“Conservative changes will allow road kill on your table,” blared the headline.

Proposed changes to federal meat inspection rules would allow injured or dangerous animals to be slaughtered on the farm under a vet’s supervision and then quickly transported to a processor or a slaughter plant and allowed into the system with normal inspection.

“They’re essentially allowing road kill-ready meat into the food supply,” Allen said in the news release.

Deputy NDP agriculture critic Ruth Ellen Roseau added that in the 1970s, Quebec had a “rotten meat scandal” because of a lack of regulation, and Ottawa was heading down the same road.

Oh dear.

Political discourse is a funny business. Outrageous and exaggerated claims are made all the time and it is considered legitimate rhetorical coin.

But even in politics, there is a line.

When the Progressive Conservatives in the1993 election campaign ran a photo of Jean Chrétien’s face, partially paralyzed because of a childhood disease, and wondered if this was who Canadians wanted to represent them abroad, the oxygen was sucked out of the campaign.

In 2004, when NDP leader Jack Layton blamed then-prime minister Paul Martin for the death of homeless people in Toronto, the backlash was visceral.

This year, when public safety minister Vic Toews said MPs opposing one of his “tough on crime” electronic snooping bills were “on the side of the child pornographers,” it was instantly clear he had gone way too far.

So it is with the road kill allegation.

The regulations would allow no such thing. The meat industry and cattle producers support the change and they have no interest in introducing unsafe meat into the system.

On a CBC television panel hours after the news release was issued, rural Ontario Conservative MP Pierre Lemieux, parliamentary secretary to agriculture minister Gerry Ritz, said the allegation was an “insult” to farmers, packers and meat inspectors.

Allen gamefully tried to defend himself, arguing that at least it got people talking about Conservative cuts to food inspection and the weakening of the system.

“We got attention to the issue,” he said.

“But you lose credibility,” shot back Liberal agriculture critic Frank Valeriote.

It did have the feel of going beyond the realm of decent political rhetoric.

In the Night Kitchen was one of my childhood favourites and when I heard that Maurice Sendak died, I popped by the local bookseller and snapped up the last copy.

It’s a dreamy and hallucinatory story, just like Where the Wild Things Are, his most famous work. My three daughters love it. Especially the bits where Mickey yells “Quiet down there!!!” and where they see his bare butt.

Sendak’s basic setup in his stories is that a cocksure and defiant boy either gets in trouble or is bored whilst stuck in his bedroom, and then – wonderfully – his room transforms into Another Place and he has to deal with a more exciting fantasyland that initially seems exciting and beguiling, but in the end leaves him yearning for his comfy home.

Reading it again last night to my three girls made me think immediately of currency exchange issues and agricultural risk management. No doubt you see the connection.

No . . . well maybe it’s just an Ed thing. But I keep thinking of Greece, the Euro, the Loonie and the Greenback as I read In The Night Kitchen, and imagined Mickey as a stand-in for Greece. Sendak’s stories are disengagingly lighthearted, but if you peer beneath the surface there’s a lot of nightmarish scariness, and the later is what Greeks are living through now.

Until three years ago they lived in a relative happyland, where everyone had a job, no one bothered to pay taxes, if you couldn’t handle private sector rigous you could join the 42 percent of the workforce in government service and do less – and everyone got to retire at the age of 20. Well, that’s all a bit of an exaggeration, but in general Greece was functional and seemed to be working as well as Canada, without the pressures of paying tax and having to work to a reasonable retirement age.

Then all of a sudden Greece fell out of its boring and comfortable bed.

Well, that was alarming! When the hapless socialist party came into power they found the previous conservative government had been cooking the books for years, and there was nothing left on the shelves. Greece was bankrupt, on top of all its myriad structural problems, and it went into an economic freefall. Due to general Eurozone weirdness-of-thinking, and due to the Greeks’ own understandable mistrust of themselves having control of a currency, the obvious (to me, anyway) response of pulling out of the Euro currency, defaulting on all the debt, and depreciating Greece into a semi-competitive economy wasn’t considered. For two years. Unbelievably. (I have often, for two and a half years now, discussed with a financial industry colleague why it is that Eurotypes repeatedly vow, in tones oozing of confidence and Euroblaseness, that anyone ever leaving the Euro is an impossibility and that all of this little bother can be wiped away by Eurozone bureaucrats and French-German summits. The ZedMo – I have given him a pseudonym to protect him from the danger of being in any way connected to a wacko like me – just laughs and notes that Europeans think they can talk any problem away, and their bureaucrats and politicians think they can make complex backroom deals that will sort things out in a manner complex enough that the public will never know how it all worked out.)

The response of the two main Greek political parties for the past couple of years was to cling desperately to the Euro and to the hopes that the Germans would pay out the debt. Which they have partially done. But only partially.

Now the Greek population has decided they’ve been getting cooked in a Teutonic oven, and they are beginning to want out.

So the Greeks recently voted for a combo of Communists, Neo-Nazi types and the boring old parties and now have a Parliament less workable than Italy’s – a stunning achievement – and no government. I don’t share many opinions with commies and Nazis, but I do share the view that a combination of deflation, depression, unemployment and decay isn’t likely to lead to a better, stronger, healthier Greece. So maybe they’ll finally chuck the Euro and get real about their problems. Hopefully they can keep control of the commies and Nazis as they do this.

That’s where we get affected. Greece leaving the Euro – now finally accepted by Europols and Eurobureaus as a strong possibility – could leave to the general unravelling of the world’s second great currency, with Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy in line to possibly eventually drop out of the Euro. Then France gets in trouble and might have to bail. And the Euro would be just really the new Mark for Germany and a few buddies. So we’d end up with all these new currencies, like the New Drachma, and the Euro or Mark shooting up in value until the German economy went into recession, and a general freakin’ mess.

Then we’ll have just one world currency again – the U.S. Greenback. It’ll be just like 14 years ago, when there was no Euro and jailbaity Britney Spears was still recording Baby One More Time.

But there would be an intense period of currency volatility, and who the heck knows what that would mean for the Greenback, the Loonie, commodity prices, etc.? It could be chaotic.

That means something for farmers, because most Canadian farmers in one way or another deal with prices delineated in both Loonies and Greenbacks. There’s a chance for locked-in prices to go way out of whack and for U.S. futures-based prices to move in unpredictable ways.

So if you’re one of those farmers so affected by the whole Greenback-Loonie relationship, you might see a lot of impact from what happens to the Euro on your prices. One way or the other. You can hedge for that exposure, but do you?

The Greeks are probably hoping – by voting for commies and Nazis – that they can find some unlikely but radical way to fly out of their present predicament.

And they’ll find out that after this long nightmarish journey into a frightening world, they fall back into their comfy old bed and be able to wake up back in the boring old home they were very used to.

That almost certainly won’t happen, with them more likely ending up on a bed of nails. But even the Greeks can dream. Let’s just hope we’re awake to the foreign exchange risks we might face.

By the way, want some proof that currency volatility really does affect the prices of goods for Canadians?

I peeled off the price sticker from the copy of In The Night Kitchen I bought the other day. Here’s what I saw:

The original price was $7.95 in the U.S. and $10.50 in Canada. The sticker placed atop the printed price is now $8.99 “in Canada.” I assume the manual change has something to do with our stronger Loonie. I was on the right side of this trade, since the book was printed before the Loonie rose in value and ended up causing the bookseller to reduce the price. Which way will your ag commodity move? Your guess.

(A note on the beautifully shot and rendered photos with this post: they are all iPhone pix of my personal copy of In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. Go buy it if you have kids or grandkids.)

But in this part of the world, she probably hasn’t done it all publicly. Her dominance has been achieved out on the back 40, where periodic face-offs keep her on top.

A story in the May 9 Globe and Mail explained that Swiss Herens cows are known for their desire for dominance. They are so keen to be bossy that the Swiss have made a sport out of it. Cows battle in the ring for the Queen of Queens title by pushing, shoving and head butting. Veterinarians at the matches step in if the fights lead to injury and no cow ever dies in battle. She just wins that particular match and goes on to fight again.

According to the Globe story, written by Nicolas Brulliard of the Wall Street Journal, the title has been fought for 90 years. Presumably the anti-doping regulations are a more recent development.

Sometimes the fights aren’t that thrilling, from the sounds of it. As in Canadian herds, sometimes the less bossy cow takes one bunt of the head from her bossier counterpart and gives up. Cows aren’t stupid, you know.

These cow fights are said to be very popular in parts of Switzerland but I doubt they will catch on here in Canada. For one thing, many cattle producers have put a lot of work into selecting cattle for their gentler dispositions and easy handling.

And for another, it’s hard to figure how push-and-shove cow battles can compete on the adrenaline scale with North American ringside attractions like bull riding and monster trucks.

I guess that says quite a lot about the comparative Swiss and Canadian entertainment preferences.

Which raises the question “Just what happened Friday and Monday?”

I called a bunch of analysts yesterday and asked them about that.

It’s a hard question to answer, because most crops suffered but oilseeds in particular got hammered even though there was a positive USDA report just a couple of days before, world equity and commodity markets were getting rocked by the usual Greek/European/Chinese/U.S. economic concerns we have grown accustomed to, and oilseeds had enjoyed one heck of a rally until recently. How do you disentangle all of that?

So is this the end of the oilseeds rally? Is it simply a correction after a dramatic run higher? Has something begun changing in the supply and demand fundamentals deep under the surface? Is it just oilseeds finally succumbing to the weight of the slumping commodity complex of the past couple of months? Is it just an outside markets thing that will wear off soon?

I can see good arguments in favour of all of those scenarios. That tells me you might be a little overconfident if you’re a committed believer in ever-higher oilseed prices. But it’s also too early to assume that canola and soybeans have hit their highs for the year.

Whether you’re bullish or bearish, the kind of dramatic price action we saw straddling the weekend should make you recheck your assumptions and see if you’re covered.

Oilseeds have taken a rather severe beating in the last week. Here’s the ugliness up close.

November canola futures

Corn Dec futures

But don’t worry, or maybe do worry, because it isn’t an overwhelming vote against oilseeds by the world market. Here’s the CRB index of all commodities:

CRB Index

The commodity party has been over for a while, with substances like oil dropping markedly and metals dropping down. European debt, China slowdown, yadda yadda yadda. We really shouldn’t be surprised that canola would eventually submit to the downdraft eventually. Corn and wheat have felt it for a while.

So we’re in a commodity downdraft and it’s sucking the wind out of the crop sails.

The good aspect is that this is happening right at the beginning of the crop weather market, where some weather scare could drive crop prices up again, regardless of general commodity complex conditions.

The Competition Bureau has approved the sale of Viterra to Glencore International. 


One of the biggest remaining obstacles to the $6.1 billion deal is a vote by Viterra’s shareholders scheduled for May 29. But there are other steps required, such as Investment Canada Act and Foreign Acquisitions and Takeover Act approval, as well as approvals by regulators in other countries where Viterra operates.


The Competition Bureau’s May 3 letter calling for “no action” on the Glencore takeover relates only to the Viterra transaction.


“The reviews of the subsequent proposed transactions involving Agrium and Richardson (International) will be conducted independently,” said the bureau in an e-mail response to The Western Producer.


Glencore has agreed to sell Richardson a number of grain handling and processing assets for $900 million plus working capital. The sale includes 19 Viterra elevators and the crop input centres at those elevators.


It has also agreed to sell 90 percent of Viterra’s crop input facilities and its 34 percent stake in an Alberta nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing facility to Agrium Inc. for $1.5 billion plus working capital.


Farm groups are interested in what the bureau has to say about those two deals. Producers seem satisfied with the Richardson arrangement but they are nervous about the Agrium agreement.


Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan met with Glencore recently to convey points raised by the rural municipalities it represents.


“Some of the RMs sent us letters and the big concern was the power that Agrium is going to get by increased control of the fertilizer industry,” said APAS vice-president Arlynn Kurtz.


The deal would result in the transfer of 232 of Viterra’s western Canadian retail outlets to Agrium. The company already owns 65 of its own, giving it a total of 297 facilities. But some allege that its power extends beyond those assets.


“One of the concerns is that some of the independent fertilizer retailers are aligned with Agrium so Agrium has direct or indirect influence in the retail market,” said Kurtz.


Producers are also worried that Viterra’s brand of herbicides will soon evaporate from the marketplace.


“If those disappear that is going to reduce competition in that area,” said Kurtz.


Agrium spokesperson Richard Downey said producer fears are unfounded.


“Retail is an extremely competitive market,” he said.


He noted that if Agrium ends up with 297 retail outlets it won’t wield much more market power than Viterra did with its 258 crop input stores.


Downey also dismissed the notion that Agrium’s stranglehold on nitrogen manufacturing in Western Canada would result in price gouging.


“Prices and market conditions are really determined globally,” he said.


Downey said farmers don’t have to worry about losing Viterra’s pesticide offerings. Good quality products will be incorporated into the company’s Loveland brand of crop protection products marketed through Agrium’s Crop Production Services outlets.


The bureau has no set timeline for the Agrium and Richardson reviews. It said it will consult with a variety of industry participants.


The move is included in proposed changes to the Fertilizers Act regulations and will come into effect April 1, 2013, if approved.


The changes would apply to fertilizers and other inputs that aren’t pesticides.


“It will be buyer beware,” said Bob Friesen of agricultural inputs retailer Farmers of North America.


“It works in the United States. It is an advantage that (as farmers) our largest competitors have that we don’t.” 


Friesen said FNA has long lobbied for elimination of efficacy testing.


“Safety, yes. That needs to be proven. Efficacy, farmers know if something works or not. They won’t be buying questionable products,” he said.


Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan president Norm Hall isn’t surprised by the proposed change.


“We have always been able to count on these products doing what they are supposed to. Like a guarantee. And that fertilizers contain the proper percentage of (nutrients). Now we just have to trust our suppliers,” he said.


He said the changes also seem consistent with the federal legislative agenda, which reduces government involvement in business.


“It should eliminate the cost of testing and if that means cheaper products for producers it’s a good thing,” he said.


Friesen said efficacy testing adds cost and delays availability of new and novel inputs, which hurts Canadian farmers’ profitability and their ability to compete with U.S. farmers.


He said the improved availability of American products might create new competition for existing fertilizer sellers.


In the U.S., companies can make claims about products without having to prove their effectiveness to authorities.


However, Canadian researchers are not convinced that the elimination of efficacy testing will benefit farmers.


Experts, who prefer to remain un-named because of their roles in the industry, feel the financial benefit to farmers might not be as great as the cost of unproven products.


Some agronomists say products that work in other regions of North America don’t always perform well in Western Canada, and without testing it falls to producers to experiment with their crops and dollars. 


It is suggested that without efficacy testing, producers might also avoid potentially profitable new products because of a lack of trust in the marketing materials.


The Canadian Food Inspection Agency brought in a change last fall that allowed for provisional registration of inputs based on trials performed in locations other than Canadian regions where the product was to be marketed. 


The latest proposal would take that one step further.


Proper labelling of products to avoid misrepresentation and consumer fraud is part of Sections 16-19 of the act, but the government hasn’t said whether that will be changed as a part of the legislative amendments.


Friesen said his organization would also like to see efficacy testing eliminated for pesticides.


“I don’t know if the (Pest Management Regulatory Agency of Health Canada) will go there, but it would put us on a more competitive footing with the Americans,” he said.


Enough already, was Dad’s vote. There is more than enough moisture on his land, and he is naturally itching to get into the ground.


He’s not alone. Managing editor Mike Raine got rained out when he attempted to start seeding, and his farm is maybe 300 kilometres away from Dad’s, so the conditions are widespread.


That got me wondering when we stopped worrying about drought and started musing about whether this would be yet another wet spring. So far, there hasn’t been a lot of flooding rain, but the March-April snows and more recent precipitation have been game changers.


In January and February, meteorologists and commodity experts were sounding alarms over weather patterns, and not surprisingly. It was a pretty strange, warm, snowless winter in most areas. But suddenly, most of Alberta and Saskatchewan are looking at normal to above normal moisture.


If you examined last week’s precipitation summary in The Western Producer, all of the areas listed in Saskatchewan were above normal, with the exception of Melfort, which was bang on 100 percent. 


Regions around Wynyard, Yorkton, Kindersley, Swift Current and Val Marie had twice the normal amount, or more. 


In Alberta, the only region suffering from low moisture was Pincher Creek.


Then it rained even more on the weekend. Now, a few regions are near three times normal. 


Manitoba conditions are much more diverse. Brandon, Melita and Winnipeg areas are at normal or above, but Dauphin and Gimli are pretty dry.


Some farmers got onto the land remarkably early because of the dry winter. 


It was a most unusual but excellent state of affairs: starting seeding extra early and staving off the threat of frost by days or even weeks. Every extra day you can get in this climate is a bonus.


Now, we’re sliding into the usual seeding time, and it’s hard to get on the fields in much of the growing region. 


But if the rain stops in the next week or so, this could still be an unusually great year in prairie agriculture.


Weather permitting, of course.

It used to be considered a foregone conclusion that rural areas would steadily decline. With farms getting bigger and requiring fewer people, nothing, it seemed, was going to revive smaller communities.


Community-owned hog barns, meat processing plants and other food processing initiatives were attempted in an effort to turn the tide, with limited success.


Instead, it has been the resource boom that has changed the fortunes of many towns. Oil and potash development is creating new jobs and attracting new people, fulfilling the earnest wishes of community leaders. Predictably, that has resulted in new challenges and problems.


Some communities are struggling to keep up with infrastructure and housing. You don’t know all your neighbours and their children anymore.


Who knew that revitalization would lead to so many strangers in town?


Another generally accepted conclusion a few years ago was that young people didn’t want to farm and ranch. Why would they when financial returns were so dismal? Much better to pursue a career in the city.


With a turnaround in profitability, agriculture now looks attractive and there’s no shortage of young people who want to return to their roots. Unfortunately, it has also become prohibitively expensive to get started. 


Farmland prices have increased dramatically. So have the prices paid for replacement heifers and bred cows. Getting a start in agriculture six years ago would have taken half as much money as it does now. And rather than just competing against other producers to buy land, you now have to compete against outside investors as well.


The ramifications should have been predictable. Why wouldn’t profitability be capitalized into the value of productive assets?


During the tough years, people left the farm because it was difficult to make a living. Now that there’s money being made, farms seem to be growing larger at an even faster pace. The only difference is that those exiting are leaving with a much bigger retirement nest egg.


If you used to hope that agriculture would shed its quaint image, that wish has also been realized.


A new tractor and seeding outfit can cost more than $1 million and there are waiting lists to get the most popular air drills. GPS guidance systems and smart phones have become the norm. Agriculture is undeniably capital intensive and high-tech.


Good luck, though, trying to get seasonal help for seeding and harvest. There are too many year-round options for good employees.


As farmers, we used to wish that consumers would stop taking their food supply for granted. These days, consumers influence the food system like never before. They have a long list of demands: some valid and some not. Big food retailers and restaurant chains are listening to the lobby efforts and dictating to the entire food chain. Markets can be quashed if a food ingredient or production practice doesn’t seem appetizing in a You Tube video. Just call it the “pink slime” effect.


Engaged consumers mean great opportunities, but also inherent dangers.


Amazingly, the rural and agricultural wish list lacks focus these days. There has been such a paradigm shift in the last few years that rural leaders and policy makers are struggling just to figure out the new realities from all the wishes that have been fulfilled.


UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier de Schutter usually casts his gaze at developing countries and ravaged countries in the midst of war, genocide or the use of food as a weapon against citizen groups out of favour.


So as the first industrialized country to face UN scrutiny over its adherence to a resolution that access to food is a basic human right, de Schutter’s May 5-16 visit is a blackeye that will besmirch Canada’s reputation, Rae told reporters May 7.


And Rae knows who to blame: Stephen Harper.


However, like most things UN, the issue of right to food and who to investigate and condemn is highly political. The Canadian investigation certainly is political.


When he reports back to the UN, it is a safe bet that de Schutter will be critical of hunger and malnutrition in the midst of a country as rich and food-surplus as Canada. Opposition politicians will have a field day.


Who wouldn’t be critical of hunger in the midst of plenty?


But before getting back to the politics of the UN investigation, let’s consider the core issue of hunger in the midst of plenty.


I have used this space many times to argue that in a world (and country) with the ability to produce food for all, lingering hunger is an obscene political decision.


A fraction of the money spent each year on armaments and war around the globe would be enough to make sure everyone had enough food (assuming politics, lifestyle and conflict allowed it to get to those who need it). 


The argument applies to Canada, where massive amounts of money are instantly available for war missions or military equipment but not so much for national poverty alleviation.


Hunger, of course, is a complicated issue infused with poverty, addiction, disease, isolation and sometimes, personal choices.


Governments in Canada have never truly dealt with it from Sir John A. Macdonald to Stephen Harper. In the midst of plenty, there always has been poverty, deprivation and want in Canada.


Children usually are the most innocent victims. But the UN decision to send de Schutter to Canada (or his decision to come on his own), smacks of UN politics.


The UN is housed in New York, in a city and country where tens of millions live in poverty, on food stamps or under bridges in the midst of vast wealth. No UN eye turns in that direction.


Few if any UN member countries would be free of poverty and in many cases, indigenous deprivation.


Almost 20 years ago, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization vowed to cut hunger in half by 2015. It has increased by almost 200 million but there has been no UN investigation of that.


Yet de Schutter is in Canada, no doubt responding to complaints about hunger, reserve deprivation and the impact of “industrial agriculture” on sustainability.


There’s nothing wrong with that. An interview several years ago showed that is his side of the food fence.


But the opposition,which also vowed to solve the poverty problem should be careful about making too much hay.