Foreign material in feed peas has been a bone of contention in the pulse industry for years. Now there is a proposed solution that has both producers and exporters wagging their tails.
Until a week ago, the foreign material issue was shaping up to be a win-lose scenario. Growers wanted to establish a second grade of feed peas with lower foreign material content, but processors and exporters wanted to keep one grade with six percent foreign material.
“It looked like we were on a collision course with the trade where someone was just going to have to back down,” said Garth Patterson, executive director of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
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But an innovative solution proposed by the Canadian Grain Commission has won praise from both sides.
The idea is to remove foreign material as a grading factor altogether. Instead, it will be called dockage and the specifications of that dockage will be negotiated outside the grade between buyer and seller. It’s a brain child producers and the trade can live with.
“They have been fairly divided and now they seem to be focused and I can tell you from my perspective this is a good thing,” said a relieved Len Seguin, the commission’s chief grain inspector and the man who has been refereeing the foreign material dispute for years.
“It makes so damn much sense I don’t know why we didn’t do it a long time ago,” he said.
The solution is complicated by the fact that definitions of foreign material and dockage are clearly set out in the Canada Grain Act. That creates some problems for a solution that involves treating foreign material as dockage.
“We’re going to have to maybe do a little massaging here to make what we want to do work,” said Seguin.
Alberta Pulse Growers general manager Janette McDonald said that is just one of the details that has to be ironed out before the issue is brought back to the grain commission’s standards committee in April 2002. But she said the general concept of removing foreign material as a grading factor for feed peas is a good thing for producers.
There will be no ostensible change in the way a farmer sells peas. The same deductions will be taken off at the elevator. What will change is the way Canadian feed peas are marketed overseas.
Grower groups hope removing foreign material as a grading factor will clean up the image of Canadian feed peas, which should help open new markets in Asia and South America.
“There has been a lot of emphasis on the product other than the peas. We’d like to shift the emphasis back to the quality of the peas,” said McDonald.
“The objective here is to communicate to our buyers our ability to produce and ship a high quality feed ingredient.”
The words “foreign material” may no longer be used in association with feed peas but that doesn’t mean exporters won’t be adding screenings to pea shipments. Under the proposal, foreign material will be called dockage and the amount and content of that dockage will be negotiated between buyer and seller.
That flexibility appeals to processors and exporters, said Francois Catellier, executive director of the Canadian Special Crops Association. He said the trade already sells feed peas with higher and lower levels of foreign material than specified in the grade – it’s a negotiable item.
“I’m satisfied that we’re heading in the right direction to finally put this thing to bed and move onto more positive things in life than to be (drawing) a line in the sand about something that has relatively little bearing on what’s going on commercially.”
Seguin said developing new grade specifications will take time. The industry has to determine what the new grading factors will be and define what constitutes dockage.
A detailed plan will be presented to the commission in April. New rules will be in place by the beginning of the 2002-03 crop year if everything goes as planned.
Seguin emphasized that work on this new feed pea grade is at the conceptual stage. A lot can change between now and April.
Patterson is glad healthy dialogue has taken the place of feuding over foreign material content rules.
“I would just like to commend the grain commission for stepping back and thinking outside the box.”
