WINNIPEG – Canadians are great inventors, but when it comes time to turn ideas into products, entrepreneurs often have to go to other countries to get support.
Participants at the Straw to Gold symposium held here last week heard many examples of how Canada has to get its act together when it comes to finding new uses for agricultural products.
Jane Teeter, the head of Agriculture Canada’s Food Bureau, illustrated the irony by describing a Canadian company that figured out how to separate the five layers of bran on a kernel of wheat.
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The Canadians couldn’t get the idea commercialized here, Teeter said, so they took it to the United Kingdom. Last fall, members of the Canadian Millers Association visited the company’s plant in Great Britain to see if they could buy the technology.
Teeter said research and other efforts into finding new uses for agricultural products have been sporadic and other countries are ahead of Canada.
“We have to scramble to catch up,” she said, adding that agriculture needs to find partners in industry like energy, health and pharmaceuticals.
Few uses developed
Teeter said less than two percent of agricultural materials are used in forms other than food, and that includes leather and wool.
Meanwhile, she said the paper, plastic, petroleum and chemical industries are worth $70 billion, and agricultural materials could capture part of that market.
The food bureau is coming out with a paper called Beyond Ethanol in a couple of months that lists about 200 opportunities for industrial uses of agricultural materials. Staff are also working on a project to see why inventions fall through the cracks in Canada.
But Don O’Connor, a vice-president of Mohawk Oil, said the government can be a hurdle for value-added industries. His company recently developed fibrotein, an additive for baked goods which is a byproduct of ethanol.
“We are not aligned in Canada for success,” O’Connor said, citing the Canadian Wheat Board and Health Canada as two stumbling blocks.
Don Murray of the Guelph Food Technology Centre in Ontario told the conference “We don’t pick up on our own ideas within our system.” The centre tries to do just that.
The centre started in January with a budget of $200,000, but has already helped 130 companies and has done $800,000 in business, for which the companies pay.
“Innovators are alive and well,” Murray said, adding that researchers need to be matched with marketable products more often.
