N.L. farmers struggling through historically hard winter

by Joan LeBlanc

It’s pretty much a sign of the times – unpredictable and extreme weather occurring more often than ever before – the unfortunate and inevitable effects of climate change.

Indeed, this winter has been one of unpredictable and extreme weather for much of Canada, particularly Newfoundland and Labrador. Parts of the province have been deluged with snow and high winds during the past few months, making life miserable for just about everyone, including farmers.

The worst storm of the season – so far – was the historic blizzard of Jan. 17 and 18, which hit eastern Newfoundland particularly hard, with a record-breaking 76 centimetres of snow falling in the greater St. John’s region, wind gusts of as much as 150 kilometres per hour, and millions of dollars in damage to infrastructure.

“Weather bomb is a good way of describing some of the storms we’ve had, and it’s definitely been challenging for a lot of producers here,” Mervin Wiseman, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Agriculture (NLFA), said recently.

Wiseman is also the longtime owner of M&E Fur Farm in North Harbour, Placentia Bay, one of the largest fur farms in the world that raises Silver foxes. Despite heavy snow, high winds, and blizzard conditions in early January, Wiseman said his operation made it through relatively unscathed.

“I can’t say that I incurred any structural damage to my buildings, some of which are 250 feet long, but I was lucky,” he said. “The practicality of removing snow from these roofs is really unmanageable. It can’t just fall off the roof because there’s no place for it to go. The snow (around the barns) is already up to the roof. There were 15- to 20-foot drifts in some places.”

LOTS OF WINTER LEFT

He added that with a big chunk of winter still ahead, structural damage could possibly occur due to high snow loads.

“If we don’t get some warmer weather so some of this snow melts, we could be looking at some structural damage,” said Wiseman, adding that one positive aspect of the increasing intensity of storms is that construction rules are stricter and Newfoundland farmers are building more resilient structures.

He said that larger farms naturally have more equipment for snow removal and alterative power sources. Those who don’t can have a tougher time with regular tasks, such as feeding and watering livestock and shipping products to market.

“One (pig) farmer, who actually lives outside of the Avalon (Peninsula), his market depended on him getting into the Avalon area,” said Wiseman. “And because of the (road) shutdowns, he had a big interruption in cash flow because he wasn’t getting to his market. And with the extra cost of feeding his livestock, too, that has some economic consequence as well.”

On the other hand, noted Wiseman, another pig farmer outside of the heavy-hit snow region admitted that he’d never done so well as during the January storm, as the demand for his product was high and he cleared out much of his inventory meeting market demands.

“I guess it’s like my mother used to say, ‘It’s a bad storm that don’t blow someone some good,’” he said.

What this all points to, said Wiseman, is that the issue of food security for an island province is more important than was previously thought.

“We obviously have to work hard at food self-sufficiency, sustainability, without having to depend on distribution and transportation systems outside of the province,” he said.

He added that the industry is aware that farming is a large contributor to climate change, but it has also begun to address mitigating factors and possible adaptations that will allow agriculture to continue successfully in the years ahead.

“There is a lot of research to be done,” said Wiseman. “We have to understand the common denominator, to come up with a workable plan for the future, to make policies that will work for the public and farmers in general.”

BLOWN OFF HIS FEET

Richard Whitaker, an 82-year-old who is winding down his small sheep and hay farm on the Argentia Access Road near Placentia Bay, said recently that although his operation sustained no real damage during the January blizzard, just coping with the extreme conditions was tough.

His main home is some 100 kilometres away from his farm, although he has a cabin on the farm property.

“There were a lot of issues – snow clearance, insufficient water supply, extreme cold,” he said. “While on snowshoes going to the barn, I was blown off my feet three times. I had a lot of problems getting the tractor moving as it was snowed in with heavy ice packed on the heater cables and the fuel pump. And I was at the farm all by myself.”

Whitaker is fortunate in that his steel-clad barns are positioned end-on to prevailing northeasterly winds, so no damage occurred.

“I was scared because if the wind had got under the roof, it would have torn it off,” he said. “And with 60 ewes in the barn, that could have been a disaster.”

Whitaker, a longtime environmentalist, believes it’s imperative that government and industry prepare for the inevitable changes brought on by climate change.

“I am afraid we are in for a lot of violent and extreme weather,” he said. “We must push the government to force greenhouse gas reduction on the nation. Whether we like it or not, GHGs contribute to the problem. We need to minimize fuel consumption and GHG-generating practices. This likely includes feedlot operations, feed composition, and manure handling. We are in a climate crisis worldwide.”

USING SNOW TUNNELS

At the Three Mile Ridge farm and country store near Lethbridge, N.L., Krista and David Chatman and their family are also trying to cope with the effects of winter weather.

Lethbridge is around 225 kilometres northwest of St. John’s.

“We didn’t get it as bad as St. John’s, but we lost the plastic on one of our (three) greenhouses,” said Krista Chatman, adding that it’s costly to replace the plastic on a 16-by-32-foot greenhouse. “We have a lot of blowdown trees on our fields and those will have to be cleared. And when you have livestock, you have to get to them, and our barns aren’t really close to our house. So, it was quite difficult coping with all this.”

Due to high levels of drifting snow, much work is required in keeping building entrances cleared, she said, noting that family members were walking through multiple snow tunnels just to gain access to their farm buildings.

“We’ve got a six-foot-high fence as one of the pens out there, and my dog walks right over it now,” she said.

Like most other area residents, the Chatmans have expended a good deal of concern and energy removing snow from roofs.

“If we hadn’t kept on taking the snow off, they would have caved in,” said Chatman. “We had to remove snow from our boys’ bedroom windows because they couldn’t see out, and you need to always have an escape route in case of emergency.”

With the effects of climate change becoming increasingly obvious, she said the challenge is still being productive despite the weather.

“We practice crop rotation, so organics stay really good in our soil and they absorb and hold water well,” said Chatman. “You really have to watch the weather, be able to know what’s coming a week in advance so you can better cope with weather extremes.”

New website urges Island farmers to discuss mental health

by Kathy Birt

The P.E.I. Department of Agriculture and Land launched a new website – www.farmerstalk.ca – on Jan. 30 to help farmers, their family members, and others in the industry access mental health information and resources.

“Crop scouts saw signs of farmers under stress and that started the conversation,” Agriculture and Land Minister Bloyce Thompson said recently. “This FarmersTalk.ca site is the result of hard work from my department.”

The website includes information on how to recognize signs of chronic stress and suicide in oneself and others, coping mechanisms, resources for those experiencing mental health issues, and testimonial videos.

The website is part of P.E.I.’s Farmer Assistance Program, which is a service that provides confidential, professional counselling services to Island farmers and their families.

Himself a lifelong dairy farmer, Thompson said he’s seen first-hand mental health issues in other farmers. “I knew a couple of farmers who committed suicide and I feel that I’m now in a position where I could do something about it,” he said.

Former P.E.I. hog producer Donald MacDonald agreed to appear in a video that can be found on the FarmersTalk.ca site as his way of reaching out to hopefully make a difference. In the video, he discusses a farming friend who was struggling with a downturn in the hog industry.

“I knew this farmer pretty well,” MacDonald recalled. “He came up to the farm every two to three weeks to buy wiener pigs. We had that same routine. One day, we were loading pigs. He made the comment, ‘I’m in this until I die.’”

The next day, MacDonald heard that the man had taken his own life. “I thought when he made that comment, he meant his own natural death,” he said. “I never thought of suicide.”

MacDonald farmed hogs from 1982 until 2016 when he sold his farm to Scott Dingwell of Hometown Pork in Mount Stewart. He stayed on as farm manager.

He noted that the closure of the Natural Organic Food Group (NOFG) pork processing plant in 2008 hurt a lot of Island farmers. “We had 325 producers in 1999, and by 2015 there was just 15 to 20,” said MacDonald. “Some had other commodities, and some got out of farming altogether.” 

While he admits he’s retirement age, he said he’s quite content to stay on as the hog farm’s manager, with an eye to world events that can and do affect Island producers.

“All this business with the arrest of that Chinese woman (Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou) in December 2018 has caused a big drop in hog prices,” said MacDonald. “China put tariffs on Canadian pork and that affects the price right to the farm gate in P.E.I.”

Thompson said such situations are examples of how world events are out of farmers’ control. “No matter how good a job you do, trade deals, tariffs can shut down commodities that are crucial to the farmers’ livelihood,” he said. “There are so many factors in farming that are out of your control. You invest everything in the spring and there’s no guarantees that in the fall things will work out.”

While politics is now taking up the bulk of his time, Thompson said he’s very much in tune with what could happen when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate. He said a farmer could be employing as many as 15 people and all those jobs are at stake if the farmer has a bad year.

“It’s not just the farmer and his family that have to be fed,” he said. “All those families have to be fed, so a farmer has to be a good financial manager, a conservationist, agrologist, an expert veterinarian, do human resources, we wear so many hats.”

Although Thompson’s farm is now in trust, he said he still goes to the barn at 5:30 a.m. every day he’s home.

“I have gotten used to getting up that early all my life,” said Thompson, adding that there are similarities between farming and politics. “When you open the barn door each day, you don’t know what you’ll walk into. You are a decision-maker in farming. You are always making decisions that affect your livelihood. The same thing could be said about politics.”

He said farmers are born to be tough and resilient. “But at the end of the day, it’s a fact that eventually it wears on you,” said Thompson. “Farmers are human and can get into dark places and feel there is no way out. If this website saves one person and/or helps to end the stigma (of mental health issues), it has done the work we set out to do.”

The numbers for P.E.I.’s Farmer Assistance Program, which fielded 140 calls last year, are 902-894-8006 or toll-free at 1-800-736-8006. The immediate issue can be shared over the phone and a face-to-face talk with a professional counsellor can be arranged.

Improving nitrogen-use efficiency should be a priority

by Amy Sangster

More than half the world’s population is nourished by crops grown with nitrogen fertilizers, and yet nitrogen remains one of the most challenging nutrients to manage.

Day to day, nutrient loss on farms goes undetected; we cannot see or smell it. Research suggests this undetected loss is especially significant after harvest when there is no crop to utilize the residual nitrogen. This results in significant nitrogen losses from the field both to the air and to water, and can also result in a significant loss to the grower’s bank account. 

Improving nitrogen-use efficiency, which is the fraction of fertilizer nitrogen that is actually taken up by the plant, results in increased crop yield and decreased environmental risk. So this should be a priority for any grower and agronomist. 

However, it’s challenging to match crop demand with soil nitrogen availability. Plants require nutrients in relatively small amounts in the early spring as they begin growing, then a greater nutrient requirement in the mid-season as vegetative growth accelerates, and then a smaller nutrient requirement again as they mature later in the season.

Trying to meet all of the crop’s nutrient needs with just one nitrogen application in the spring leaves many avenues for nitrogen loss throughout the season. In an attempt to circumvent this, we split fertilizer applications. The additional application can be made later when the crop’s requirements are greater. However, the nitrogen cycle is a leaky one and nitrogen is often over-applied in order to have some assurance that the crop will find enough nitrogen in the soil to complete its growth. 

The most commonly used commercial fertilizers are water-soluble fertilizers that release plant-available nutrients very quickly. For example, ammonium nitrate (AN or 34-0-0) provides readily available nitrogen in both the ammonium and nitrate form. Most agricultural crops prefer the negatively charged nitrate form of nitrogen. But some, such as lowbush blueberries, prefer the positively charged ammonium form.

Urea (46-0-0), on the other hand, must undergo some biologically mediated transformations before it’s converted into the plant-available nitrate. This happens by what you can imagine as a production line, and workers (microorganisms) on the line have tools (enzymes) that ultimately convert urea into plant-available nitrate. 

The global fertilizer industry has been working to develop fertilizers called controlled-release fertilizers and slow-release fertilizers. However, both of these terms can be somewhat misleading, and these products might be better described as delayed-release fertilizers. 

Controlled- or slow-release fertilizers can be classified into two basic groups. One group contains compounds of low solubility and coated water-soluble fertilizers. Other products, known as nitrogen stabilizers or bio-inhibitors, reduce nitrogen losses by slowing nitrogen transformations, or, in other words, control the tools along the “microbial production line.” 

Controlled-release fertilizers are typically coated or encapsulated fertilizer granules resulting in a controlled rate, pattern, and duration of plant nutrient release. The most common coated controlled-release fertilizers are sulphur- and polymer-coated products.

Sulphur-coated urea is an older product that was first produced in 1972. The polymer-coated urea (i.e. ESN) has more recently become popular, and its release is regulated by polymer chemistry, coating thickness, soil moisture, and soil temperature. It should be emphasized that these controlled-release products should only be considered controlled as much as you can control soil moisture and temperature. 

Bio-inhibitors are generally either urease or nitrification inhibitors. When urea is applied, the bio-inhibitor NBTP (N-(n-butyl) thiophosphoric triamide) inhibits the urease enzyme, which is the first “tool” to be used in the eventual conversion to nitrate. A commercially available example of the NBTP inhibitor is Agrotain. A common commercial nitrification inhibitor is DCD (dycandiamide), which goes by the trade name SuperU.

The NBTP inhibitors are marketed to reduce ammonia volatilization. However, with our wet springs, we typically get enough rainfall to prevent extreme ammonia volatilization from spring urea applications. Both inhibitors can then be used to slow the “production line,” which ultimately produces nitrate.

Research in Ontario showed that these two inhibitors were effective in delaying nitrification when spring-applied to corn. This trial showed peak conversion to nitrate occurred at about two weeks in the regular urea applied treatment and occurred at about three weeks in the Agrotain treatment, while the SuperU treatment’s peak nitrification was delayed past 30 days after application. Again, this delay is dependent on soil climatic conditions, so it’s difficult to predict the exact time of release after application. 

Regardless of the fertilizer product used, proper nutrient management should include the “four Rs” of fertilizer use: apply the right nutrient, at the right rate, at the right time, and in the right place for the selected crop. These fertilizer technologies can’t replace common sense or the value of observing the unique conditions of your farm.

Finally, don’t forget that some of the most valuable slow-release nitrogen fertilizers are manure and compost, which give far-reaching benefits beyond just slowly releasing nitrogen through the growing season.

(Amy Sangster is a soil specialist with Perennia Food and Agriculture Inc. based in Bible Hill, N.S.)

Newly elected AANB president introduces herself

by Lisa Ashworth

Greetings from the frozen north – of New Brunswick that is! The Agricultural Alliance of New Brunswick (AANB) held its AGM on Jan. 16 and 17, and I had the privilege of being elected president of the organization.

Having been an AGM delegate numerous times and a director on the AANB board for the past number of years, I can honestly say I am always amazed by the work of New Brunswick’s largest general farm organization. The AANB strives to assist in fostering a prosperous and sustainable industry for all producers, whether small or large, conventional or organic.

I am looking forward to meeting as many stakeholders as possible and learning more about the great things happening here in our province as we move toward the future together.  

 Given that this is the beginning of my term, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and give a bit of background regarding my life in agriculture. I was raised in Mount Thom, N.S., on a small beef and blueberry farm. We were an active 4-H family, so a wide variety of projects and activities were a regular part of our household. Along with having public speaking, meeting management, and record keeping as part of my life from a young age, I can credit these early years for fostering a love of nature, an enjoyment of meeting people, and always learning new things.

After high school, I attended the Nova Scotia Agricultural College (now Dalhousie University’s Agricultural Campus) to complete a bachelor of science degree in animal science. Here I was able to add to my beef and poultry knowledge and learn much more about other livestock species and how the industry as a whole functions.

Enjoying the university experience meant I took part in the judging team and student union, among other activities. Four years of university led to an opportunity to continue studying and gain some really interesting research experience. I completed a master of science degree in nutrition, and expanded my horizons from land-based agriculture to studying the amino acid requirements for health and efficient growth in Atlantic salmon.

There was one more post-secondary educational stop before it was time to join the workforce. A bachelor of education degree from Mount Allison University helped to provide me with the tools needed to be an effective teacher, and I have to admit that most of the presentations required to qualify as a science and math teacher had an agricultural theme.

Putting all of these educational pieces together led me to an exciting two years of work at NSAC before I moved into my next stage of life. As the NSAC’s animal science technical program coordinator, I was privileged to help develop and teach the curriculum that gave hands-on knowledge to students wishing to pursue a career in animal agriculture. 

 As a reader, you may notice that there is not a mention of dairy or New Brunswick anywhere in the narrative to this point. Life has a funny way of unfolding sometimes! After a youth immersed in 4-H and avoiding all dairy production courses during university because I had no great interest in the industry, I married a dairy farmer and settled in northwestern New Brunswick where there was lots of French spoken and not much interest in 4-H. So the adventure was a new one for me on all fronts, and who doesn’t love a grand adventure? 

 That was 20-plus years ago, and three children later we have had many great adventures both on and off the farm. As our kids became more independent, I was able to devote time to many volunteer activities in sports, education, community healthcare, and church. But most recently, my involvement with the AANB has brought me full circle to once again enjoy being involved in the diversity of our great agricultural industries.

Through the AANB and my involvement as the Canadian Federation of Agriculture’s New Brunswick representative, I am meeting producers, hearing stories of our strengths and challenges, and looking forward to helping maximize the potential of agriculture to grow our province’s economy.  

 I believe that one of the great assets in rural communities is the ability to come together and work for the betterment of the entire group, and I see this trait in the activities that the AANB has undertaken on behalf of its membership.

With thoughtful resolutions passed at the AGM to help guide the work of a dedicated board of directors during the coming year, I look forward to my role on the team and moving forward together. Now if Mother Nature would like to join our team for the entire season, we would all be exceedingly grateful!

(Lisa Ashworth is president of the Agricultural Alliance of New Brunswick.)