The Farmer’s Share events of a couple of days ago have me thinking of the local markets we could have, but choose not to serve.
Farm orgs in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been funding analysis of how much of a representative family’s food budget ends up in the farmers’ pocket, and what three years of data have shown is that farmers receive about one quarter of the food dollar.
But the important point for farmers on the prairies is that prairie-produced products bring in a far lower share of the consumer buck. Fruits and vegetables – mostly grown outside the prairies and generally outside of Canada – bring in a good share of about 28-29 percent. Milk brings home more than 50 percent of the consumer dollar to the farmer. But meat only brings about 25 percent. And grain products bring a dismal 4.3 percent.
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Kochia has become a significant problem for Prairie farmers
As you travel through southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, particularly in areas challenged by dry growing conditions, the magnitude of the kochia problem is easy to see.
To a large degree this is to be expected. Grains are seldom sold as raw grain. They are sold after long, complicated, expensive processes are undertaken to turn them into things that don’t break your teeth when you try to eat them. And it takes quite a bit of work to transport, kill, cut, process and market meat products. But fruits and vegetables go in a fairly straight line to the consumer’s tummy. And milk travels quite easily from the farm to the plant to the supermarket shelf.
So these numbers are not necessarily signs that there is a problem with meat and grain production that robs the producer more greatly than milk and fruit producers are robbed. And these numbers are not connected to the profitability of the product to the processor or retailer. Price and profitability are two separate issues.
But these results underlined for me two basic conclusions that I’ve been making for years: 1) grain and meat producers need to focus on being super-low cost suppliers in order to be profitable. That’s a more useful focus than trying to find government regulatory tools that could attempt to force higher prices. 2) we should be growing more of the fruits and vegetables here on the prairies.
Conclusion #2 isn’t as wacky as it sounds. We already have a small but bustling commercial vegetable industry here in Manitoba and there are others across the prairies. Peak of the Market, the Manitoba vegetable producers cooperative, is a big export success story and its products take up a big chunk of the local retail vegetable space in crops like carrots. And we have a tiny but exciting and admirable Saskatoon berry industry scattered across the prairies, which not only supplies the high value North American market, but also exports to Europe and Japan.
But I’m sure it could be far, far larger. Eventually. And if that’s where the farmer gets the biggest gross share of the consumer dollar, it’s not a bad direction to explore.
I don’t think it could be done with present open field production practices, unless California and China really do run out of fresh water and prices soar to extreme levels. But as marijuana growers and Chinese-Canadian vegetable producers have shown us, simple greenhouses on the prairies can produce big, high quality, high price crops that are world competitive. The marijuana growers situation is a bit more difficult to analyze, because it’s an illegal crop and relies to some degree on the arbitrage of less aggressive Canadian enforcement versus heavy, heavy enforcement in the U.S., which is where the demand is. But I note with some interest that the biggest network of marijuana greenhouses ever found in Canada, some of them in Manitoba, were operated by a China-based organized crime ring.
That’s interesting, because the Chinese are great greenhouse experts – producing much of their nation’s vegetables in greenhouses – and legitimate Chinese farmers are some of the most successful greenhouse operators in Canada. Here in Manitoba a Chinese vegetable company west of Winnipeg grows oriental vegetables in greenhouses and sells them in local grocery stores, including Safeway. They’re proving you can produce that sort of stuff here and sell it competitively.
And a Chinese agricultural engineering professor at the University of Manitoba has spent years researching prairie-appropriate greenhouses that could boost production across the prairies. These would not be fully-heated, 12-months-per-year greenhouses, but ones that would extend the growing season for months longer, perhaps only cutting December, January and February out of the growing season. With the shortness of season being the key limiting factor on farmers here, stopping them growing 95 percent of the world’s food crops, lengthening the growing season would be a big deal.
There are going to be lots of snags and complications developing a system like this, but with California and China running out of fresh water, energy to transport food getting more expensive, and land, water and sun abundant here on the prairies, greenhouse probably will be a big factor here – sometime.
But I wonder if it will be the traditional farm community taking on this challenge and this new production system, or immigrants from places like China. Lots of Dutch, German and English immigrants have come to the prairies in recent years and gotten involved in ag production that few thought realistic before their arrival. Perhaps the same thing will happen with greenhouse production. Or maybe prairie farmers will start gingerly experimenting with some sort of covered production, and 50 years from now California-grown produce will be much rarer around here than it is today.
