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Fresh dairy milk in glass and bottle
Dairy Cattle, Guide Business

After milk quotas

French dairy farmers look for a way ahead after Brussels gives up the European supply management system

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French dairy farms are in turmoil. France is the second-largest dairy producer in the European Union, and for the past 30 years, governments there had used quota to tie milk production to assigned farm regions. But then Brussels pulled the plug on the EU quota system in 2015, and now decisions about where and how […] Read more
Michel Welter, the French producer whose 1,000-cow farm business model has shocked the whole country. The country’s average farm has fewer than 60.
Dairy Cattle, Guide Business

The most hated dairy farm in France

Milk After Quotas: Some dairy farms in southern France are facing an existential crisis

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The least we can say is that Michel Welter, director general of France’s biggest dairy farm, is a tough cookie. At 51, this former dairy producer works not only under daily pressure from the citizens of his village, Abbeville, located in northern France, but from the whole country for having built an “industrial farm” of […] Read more
Biolait director general, Théophile Jouve, was born in New Brunswick. He holds a diploma in management and international trade and has worked as a consultant for Deloitte. Biolait is a co-op which offers technical advice and promotes 
self-sufficiency on the farm.
Dairy Cattle, Guide Business

Organic milk: 1,000 farms for one cow

Milk After Quotas: In the past decade, Biolait has seen its production double in size

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When I meet him at their brand new headquarters in Saffré, a village in western France, it’s clear Théofile Jouve, director general of Biolait is a proud man. “In 2013, when the price of conventional milk was almost the same as organic milk, we had 60 farmers ask to be part of our business,” he […] Read more
At 27 years old, Baptiste, Jean-Marie Guinchard’s son, intends to take over the family farm and continue the Comté tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages.
Dairy Cattle, Guide Business

Setting their own quota

Milk After Quotas: Milk producers find more success with cheese

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Jean-Marie Guinchard looks across his ancestral farm located at la Sommette, a hamlet near the Swiss border. “We are cheese producers before being milk producers,” he tells me. “That’s saved us because we get a much higher return than conventional milk.” With his herd of 160 milking cows of the Montbéliarde breed, the 58 year […] Read more
Women like Geetaben Patel are at the heart of India’s White Revolution 2.0.
Dairy Cattle, Guide Business

White Revolution 2.0

While Canada and the U.S. clash over NAFTA, Cargill, Nestlé and other global dairy giants are pumping their money into India

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India is the world’s largest dairy producer, thanks to the “White Revolution” that it launched shortly after the country’s independence in 1947, when it first gave itself the goal of replacing dairy imports and promoting self-sufficiency. Now, the country has embarked on a White Revolution 2.0 that will keep its borders closed to imports of […] Read more
Audette’s experience with commercial grain production proved a big help as the four Agri-Fusion farmers transitioned to organic.
Crops, Guide Business

Large, commercial… and organic

Agri-Fusion says its choice to go organic is a business no-brainer, with a collaborative new management design to make sure it pays

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Agri-Fusion’s four owners of Quebec largest organic farm never looked back at their choice to go organic. Whether it’s wheat, corn, soybeans, beans or peas, organic crops earn them twice as much per acre as conventional crops, and they cost much less to produce. It’s a point I heard again from 67-year-old Gilles Audette, one […] Read more
Haridenyat Gill is investing C$100,000 in a modern greenhouse to produce organic vegetables. He admits that it is hard to wean himself from the highly subsidized wheat and rice production.
Crops, Guide Business

The slow death of the Green Revolution

Even as the negative impacts of the great Green Revolution pile up, there is hope

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It saved one billion people from starvation. It won a Nobel peace prize for its founder, and it transformed India, all by discovering new varieties of high-yield rice and wheat, and new ways of growing them. Yet today, 50 years later, the Green Revolution is sputtering. Those high-yield crops have touched off ecological disasters, and […] Read more
Market opportunities range from five million tonnes per year of pulses to shipments of maple syrup, says Canadian counsellor Parthi Muthukumarasamy. “Canola oil could carve itself an incredible market share in India.”
Guide Business, Hogs, Pulses

Feeding the Indian tiger

Move over China. Food sales to India are set to roar

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“The Indians are crazy for red lentils… potential sales are incredible,” says Lance Walker, head of Lazer Enterprises Inc. in Borden, Sask. Walker was working in a trade show booth as he told me this, one of the representatives of the 23 Canadian businesses that were participating at the 31st Aahar Food Hospitality Trade Fair […] Read more
Dairy producer Alain Rouleau (l) and Logiag vice-president Jacques Nault describe how each soil sample is georeferenced.
Crops

Soil testing by laser beam

A Quebec company has developed a soil-test system using laser technology that reports more accurate results in just three days

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Iké Nault regularly stops his ATV on a 25-acre freshly cut hayfield belonging to a producer from Howick, 30 kilometres south of Montreal. Probe in hand, the young technician methodically collects soil samples. Each stop is georeferenced as a green dot on a field map on his cellphone screen. It really is “space age” technology, […] Read more
Despite his lawyer’s advice, Jeff Kooyman discusses the MFA video, and the steps they have taken in its wake.
Dairy Cattle, Guide Business

After the animal abuse video went viral

What’s it like for a Canadian farmer at the centre of an international animal rights media frenzy?

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A year and a half later, Jeff Kooyman is still disturbed by a video produced on his farm, Chilliwack Cattle Sales, by the advocacy group Mercy for Animals. Broadcast during prime time on CTV national news on June 2014, the video let the whole world see young workers shouting “f***ing bitch” at cows, kicking one […] Read more

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