Monday 12 March 2012

March 9 - visiting farms

Started the day enjoying the sunrise and  beautiful surrounds at Wally & Ruth's house. Snow and ice everywhere - so different to my hot and dusty home!

Today we visited a soyabean processing plant where the family enterprise produces soymeal and soybean oil for the livestock feed industry.
We then inspected a 720 cow dairy where cows are shedded in a modern barn out of the extreme cold and milked 3 times a day on a rotary milker.
We went on to visit an enterprising young farmer who performs mass braodacre contract cropping services but who has also just innovated machinery to produce a dustless hay product which is used as animal bedding. This product is used in barns and trucks and has wide application in Canada's livestock industry. It has big demand and competes favourably with sawdust and woodchips which up until now have been used for this purpose.
Also spoke to a large cropping family farmer who explained to us that his business model includes expanding his cropping area, recycling secondhand timber to manufacture usable building and furniture products, and development of a new health bar that is high in nutrition, from ingredients grown on his own farm - value adding raw material.

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