 Welcome back to Think Tech, I'm Jay Fiedel. This is you from the North, where we look at things in terms of North America. Today we're gonna talk about agriculture in Canada. We talked to Ken Rogers. We'll be right back after this moment. Dr. Ken Rogers, retired businessman who lives in British Columbia, joins us to talk about agriculture in Canada. It's a really interesting time. I was thinking about, Ken, I was thinking about wine. You know how wine has moved up from California to the Pacific Northwest? How wine has moved up from France to the UK? And I wondered if wine has moved up to Canada, to the Okanagan. Is that what's happened in Canada too? Well, there's been wine in the Okanagan for quite a while, but importantly in the moving up, there's two main factors. One, climate change has contributed, but the main reason that a variety of wines have been growing in more northern climates has been the technology. You've got research facilities around the world, dealing with agricultural products in general, but since wine is a high value agricultural product, countries will look at what variety of wine will grow in a more northern climate. For example, in Europe, you always had some of the best red wines, like Cabernet, Sauvignon, and grown in sort of southern France, places like Burgundy, where you had fantastic white wines in the Rhine country in Germany, where it was far colder climate. Well, that same idea in northern places, you'd say, how much do you have to play with the German wines before they could grow in a more northern location, such as England probably as similar weather to most of Germany, but probably you have other climate factors, but the research in agriculture is quite fantastic. I mean, that's the future in agriculture is really gonna be based on what technology can do rather than all the problems with climate change. Canada has a lot of technology. I have some great universities. I'm thinking of McGill, come and stuff that my brand. And it must be given the fact that Canada has such great resources or agriculture, we can talk about how that breaks down. There must be plenty of technology going on, in the experimental area through all of the provinces and in the universities. Yes and no. One of the main things in Canadian agriculture is we have a lot of land and not very many people. Well, when you have lots of land and not many people, you can grow something like wheat or flax or barley or rye or oats, grain product. Where if you were taking New Jersey, it'd be kind of hard to have a wheat farm in New Jersey. If you take my example of the complete contrast with Canada would be the Netherlands. The Netherlands has the second greatest agricultural exports in the world and it's really just a little bit bigger than the state of Maryland. It's like take New Jersey and double the population and double the size and that you'd have fallen toward the Netherlands. And they produce a fantastic amount of agriculture, like 50% of the land in the Netherlands is used to produce agricultural products. And that's not a coincidence, they weren't hard at it. Well, yeah, but they also have a major difference from Canada. I mean, in the Netherlands, you've got a fantastic development of greenhouses and then carry that a step further and you start to get hydroponics or equivalent in inside the greenhouses. And then eventually you'll evolve to where you got vertical agriculture where you're dealing with artificial light. Well, the future of the world for food is never gonna be a problem, can we produce enough food? It's really, can most the world afford any? Yeah, I have a Calabash son in Singapore who's working on vertical farming which has great prospect over there. But you know, and very little of it in the US, I think there's a particular plant in Pennsylvania but it's nothing compared to other more advanced vertical farming areas in the world. And what troubles me about the old of that is that if you have a lot of land, you're kind of spoiled. I mean, it would be hard, for example, for Canada to move over the vertical farming because it has so much natural farmland. Why would it do that? Why would it make the investment? Well, it's not so much the farmland as the population. For example, there's only a couple parts of Canada that could justify even a bunch of substantial greenhouses. You know, like you can have a greenhouse that can use hydroponics or even without that to develop or grow tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers. Those are the first three that seem to be most easily done in a greenhouse. Well, you could have a greenhouse somewhere near the city that I live in, but the market's so small that you have trouble justifying it. So if you took all of Canada, you really have a substantial ability to have something in Southern Ontario, just let's say not far from Cleveland or Buffalo or Detroit. About 40% of Canada's population is between Montreal and Detroit. If you were to pick a geographic item, well, you got another pocket of reasonable density right near Vancouver. You know, what's called the Fraser Valley, but you couldn't have any high-tech agriculture involving greenhouses and hydroponics in a place like Saskatchewan or Manitoba or most of Canada because there's not enough population to support it, it's not worth doing. I want to talk to you about Saskatchewan and Manitoba. My research, 34% of all the agricultural products of Canada are in grains and oil seeds, you mentioned a couple of them. And that comes from Saskatchewan and Manitoba, doesn't it? Midwest, so to speak, in Canada. Yeah, what are called the prairie provinces. You got to include Alberta and that, but Saskatchewan's in the middle and a higher percentage of the land in Saskatchewan is suitable for things like growing wheat or canola. Canola is really an example of scientific evolution. You used to have a product called rapeseed and it had a lot of problems with, you needed herbicides and pesticides and you couldn't grow it in a climate as far north as Saskatchewan very successfully. Well, Canadian agricultural research modified rapeseed developed a product called canola and it's just about the largest agricultural export Canada now has, the canola oil. Well, it's a staple worldwide, isn't it? It's a staple just like wheat, yeah? Well, soybean oil is a bit larger still than canola oil, but certainly they're similar in terms of what you can do but you can grow the canola in a harsher climate than soybeans. You know, we know that Ukraine is the best basket of Eastern Europe. In fact, maybe more productive than Russia, which is way bigger. And we know that wheat in Ukraine has been stopped by the war there and there have been real difficulties in getting what wheat there is out, by shipping it because Russia has stopped the shipping. Real problem for the world, for Africa, for example, and other developing areas. And I wondered if, you know, Manitoba, the sketch one, British Columbia, was it Alberta, rather? Whether these places have had a boom in terms of exporting and whether prices of these staples have gone up because of the shortages in other areas because of the war, the invasion in Ukraine. Well, there's a fair time lag for production. You know, and those areas of Canada are what are called dryland farming and that's really what Russia and the Ukrainians, you know, where Nebraska, by comparison, you know, you really can't have just simple dryland farming in Nebraska. You gotta have a whole bunch of irrigation. Well, that's a problem too, isn't it? Well, water is a major problem and that's where, you know, greenhouse growing is really, you know, the way of the future. In the meantime, without the greenhouses, without the vertical farming, through those prairie provinces, seems to me that you probably have the same water problems that Colorado and Colorado River and the whole basin in the Western US, you probably have the same problems about getting water. I mean, you may have floods in one place and drought in the other place and if you run parallel to the US, those provinces are probably having trouble, no? Well, not yet, but it's, you know, on the horizon there's measures being taken to correct it. You know, the simplistics are that the glaciers that feed a lot of the streams that run, let's say, those provinces get all their water from the Rocky Mountains or rainfall. You know, like the Rocky Mountain glaciers feed, you know, like the Saskatchewan River system is the biggest river system feeding all of the agricultural land. Well, it's not anywhere the size of, say, the Missouri River that has the same kind of starting position, you know, it starts in the Rockies, in, you know, Montana and Idaho and Wyoming, you know, where that water flow is less, but they, you know, have started to take measures to preserve it. Like the US many, many years ago, the big political thing was to have these mega-sized water projects. Well, you haven't done any for, you know, I don't know whether it's 50 years or more, you know, there are no main water projects that the US federal government has endorsed to really solve a problem like the Central Valley in California. I mean, it'd be a shame to just have it died because of lack of water. I don't know, they say it is dying. There's plenty of footage on TV, you can see it dying, but at the same time, the floods. Somebody said, well, I wanted to make a pipe, big pipe goes from the flooded area to the agricultural area. What do you think? Well, you know, you can't, the flooded area is temporary. You know, if you're gonna build a pipe and have a decent project, you might as well start near Portland, Oregon, you know, where you've got the Columbia River is probably the second largest amount of fresh water flowing into the ocean in the United States. I mean, the Mississippi would be larger, but not a heck of a lot or certainly, you know, the Columbia River would be a great source of fresh water for California without disrupting anything upstream. You know, if you just took it from the mouth, most of the Columbia. Something else that troubles me. And my research shows that 24% of the agriculture in Canada is from red meat and livestock. And, you know, every time I turn around, I hear, you know, talk about vegetarianism, veganism, stay away from red meat, bad for climate change, you know, it's too expensive, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, of course the cattlemen promote the meat and a lot of other people are opposing the meat. And so there's a controversy over red meat. Where it is a very big export from Canada. How does that look for the future? I mean, there's a global aversion these days or potentially a global aversion to red meat. What's gonna happen to Canada's red meat exports? Well, one thing about exports is you need to put something in perspective, you know, red meat and calves and cattle exports from Canada are the largest of the agricultural exports and they're about five billion a year. But just to compare that, automobile parts are about 30 billion. You know, that agriculture in dollars is pretty tiny compared to most parts of a modern society. You know, that, you know, farm country is poor country. I mean, why is Nebraska and North Dakota and South Dakota, you know, not overly prosperous states? You know, they have tons of agriculture. You know, Iowa at least is upgraded a bunch of theirs, but Iowa has more processing stuff. But even if you have a wonderful level of agriculture, you don't get very rich at it. Well, but you mentioned earlier on that food is gonna be a problem going forward. There'll be shortages of food and the markets and food and food products will have to adapt to that. Not only in North America, but in Latin America and in Europe and Asia. And so isn't it a good bet right now to get into agriculture in the thought that as we go forward, there'll be problems. These problems will cause, you know, the need for greater investment. They'll cause the need for higher prices and food will become more expensive, maybe even more lucrative. What do you think? Well, the opportunities in agriculture, you know, as I spent most of my life as an entrepreneur and, you know, I certainly would not go into the agricultural business as an entrepreneur in those parts of the world that are gonna have a problem eating. I mean, would you set up a business in Pakistan or in Ethiopia? You know, I wouldn't. You know, even though they're the places where the people are gonna starve. You're talking about geopolitics. You're talking about instability, right? Well, there's no aspect of any of world trade that has more constraints than to deal with food and agricultural products. I mean, Canada, for example, you know, most people would think of Canada as pretty open for trade, you know, and has lots of trade and doesn't have too many miserable constraints. Well, you know, we have one aspect of agriculture that really stands out as an impediment to trade and that's anything to do with dairy. You know, if you want a gallon of milk in Canada, it'll cost you about twice what it will rate across the border in the United States. So you're not exporting much dairy then? Well, no, no, the problem is they have a marketing board that controls 100% of milk, eggs, you know, chicken, a bunch of anything to do with dairy products. Really, you know, I threw chicken in there just for something to do with, but really it's a constraint. And, you know, the United States is not, you know, a friendly place to export to because, you know, it doesn't take diddly squat in the US to have some kind of lobby in Washington that suddenly creates, you know, a, you know, illogical, but very effective type of tariff. You know, the best... Yeah, and we have very strange things going on in the US like price supports in agriculture. And for example, you know, recently there's been talk about eggs. I'm not sure I know why, but eggs are hard to find now in the United States. I don't know about poultry, but eggs are hard to find. And for reasons that are not clear, you can't find eggs sometimes and they're very expensive. So that's a marketing or a market problem, right? It's an irregularity in the market. And what I'm asking really is if we can get by these irregularities in the market, if we can export things around the world, then the concern about Somalia and, you know, other not particularly stable governments is overcome by the fact that the market will deliver, maybe likely from Canada and the US. That's a dream. That's a dream. That'll just never happen in our lifetime or the lifetime of our children, you know? It's just, you know, it's like saying, you know, how many, well, certainly for my entire lifetime, there's been a dispute between the US has always had that softwood lumber exports to the United States. You know, and I think of that as it's almost agricultural-ish in the sense that it's a pretty raw material type of thing. And, you know, and you've got a problem with the price of housing and the price of lumber, but, you know, there's still always a huge penalty at the border on all lumber coming from Canada. You know, and it's really stupid, but that kind of stupidity exists in agriculture more than it does in any other field. It is stupid. And here we have where the whole country has a housing problem. I can tell you that Hawaii has a housing problem and part of the solution to the housing problem are construction kits, wood kits, prefabricated houses that come in a big kit. You open the kit, you build the house, real simple. But we have problems in importing those things for one reason or another. Maybe it's federal, maybe it's, you know, competition, lobbying, and in Hawaii, it's the unions. They don't want to make it too easy to build the house. And the result is we don't have the benefit of all that lumber coming from Canada and that could help us deal with our housing problems. It's really tragic. But let me move on to something about human resources, you know? I noticed in my research that, you know, you can make a decent living working in agriculture in Canada, as opposed for example to the... Who said that? I have to send you annotated authorities. But that's... No, well... Look at the big 50,000 American working in agriculture in Canada. No? Wrong? Oh, well, yeah, okay, that may be a reasonable living at a low end, you know? But if you're a college graduate, you know, what kind of agriculture would you go into? You know, and you, you know, really, you'd need a pretty large scale operation. Like the United States, when I went to university in New York City, I had a professor that had written a book, you know, and it was called The Great Farm Problem. You know, and it was really the U.S. could produce enough food to feed the whole world. You know, but, you know, why doesn't that happen? You know, like the big problem in the U.S. is the ability to produce far more than can be consumed. And yet the price of whatever you produce goes up and down. I mean, if the weather's a little better and the corn crop is large, then the price of corn goes down. You know, and so the farmer doesn't do too well. You know, in the next year, you know, there's a drought and the price is high, but the farmer has to, you know, you know, mow his whole field down because it's dead for lack of water. Well, it takes us back to technology. I mean, for example, you can inspect your field with a drone. You can figure out how well it's doing. You can take measures to make it do better with certain kinds of chemicals, herbicides, whatnot. And you can deal with the weather at least to some extent using the technology. Isn't that where it's going? That's how it can go. And that's how, you know, a farmer in Iowa that, you know, has pretty easy access to big populations in, you know, Chicago area, et cetera. That might make sense. But if you're, you know, you know, in central Saskatchewan, you know, you're, you know, you're 500 miles at least in the nearest city of any population. You know, and so, you know, and you can, you're dry land farming, you can get it without all of that other expense. And by the time you get your wheat or whatever it is to market, you know, you're lucky to, you know, make a decent living. Well, let's talk about human resources a little more. And that is, you know, in the US, we have people who are undocumented aliens working in the fields. They're not making $50,000. They're making peanuts. And it's, you know, it's a marginal existence. But in Canada, you also have a labor shortage. And I'm not, I'm not sure it's the same kind of labor shortage. I'm not sure you have the undocumented aliens working in the fields. I think you can't find anybody. It's a recruiting problem. And maybe it's so, especially in COVID. And this is a problem. Maybe this is why it's as much as $50,000 to work in the fields, because you can't find anybody to work in the fields. Can you talk about that? Well, undocumented aliens or whatever, undocumented workers is not really a term that has any meaning in Canada. Because how can you, you can't walk across the border into Canada. You know, and if you just think of Canada geographically, how'd you ever get there by a boat? You'd need a pretty good boat because you got to cross the whole ocean to get there. You know, and why would you go from, from, you know, New Hampshire to Canada or from Montana to Alberta or whatever, unless you had, you know, some, you know, odd reason because there's no great reason for anybody to come. Now, Canada has a foreign workers program. And, you know, where I live in British Columbia, that's very, very relevant because they bring in particularly Mexicans and, you know, tons and tons of them every year to deal with all of the orchards. You know, like, you know, we have a fantastic export program for cherries. You know, you can have a cherry that's picked it at nine in the morning, they start to pick it and an orchard, you know, a couple of miles from my current house. And by nine the next morning, it's in a market in Tokyo. You know, it's really, you know, pretty good. It's been picked, it's been sorted, it's been washed, it's been packaged, it's been transported, you know, by vehicle to get to an airport to Japan and you got these fantastic fresh cherries, you know, tree pick the same day. Now, those pickers, they're nearly all Japanese because a normal Canadian, you know, says, well, gee, you know, that's only gonna make me, you know, $20 an hour or $15 an hour. The Mexican's happy to come to Canada and send most of this check home for his family where the Canadian thinks that who would wanna do that? I mean, we're sitting now where we've got 65% of young Canadians are getting college degrees. You know, and now if you've got a college degree and you think of agriculture, well, you'd like to work at one of the gigantic research centers like Canada has 20 large agriculture research centers, like the, I just mentioned cherries, well, there's one of those 20 research centers was about five miles from where I used to live in another area of the Cologne area, it's called about 20 miles south of Cologne. And that research center, you know, has gone through different varieties of fruit and what fruit will grow best and, you know, to have different varieties. So you've got about 20 different varieties of cherries that can grow in our area. Now, those cherries are still, you know, in open land. You know, we've got enough land, you know, even though it's a valley that's got wonderful weather and good soil and growing conditions, you know, the population is still sparse enough that you can have these huge open agricultural plots. You know, much of the world can't do that. Yeah, well, much of the world needs Canada. It seems to me that, you know, the four corners of this conversation is that, you know, you're growing grains and oil seeds, you're growing red meats and livestock, you're growing dairy, you're doing horticulture by my reading substantially, and you have poultry and eggs. What do I need to go outside of Canada? I got it all right there. Why should Canada have to import anything? Does Canada import anything? Or is it self-sufficient and beyond self-sufficient? Is it a, you know, a food bread basket for the world? And will that increase? Well, Canada exports about 50% of what it produces a agricultural product. However, and the biggest market for that is the United States. No, the United States has a, let me think it's a, I saw the statistics the other day. The U.S. has $196 billion of agricultural exports, but it has 194 billion of agricultural import. You know, so it really only has a surplus about two and a half billion in agricultural exports. Now the U.S. is the largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. Surprisingly, the Netherlands is second, you know, just comparing the size of it and sort of, and that points to the future. Well, the United States, if there was a market, the United States could provide the food or the agricultural product to satisfy that market. It's just, you know, Ethiopia isn't gonna buy more U.S. agricultural products because they can't afford it. And just that simple, you know, there's, you know, what like India and China are humongous producers of agricultural products, you know, but, you know, as a generalization, they're not able to produce enough. You know, like they definitely, that's a problem for them. And, you know, they're the ones that are gonna have to learn from, you know, from places like the Netherlands. You know, how do you produce more? You know, a greenhouse with hydroponics will have probably 20 times the food output per, you know, oh, let's call it acre, you know, for every acre of land in a greenhouse that's got, you know, hydroponics and artificial lighting. Well, in India, you know, they got all kinds of parts of India where they can't even afford heat, let alone to have, you know, LED lighting in a greenhouse. Yeah, and these vertical spaces, the vertical farming areas that don't use as much water, it's more efficient with the hydroponics, isn't it? Oh, far more efficient and far more productive, but still, when you count the physical structure, like the building, and then the artificial lighting, and if you're doing it like they're doing it in, you know, parts of Canada, parts of the US, you know, for example, there's a fantastic facility about, you know, you know, an hour drive from Atlanta, you know, that produces, you know, just the most high tech kind of greenhouse hydroponics you could get, you know, but, you know, there's none of those in Pakistan or either it may be somewhere in India, but I doubt it, you know, and so the areas of the world that need the food really are, you know, suffering. I mean, the oldest type of, you know, let's call it advanced agriculture in a lot of ways was dealing with the ocean, you know, like, you know, most of the seafood in the world is coming from fish farming rather than from, you know, open fishing, and, you know, and you got seaweeds and that type of thing that, you know, big business and could be much larger. Well, you'd say, well, gee, what's the United States doing about that? Not much, because who needs it? Right. So my last question to you is a look into the future. I know it's hard with so many variables to get a perspective into the future, but here, you know, we talked about the, what do you call it, the irregularities in the global marketplace. We talked about water problems. We talked about labor problems. We talked about diet changes around the world. We talked about technology and how it changes things. All these variables all in play, but it seems to me that Canada has great prospect, assuming we can deal with some of these challenges and take advantage of some of the variables, great prospect in terms of being a great source of food in all continents, even continents that are capable of growing at least some of their needs. Do you see Canada going that direction? Where is Canada going? That's my question. Well, I do not see a major growth in Canada's provision of food for the rest of the world. You know, that if you used wheat as an example, wheat is often thought of as the queen or the king of all grain products. Well, you know, where else in Canada would somebody start a new wheat farm? And how can you produce more wheat from the same acreage? Like there is no more acreage that you could, you know, you know, convert into farmland for growing wheat. I suppose you could mow down some forests, but you know, the forest's worth more than the wheat. So I don't see any growth in those simple products, like I call them simple ones where you're just growing in a field, you're growing something. You know, you have, Canada will probably be importing less vegetables and less fruit in the future than it is now. You know, and that will be because there will be some, you know, near Vancouver, you'll have very large greenhouses and those will gradually improve in their stuff and they will produce the food that will be sent to Alberta in Saskatchewan, you know, by truck rather than it coming from California. However, you know, things like, you know, meat production, I don't, you know, that that's one Canada could increase quite dramatically, but the U.S. could increase its significantly as well doing it with exactly the same technology. You know, you touch on a point, we're out of time, but you touch on a point that we really haven't covered and that is the variable of transportation. If I give you a side of a cow and I tell you to move it around the world, that costs money and we don't exactly know how the cost of shipping is going to change in the future. That's the great advantage of greenhouses near big cities. Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, and the aquaculture or dealing with hydroponics in a greenhouse, you know, you've got to, the big expense is the building and the artificial lighting, LED lighting, and it's being offset in part because you have a much, much higher yield, but also the, you know, efficiency in water usage, less herbicides, less pesticides, you know, and shortened transportation. Yeah, your market is across the street. That's where eventually it should work out for India and China, you know, in places like Pakistan, but you know, you've got to have some entrepreneur in Pakistan that can amass the money to get the piece of land to build it. There it is. The export is not necessarily the food, it's the technology. That's what we have learned. Yeah, Ken Rogers. In fact, the Ken Rogers in Kelowna, British Columbia, and discussing with us agriculture in Canada will be back in two weeks with more. We want to educate you about Canada, its prospects and its relationships with the United States. Thank you so much, Ken. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.