacturing (DRAM) in which plastic waste is cleaned, shredded and put into a recycle bot — an extruder that produces material that can be used in 3D printers. Agricultural plastic waste would be a good candidate.

“It drops the cost of filaments — which are about $20 a kilogram for commercial applications — to under 10 cents, depending on the cost of electricity and so on,” Pearce says.

A newer direction is that there are 3D printers in a mid-range price (more than $5,000) that can take shredded plastic directly — without the recycling step.

“That’s mostly for making larger components,” he says. 

In his previous life with Michigan Technological University, he says his group developed extrusion moulds that could be 3D printed and then used to produce many of the same type of component.

“For example, you could make a mould that weighs a tenth of a kilogram and it could then produce components that weigh, say, two kilograms,” Pearce says. While the products wouldn’t be perfectly refined, they will serve the purpose.

The next step

Thorstad says that there are higher-end printers — about $200,000 — on the market that use high-powered lasers to melt powdered steel into the shape that you want that are 80 to 90 per cent as good as machined parts. Kit printers are a lot better quality than they used to be, and around $300 to $500 will get a build-it-yourself printer to make things you’ve broken around the house or the barn.

There’s also a huge number of 3D designs that are available for free on open source websites like Thingiverse.com

Says Thorstad: “It’s getting more and more accessible over time, and it’s really good for everyone involved.” 

The post Time to hit ‘Print’ for that machinery part? appeared first on Country Guide.

It wasn’t in the plan. “We were just looking to get out of the city, get some land and put in a vegetable garden for our own use,” admits James Morin, who has four children ranging in age from 12 to 26. 

Morin has adopted regenerative agriculture principles for Kipling Ridge, his 160-acre operation near Verner in northern Ontario. That means he raises his cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens on pasture. He uses no herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers. He also buys hay for feed direct from two local farmers and adds in barley and pea supplements when they’re needed. 

But that is only part of what makes Morin’s farm unique in the area. The other part is his financial background. He holds a masters in business administration, and has been employed in commercial banking for a number of years and still works full-time on contract with Concentra, a lending and investment company based in Saskatchewan.

“We’ve paid close attention to our costs of production and how that translates for prices, for example,” he says. “Using (regenerative) techniques, we’re offsetting our feed costs for the cattle especially, because we’re maxed out on our land base which limits the number of cows we can run.”

Regenerative agriculture is trending hot these days, with farmers the world over taking up the cause and large companies like General Mills and Danone getting on board to incentivize suppliers to adopt methods that not only sustain the environment but give back to it.

While there are many different definitions of this production method, it usually encompasses a holistic approach and its principles include: reducing or eliminating tillage; protecting the soil (e.g live roots in the ground); incorporating biodiversity (e.g. different livestock species, cover crops and rotating crops); and integrating livestock with cropping. Taking care of water — both in terms of quantity and quality — is also important. Some, like General Mills, add in components like farmer economic resilience.

“We’re in a very interesting space in this trend, with large operations using regenerative techniques to save money on fertilizers, so there’s a clear ROI right there,” Morin says. 

“For us, we bought a place where the hay was taken off for a good 40 years — so there were really degraded pastures and it was very weedy.”

Using regenerative methods — and especially using rotational grazing — he says he has turned unproductive land into land that’s flush with all kinds of different grasses and clovers that weren’t there before.

Banking and farming

Morin says that becoming a farmer has made him a better banker.

“They (bankers) really have no concept of the stress, the risk, how important the business is to them (farmers) — not just professionally but personally,” he says.

Juggling both the farm and the full-time career meant that he took a job with Concentra in December 2020 where he found the sweet spot of flexible work hours and good compensation. 

“I have a home office on the farm, so if something comes up that I have to deal with right away I can,” he says. 

What he likes about the regenerative approach is that it’s a way to experiment with different methods without having to invest a ton of money in infrastructure.

“If you put up a hog or poultry barn, you’re committed,” he says, adding that he’s not knocking anyone who does, he’s just going about it in a different way.

Starting up

Living in Sudbury, the Morins had a 20′ by 50′ yard that they filled with a robust vegetable garden. But it wasn’t enough — James and Josée talked it over and wanted to do more — which is when the idea of the farm arose. 

“We weren’t from farming at all. I was born and raised in a mining community and my wife is from a logging community,” he says.

The first and second summers were a continuation of the gardens and the livestock followed. 

“We were basically homesteading,” he says. “I was involved in organizations locally that supported buying local, and opportunities opened up to work with other farmers on co-marketing.”

“It really just snowballed and we haven’t been able to keep up since,” he adds.

In terms of startup, he obtained a regular mortgage like anyone else — at a staff interest rate, since he was working at the local credit union at the time. His wife was and continues to work full-time as a teacher. 

The farm officially got underway in 2015, and he stepped away from his financial career in 2017-18 to go full-time into farming with the intent of making Kipling Ridge into a going concern. 

“It was extremely difficult on our cash-flow,” he says, reiterating the lessons he learned about how big a burden the financial side of the business is on farmers.

He realizes his situation isn’t unique — many farmers are full-time employees off-farm, as well.

In 2018, he applied to the Canadian Agricultural Loans Act (CALA) program for a 10-year loan to buy equipment and re-finance his mortgage. CALA is a federal loan guarantee program in which the government will compensate the lender 95 per cent of their loss due to a default on an eligible loan. The loan limit is $500,000 per farm. 

He also has an operating line of credit based on equipment for which he paid cash, as well as his livestock. 

The farm and meat sales

Morin characterizes his farm as small scale, with 30 head of Dexter and Dexter-Angus cross cattle and 120 pigs — Large Black hogs and Kune Kune pigs — at any given time year round. In the spring and summer, he also raises 50 turkeys and about 1,500 chickens. He takes the pigs and cattle from breeding right to slaughter, and he’s looking to double the number of pigs this year. 

Calving and farrowing happens out on the land or in the forest, and the animals have generally acclimated to the weather.

He uses a pasture-based, multi-species rotational grazing system, and runs the cattle to keep the pasture at a lower level so it’s better for the hogs and chickens. 

“We’re raising three different kinds of livestock — it’s like stacking,” he says. 

He sells the meat through two streams: whole hogs into an online farmers market aggregator with 25 vendors, and half or whole animals direct-to-consumer. 

The aggregator takes whole animals — branded under the Kipling Ridge banner — and has them processed to specifications dictated by what customers are buying. They also take care of all sales, invoicing and customer service. 

He sends his other animals to two local provincially licensed abattoirs — one for the cattle and pigs and one for the birds.

The COVID-19 effect

Demand for meat produced the way he produces it spiked during the pandemic.

“It was just remarkable — by the end of April last year, our 20-foot walk-in freezer was emptied and we had deposits on everything we’re raising to the end of June 2021,” he says. 

Usually, he’d be taking deposits for hog meat three months out, and sometimes six months for the cattle — which he only sells in the spring and fall. 

“We flipped from having animals on the ground that weren’t sold yet to having deposits on hogs coming from sows that weren’t even bred yet,” he says.

He says almost all the farmers he knows who took this approach — who have their animals on pasture and treat them well — had the same kind of demand over the past year.

The huge demand also caused some headaches when it came to explaining to would-be customers that he couldn’t supply for a year.

“It complicated the customer-service side of the business,” he says. “A lot of folks think livestock farmers are like the grocery store.” 

Another factor that complicates the relationship is that customers don’t really know what the bottom-line price will be when they make a deposit. 

Morin had to raise his prices twice — partly because of rising feed costs. He does an annual check-in with his numbers to ensure he’s making money.

Fortunately, he has a regular, loyal customer base — especially those who buy whole or half animals from him.

He was still getting weekly calls from people who wanted to get meat immediately in March 2021.

What about regen farming? 

Morin is keen on keeping up with the trends and regularly promotes the regenerative movement. He says that now, most regenerative agriculture farms are small and mixed — fruits and veggies and grains or, like him, mixed livestock. 

“As they get larger, there tends to be more specialization — large grain and cattle farms, for example,” he says. “We’re seeing it evolve — in the States, especially, there are folks putting 300, 400 or 500 pigs on pasture, which is remarkable, and they’re doing really well.”

Many of them are acting as suppliers to smaller mixed farms — who want to raise just 20 or 30 hogs.

“There are so many different ways to put a business model together in this,” he says.

While he has nothing against the bigger, efficient operations, he thinks there should be more small farms and abattoirs — to boost local economies and to build resilience in the supply chain. 

“We’ll always need the larger farms — to supply the kind of volume that’s needed in, say, fast-food chain restaurants,” he says. “We can’t compete for price on that level.”

He says that using regenerative agriculture is “not a linear thing,” and that there is a period of transition — especially if the farm has been traditionally run. 

It takes time, and the approaches are different for nearly every farm — depending on soil type, weather, geography and a whole host of other factors. 

Morin has noticed that a lot of the farmers who have been in regenerative agriculture have become vertical integrators. For his own business, when he wanted to scale up he had to make a decision to either increase his land base and grow his own feed, or expand at the other end of the chain and build or buy an abattoir.

“When you spend all this time and care to raise these animals in a certain way, you want to be sure that the slaughter process and getting to the final product uses those same ideals all the way through,” he says. 

From the front end, one of his hay suppliers has also offered to allow Morin’s livestock to graze his crop residues. 

“Little steps like that could help me double my herd — with free access to his land,” he says. “During difficult times of the year, it’s great to have that — and he gets free fertilizer, saving him some money.”

He’s also keenly interested in figuring out better approaches to financing the restructuring and expansion of regenerative farms. 

“On the business side, what we really need to see is some innovation in financing,” he says, especially to bridge the gap that occurs when farms are going through the transition phase from conventional to regenerative, and revenues are scarce. 

“There are a lot of financial companies around the world working to address that — a lot of it has an equity component,” he says. 

He’s a fan of Area One Farms, which has an innovative model for helping farmers scale up their businesses. Founder and CEO Joelle Faulkner put together the private equity fund about 10 years ago.

“What they’re doing is game changing,” Morin says. 

Basically, Area One Farms connects willing investors with established farmers who want to expand but not take on debt and interest payments, fees or rent.

Between 2012, when the company was founded, and March 2021, it had $450 million in assets under management on 20 properties in four provinces across Canada, and is moving more and more into investing in regenerative agriculture as a risk reduction method. Faulkner’s idea is that consumer preferences will drive a lot of change on the farm, especially demanding lower inputs. So she has decided to turn her sights — and investors — onto regenerative. 

Kipling Ridge — next steps

Morin managed to build a good relationship with his two abattoir owners, although booking slaughter times has been a bit tricky.

“We have to look six to 12 months out,” he says, noting that planning is huge part of the operation and when there are X number of piglets and weans on the ground. Meat processing is one of his biggest costs, along with feed. 

To get some regularity for slaughtering his animals and reduce costs, he even planned to build an abattoir. He had priced it out and was ready to go when he advised the abattoir owner he currently deals with of his intentions.

To his surprise, the owner offered to sell his business — which worked out well, since it’s only 15 minutes from the farm, is already provincially licensed and has a well-trained staff of six full-time and three to four part-time employees. It also has an established customer base.

Creative Meats slaughters every species except poultry and has an on-site retail butcher shop. It does custom work for the local farmers, and also brings in sides from packers. The facility has been around for about 50 years and has the capacity to slaughter 20 cattle or 35 hogs a week. Right now there’s only one kill day — a limitation dictated by having enough cooler space. 

“The intention is grow the farm to the extent that it can supply the retail shop,” he says. “But it takes time — we need to get to a scale where we can finish animals at least every month on the cattle side.” He’d like the business to get to 10 times its current size — including more farms. 

Describing how he manages a full-time financial career while being a full-time farmer, Morin says he’s learned how to use his time efficiently, and, because he’s passionate about it, he genuinely enjoys farming. 

“I get relaxation and joy out of the farming,” he says.

“I don’t want to send the message that it’s absolutely necessary if your farm is designed and operated properly. Josée and I both love our professional careers as much as the farming.

“Of course, the extra income does help smooth out cash flow, and our operation is profitable — but my wife and I have made the choice to have certain luxuries and are happy to continue working to afford that.”

Those extras include equipment that, says Morin, “isn’t exactly necessary, but we like having it around as we develop our property. Our tractor and related implements are basically new, and we also have a five-year-old 9-tonne excavator.”

And there are strategic considerations too. The couple are in their mid-40s and have a clear business objective: “to pay off all of our financing within 10 years so that a transition to our children doesn’t come with any financial burdens.”

“We all have the same 168 hours in a week, and if you take 68 off for sleeping and personal care, and another 40-50 for your career, it still leaves us with at least 50 hours to devote to other endeavours. How that time is spent has a significant impact on your lot in life — we’ve chosen to build a regenerative farming enterprise with ours.”

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Bill Vanderkooi has been testing the Hydrogreen system on his Abbotsford, B.C. farm for the past two years with his 250 head of grass-finished beef cattle.

Three months before slaughter, Vanderkooi feeds his Angus-Holstein cross steers a finishing ration of grass silage and Hydrogreen wheat grass with minerals, plus free-choice liquid whey.

“We’ve had great results in terms of performance and quality — they’re mostly grading AAA, which is unusual for grass-finished animals,” he says.

The Hydrogreen growing system is fully automated. One operator using a control panel at the end of the machine can do all the seeding, watering, lighting, fertilizing and harvesting work by pushing buttons. Vertically stacked growing surfaces are mechanically seeded, usually with wheat or barley. One pound of seed will produce five pounds of feed in six days.

At Vanderkooi’s Bakerview EcoDairy, Hydrogreen machinery produces a continuous, year-round supply of green fodder for his beef and dairy herds.

On the dairy side, he’s testing the equipment on his 45-cow herd as a substitute dry matter for grain in one total mixed ration (TMR), forage in another, and a control diet. The trial started in the fall of 2019 and will run until 2024. Data is being collected on milk components and volume, ruminant activity and cow health.

Hydrogreen’s beginnings

A few years ago, South Dakota-based rancher and inventor Dihl Grohs was looking for a way to more efficiently feed his Idaho beef herd. The state was experiencing some drought, and while he was intrigued by some experimental dairy feed systems that used sprouted barley in pans, there was still too much labour involved. So he hit on the idea of an automated conveyor belt.

While the cattle loved the product, the automation piece wasn’t falling into place. That’s when he met and tapped Craig Livingston, a fellow South Dakotan who has a background in computers, sales and marketing —and startups.

“We drew up some business plans, crunched some numbers and decided that it looked really feasible,” Livingston says.

Six years later, Livingston is the vice-president of Hydrogreen, a company that has merged with Cubic Farm Systems Corporation, which grows hydroponic food for people in British Columbia.

“It took us about three years of R&D to get a piece of equipment that would really do the job,” he says. “It takes a lot of time and money — especially when you’re doing something no one has ever done before.”

Livingston says farming is a traditional industry and the technology was a significant change to how animals were fed. The toughest challenge was finding a handful of early adopters who understood the company’s vision, listened to the science backing their technology and were willing to take the time to understand the economic and nutritional benefits.

This also helped with marketing the technology — by leveraging the results of the early adopters and “showing and telling” others.

After several changes of direction, many sleepless nights and visits to robotic dairies, they decided on a fully automated system.

“We needed to get to a place where you could do everything with the push of a button,” Livingston says, adding that the company received a great deal of help from an Iowa patent attorney who also had a background in agriculture.

How it works

“We have a philosophy that change is good,” Livingston says. “We try to make the product better every day.”

Currently Hydrogreen is being marketed to the dairy, beef and equine sectors, but they’re looking to expand into goats, poultry and other livestock in the future.

The equipment is fully customizable to what farmers need. Machine components are manufactured at the Sioux Falls, South Dakota factory and the main structure of the system is often fabricated nearer to the farm where it’s being installed.

“When we first started the business, we wanted it to be worldwide,” says Livingston. “So the system is basically an erector set.”

The steel for the frame can be cut by laser cutters which are available around the globe. Designs can be sent from Hydrogreen to wherever the client is situated.

The company then has crews that are sent to put the equipment together and train the farmer/operator on how to make it work.

Benefits

There were several upsides to building the business. They discovered, for example, that being able to control the growing environment produced better grass. While the original idea was to save labour, a number of other benefits became apparent.

In the lower mainland of British Columbia, for example, land prices are around $100,000 an acre, according to Vanderkooi. So, besides being interested in testing out the innovative equipment, he wanted to see if it paid off in terms of reducing land costs.

He has two buildings that house the machines. The smaller, 800-square-foot building holds two four-layer machines and the larger, 1,200-square-foot building holds two six-layer machines. Together, the Hydrogreen machines produce the equivalent of 50 acres of dry matter.

Last year, the total cost to Vanderkooi of retrofitting the 1,200-square-foot silage bunker plus the machines was $667,000.

Vanderkooi’s cautionary note about these savings is the need to adhere to manure management regulations and having enough land to accommodate the output. In other words, people have to be careful about what’s coming out of the animals as well as what’s going into them.

Still, with this system, greenfeed is available every day of the year and takes a fraction of the time, energy and cost to grow and harvest. The technology’s indoor location also means that there’s no risk of drought, disease or pests.

It also saves the costs and environmental effects of shipping grain into the province from Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Environmental effects

The advice from the company to anyone looking to bring a disrupting invention to market is to focus on helping farmers get closer to a net zero carbon footprint and to become more environmentally and socially sustainable.

A study recently submitted for publication by a team from the Food and Agriculture Institute of the University of the Fraser Valley concluded that “hydroponic farming of fodder could contribute to climate mitigation objectives if complemented with effective energy and land use policies.”

The research was conducted, in part, with the Bakerview EcoDairy’s Hydrogreen system.

The paper’s theory is that, with the pressures on animal agriculture to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but also with demand for meat protein continuing to climb, technological feed solutions are needed to lessen the effects of conventional agriculture’s carbon footprint.

Using equipment like Hydrogreen reduces the use of the land, nutrients and fossil fuels associated with conventional feed production by moving everything inside. The effects include “higher yields with much smaller footprints and lower water and nutrient consumption.”

Overall, the paper says the system produced 5.5 per cent fewer GHG emissions than conventional barley grain fodder and 23.2 per cent fewer emissions than alfalfa hay.

For the future

Livingston says that the merger with Cubic Farms has been very good for business. They’re expanding globally and have made sales in Sweden, Germany, Italy and a number of other countries. The company is connecting with distributors in the U.S. and around the world, and they’ve been looking for distributors in Ontario.

They’re continuing to refine the system and are conducting more research into how the feed affects such areas as animal nutrition and health. They sold 24 machines to a certified organic dairy farmer in Western Canada that are expected to be installed in early 2021 and have several more orders from across the country in the pipeline.

The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t slowed the company down. In fact, Livingston says the staff in Sioux Falls has doubled over the spring and summer of 2020.

“We have talented people pulling in the same direction — it’s really fun to be part of it,” he says.

Livingston cites the fact that, in certain parts of the world, wars are waged over food, and if they can do something to help change that, it’s great.

“I can’t think of a downside to what we do,” he says. “We can make the animals healthier and happier, increase production and help farmers and ranchers — they’re all good things.”

Haiwick Heritage Ranch

Nick Ferens and Paula Haiwick’s South Dakota ranch was started by her grandparents in 1939, and the couple took up the reins in 2013, when Paula’s dad was slowing down.

They raise 300 head of Angus cows and directly sell the premium, dry-aged beef. They also have horses and sheep.

“We had a really tough drought in 2017,” Nick says. “So I started looking around for a better way to feed the cattle.”

After researching the market, he had a six-rack Hydrogreen system installed in 2018 in a purpose-built structure that can accommodate three more six-rack systems as the operation expands in the future.

He uses the Hydrogreen fodder primarily for his replacement heifers. For two years, he has fed a control group of five or six heifers rations that don’t include Hydrogreen.

“The heifers on Hydrogreen have averaged about 100 pounds of gain over the cows on the traditional diet over the same period of time,” Ferens says.

It takes him only an hour or so to feed the cattle for the day. He mixes in about 700 to 750 pounds of dry hay with the Hydrogreen fodder.

“I can put three (large square) bales out for 60 head and it’ll last for three days,” he says, adding that the hay consumption has decreased dramatically since he started using the automated system.

He’s had his rations tested and the amount of minerals he needs to add is “insanely small.” In fact, his nutritionist has at times recommended not adding any mineral supplements at all.

The consistency of the Hydrogreen fodder is also a benefit. Last year, for example, the protein content of his hay was very low — about 60 to 70 per cent of what he needed.

Rather than having to buy added protein content (alfalfa), he used more of the Hydrogreen fodder for his other cattle.

“Whatever the seed you use — wheat or barley — you have to make sure there’s good protein content,” he says.

His Hydrogreen equipment can produce the equivalent of 320 acres of South Dakota prairie.

Land is selling for $2,000 an acre and Ferens calculates that, if each cow/calf needs 10 acres, he could add 32 head of cattle on land valued at $640,000. Which makes his one Hydrogreen system that feeds 150 head of cattle a bargain at about $125,000.

While he had to build the structure and install a grain bin and vertical mixer, he figures he’s still ahead, with a break-even timeline of about eight years. This he compares with buying the land to allow him to run a single additional head — which would be closer to 45 years.

He also points out that the system isn’t subject to drought, frigid temperatures or massive snowfalls, and he says he’s very pleased with the customer service he has experienced, and appreciates that Hydrogreen staff have been quick to help him with the rare times he’s needed to reset the system or fix a wire.

He also finds the Hydrogreen fodder highly palatable for the cattle.

“They’re so happy when the feed comes out — they can’t get to it fast enough,” he says, adding that a side benefit is that he hasn’t had to clean out his feed bunks in two years because the cows do it for him.

The post Looking for the green appeared first on Country Guide.

“Make sure it is of use and relevant to farmers,” says the founder and CEO of Farm Health Guardian. If it sounds like a no-brainer, think again. Remember, Nelson is a serial inventor who has worked in Australia, the U.K. and Canada and has founded many leading-edge organizations including the Livestock Research Innovation Corporation (LRIC), based in Guelph, Ont.

Nelson says anyone with a great innovation has to start by KNOWING it’s something the industry will want.

“You’re providing them with an answer to a question,” he says. “You also have to be sure it makes things more efficient, and makes the life of the farmer better.”

Preventing disease spread

Nelson’s latest invention — Farm Health Guardian — is a computer system and application that’s designed to identify animal disease outbreaks and prevent them from spreading from farm networks that supply livestock to companies or organizations. The company buys the equipment and subscribes to the service.

Nelson says that although the system can’t stop disease from coming onto farms, it can prevent disease spread by generating a map and a list of people who have been on the farm when the pathogen was “hot.” It also tracks where each person went after having been exposed and, starting with the index farm, it documents direct contacts, as well as secondary contacts like feed mills or truck plants.

“We’ve had three events that led to lockdowns which, in the past, would have taken four or five days to achieve — and took only 10 minutes,” Nelson says.

Maple Leaf Foods was integral in helping develop Farm Health Guardian from an earlier generation technology called Be Seen Be Safe. Nelson hit on that idea from his time as executive director at the Poultry Industry Council (PIC) where, during disease management simulations, he identified a big gap in terms of the time it takes to get a disease under control once they knew it was present.

The new version is completely rebuilt, much more robust, and “very fast” at tracking and tracing, Nelson says.

Farm Health Guardian is also scalable — it can cover a single network of farms, or it can cover an entire country.

“If we were hit with African swine fever and we had four or five big integrators on the system, we could provide a network map of where it’s gone in that 10-minute period,” he says.

The key to making it work is to get it installed in many locations. He’s currently focusing on large, commercial entities that are supplied by a “lot of farms.”

The technology’s benefits go beyond controlling disease outbreaks.

“It works in peacetime, too — if you’re looking to do audits of visitors, rationalize trucking routes, or determine the health profiles of barns,” he says.

Nelson also says that, if companies know they can stop a disease moving quickly through their farm networks, there are savings to be had in buying fewer pharmaceuticals.

Maple Leaf is already talking to other integrators to get them on board with Farm Health Guardian, and Nelson has a number of demonstrations with large companies and organizations lined up.

Most recently, Nelson partnered with Rob Hannam and his Synthesis Agri-Food Network, which will bring business and communications expertise to getting the system into the marketplace.

Know your customer

Nelson says the “show and tell” aspect of new inventions is a key strategy when trying to convince farmers to buy.

“Farmers have a business that is also their way of life,” he says. “Imagine someone coming into your business and saying, ‘you can have this great new thing, but you’ll need to change what you’ve been doing for the last 20 years.’”

He is also very aware of the interconnectedness of the operations on an individual farm.

“Farms are complicated and have systems within systems — there’s a risk that by changing one thing, you’ll adversely affect something somewhere else.”

His new system automates paper bio-security systems that track when people enter and exit farms.

“We’re not collecting any different information, but it’s a whole lot more efficient and we can use the data right away in case of a disease outbreak,” he says.

Nelson also points to a Quebec study, conducted by Racicot and Vaillancourt in 2011, which showed that biosecurity compliance on poultry farms was “pretty low.”

“The more we can automate and the less human interaction there is, the more accurate the information is in terms of who’s come and gone off the farm and where they went,” he says, adding that he’s not knocking people — it’s just human nature to become a bit complacent.

Do your homework and be persistent

He says his time at the head of both LRIC and PIC were eye-openers because, often, someone would come to him with what they thought was a fantastic idea, and when he told them to do some marketing research, he’d never hear from them again.

He says innovators have to do the research or have a really good understanding of the market and its pain points.

Choosing where to market is another step. With his deep connections in the business, he’s able to draw on the advice and help of trusted colleagues.

“My method is to talk to people I work with, present the advantages of the product and ask them to talk it up to their networks,” he says. By starting a bit of a buzz around the product, he then pursues the more traditional ways of marketing — including advertising, trade shows and the like.

Nelson has an anecdote from his youth in the U.K. in which a guy parked at the side of the road and leaned on the fence waiting for Nelson’s employer to stop the combine he was driving during harvest. The farmer didn’t stop. All day. So the fence-leaner gave up. The farmer figured it was a salesman and he wasn’t interested in buying.

“I never want to be the guy leaning on the fence,” Nelson says, adding that he thinks it’s important to look for and get to know industry mentors and people who farmers trust and listen to.

Nelson also says that, with the internet, market research is pretty easy. For example, after having read an article that someone wrote about biosecurity, he looked the person up on LinkedIn and arranged for a conversation about Farm Health Guardian.

In terms of building a team, he says it’s crucial to get people who know the industry, and it’s even better if they’re from a farm.

He says university ag students are great because they have the knowledge, the networks and the energy.

Nelson also cautions that the team needs someone who’s good with administration and keeping the books.

“It’s an expensive endeavour and you have to be tenacious — especially in agriculture,” he says, adding it takes a while to get established and to have people start looking for you.

He’s also a big fan of organizations like Bioenterprise, Communitech and Innovation Guelph, which are geared to helping innovators prepare to go to market, including how to approach venture capitalists (VC) and angel investors.

“You don’t have to go the VC route — you could find a company that is interested in investing in your product,” he says.

He warns that “it’s bloody hard work” and you have to be prepared to deal with setbacks. He cites that, with Be Seen Be Safe, he was surprised at how unwilling veterinarians were to listen to him because he didn’t have an animal health background. He did, however, know about tracking and tracing.

Where to from here

In terms of the future, Nelson says that a big question is how to best manage all the data that’s swirling around agriculture, and that, if companies want farmers’ data, the farmers should get a return on the investment they put into collecting and providing it.

“Having said that, there’s a lot of data out there that we’re not connecting together to make it useful,” he says, citing animal health data, weather data, soil data and so on.

He thinks research should be aimed at connecting the dots between what may seem to be disparate sets of data.

He cites his experience in 2015, when he monitored the outbreak of avian influenza (AI) in the U.S. and porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) in 2013. He mapped the movement of the outbreaks, and recognized that trucks — and the movement of the animals — were a big part of the problem.

“Many were saying AI was because of wild migrating birds — which was a lot of nonsense,” he says. It was people who were responsible for the spread.

He thinks that looking at the broader picture and at other industries for inspiration would also be a good idea. Animal health researchers could, for example, be looking at advances in human medicine and adapting new technologies to resolve problems in livestock agriculture.

He also thinks that companies could do well to collaborate with one another on basic, pre-competitive research in animal health, and points to PigGen as a good example of this — another organization for which he is executive director. It’s a non-profit that pulls together several swine genetics companies and co-ordinates research strategies with the pork industry.

“They’re really fierce competitors in the marketplace,” he says, “but they work together on basic research around pig health.”

The post The agricultural market awaits appeared first on Country Guide.

“We know that food sovereignty is on the mind of everyone,” says Carole Lavigne, director of economic development and tourism in the United Counties of Prescott-Russell. “People are more inclined to go back to basics and know where their food comes from.”

Food hubs are centres where local farmers can get their products aggregated, distributed, marketed and sold. They have different characteristics — some provide processing capacity, business management workshops and food safety training, for example. They can be bricks and mortar buildings or digital meeting places. The point is to connect farmers with consumers, retailers and institutional buyers who can buy their products.

The Prescott-Russell story

In her past, Lavigne lived on a dairy farm that was basically self-sufficient in food — preserving the bounty from their gardens and orchards, processing milk into butter and cheese, and raising cattle, chickens and pigs for meat, and even using the hides for clothing.

She felt that if she could bring other small- and medium-sized operations together, they could feed a whole region, province or country.

Lavigne has been working on restructuring the agri-food sector in eastern Ontario since she joined the Prescott-Russell office in 2007. Between that time and 2014, she launched many activities to increase consumer awareness of local food and bring local farmers’ products to market.

An especially successful foray is the “Local Food Counter,” which started in 2014 with a Metro grocery store in Casselman. Basically, a self-service part of the store is dedicated exclusively to selling products that are proudly branded as local.

“Farmers experienced a 32 per cent increase in sales in the first year,” she says, and the Metro realized a $1 million increase in net new overall sales.

Subsequent farmer surveys, however, showed that the middle of the supply chain was a real issue — especially the lack of local abattoirs, processing facilities and access to marketing.

That’s how the idea of the food hub came about. The proposal, which obtained council approval in April 2020, is for a 100,000-square-foot facility that will be located close to Highway 417 for easy access to transportation.

The facility will have slaughtering and cold storage for red and white meat. There will be separate sections for processing raw meat and fruits and vegetables, and another section for producing ready-to-eat products. Everything will be traceable and branded local, and the facility will be federally inspected, so products can be sold into national chain stores.

A dearth of mid-scale processing

Alison Blay-Palmer says that the gap in local processing capacity is a problem right across the country.

“It’s a key missing piece,” says the UNESCO chair on food, biodiversity and sustainability studies who leads the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.

Blay-Palmer and a team of researchers recently completed a comprehensive study of how the Greater Golden Horseshoe’s (GGH) food system works. The GGH extends from Niagara Falls around the western end of Lake Ontario through Toronto to Oshawa.

As part of the study, redundant trade was identified as an issue. A food flow analysis conducted in 2016 showed that, for example, 25 per cent of carrots were exported from the area while 20 per cent of the carrots consumed were imported. Furthermore, production could not keep up with local demand, with a deficit of 2.9 million pounds of carrots.

“A big part of the reason for this is that most of the products go through a centralized point — the Ontario Food Terminal in Toronto,” Blay-Palmer says. “There are no regional distribution centres for farmers to sell their product locally, and the pandemic has really shown us clearly why that’s important.”

It’s part of a wider explosion of innovation. Besides the physical food hubs like the one in Prescott-Russell, there are also online markets like Open Food Network Canada, which is actually an international organization dedicated to connecting local farmers and consumers.

“All these initiatives are happening because we don’t have the middle-scale infrastructure to support farmers,” Blay-Palmer says.

In fact, the GGH study’s top recommendation was to develop that infrastructure and improve regional food flows. It specifically pointed to food hubs as a possible solution.

“We have people producing food, and we could have people producing that food for local markets,” she says. “The food hub also provides an opportunity for local institutions, like schools, to get their food from local farmers, without having to drive all over the place.”

There are multiple benefits to having a food hub, and Lavigne is passionate as she lists off the “whys” for going ahead with her project: Helping small and medium producers increase revenue, providing more local food to the region, and helping sustain the regional economy and food security in case of a disruption (like COVID-19) in global food supply chains.

What about the export-oriented industry?

Blay-Palmer says that Canada’s dependence on world markets will never go away — commodities like wheat and soybeans will always need those markets and Canada will always need to import items like bananas and coffee.

“The idea is not to have no exports, but we are aiming for increased production for local markets and improved income stability for farmers,” she says. “It’s ridiculous that some farmers live hand to mouth.”

“Things are out of balance right now — the food system is leaning far too much on the export side.”

She uses the COVID-19 pandemic as one example of how the current food system showed its weaknesses, and cites the 9/11 crisis, when the U.S. closed its borders and Toronto was within three days of running out of food.

As to whether people would actually be willing or able to pay more for local food, Blay-Palmer suggested governments could mandate procurement policies for public institutions in which fair wages for farmers and their workers could be built in.

“If we’re providing healthy local food to people, the money stays in the community, creating a circular economy. It also helps keep Canadians healthy, which keeps them out of hospitals — reducing costs to the public.”

Keeping money circulating in the local economy is a big factor in Lavigne’s food hub proposal.

With more than 7,000 farms in eastern Ontario, and additional farms in western Quebec that could take advantage of the hub’s services, she is confident it will be a success. She’s also sure of the people backing the project.

“We have a tremendously talented team here, and we have lots of support from council,” she says.

Lavigne has already lined up $2.5 million from the local government. The project will need $12 million from other levels of government and $21.5 million from private sector investors.

While a site had yet to be chosen at time of printing, she expects to see shovels in the ground next spring and opening the food hub in the fall of 2022. A total of $11.4 million in sales is projected for the first year, and 65 people will need to be employed initially, rising to 100 when the hub is fully operational.

More on food hubs

• Ontario Agri-Food Venture Centre
• Food Secure Canada
• City Region Food System — Toronto and the Greater Golden Horseshoe research
• Fledge — Food Locally Embedded, Globally Engaged
• Open Food Network Canada

The post A food hub that grows appeared first on Country Guide.