Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz lavished $700,000 on the Canadian Fertilizer Institute for research into greenhouse gas mitigation.
But the institute has already decided that it's 4R Nutrient Stewardship program is the answer - Right Source, Right Rate, Right Time and Right Place.
The money will, therefore, be spent to justify the Fertilizer Institute's program.
And the Canadian fertilizer industry hardly needs any help from taxpayers. It has rigged prices to all-time highs, including government-approved price-rigging for the Saskatchewan potash mining companies which happen to dominate Canadian fertilizer sales to farmers.
I have a hard time come up with a more egregious example of waste of taxpayer's money out of agriculture department budgets.
Moreover, the federal agriculture department cancelled its near-useless fertilizer quality-monitoring program this year.
It was nearly useless because companies had a choice whether they wanted to participate.
Those who did were consistently shown, year after year, to be short-changing farmers on full value for what they were being sold.
The way the standards worked, companies could be way out of whack on meeting claims for individual components - nitrogen, phosphorous and potash - just so long as the combination of all three fell within a tolerance for combined value of the three nutrients.
And even with that degree of flexibility, a huge percentage of the samples collected under the agriculture department program flunked.
And now we, the taxpayers, are forced by Ritz to fork over $700,000 to these companies.
Some kind of stewardship that is!
