Small-town club raises money to fund its operation by selling donated seed to farmers, who then conduct crop trials
Members of the curling club in Indian Head, Sask., are using canola field trials to raise funds to repair their 95-year-old rink.
For the last three years, Andrea De Roo and Curtis Russell have partnered with Ben and Joel Cavers of Be-Ver Farms to host one of the largest field-scale canola trials in Canada.
Under the plan, seed companies donate bags to the rink, which sells them to farmers, who seed, spray and harvest the trials.
The rink profits from the seed sale, and the farmer gets to test different varieties first-hand. As well, seed companies benefit by being able to test and display the plots.
The trials allow seed companies like BASF, Pioneer, Canterra, Corteva, Bayer, Proven Seeds and Brett Young to display products in 8.5-acre plots over 263 acres of field north of Sintaluta, Sask.
Available to anyone who would like to see it, there are 27 varieties seeded this year, an increase from 26 last year and 16 the year before.
“Honestly, we would have shut our doors without this trial. There’s no way we would have been able to last,” said De Roo, president of the curling club and the agronomy lead at South Country and Crop Intelligence.
“At the time we need to fundraise for new (cooling) plants, just updating from water to an air-cooled system,” said De Roo. “And then our roof started leaking, so now we need to re-tin the roof.”
They remembered a $16,000 donation from Whispering Pine Farms in 2015 from canola trials to the Little Castle Childcare Centre in town and decided they could do something similar for the rink.
When they came up with the plan, Russell, a member of the curling club and former Bayer sales representative, contacted major companies, which he said were on board by the end of the day.
Darren Luscombe, who is associated with Whispering Pine Farms and part of the trials, reached out to Ben Cavers and got him on board.
“I think everybody is seeing value, so it’ll continue indefinitely as long as that continues. I have young children I would like to curl and our community needs fundraisers like this in order to have a curling club,” said Russell.
De Roo carries out in-depth report on the trials. She conducts plant counts, uses normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) imagery, crop intelligence and weather station moisture probes to “determine what our water driven yield potential is.”
This year, the trials are in very good condition. De Roo said the rainfall has been around 100 to 120 percent of average.
Cavers, whose farm is located nearly an hour away in Sedley, Sask., jumped at the opportunity when Luscombe came to him with the idea.
“They approached us about doing it and we thought it would be good to do something for the community and get our name out there a little bit where nobody knows us.”
Russell said it can be difficult getting farmers to come out and tour the plots at times, but De Roo’s report keeps the companies interested and is the reason for their continued success.
“Getting info from Andrea, it’s always great. Any little bit you can learn from reading the reports is good, 100 percent,” said Cavers.
“We have a really tight knit group of volunteers,” said De Roo. “To bring all the generations together in sports, regardless of your athletic level, is pretty unique.”
The fundraiser has brought in $70,000 for the club over the last two years, and organizers expect to raise about $40,000 this year.
