REGINA – Short-line farm equipment manufacturers are not in step with the rest of the Canadian industry. And that’s a good thing.
Last week the Conference Board of Canada reported Canada’s level of innovation had fallen to 14th out of 17 industrialized nations.
“Innovation is centrally important to Canada’s competitiveness and sustainable prosperity, but our performance is woefully inadequate,” said Ann Golden, president of the conference board.
The board’s report scolds businesses for failing to use the best in technology or invest in worker training.
Read Also
Final crop reports show strong yields, quality
Crops yielded above average across the Prairies this year, and quality is generally average to above-average.
It said Canadian engineers, researchers and scientists are not keeping up with other countries in the creation of new, patentable concepts and products.
This came as a surprise to Pat Beaujot, president of Seed Hawk, a Saskatchewan manufacturer of minimum tillage seeding equipment.
“If we weren’t constantly being innovative with technology and meeting the demands of the world’s most sophisticated agricultural producers, our business wouldn’t have any customers,” he said.
Beaujot’s company and hundreds of other farm equipment, service and supply businesses have brought their latest technology to Regina for the Western Canada Farm Progress Show this week.
Seed Hawk’s contribution to innovation at this year’s event is the world’s largest air seeder, designed to address North American farm size increases of 40 percent in the past decade.
Don Henry, chief executive officer of Brandt Industries, a Regina short-line equipment manufacturer, said Canadian short-line and seeding equipment producers lead the world.
“Flexicoil, Bourgault, Morris, Seed Hawk, Conservapak. These companies developed the technology that now plants the world’s crops. It wasn’t the large farm equipment manufacturers. It was innovative companies from Saskatchewan. Degelman’s heavy harrow technology, years ahead of its competition.”
Henry said his company is forced to be innovative to survive in a competitive marketplace.
“American and Australian companies look to Canada for their lead. They learned that a long time ago, and they’re tough competitors,” he said.
Short growing seasons and farmer customers who rely on technology to survive against subsidized foreign production and tough economic times have focused the efforts of Canadian farm machinery makers on innovation to succeed, Henry said.
Greg Cruson of Regina’s Dutch Industries agreed.
“Canadian agriculture forces us to be innovative. We need to adopt new technology that makes us efficient. We have to have highly qualified and motivated workers and give them the tools to make our companies productive.”
Cruson’s company relies on customer feedback to drive its product design.
“We are bringing some new opener technology, untested, to the (Farm Progress Show) this week. We are just looking for feedback from farmers on it. That just isn’t done in most industries. But it works and we’ve got a business that has lasted four generations to prove it,” he said.
The conference board report said Canadian companies’ lack of tolerance for risk results in mediocre economic performance, which is weakening foreign investor confidence in Canada.
Morris Industries’ new owner, Casey Davis, believes smaller Canadian manufacturers rely on innovation to remain in business in the face of global competition.
“We take risks that some larger companies won’t or don’t. We have to find novel ways to market our products. We found that by demonstrating that we could grow what were seen as incredible crops in Eastern Europe, that we could attract customer attention (there),” he said.
“It took more than showing them the equipment and explaining. We had to bring in agronomy. We had to invest and prove it. It brought sales and that has been good for Morris and Canada,” said Davis.
The not-for-profit conference board is a think-tank based in Ottawa. Its 24 member board includes prairie representatives such as Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s Mayo Schmidt, Agricore United’s Brian Hayward, Michael Wilson of Agrium, Paul Hill of Harvard Developments and Indira V. Samarasekera of the University of Alberta.
The board graded Canada’s performance in six areas including economy, innovation, environment, education and skills, health and society. Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, the United States and Germany scored first to fifth in innovation. Canada was 14th between France and Norway.
