The machine is being commercialized by an unnamed Brockville, Ont. company and is set to enter the final testing phase later this year, said Harry Pelissero, general manager of the Egg Farmers of Ontario.

“There is a global demand for this technology,” Pelissero said in an interview. “It does represent a real export market for Canadian hatchery equipment manufacturers.”

There’s already interest in the machine from the United States, Holland and Sweden.

“Literally the International Egg Commission, the international scene, is waiting for us to take this to commercialization level,” Pelissero said.

The discovery came as part of an ongoing research effort by the council, Pelissero told the Senate agriculture committee recently.

OPIC hired a McGill University professor five years ago to develop the technology for detecting infertile eggs.

“For every 12 eggs that come in from the farm, probably 10 are fertile and one or two aren’t,” Pelissero said. “If you’re able to identify which eggs are and you’re putting all fertile eggs in, it means that hatchery capacity is greater.”

Once the professor succeeded in the original task, the council asked him if it was possible to identify male and female eggs. “Fifty thousand dollars later, he came back with a yes,” Pelissero said, and OPIC moved quickly to patent the technology.

Getting the sex of the chicks right before they’re hatched would immediately nearly double the efficiency of egg hatcheries. The accuracy is at around 95 per cent currently with an end goal of 98 per cent accuracy.

Egg producers want only female chickens and until now male chickens have been an expensive inconvenience and animal welfare concern.

There are about 22 million laying hens in Canada, but to get 22 million hens the industry currently needs to incubate about 50 million eggs.

“Now if you only need to incubate 22 million eggs, you’re doubling the hatchery capacity,” Pelissero said.

The gender identification machine would be priced to encourage hatcheries to acquire them to test incoming eggs so they can divert the male and infertile ones to appropriate markets, he said.

“We’re trying to do it for a nickel per egg, which we think is reasonable,” Pelissero said.

It would end the practice of destroying male chicks because their eggs could be diverted to the broiler or other markets, he said.

“It’s a huge welfare issue to dispose of these male chicks when they are hatched a day old,” Pelissero said.

Likewise another problem, infertile eggs, may someday become an opportunity and be in demand for a medicine to treat depression in humans.

Egg Farmers of Ontario is supporting research by United Paragon Associates, which is testing whether an egg that has been incubated for a few days could be used to make a drug called Rellidep that will treat depression.

“They do have some really good information, and they are just in the process of getting in the second round of trials on that type of thing, so that would be huge,” Pelissero said. “It falls right into everything with the gender identification, because those eggs could be diverted to that program.”

If the research succeeds, it could create a whole new demand for eggs, Pelissero said.

The egg-sexing technology could also be applied to turkey and other fowl.

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In a study published in the December issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the researchers compared four different labelling systems and found that the Nutrition Facts label currently required on most food products in the U.S. and Canada was least usable. That label, which lists the percentage daily value of several nutrients, took more time to understand and led to nutrition choices hardly different from chance, the researchers said in a release.

The researchers said the best system was NuVal, a shelf sticker used in some American food markets. It indicates the overall nutritional value of each food item with a number from 1-100.

NuVal scores are calculated by nutrition experts at several U.S. universities, including Yale, Harvard, and Northwestern, and emphasize both the positive and negative aspects of each food. For example, several fruits and vegetables rate 100.

The NuVal number can also be used to compare products. For example, Cap’n Crunch cereal rates only a 4, while Post Frosted Shredded Wheat earns a 31.

At the bottom of the sample list on the NuVal website? Nabisco Chips Ahoy Chewy Real Chocolate Chip Cookies, which rate a 1.

The post Cap’n Crunch and chocolate chip cookies don’t score well appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Why do some farmers who use farm chemicals resist a conversion to organic methods even when it can be more profitable? A new study in the Journal of Marketing suggests it may be because making that change feels like switching belief systems.

“The ideological map of American agriculture reveals an unfolding drama between chemical and organic farming,” write authors Melea Press (University of Bath), Eric Arnould (Southern Denmark University), Jeff Murray (University of Arkansas) and Katherine Strand (McGill University). “Chemical farmers argue that to make money, one must follow chemical traditions; when organic farmers make more money, it seems “wrong.”

The authors looked at chemical and organic wheat farmers of the American Plains to see which crop production strategies they used, and why. They found that, as predicted, both chemical and organic farmers often gave passionate, belief-based reasons for their choices, and clearly felt that their beliefs were in competition.

One farmer who uses farm chemicals stated that he felt organic farmers were unscientific and that they probably followed “an organic crop guru.” An organic farmer, by contrast, stressed the joy of bringing the earth back to life: “I had thousands of seagulls, but my chemical neighbour did not have one. Why was this? Earthworms. My soil is getting healthier because I’m not putting all the herbicides and pesticides out there.”

The authors conclude by stressing the vital importance to agricultural managers of recognizing how ideological beliefs influence farming methods, and of using this understanding to find new ways of inspiring farmers to adopt profitable changes.

“It is possible that when approaching strategic change, managers might have greater success if they recognize that potentially conflicting ideologies are in play. As we have illustrated, the preservation of the agricultural world is at stake.”

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Researchers with Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences led an investigation that quantified this loss in both the United States and Argentina. The study’s results are published in the Aug. 19 online issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“While the phenomenon of woody plant invasion has been occurring for decades, for the first time, we have quantified the losses in ecosystem services,” said Osvaldo Sala, Julie A. Wrigley chair and foundation professor with ASU’s School of Life Sciences and School of Sustainability. “We found that an increase in tree and shrub cover of one per cent leads to a two per cent loss in livestock production.” And, woody plant cover in North America increases at a rate between 0.5 and two per cent per year.

In recent years, the U.S. government shelled out millions of dollars in an effort to stop the advance of trees and shrubs. The U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service spent $127 million from 2005-09 on herbicides and brush management, without a clear understanding of its economic benefit.

• From the Canadian Cattlemen: Measuring agriculture’s shadow

The research team used census data from the U.S. and Argentina to find out how much livestock exists within the majority of the countries’ rangelands. In both countries, the team studied swaths of rangeland roughly the size of Texas — approximately 160 million acres each. These lands support roughly 40 million head of cattle. Researchers also used remote sensors to calculate the production of grasses and shrubs. And, to account for the effects of different socio-economic factors, researchers quantified the impact of tree cover on livestock production in two areas of the world that have similar environments, but different level of economic development.

Surprisingly, the presence of trees explained a larger fraction of livestock production in Argentina than in the U.S.

“What’s happening in Argentina seems to be a much narrower utilization of rangelands,” added Sala. “The land there is mostly privately owned and people who have ranches are producing predominantly meat to make a profit. But in the U.S., many people who own ranches don’t actually raise cattle. They are using the land for many other different purposes.”

While ranchers clearly depend on grasslands to support healthy livestock, ecosystems also provide a range of other services to humans. Stakeholders such as conservationists, farmers, builders, government entities and private landowners, depend on the land for a variety of reasons and each has different values and land use needs.

• From the Canadian Cattlemen: Planned grazing makes for healthier pastures

Why are trees and shrubs taking over grasslands? There are several hypotheses as to why woody plant encroachment is happening. Fire reduction, grazing intensity, climate change, and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are some widely held beliefs as to the cause. However, Sala’s study is focused not on the cause, but rather on the cost of this change to people.

“For each piece of land, there are different people who have an interest in that land and they all have different values. And, they are all OK,” said Sala. “However, in order to negotiate how to use the land and to meet the needs of these different stakeholders, we need concrete information. We now know how much increase in tree cover is affecting the cattle ranchers.”

Sala and his colleagues hope that the information found in their study will be used to inform discussions as policy-makers and other stakeholders negotiate changes in land use. Researchers who took part in the study include Sala and Billie Turner II with ASU, José Anadón with City University of New York, and Elena Bennett with McGill University. National Academies Keck Futures Initiative and the U.S. National Science Foundation funded the study.

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The study, published online April 6 in the journal Climate Dynamics, represents a new approach to the question of whether global warming in the industrial era has been caused largely by man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Rather than using complex computer models to estimate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, Lovejoy examines historical data to assess the competing hypothesis: that warming over the past century is due to natural long-term variations in temperature.

“This study will be a blow to any remaining climate change deniers,” Lovejoy says. “Their two most convincing arguments — that the warming is natural in origin, and that the computer models are wrong — are either directly contradicted by this analysis, or simply do not apply to it.”

Lovejoy’s study applies statistical methodology to determine the probability that global warming since 1880 is due to natural variability. His conclusion: the natural-warming hypothesis may be ruled out “with confidence levels greater than 99 per cent, and most likely greater than 99.9 per cent.”

To assess the natural variability before much human interference, the new study uses “multi-proxy climate reconstructions” developed by scientists in recent years to estimate historical temperatures, as well as fluctuation-analysis techniques from non-linear geophysics. The climate reconstructions take into account a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales.

For the industrial era, Lovejoy’s analysis uses carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences.

Although Lovejoy used a different methodology, he said his findings effectively complement those of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Although organic techniques may not be able to do the job alone, they do have an important role to play in feeding a growing global population while minimizing environmental damage, according to researchers at McGill University and the University of Minnesota.

A new study published in Nature concludes that crop yields from organic farming are generally lower than from conventional agriculture. That is particularly true for cereals, which are staples of the human diet — yet the yield gap is much less significant for certain crops, and under certain growing conditions, according to the researchers.

The study, which represents a comprehensive analysis of the current scientific literature on organic-to-conventional yield comparisons, aims to shed light on the often heated debate over organic versus conventional farming. Some people point to conventional agriculture as a big environmental threat that undercuts biodiversity and water resources, while releasing greenhouse gases.

Others argue that large-scale organic farming would take up more land and make food unaffordable for most of the world’s poor and hungry.

“To achieve sustainable food security we will likely need many different techniques — including organic, conventional and possible ‘hybrid’ systems — to produce more food at affordable prices, ensure livelihoods to farmers and reduce the environmental costs of agriculture,” the researchers conclude.

Overall, organic yields are 25 per cent lower than conventional, the study finds. The difference varies widely across crop types and species, however. Yields of legumes and perennials (such as soybeans and fruits), for example, are much closer to those of conventional crops, according to the study, conducted by doctoral student Verena Seufert and geography professor, Navin Ramankutty of McGill and Prof. Jonathan Foley of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

What’s more, when best management practices are used for organic crops, overall yields are just 13 per cent lower than conventional levels. “These results suggest that today’s organic systems may nearly rival conventional yields in some cases — with particular crop types, growing conditions and management practices — but often they do not,” the researchers write.

Improvements in organic management techniques, or adoption of organic agriculture under environmental conditions where it performs best, may help close the yield gap.

“Our study indicates that organically fertilized systems might require higher nitrogen inputs to achieve high yields as organic nitrogen is less readily available to crops. In some cases, organic farmers may therefore benefit by making limited use of chemical fertilizers instead of relying only on manure to supply nitrogen to their crops,” Seufert says. “At the same time, conventional agriculture can learn from successful organic systems and implement practices that have shown environmental benefits, such as increased crop diversity and use of crop residues.”

Yields are only part of a set of economic, social and environmental factors that should be considered when gauging the benefits of different farming systems, the researchers note. “Maybe people are asking the wrong question,” Ramankutty says. “Instead of asking if food is organically grown, maybe we should be asking if it’s sustainably grown.”

The results point to a need to get beyond the black-and-white, ideological debates that often pit advocates of organic and local foods against proponents of conventional agriculture, Foley adds.

“By combining organic and conventional practices in a way that maximizes food production and social good while minimizing adverse environmental impact, we can create a truly sustainable food system.”

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he Brewing and Malting Barley Research Institute (BMBRI) has announced a total of $92,000 in funding for five projects this year.

BMBRI represents brewing and malting companies from Canada and across North America.

We recognize that barley acreage has fallen over the past several years, and our members want to contribute to research what will make the crop a better choice for Prairie grain growers, while at the same time improving malting and brewing quality, said BMBRI president and CEO Michael Brophy.

The projects are:

” Saturation of barley chromosomes with transposons to target malting quality traits, Department of Plant Science, McGill University.

” Character ization and quantification of arabinoxylans in Canadian malting barley, Canadian Grain Commission (CGC), Winnipeg.

” Improvement of malting barley quality characteristics through production of more homogeneous seed that results in better endosperm modification, AAFC, Lacombe, Alberta

” Detection of partial resistance in barley to fusarium head blight using multiple assays, Alberta Agriculture, Lacombe, Alberta.

” Characterization of beta glucanase activity in Canadian two-row malting barley, University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre.

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T

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The ambassador unwittingly revealed the fundamental reason why future progress is so unlikely. The Americans have absolutely no intention of changing a single one of their food regulations just to be the same as Canada. They never have; they never will. In spite of what the ambassador says, harmonization to the Americans is not a bilateral negotiation; to them, harmonization is Canada changing its regulations to match theirs. It never occurred to the ambassador that the solution to his Cheerios problem would be for the U.S. to adopt Canada’s rules.

The situation is completely different in Canada. When it is in our trade interests, we often unilaterally adopt American food standards.

When it is not in Canada’s interests and when we have legitimate policy differences, why would we want to unilaterally adopt American standards? Take the case of Cheerios. After 10 years of study, officials finally developed a new draft policy to allow a greater range of food fortification. But the minister of health stopped the proposed change on the one-yard line because Canadian dietitians raised the alarm that this would allow big bad food companies to fortify junk food. Even the new rules would not have allowed American Cheerios to be sold in Canada, but the broader point is that Canada has every right to have policies that reflect the concerns of Canadians.

In spite of the fact that there are rules that are designed to prevent the blatant use of standards for protectionist purposes, we still have, for example, standardized container sizes, and the U. S has country- of-origin labelling (COOL) standards that have undeniably protectionist effects.

But most of our regulatory differences are the result of legitimate policy/science differences. That is why we have different rules, for example, on food colours, additives, novel foods, artificial sweetening agents, standards of identity, food packaging, health claims, bilingual labelling, nutrition claims, metrification, pesticide residues, processing aids, synthetic hormones in milk, nutrition labelling, meat from cloned animals, and allergen labelling – to name just a few!

Does it matter that we have so many different food standards? Are they more than just an irritation to cross-border companies? We’ll never know until the two countries have an honest, grown-up discussion and get beyond rhetoric. Don’t hold your breath.

Ronald L. Doering, a past president of the Canadian Food

Inspection Agency, practises food law in the Ottawa offices of Gowling Lafleur Henderson

LLP. Contact him at Ronald. Doering@gowlings.com.

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The chair will undertake collaborative research, offer undergraduate and graduate teaching programs, and provide the independent, third-party expertise on food safety issues.

The Ian and Jayne Munro Chair in Food Safety was kick-started with a generous $1.5-million gift from the leading food safety researcher and his wife. – Staff Fatal fall:A 20-year-old Winnipeg woman injured after she was thrown from her horse at the Pine Ridge Equine Park near Oakbank April 10 died three days later in hospital.

RCMP say the critically injured victim was transported to hospital via the STARs air ambulance on loan from Alberta during the flood.

Police would not release further details or the victim’s name. However, sources say she died of head injuries. She was wearing a helmet when the accident occurred.

– Staff

A pipe dream no longer:

Novozymes and partner M&G have broken ground on the world’s first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in Crescentino, Italy.

The 50-million-litre plant designed to produce ethanol from biomass crops such as wheat straw, corn stover, municipal waste, or energy crops, could be in production by 2012. “With this state-of-the-art facility, M&G proves there is a cure for the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. Biofuel made from lignocellulosic biomass is no longer a distant pipe dream,” said Novozymes spokesman Poul Ruben Andersen. – Staff Vote for CWB:A non-partisan group of farmers from across Western Canada has launched an advertising campaign urging voters to support farmers on May 2 by voting for candidates who support the Canadian Wheat Board. “Unfortunately Stephen Harper is ideologically opposed to the Canadian Wheat Board, so he has launched an endless string of attacks and dirty tricks against the board over the last five years. As farmers, we have decided to go over the head of the current prime minister and appeal directly to the voters of Canada,” said Bill Gehl, chairman of the Canadian Wheat Board Alliance. – Staff Impact unclear:It is still too early to say whether the socio-economic impact of genetically modified (GM) crops is positive, the EU bloc’s executive said in a report April 15. But a spokesman said whatever conclusions the EU reaches on the socioeconomic impact of the technology, they would not become part of the EU’s approval process for GM crops. “From a purely legal point of view, socio-economic factors cannot be taken into account when approving GM crops. To be approved, they must simply be shown to be safe for human health and the environment.” Beaver blitz:The province is investing almost $400,000 to introduce a new pilot program to intensively manage beaver dams in light of heightened flooding concerns, Conservation Minister Bill Blaikie has announced.

“Beavers cause well over $3 million in damages to private property and municipal and provincial infrastructure every year,” said Blaikie. “These enhancements to the Problem Beaver Management Program will better support municipalities in the western part of the province and the Interlake and help reduce damage.” – Staff Northward bound:High U.S. cattle prices and a drought in Mexico have had a record number of cattle coming into the United States, where they are being fattened in feedlots or grazed on pastures, according to analysts and USDA data.

Government data show 412,252 Mexican feeder cattle have been imported year to date, up 38 per cent from 299,192 a year earlier. “Normally they would go to pastures but because of the drought a larger percentage are going to feedlots,” Jim Robb, economist with the Livestock Marketing Information Center, said of the Mexican cattle.

Export quotas hot news:

Journalists on Ukraine’s leading Englishlanguage newspaper have gone on strike to back its editor who was sacked for publishing an interview with the government agriculture minister. Journalists said its British owner had ceded to pressure from the government in what they saw as a further case of infringement of media rights by President Viktor Yanukovich’s leadership. Brian Bonner, chief editor of theKyiv Post,was dismissed after publication of the interview that touched on the sensitive issue of grain export quotas. Doha done?:World Trade Organization director general Pascal Lamy warned the International Monetary Fund April 16 that the Doha round is once again on the verge of collapse. The failure of intensified efforts since the start of the year to bridge those differences has caused many to wonder the point of continuing the nearly 10-year-old talks – and some to conclude they are already dead.

He asked finance ministers to “ask your leaders to consider the cost of failure of these negotiations, both from a microperspective, as from a macroeconomic point of view.”

The post In Brief… – for Apr. 21, 2011 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Now, a century and a half later, his words may be prescient.

The Palliser Triangle, a 200,000-square-km area named after the 19th century explorer and stretching across southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, currently produces most of Canada’s high-quality hard red spring wheat.

But climate circulation models predict that, if global warming continues, the area will be suitable only for livestock grazing by the end of this century, according to Don Smith, a McGill University plant scientist.

MAJOR ALTERATIONS

Smith told a recent seminar at the University of Manitoba that rising temperatures brought on by climate change will bring major alterations to the crop-growing regions of the Prairie provinces.

Since climate change is likely inevitable, the most important thing farmers can do is prepare for it, he said.

“They should be open to change because they’re going to need to adapt.”

The two watchwords for climate change on the Prairies are: warmer and drier.

The greatest impact will be on the soil. Drier soils have lower organic content. Warmer weather produces greater average wind speeds, resulting in a 20 to 30 per cent potential for more wind erosion, said Smith.

LESS WATER

Warmer and drier weather will produce other results as well, Smith outlined in a PowerPoint presentation.

Reduced rainfall and retreating glaciers will mean less available water for both dryland and irrigation farming.

New weeds, insects and plant diseases will spread northward, some on the wings of stronger winds.

Grasses and native vegetation will change to hardier but less grazeable species.

It’s possible that, within decades, the central part of the Palliser Triangle will no longer be suitable for growing crops, Smith said.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that crop production will migrate northward into an area as large as the region going out of production.

The downside is that the soils in the new area are younger, less fertile and therefore less productive, said Smith, who specializes in crop ecology.

Overall, the net result of climate change is a decidedly mixed bag for agriculture in the West. But, as with anything, there are positives and negatives, he said.

NEW PESTS

On the plus side, no-till and minimum-till systems will become more feasible with warmer soils. These systems store water and sequester carbon, creating less potential for soil erosion and lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the arrival of new pests creates a greater need for insecticides, fungicides and herbicides.

Smith said increased potential for irrigation exists in some areas. In others, however, irrigation use will decrease as meltwater from glaciers decreases and river flows decline.

Smith noted glaciers around the world have generally retreated about 30 per cent in the last century. In Alberta, the Peyto glacier, which feeds mountain streams and eventually rivers used for irrigation, has lost 70 per cent of its mass in several decades.

LONGER GROWING SEASON

A longer growing season means the potential for growing new crops and expanding existing ones. Smith, originally from Saskatchewan, said the possibility exists for growing more winter wheat in areas currently devoted to spring wheat.

But just because more crops can be grown farther north doesn’t mean they will be. Smith said a milder growing season won’t greatly help Quebec, where he works, because much of the province is a giant slab of granite called the Canadian Shield.

Bes ides teaching at McGill, Smith is the scientific director for the Green Crop Network, a national research network for greenhouse gas management in agricultural production systems.

ron@fbcpublishing.com

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“They’regoingto needtoadapt.”

– DON SMITH, MCGI LL UNIVERSITY

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