It’s similar, but different.
That was something a group of Australian farm women already knew about Western Canada when they recently toured the prairie provinces.
And they were hoping to find something different here that would work back home.
“Anything that’s useful that we could use down under,” said 29-year-old farmer Brooke Nicholson.
“Your climate is a lot different. Your growing period is much shorter. But it’s really dry in both places.”
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The tour was funded by an Australian government grant for promoting farm women’s knowledge and organized by Agfarm, a farm marketing advisory service.
It connected with Winnipeg’s Farm- Link Marketing Solutions, a similar organization.
The purpose of the trip was to get a sense of “what a farming business might look like in 2020 and beyond in light of climate change and increasing commodity price volatility.”
The past few years have been tempestuous for Australia’s grain sector, with the nation’s single desk exporter losing its monopoly and big ownership changes occurring among its grain handlers.
Nicholson said so far farmers are disappointed with the changes, which haven’t helped their situation.
“Farmers thought there would be more price competition and the price would go up a little bit, but that didn’t happen,” said Nicholson.
“It seems like less,” she said.
Elissa Strong, an agronomist in Nicholson’s local town of Forbes, shared that view, but hoped other technological changes would improve farming in other ways.
She was looking forward to seeing the on-farm storage on Canadian farms, which is much different from the Australian situation, in which farmers generally haul straight to grain terminals from the combine.
“Here you store for a long time, which gives you different marketing choices,” Strong said.
She noted other differences, such as the sharply different profit pictures of wheat and canola in the two regions on the opposite sides of the world.
In her part of Australia, central New South Wales, wheat is the big money maker and canola is questionable.
Nicholson said she and her husband grow wheat and barley, with canola occasionally added to the rotation.
Agfarm tour organizer Leonie O’Driscoll said she hoped the similarity of the dryland farming regions would highlight differences of methods and technology better than seeing different farming areas, such as the United States Midwest or interior Brazil.
“I think Canada has the most similar farming production system and marketing environment,” said O’Driscoll.
“We hope to learn from your organizations and farmers.”
While in Canada, the women met with Canadian farm companies like Farmer’s Edge about variable rate technology and grain companies like Viterra, which now has a major presence in Australia.
They also toured SaskCan Pulse Trading near Regina, visited a feedlot near Lethbridge, visited prairie farms and met proponents of carbon trading systems.
