Clutching at straw

“I should’ve never took up with her,” sings Fred Eaglesmith, in full-on forlorn mode. “Should’ve never had a girl who didn’t know hay from straw.”

It’s a great lyric – both the syntax and the sentiment. I think of that song whenever the topic of straw comes up, as it did recently when a friend mentioned that he was having trouble sourcing straw bales for a building project.

I don’t know why this construction technique hasn’t become more popular, because there is much to recommend it, in terms of cost, comfort, and reduced carbon footprint. In the Maritime climate, straw-bale houses usually have a roof with a generous overhang, to prevent moisture problems (with the added advantage of keeping the house cool in summer).

No one builds with hay, of course, because it would be more susceptible to rot or mould issues, and more likely to include seeds that would attract mice. There is also a notion, among some straw-bale construction advocates, that it is more sustainable because this material is essentially a waste product, whereas hay is a feed source. But these days a lot of straw is fed to dairy cows, usually as a component in total mixed rations (TMR). Along with the strong demand for livestock bedding and garden mulch, this means straw is sometimes in short supply – at least here in Nova Scotia, where grain acreage is relatively small, and especially in the form of old-fashioned square bales. My friend says he may actually have to buy round bales and pay someone to bust them up and re-bale them, to get a few hundred squares for his exterior walls.

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As of July 1, grain grown in the United States is now eligible to receive an official Canadian grade if it is a variety registered in Canada, and it will no longer require a country-of-origin statement on its inspection certificate when it is brought into Canada.

These amendments to the Canadian Grain Act were included in Bill C-4, the legislation to implement the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement (CUSMA – or in America-first parlance, USMCA), which was hammered out (arduously, as I recall) in late 2018, to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada was the last of the three signatories to ratify the new deal. Bill C-4 was introduced late this January, and expedited due to rising concerns over the COVID-19 situation – passing on March 13, the same day Parliament was suspended. A long-promised public review of the Canadian Grain Act had been planned for this spring, but that went by the wayside.

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has raised concerns that this hasty legislative process resulted in insufficient scrutiny of the amendments to the Grain Act, including changes that were not negotiated under CUSMA and not debated in committee hearings. Canada had only agreed to treat U.S. wheat the same as domestically grown wheat, but the amended Act extends this privilege to all U.S.-grown grain: oats and peas and barley – and also rye, beans, buckwheat, canola, chick peas, corn, flaxseed, lentils, mustard, rapeseed, safflower seed, soybeans, sunflower seed, and triticale (a wheat-rye hybrid) – and any others that may crop up, so to speak.

“The NFU was the only group that even caught it. Everybody assumed it was only going to be wheat,” says Cam Goff, a grain producer in Hanley, Saskatchewan, who served as a director on the Canadian Wheat Board until its termination in 2011. “We tried to make a stink about it, but we had no time. We had about a week, and then COVID hit. This is a very bad thing that has happened, and time will show that.”

Agricultural trade issues do not resonate much with the general public, but Goff believes this is one that really shouldn’t have been allowed to slip by unnoticed. “It affects all Canadians, and not in a good way,” he says. “Canada has a reputation for having the best grain in the world. Nobody has any better. We definitely have a much better system, as far as registering our varieties to ensure the consistency is there, in all of the grains that we grow and ship.”

Goff says Canada has very little enforcement capacity to ensure that grain coming into Canada really is what it is supposed to be. And even if it is a variety registered in Canada, there could be considerable differences in quality.

“If they’re growing it 200 miles south of where it was intended, it may not have some of the same properties as the grain grown up north – qualities that allow it to fit into a certain class of grain,” he says. “Bill C-4 weakens the Canadian Grain Commission’s ability to deal with problems resulting from admixture of U.S.-grown grain in Canadian shipments, such as dockage contaminated by herbicide-tolerant noxious weed seeds that are not found in Canada. It’s dangerous for our reputation.”

Although shipping U.S. grain north of the border is not a particularly attractive option at current exchange rates, a shift in market conditions could spur more U.S. producers to tap into this market – potentially overburdening Canada’s transport infrastructure, and driving up freight rates. (With COVID-related reductions in shipments of oil and containers, freed-up rail capacity has allowed for record Canadian grain shipments – mostly for export via Vancouver, and to a lesser extent through Prince Rupert and Thunder Bay – but this is expected to change.) The NFU has warned that an influx of cheaper grain, grown under U.S. farm subsidies, would put downward pressure on prices paid by Canadian elevator companies.

“We’re not afraid to compete head-to-head with U.S. producers, and have done so,” says Terry Byrne, a member of the NFU’s Ontario Regional Council, in a recent statement from the group, “but we cannot compete with the U.S. Treasury.”

It is disconcerting that Canadian officials slipped in these concessions while normal democratic oversight was curtailed. You have to wonder what else we may have bargained away, in our desperation to nail down a colossal trade deal. (I guess you could ask a dairy farmer.)

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With the COVID-era craze for home baking, there was a brief period when all-purpose flour was hard to find in Canadian grocery stores – as scarce as square bales of straw, you might say – and perhaps as over-hyped as toilet paper hysteria. In fact, there was never any shortage of flour or wheat in this breadbasket nation; our vast reserves just weren’t conveniently packaged in small, retail-friendly bags. Presumably this has now been sorted out. (What would a real shortage look like? I guess we could ask the people of Syria.)

Amid the flour frenzy, more consumers turned to local producers – and we should probably view this as a positive development. In Europe, there were reports of historic mills being cranked up to full capacity, including the Moulin de Hollange, near Fauvillers, Belgium. At this mill, located on a tributary of the Sûre River, the millstones are normally driven by two waterwheels – though with recent dry weather, the operator was faced with the possibility of having to use backup electric power. In the U.K., the Sturminster Newton Mill, on the River Stour, in Dorset, went into commercial production for the first time in 50 years. This mill dates back to 1611, and normally operates as a museum. When it was forced to close its doors to tourists, the operators got to work milling and bagging flour for the local market.

Those are rather quaint examples. Here in the Atlantic provinces, there are producers oriented more toward nourishment than nostalgia – notably Speerville Flour Mill in New Brunswick, as well as smaller operations like Bear River Farms in Nova Scotia – and there are other farms that mill some grain as part of their diverse product offerings, for direct sales. In recent years, RD has profiled Crystal Green Farms in Bedeque, P.E.I., and Longspell Point Farm in Kingsport, N.S. In the Chronicle Herald, Aaron Beswick recently wrote about Sweet Mountain Farm, in Antigonish County, where Riley and Gabe Chisholm have gone into the flour business on a modest scale.

If you have a favourite local flour supplier, please write and tell us. Commodities have their place, but we know that national and global supply chains are subject to disruption, for any number of reasons – so it’s important to maintain a network of producers and processors close to home. This applies not only to food, but also to animal feed. (Similarly, with the recent rush on building materials, we should be glad to have family-run sawmills that will sell lumber directly to consumers, and portable mill operators who will do custom orders.)

Growing grain is not kids’ stuff. You can’t just sort out the best part of the crop for premium markets. And in addition to the quality standards that must be met, there is the economic requirement to achieve sufficient yields. But not all farmers view this the same way. One grain producer in this region, who leans more toward low-input methods and local markets, recently suggested to me that it would be nice to see less emphasis on yield: “Wouldn’t it make for a much better good-news story to share how farmers are competing to regenerate and grow the best soil, the healthiest micro-organisms, the most diverse soil life?”

We’ll take that under advisement. DL