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Better energy balance key to future of agriculture

They were given a jar of banana pulp and a male and female fruit fly. Every day, he and his classmates would examine the jar. By day 26, there were more than 100 fruit flies. By day 28, there were more than 200. By day 30, there were about 500, but on day 31, they were all dead.

It was a pivotal moment in McQuail’s life, said the regenerative agriculture advocate. It opened his eyes to the importance of environmental sustainability, he told a recent online seminar hosted by the University of Manitoba.

“The thing that really struck me about that experiment was that there was still banana pulp that could have served as food, but fruit flies had poisoned their environment with their metabolic wastes.”

After high school, McQuail got his start in farming by working as a hired hand on a dairy farm. He bought a farm near Lucknow, Ont., three years later, in 1973. There he honed his skills with respect to sustainable farming and put the lessons learned in science class to work.

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