Controlling gophers
In response to your article, “Gopher hunt draws fervour and furor,” (WP, May 8) I think you’re missing the point, which is the reason behind this influx of gophers (pocket gophers and Richardson’s ground squirrels.)
First, like all other animals and insects, they run in cycles according to Mother Nature’s whimsy following closely variations in the weather and feed conditions.
Second, we’ve done away with most of their natural predators and their habitat so really we’ve only got ourselves to thank for this “explosion.”
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
Years before all the land was cleared, hawks, crows, coyotes, foxes, badgers and other predators made it a point to eat gophers and other rodents. They were the mainstay of their diets.
As a wildlife activist, I am opposed to controlling these animals (gophers/ground squirrels) in this somewhat barbaric manner. I do realize they must be controlled in some fashion and frankly, if given a choice, firearms are a far better method of dispatching them than poison. Poison transfers on down the food chain and kills innocent victims, not just the intended victims.
The point that upsets me the most is when the government allows the killing of foxes (gophers/ground squirrels’ natural predators) and coyotes, claiming these animals are killing livestock.
I’ve raised livestock on 100 acres of treed pasture for going on 20 years. My pasture is also home to three coyote dens and I have yet to have calves or cows attacked or bothered. In fact, the coyotes actually mingle with the livestock to hunt other prey.
The sick part of your article is the information that an outfitter actually books American hunters to blast away at heads popping up out of the ground – and probably anything else that moves or flies. Someone perhaps needs to get a life.
I find this to be almost as bad as the Saskatchewan game farms where for an often enormous sum of money you’re guaranteed a trophy, even if you have to wound several other animals in the process.
Please, could we just keep this whole problem in perspective?
– Dennis Paddington,
Qu’Appelle, Sask.
Promote Manitoba
I am store manager of the Manitoba Agri-Food Store at the Forks Market in Winnipeg, Man.
I just wanted to send a quick note about the May 8 article that appeared on your site by Mary MacArthur and Ian Bell. The article outlined the Alberta government’s (plan) to create and fund an agriculture business incubator to “hatch new value-added ideas into successful businesses” in Alberta.
Many Manitobans were excited to hear about this because we have a registered Agri-Food Launch Incubator created by Steve Melnyk of Creative Advantage Inc. already at work in Manitoba. (It) works with the support of the Food Development Centre in Portage La Prairie (mentioned in your article as well) and the Manitoba Food Processors Association, to help new food producers create and market their food products in Manitoba and abroad.
The Manitoba Agri-Food Store, set to open at the end of this month, will be a further expansion of the Agri-Food Launch Incubator and will help prepare food producers to market their products in a retail setting. …
Thank you so much for the informative article and for keeping us up to date on agriculture in Canada. Agriculture is the backbone of this country and certainly of the province of Manitoba and I am looking forward to promoting our hard-working and extremely creative agri-food entrepreneurs.
– Susan Melnyk,
Manitoba Agri-Food Store,
Winnipeg, Man.
Buy Canadian
I agree with the letter entitled “Not puppets” published in the May 8 issue of The Western Producer.
The so-called free trade agreement approved by (former prime minister Brian) Mulroney made it difficult for Canadian fruit producers to survive. At that time, fruit growers in the Okanagan were said to be struggling under a billion-dollar debt, while at the same time fruit from American orchards was allowed to flood our markets.
Our family decided to purchase Canadian fruit and vegetables whenever possible. This seemed even more essential after Canadian inspectors reported finding a potato plant infected with potato wart in a field in Prince Edward Island. The United States immediately ceased to import P.E.I. potatoes, and to add insult to injury, the U.S. issued an edict stating that P.E.I. potatoes could not be sold anywhere in Canada.
That was outright interference with our internal Canadian commerce. And then our press reported that potato wart had been identified in a field in one of the eastern American states a couple of years earlier. The U.S. had kept that a secret.
Our family has noticed that Canadian fruit from the Okanagan and garden vegetables from Saskatchewan are equal to or superior to American-grown produce in flavour and quality. Canadian consumers should do what they can to help our producers survive.
– F. J. H. Fredeen,
Saskatoon, Sask.
Game farming
It’s about time that there will be printed a positive article about game farming. So far it’s always been negative or something to do with Chronic Wasting Disease, which has to be taken seriously, of course, but every game farmer does because they are under a mandatory surveillance program (also for tuberculosis.)
It has long been traced back to where it originated. It’s always been there in the wild too and it’s no more a threat than any other kind of livestock and producers are willing to do what it takes to take control of it with veterinarians to prevent further outbreak and it is really no more serious than any other disease in domestic livestock that needs to be kept under control….
In Europe and New Zealand venison is a multi million-dollar business. Ninety percent of venison is imported from there. Why, if we can raise them here, where Canada’s major cattle feeding industry is?
Saskatchewan has recognized the potential of the economic boost hunt farms will give them. Borders are kept closed for good export markets. Why do they play such political games?
Game farming will reduce poaching too by competition. Criminals know how to get big bucks either way and big bucks are being paid already by hunters whether behind a fence or not, for a guided tour.
Anybody that has ever chased a deer in the wild knows that they don’t need 100 acres to hide, while those hunt farms have to be 400 acres or more with bush. If you can’t shoot a pigeon off the barn roof, you’re out of luck there too. What do you mean, canned hunting? Don’t give any misconception to the public…..
The meat from hay and grain fed deer is delicious and healthy and it doesn’t have to be expensive and that’s what I like to raise them for. These animals native to North America are fantastic to raise.
It’s just frustrating when you’re trying to make a living, and you hear all this hogwash.
– John Koekoek,
Barons, Alta.
Divining water
Re: Water witch work ignored WP, May 8.
I am a geologist in South Africa. I have used divining wires for the last 20 years. I have done electrical resistivity surveys to prove the divining wires located positions that correlated with geological fracture zones and faults that often contain water.
The change in the earth’s magnetic field is what everybody is picking up. I have drilled and cased/lined more than 1,000 water wells. I have come across a few good dowsers and I have drilled many dry boreholes/wells sited by dowsers and geologists.
The point is that as the earth is highly fractured and porous, in good water areas you can drill anywhere you like and get water. In deserts, a person will drill many dry boreholes to get water, irrespective of who sites it.
Beware of the person who states they have never sited a dry well.
Here is the important point. It is because you are able to pick up these broken shattered zones underground (that) you are likely to find water there. Does that make sense?
I have taught every client I came across to divine within two minutes. The “gift” is universal. Kids can divine from the age of five upwards. I have never come across a person who could not divine. It is only a case of holding the wire rod or rods correctly.
Most people make the mistake of putting their thumbs on the vertical section. Place your thumbs on your hand.
Divining is practiced heavily in South Africa, where either properties are too small to get electrical spans of wire in or magnetometers cannot be used because of overhead power lines and underground power cables.
Alternatively, the people cannot afford a geologist. A magnetometer, a device used by geophysicists, is to pick up breaks or faults. It is likely you will find water in those faults, providing they have not been baked hard, usually a problem in igneous/volcanic rock regions. …
Good luck on finding water and minerals if you are in a hydrothermal area. Pendulum divining is simply using gravity to detect changes in density in the rock strata. Some people are sensitive enough to pick these up by holding a brick in their hand or a bottle of water. When this tilts over, “X” marks the spot. A gravimeter can also be used to pick these spots.
Perhaps, because of the lengthy training to become a geologist or geophysicist, the fun seems to no longer be there and some dowsers love to appeal to the magic in themselves, usually to make money, when in reality everyone is a dowser.
I suppose, like sharks who can sense electromagnetic fields, we can too.
– Chris Landau,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Our business
Re: Private facilities have a place in universal health care, by Peter Holle, May 8.
Mr. Romanow’s recent Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada proves that the single-payer, publicly administered system is the way to go. Canadians from coast to coast to coast were adamant about that.
Based on solid evidence, a single-payer public system is less expensive, has better outcomes, is more efficient and most of all it is based on Canadian values.
Mr. Holle in his article states that health-care delivery has to do with being Liberal or with Mr. Chrétien. I don’t agree.
Health care is everyone’s business. It doesn’t matter if you are Liberal or NDP. Everyone needs health care sometime in their life, whether it be for drugs, maternity, home care or a parent in a lodge.
So, I think we all should work to keep our public health system without regard for politics. It is not right that those with money can buy their way into the system.
As Mr. Romanow said, “health care is not a commodity to be traded in the market place – it is a public good.”
Another point: would you not rather have your tax dollar go into a national public health-care system to be equally shared by all Canadians than into a private for-profit system where the profit comes off the top and what is left goes for Canadians’ health care?
Privatization picks favorites. It is wrong that profit should be made from people who are sick or in need. And another thing, what if the private facility doesn’t make a profit? It shuts down or moves away. What then?
Mr. Holle also talks about Spain’s and other systems. Well, I say to him that we are Canadians and we should organize our health-care system to suit us, based on our values.
So, along with a Health Council of Canada for measuring and reporting, let us all work to keep our Medicare public.
– Jacquie Christenson,
Sedgewick, Alta.
Fair deal
The recent removal of subsidies on Canada’s dairy exports reminds us that fair trade is alive and well. Perhaps it’s no coincidence this was announced just before Fair Trade Week May 11-15.
Canada’s move, taken as a result of pressure from the United States and New Zealand, should cause us to rethink policies we traditionally think are necessary and beneficial – the wheat board is an example western Canadians know too well.
Increasingly, we need to be seen to do the right thing, with our imports as well as our exports. In the last year, Canada has removed tariffs on imports from 40 of the least developed countries, in request to level the playing field for the developing world.
But we can do more. Coffee producers are in shock with prices at 100-year lows in real terms while retailers and roasters make handsome profits. It’s time to give the producers a fair shake.
As consumers we should encourage our major coffee importers like Kraft and Nestle to pay fair prices (and yes, we might need to pay an extra cent or two for a cuppa.) As citizens we should encourage Canada to stay connected, to rejoin the international coffee organizations after a decade of absence.
Perhaps the time has come for international marketing boards for major products like wheat, coffee and chocolate. After all, there may be complaints about OPEC’s management of world oil prices but no serious challenges.
Fair trade means a fair deal for farmers, no matter where they live.
– Randy Rudolph,
Calgary, Alta.
Water witching
Water witching definitely works. On our farm we drilled a well in 1962, at 20 gallons per minute, but it had to be abandoned because we couldn’t keep the leathers in the pump on account of the fine sand. The hole was filled with sand and dirt, 530 feet.
Twenty-two years later, a witcher happened by from Calgary. We showed him an area 500 x 500 feet where we’d like to have a well for easy access to the yard. Twenty minutes later, he marked a spot about four feet from the previous hole.
He didn’t see the stone that marked the old well because it was overgrown with grass.
He even said the water would be about 500 feet. It turned out to be 540.
With a good stainless steel screen, we now pump it from 340 feet at 20 gallons per minute plus good water at 1.5 grains per gallon hardness.
– Paul M. Entz,
Swift Current, Sask.
