Our Nature is Organicwww.cog.ca Spring-Summer 2014 – 1

SPRING-SUMMER 2014MAGAZINE.COG.CA

Agroforesty: a mushroom business

Adding livestock to your farm

Resurgence of the Dugout

The Canadian Organic Grower www.cog.ca2 – Spring-Summer 2014

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Our Nature is Organicwww.cog.ca Spring-Summer 2014 – 3

Canadian Organic GrowerFeaturesDepartments

Editorial .................................5Adding Livestock to Your Farm

COG Donation and BookForm .....................................16

Classifieds ............................29

The Last Word .....................30 Want to Help the Movement? Be a #roadiefarmer

Resurgence of the Simple Dugout ...............................8

Agroforestry ................................................................10A Porcini and Chanterelle Mushroom Business

Library update.............................................................14News and New Arrivals

Our Small Scale Cooler Solution................................18

Les Viandes Rheintal...................................................22Sébastien Angers & Guylaine Buecheli, Sainte-Monique QC

The

Contributors:Nicki Ault, Rebeca Kuropatwa, Karyn Wright, Laura Telford, Ann Slater, Maryann Roebuck, Nicole Chartrand, Allison Grant, Sébastien Angers, Guylaine Buecheli and Jordan Marr

The Canadian Organic Grower www.cog.ca4 – Spring-Summer 2014

Cover photo credit: Nicki Ault Cover design: Irene Hawkings

The Canadian Organic Grower

Co-Editors Beth McMahon / Lily Pepper

editor@cog.ca

Advisory Committee Roxanne Beavers, Matthew Holmes,

Anne Macey, Stuart McMillan, Gwen O’Reilly, Av Singh,

Elizabeth White

Special Thanks

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Volume 11, Number 2 Spring-Summer 2014

FAREWELL

After 22 years of doing the layout and production work for the Canadian Organic Growers magazine, I am finally hanging up my keyboard.

I saw the magazine through its several versions including Cog-nition (with Liz Irving as editor), EcoFarm & Garden (I suggested renaming it RECognition but the powers that be wouldn’t have it!) and finally, The Canadian Organic Grower magazine (with Janet Wal-lace as editor).

I was privileged to have worked with some truly dedicated and talented people who taught me much over the years. The spirit of entrepreneurship was in them all, as they juggled the duties of getting an informative magazine out four times a year with running farms, families and promoting healthy food.

During this time, I was often

able to access relevant informa-tion through the COG library for jobs that I have had. For example, information about community shared agriculture while I was a CSA Coordinator for the Quinte region in the 1990s, seed saving tips as I was learning how to run a successful heirloom seed company, and soil amendment info as I set up an organic gardening center for our region.

Now I can spend less time at a desk and devote more time pro-moting Terra Edibles and running my store, the Village Green. I feel blessed to have been associated with COG and will continue to help promote its good work in any way I can. Many thanks to all of my many COG mentors over the years.

Cheers, Karyn Wright

Karyn Wright, standing at her Terra Edibles seed table at the Guelph Organic Conference.

Our Nature is Organicwww.cog.ca Spring-Summer 2014 – 5

By Laura Telford

Have you ever thought about adding livestock to your organic farming operation? If not, here’s some food for thought.

On any farm, livestock can be a major source of income and help to balance cash flow over the year. On organic farms, livestock do more than that; they make the system work. In fact, some experts believe that you can’t make an organic farm work without livestock.

Here’s why: While mainstream producers have no trouble making essential nutrients such as phospho-rous available to crops, it’s much harder for organic producers to do so without a good source of manure. At a cost of $125 per acre and uneven supply across the country, many producers without livestock find it impossible to apply composted manure to their fields more than once in ten years.

Martin Entz and his research team at the Uni-versity of Manitoba have shown that livestock grazing can add value to green manure crops. The researchers have found that a pea/oat green manure on its own realizes a net return of $168 per acre. Grazing sheep on the same green manure produces a net financial return of $30 per acre. With a yield of 5,000 lb./ac. and 50% utilization (2,500 lb./ac.) and a 7% feed con-version ratio, you can expect a 175 lb./ac. live weight gain (Thiessen Martens and Entz, 2011) and turn a net economic loss into a net gain. Entz and his team also found that grazing the green manure does not reduce the amount of nitrogen (N) available to the following crop, which is the whole purpose of planting a green manure crop (Cicek et al., 2013). In fact, in some cases, grazing actually increased available N.

In addition to the economic arguments for keeping livestock, the environmental reasons are also compelling. By adding value to grasslands, ruminant species help to keep perennial forages intact. In the Prairie region, cattle have replaced bison as the key grassland ruminant, distributing and fertilizing grass seeds and keeping grasslands and native prairie in-tact. Without the value provided by cattle, the land would be cropped, and even under an organic man-agement system, cropping would have a significantly greater environmental footprint than a perennial forage system. Grasslands store carbon in plant matter

and in the soil. In fact, a third of the globe’s carbon supply is stored in grasslands.

With consumers becoming more interested in adding organic meat to their diets, this is a good time to consider adding livestock to your farm.

Laura Telford is the former national director of Canadian Organic Growers and is now the organic specialist for the province of Manitoba.

Laura and Anne Macey have just released the long awaited revision of the Organic Livestock Hand-book. This second edition includes new scientific in-formation about organic livestock production systems and contains in-depth profiles from some of Canada’s most successful organic livestock producers. You can read one of these profiles on page 22.

Thiessen Martens, J.R. and M.H. Entz. 2011. Integrating green manure and grazing systems: A review. Can. J. Plant Sci. 91:811-824.

Cicek, H., J.R. Thiessen Martens, K.C. Bamford and M.H. Entz. 2013. Effects of grazing two green manure crop types in organic farming systems: N sup-ply and productivity of following grain crops. Agric. Ecosyst. Environ. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2013.09.028

EDITORIAL: ADDING LIVESTOCK TO YOUR FARM

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The Canadian Organic Grower www.cog.ca6 – Spring-Summer 2014

By Op-ed Contributor, Ann Slater

In December, Bill C-18, The Agricultural Growth Act, was introduced in the House of Commons.

This omnibus bill amends several agricultural laws within a single piece of legislation, including the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act, the Seeds Act and the Fer-

tilizer Act. The bill passed second reading on June 17 and will go before the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food when the House resumes sitting this fall. Although Bill C-18 amends several agricultural laws, I am going to focus my discussion on the changes to the Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR) Act.

As an organic farmer, one of my first questions when looking at legislative and regulatory changes is how they fit with Canadian organic principles. Organic growing is based on some clear and widely accepted principles including the following:

• maintain biological diversity within the sys-tem,

• recycle materials and resources to the greatest extent within the enterprise and,

• rely on renewable resources in locally organ-ized agricultural systems.

The amendments to the PBR Act would bring Canada under the UPOV ‘911 regime of plant breed-er’s rights. The changes would give plant breeders exclusive control over the production, reproduction, conditioning (cleaning), stocking, importing and ex-porting of PBR-protected varieties of seed. Although Bill C-18 includes a “farmers’ privilege” exception, it also enables the Governor in Council (cabinet) to make regulations to restrict or put conditions around the “farmers’ privilege”.

Both Bill C-18 and the UPOV guidance doc-uments provide valuable information on potential regulations surrounding the “farmers’ privilege”. In the guidance documents, governments are advised to restrict any “farmers’ privilege” to crops where it is a common practice for farmers to save seeds at the time the legislation is brought into place, and to be prepared to remove crops from the privilege over time. Factors like size of farm, value of crop and area of crop grown are to be considered in regulations. Bill C-18 enables the government to exclude classes

1 UPOV is the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties. The Convention was most recently revised in 1991. Canada currently uses the UPOV ‘78 model law.

BILL C-18, THE AGRICULTURAL GROWTH ACT

Our Nature is Organicwww.cog.ca Spring-Summer 2014 – 7

of farmers, plant varieties and uses of harvested material from the “farmers’ privilege”. In my mind, the regulations around “farmers’ privilege” in C-18 could lead us away from using seed grown on our own and neighbouring farms.

PBR’s apply only to new varieties – not to older commercial varieties in the public domain and generally not to heritage seed. This may seem like a solution; however, organic farmers also use new varieties. The combination of ongoing cuts to public breeding and giving private plant breeders more control over seed, leaves the development of new varieties more and more in the hands of large seed and chemical companies. These companies are likely to put more emphasis on importing seed developed for larger markets than on breeding varieties for Canadian conditions. Over time, we are likely to have fewer new varieties available to us, leading to a loss of biological diversity.

Organic principles require us to find ways to rely on the renewable resources of our own farms and to increase biological diversity. When it comes to seeds, that means working towards Canadian seed laws that recognize our inherent right to save, reuse, select and exchange seed – and it means finding ways to develop new varieties suited to organic pro-duction that are freely shared within local organic agricultural communities.

Ann Slater has been growing and selling vegetables in St. Marys, Ontario, for over thirty years. Since the mid-1990s, the small intensive market garden has been her full-time occupation. Ann is continually adding new crops, always trying to keep in mind what vegetables people eat in her community, selling 99% of her vegetables within 10 km of the farm. http://annslaterorganics.com

WHEREORGANICFARMERS

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1-800-563-5441@outdoorfarmshow Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show

The Canadian Organic Grower www.cog.ca8 – Spring-Summer 2014

Dugouts, or farm ponds, have always been a part of agricultural landscapes; however, in recent years there has been an increased interest in

Manitoba in retaining more water on the land. This has led to the accelerated adoption of various water retention schemes, including basins, which are more commonly referred to as “dugouts”.

Dugouts serve many important ecological, social, and economic benefits for producers, communities and the environment. They help to reduce peak flows and flooding, as well as reduce nutrient loading, which is a major concern for Lake Winnipeg.

And while one may believe the problem of nutri-ent loading is solely from industrial agriculture (i.e. hog barns), experts say the problem is the result of decades of fertilized soil, which runs into the lake with every rainfall and spring melt.

Lorne Rossnagel of Plumas, MB, is a producer and vocal advocate of the simple dugout structure, as means to reduce harmful runoffs and protect the threatened Lake Winnipeg.

Farming since 1976, Rossnagel owns and manag-es a mixed farm operation of grain and cattle, with a larger percentage of the operation being cattle, due to the problems they have with water supply on their land.

“We’re at the bottom of the escarpment here,” ex-plained Rossnagel. “Right where we are, it’s extremely flat. To the west of us, the elevation starts increasing, anywhere from 10-25 feet per mile. So, if there’s any kind of large precipitation to the west of us, it travels down the hills, 100 miles an hour, until it gets here, which is basically where the buck stops. All around us is basically a series of hills and ridges. From where we are, here, to the Big Grass Marsh, it’s a fairly flat plain. The whole area here is so flat that drainage for everyone in the area is a huge issue, because of the lack of elevation and slope.”

Rossnagel heard of the dugout concept when attending a water meeting in Winnipeg. “A fellow from the University of Manitoba gave a talk about digging, drainage, and water storage,” he recalled. “I thought to myself that this is something we’re al-

ready doing and then saw the even bigger potential of them – keeping a lot more water in the country.”

For Rossnagel, the dugout concept is not the be-all-end-all solution to runoff, but it is certainly part of the solution. Not only do these dugouts hold and store some of the runoff, they also provide water for livestock in times of low precipitation.

“Before the dugouts, the excess water went zoom-ing right on by,” said Rossnagel. “A lot of it ended up in creeks and ditches that were already overloaded. That water ended up in Lake Manitoba and eventually into Lake Winnipeg.”

The dugout they built is about 650ft long, 150ft wide, and about 25ft deep. The Rossnagels hired two track hoes to excavate the hole. Then they used a bulldozer to push the excavated material back from the edge of the dugout to reduce the risk of future

By Rebeca Kuropatwa

RESURGENCE OF THE SIMPLE DUGOUT

Dugout construction and dredging in Manitoba. Photo credit: Government of Manitoba.

Our Nature is Organicwww.cog.ca Spring-Summer 2014 – 9

cave-ins. Next, they built a fence around the dugout, so

none of their cattle would come in contact with the water, keeping them at least 40-50ft from the dugout. The Rossnagels received some environmental grant money for the trenching and water lines, making it possible for them to get the water to their cattle.

There are many different water retention struc-ture designs, such as impoundments on drainage networks or off drainage channels. The size and the design will vary depending on the producer needs (e.g. livestock watering, irrigation, drinking water supply, recreation). The site has to be carefully se-lected and some design expertise is needed to get the most benefit from the producer’s investment.

“For a farmer considering doing something like this, the total cost would depend mostly on how much he’d need to do – things like how far you need to deliver the water and the amount of cattle you have, etc.,” said Rossnagel.

“We probably have about double invested in the water lines, trenching, water units, and pump houses, as we did in the dugout. Our total investment was probably in the neighbourhood of $60-70,000, with the dugout portion of it being about $20-25,000.”

Other actions producers can take as part of

the runoff solution, suggested Rossnagel, include repairing areas around a field’s perimeter, as well as using municipal ditches to store water in the spring by closing culverts.

“When we pasture-feed the cattle in the winter, we try to do it as far away from runways and ditches as possible, so the manure doesn’t end up running off into the ditches,” noted Rossnagel.

With continued efforts from Manitoba farmers to reduce the potential for nutrient transport off their farms, the restoration of watersheds and Lake Win-nipeg is a true possibility. Protecting and respecting water is everyone’s responsibility, but for farmers who take action, it can prove both beneficial to the ecological and financial bottom lines.

For more information, “Quality Farm Dugouts” is a workbook developed by Water Specialists from across the Canadian prairies and can be found online or downloaded as a free e-book: http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/eng4696

Rebeca Kuropatwa was born and raised in the prai-ries of Manitoba, and now lives in Winnipeg with her husband and young daughter. When she is away from her desk, Rebeca can be found walking in the boreal forest or dreaming under the clear blue prairie skies.

ARTICLES WANTED!

If you are passionate about current issues in organic growing, know of a farmer or gardener who’s using in-novative techniques, or have a topic in mind that pertains to the organic lifestyle, please send us an email at editor@cog.ca and pitch us an article. The deadlines for completed articles are: July 15th for the Fall 2014 issueand November 15th for the Winter 2015 issue