Changes in the grading system should bring smiles to the faces of buyers of Canadian barley.
And grain marketers and farm groups here hope changes will also give Canada a leg up in the highly competitive world barley markets.
New standards announced by the Canadian Grain Commission are designed to produce drier malting barley and cleaner feed barley.
“These changes have occurred in the past and they will continue to,” said chief commissioner Barry Senft. “As we see other countries and competitors fine-tune their quality approach to things, we have to do likewise.”
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The agency, whose job it is to sell Canadian barley, welcomed the new standards.
“On feed barley we have to keep up with Australia on foreign material,” said Canadian Wheat Board information officer Deanna Allen. Also, both Australia and the European Union put a drier malting barley on the market than Canada.
Two major changes, recommended by the industry’s grain standards committee, will go into effect with the new crop year Aug. 1:
- The maximum moisture level for straight grades of select barley will be reduced to 13.5 from 14 percent. High moisture levels can reduce germination vigor in stored malting barley, which in turn can result in shipments being rejected by maltsters or exporters. The new lower moisture level brings Canada’s standards in line with those elsewhere in the world.
- Tolerance levels for foreign material will be reduced for general purpose grades of barley delivered to primary elevators. For No.1 CW barley, the tolerance for total foreign material will be cut to three from 3.5 percent. The tolerance at export elevators will be cut to 2.5 from two percent.
Senft said there will now be more onus on farmers to deliver clean grain to elevators or pay the price by having their barley downgraded.
“The ones it will affect are the ones who were delivering what wasn’t as clean as it might have been,” he said.
Good product penalized
Under the old system, he said, farmers who cleaned their barley felt they were penalized because their grain was blended with dirtier product and they received no financial benefit.
An official from the Western Barley Growers Association was blunt in his assessment of the feed barley Canada is now selling into world markets.
“We’ve been pushing for that for years because the (feed) barley we have in export position usually looks like garbage,” said Ted Cawkwell, a farmer from Nut Mountain, Sask. and past-president of the Western Barley Growers Association.
The barley grower official, often a vocal critic of the Canadian Wheat Board’s role in grain marketing issues, says this is one area in which his association and the board can find common ground.
“I don’t envy them the job of trying to sell something that looks like that and calling it No. 1 feed barley.”
The association would like to see the barley grading system completely revamped so producers are paid for exactly what they deliver, he said, adding that farmers will deliver dry, clean barley if they’re rewarded financially for doing so.
That’s also the view of the Alberta Barley Commission, said general manager Clifton Foster. While welcoming the changes, he said the commission is just tinkering with a system that needs a complete overhaul.
“They may be going in the right direction, but they are still not going near far enough in terms of dealing with the issue of quality and paying farmers for quality,” he said.
The barley commission says the current system works to the advantage of elevator companies by allowing them to blend grain. He said farmers have to pay at country elevators to have barley cleaned, and then terminal companies add dockage to the maximum tolerance before it’s shipped to export customers.
