Canadian agriculture and food industry supports Drive Away Hunger

Feb 16, 2023

Canada’s agriculture and food industry has once again delivered incredible results for Drive Away Hunger, providing an equivalent of more than 40 million meals to food banks and feeding programs across the country.

Founded by Farm Credit Canada (FCC), the industry-wide initiative has been collecting food and cash for nutritious meals for the past 19 years.

The results were announced today at the Future of Food conference in Ottawa - a gathering of industry stakeholders hosted by FCC to mark Canada’s Agriculture Day.

“Drive Away Hunger provides a way for the agriculture and food industry to positively impact food security in Canada,” said Todd Klink, FCC executive vice-president and chief marketing officer. “Local food banks play an important role in communities across Canada as they support the ongoing need to provide nutritious food for families.

“Those who grow, produce and process food and beverages every day truly understand and appreciate the importance of providing high-quality and nutritious food,” he said. “FCC and our many industry partners are proud to support this initiative that provides food and cash donations, promotes food reclamation initiatives and supports school feeding programs.”

Click here to see more...

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators