Cracks and dirts

A friend has provided me with a copy of the information whistleblower Norman Bourdeau has provided to a number of regulatory agencies, including the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission.

Among items not so far reported by anyone are:

- The Canadian Food Inspection Agency granted Gray the right to reduce wash-water temperatures from 40 to 32 degrees Celsius. An e-mail between Peter Westelaken and Scott Brookshaw indicates aerobic bacteria colony counts on three samples were 1.8 million, three million and 2.7 million: the target is less than 100,000.

- Bourdeau's allegation, backed by e-mail correspondence, that L.H. Gray and Son Ltd. "sold" worthless cracks and dirts culled from regular pickups at farms as "nest-run" program eggs to the Ontario Egg Board at $1.50per dozen. An e-mail from Scott Brookshaw, vice-president of operations, says "make sure production staff knows to keep up taking the dirty out of the pack as they are being sent Nest Run."

- Ian McKillop, past president of the Ontario Cattlemen's Association, and his brother, Alan, benefitted from Gray's practice of putting cracks and dirts into Grade A retail cartons. For example, a pickup of 7,200 dozen on Aug, 24, 2009, contained 105 dozen cracks and 22 dozen dirts, but Gray's report to the Egg Farmers of Ontario Marketing Board was that there were only 68 dozen cracks and no dirts. This discrepancy was worth $164.97on that pickup.

- The McKillop discrepancy is peanuts compared with one or two thousand dollars per pickup for some other farmers.

- The documents indicate that the better the eggs the farmers shipped, the lower the "discrepancies". For example, on a Nov. 11, 2009, shipment from Griffith Farms, the discrepancy on a pickup of 8,100 dozen was $1,114.84. On Dec. 15, 2009, Playford shipped 4,260 dozen and the discrepancy was only $30.97.

- Gray cheated the egg board on bird counts. On June 14, 2009, Ross Snyder e-mailed Scott Brookshaw that inspector Chris Vanderkooy was coming  to count birds in early September, and he asked whether he should "open the wall and let them go" so the excess birds in barn 31 could mingle "with older birds. Then we would go undetected."

I have also learned that the British Columbia Farm Industry Review Board has been informed about similar Gray grading practices at Golden Valley egg grading, which accounts for about 80 per cent of the B.C. market. Since egg farmers, including some directors on the B.C. egg marketing board, are in a co-operative that shares ownership of Golden Valley, I wonder how vigorous the B.C. authorities will be about cracking down.

If they take their cues from Geri Kamenz, chairman of the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission, they will stick their heads firmly in the sand.

Kamenz is refusing to conduct an inquiry on the grounds that Bourdeau's allegations are before the courts. Only a small fraction of the alleged wrongdoing is before the courts.  For example, the allegation that Gray sells culls to the board as "nest run" program eggs is certainly not before the courts and surely worthy of an investigation on behalf of egg farmers and the public.

For the record, Gray denies any wrongdoing. The allegations and Gray claims of innocence have yet to be tested in court.

Burnbrae and CFIA censor reports

On Feb. 21 I asked the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for the 2009-2010 inspection or audit reports for egg-grading and egg-procesing operations of Burnbrae Farms Mississauga.

Today, the first day of resumed Canada Post service, I received a stack of useless documents so heavily censored that virtually nothing remains. Only on a few of the reports have they allowed me to see that "product must meet grade claimed."

Incidentally, one of those reports is for eggs from L.H. Gray and Son Ltd.

Most of the censorship has been applied under Section 20 (1) (b) which says : "financial, commercial, scientific or technical information that is confidential information supplied to a government institution by a third party and is treated consistently in a confidential manner by the third party."

Some has been applied under Section 19 (1) which covers personal information.

So, dear Canadians, we are not allowed to see any shortcomings in Burnbrae's egg-grading and egg-processing operations at Mississauga.

And egg farmers can't know why some of the eggs at Burnbrae, the biggest egg-grading company in Canada, fail to meet the grade claimed.

This is why whistleblowers are so useful, and why Bill Gray is going to extraordinary lengths to keep whistleblower Norman Bourdeau from sharing information he took from L.H. Gray and Sons Ltd.

Wasted food could end hunger

Washington, D.C.- Roughly a third of food is wasted, according to new statistics from the United Nations’  Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). That’s about 1.3 billion tons per year.

In the developing world, over 40 percent of food losses occur after harvest-while being stored or transported, and during processing and packing.

In industrialized countries, more than 40 percent of losses occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but often perfectly edible food.

“At a time when the land, water, and energy resources necessary to feed a global population of 6.9 billion are increasingly limited-and when at least one billion people remain chronically hungry-food losses mean a waste of those resources and a failure of our food system to meet the needs of the poor,” says the Worldwatch Institute.

According to Tristram Stuart, a contributing author of Worldwatch's State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet report, some 150 million tons of grains are lost annually in low-income countries, six times the amount needed to meet the needs of all the hungry people in the developing world.

Meanwhile, industrialized countries waste some 222 million tons of perfectly good food annually, a quantity nearly equivalent to the 230 million tons that sub-Saharan Africa produces in a year.

Unlike farmers in many developing countries, however, agribusinesses in industrial countries have numerous tools at their disposal to prevent food from spoiling-including pasteurization and preservation facilities, drying equipment, climate-controlled storage units, transport infrastructure, and chemicals designed to expand shelf-life.

"All this may ironically have contributed to the cornucopian abundance that has fostered a culture in which staggering levels of 'deliberate' food waste are now accepted or even institutionalized," writes Stuart in his chapter, "Post-Harvest Losses: A Neglected Field."

"Throwing away cosmetically 'imperfect' produce on farms, discarding edible fish at sea, over-ordering stock for supermarkets, and purchasing or cooking too much food in the home, are all examples of profligate negligence toward food," he wrote.

 "Humanity is approaching -- and in some places exceeding -- the limits of potential farmland and water supplies that can be used for farming," says Worldwatch Institute Executive Director Robert Engelman.

"We're already facing food price spikes and the early impacts of human-caused climate change on food production. We can't afford to overlook simple, low-cost fixes to reduce food waste," he says.

The Worldwatch Institute has several suggestions: 

·Getting surpluses to those who need it. As mountains of food are thrown out every day in the cities of rich countries, some of the poorest citizens still struggle to figure out their next meal. The institute mentions several large food banks as one answer.

  

·Raising consumer awareness and reducing waste to landfills. Those who can easily afford to buy food - and throw it away - rarely consider how much they discard or find alternatives to sending unwanted food to the landfill. In 2010, however, San Francisco became the first city to pass legislation requiring all households to separate both recycling and compost from garbage. Nutrient-rich compost created by the municipal program is made available to farmers. The Love Food Hate Waste website in the United Kingdom has online recipes for using leftovers as well as tips and advice for reducing personal food waste.  

·Improving storage and processing for small-scale farmers in developing countries. In the absence of expensive, Western-style grain stores and processing facilities, smallholders can undertake a variety of measures to prevent damage to their harvests. In Pakistan, the United Nations helped farmers cut their storage losses by up to 70 percent by simply replacing jute bags and mud-wall storages with metal grain storage bins. Purdue University is helping communities in rural Niger store cow peas in hermetically-sealed plastic bags. Another innovative project uses solar energy to dry mangoes after harvest; each year, more than 100,000 tons of the fruit go bad before reaching the market in western Africa.   

                              

Gray golf tournament

L.H. Gray and Son Ltd. and Gray Ridge Egg Farms have raised $10,000 for two ventures that support the Ontario Farm Animal Council (OFAC) and Agricultural Groups Concerned About Resources and the Environment  (AGCare).

The money was raised through Gray’s fifth annual customer appreciation golf tournament June 21 at St. Marys. The total is about double what organizers anticipated.

More than 160 people, most of them egg farmers or from businesses related to eggs, participated and donated.

The money will go into the newly-formed Farm Care Foundation and the Young Ambassador program begun in 2008 in honour of the late Jim Johnstone, egg farmer and founding chairman of OFAC.

Bill Gray, owner of Gray Ridge, said “we saw our golf tournament as being a

great opportunity to raise awareness and support for this valuable

cause. 

“We're proud to be part of a program that helps to ensure

agriculture's voice is heard by Canadian consumers."

                                                -30-

Another Grayridge blog

Melissa Snyder has posted another e-mail between Scott Brookshaw, vice-president of operations, and his boss and company owner Bill Gray of Grayridge Eggs Ltd.

Scott writes to Bill:  “When I met Harry (Pelissero, general manager of the Egg Farmers of Ontario marketing board) today he will give $1000 per week and tell me how to invoice the Egg Board.  Based on a 65000 pound load that gives 1.54 cents per pound.  The extra transportation cost is 1.5 cents per pound so the money we will get for breaking the 65000 pounds of egg white for drying will be a bonus.  We can start with a load next week.  Harry will only pay for one load as he is going to try and hide this.  Wants us to keep quiet.  Scott.”


Sure looks like collusion to do something improper, doesn't it?

False security

Canada's dairy and poultry marketing boards issued a news release hailing an agreement among farm leaders of 66 countries, basically opposing freer trade.

Canada's marketing board spokesmen said they oppose tariff reductions, which is no surprise, but they cloak that opposition in the claim that it's necessary for food security.

Nonsense!

The greatest food security is enough money to buy food.

The second-greatest food security is to have free trade so, with enough money to buy food, it can be bought and brought from any corner of the world.

That, one might imagine, would be a policy that farmers would support. They would always be able to sell whatever they produce, if everybody had enough money to buy the food they want and need, and without trade barriers, good-quality food would always command a fair price.

Some will no doubt worry that the world's farmers might produce too much food, driving prices down below their cost of production.  I say let's worry about that when and if it happens; right now we have more than 800 million people without enough nutrition.

I much prefer a world where political leaders focus their attention on ensuring all people have enough money to buy the food they need to today's world where our political leaders are pressured by farmers into stale-mating the Doha Round of world trade negotiations which are, I remind you, intended to focus on agriculture and to redress the failures of the Uruguay Round to address the needs of the poorest people in the poorest nations.

Chicken barons ignore Northern Ontario

The Chicken Farmers of Ontario marketing board has no compassion or policy to allow a chicken industry to develop on Manitoulin Island or anywhere else across Northern Ontario.

This is an issue that is likely to end up before the Ontario Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Appeals Tribunal.

Max Burt, the son of a proven chicken farmer on Manitoulin Island, has been struggling to achieve legitimacy for his fully-integrated chicken business - raising, slaughtering and selling them fresh to local customers.

The chicken board refuses to accept the family claims about how many chickens it was producing when the marketing board gained power to control chicken production for the entire province and refuses to believe that the family did not know it needed to apply for quota.

Yet this same chicken board seemed to be ignorant of ongoing chicken production on Manitoulin Island. My guess is the board learned because processors in Southern Ontario, eager to retain their monopoly on sales to stores in Northern Ontario, drew the board's attention to Burt Farms.

In any case, the chicken board did learn about chicken production and processing at Burt Farm and moved to squelch the business.

Max Burt has invested an enormous amount of time and effort in developing a meat-processing plant that is government-approved and inspected to slaughter a variety of species, ranging from cattle to chickens. He has developed a loyal clientele eager to buy locally-produced products, including chicken, some of them raised to niche-market standards such as free range.

Burt has no intention of ever producing and processing enough chicken to begin marketing in Southern Ontario, but he would like to serve the local markets which he is convinced would expand if the people could buy locally-produced and fresh chicken instead of what's trucked hundreds of kilometres from the Toronto area.

But the chicken board stands in the way. It won't allow him to produce chicken unless and until he buys quota from one of its millionaire members in Southern Ontario. And if he does grow chicken without quota, the marketing board will throw him under the bus.

Burt has stated his case in hearings before the directors and staff of the chicken board. They refuse to bend. He has appealed their decisions. They refuse to bend. So now Burt is pondering an appeal to the tribunal.

It ought not to take Max Burt of Burt Farms that much time and effort.  The McGuinty government, which bestowed one of its Premier's Agri-Food Innovation Awards on Burt Farms in 2008, ought to intervene to set things right by ordering the chicken board to issue special quota for Northern Ontario.

It could, while it's at it, make this free quota and ban its sale out of Northern Ontario.

This is far from the first time this issue of chicken board injustice against Northern Ontario has been raised. In 1984, Elie Martel, NDP member for part of Northern Ontario, raised the issue in the Ontario legislature, noting that there is no chicken quota in all of Northern Ontario.

At that time, he said a young farmer who wanted to grow chicken would have to buy quota in Southern Ontario, produce at the same farm where that chicken quota was located for two years and only then would he qualify to apply to the marketing board for permission to move the quota to his farm in Northern Ontario.  For obvious reasons, nobody did that.

And so, Martel complained, "he cannot even produce legally for local consumers."

Yet between then and now, the chicken board "discovered" large-scale chicken-producing farms in Eastern Ontario, all of them without quota, merrily producing thousands of kilograms of chicken for processors in Quebec.

After much controversy, those farmers were granted special "interprovincial" quota, and later that was converted into regular Ontario chicken quota. Those farmers, who had no track record of chicken production before the marketing board gained supply management powers, have joined the millionaires' club. Meanwhile, the Burt family, which has a track record of chicken production, is frozen out.

The chicken board could create special quota for Northern Ontario and issue enough to Burt Farm to cover production for local customers.  And if it won't, the McGuinty government could and should intervene to make it happen.