Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
The fertilizer stuff is interesting as their are real opportunities to reduce cost and improve yields through the latest farming practices. There are a wide variety of adoption levels of science based farming. Some regulation created by local organizations likely has benefits. What if you made farming a self regulated profession like doctors lawyers or engineers and part of their responsibilities were continuous improvement and implementation of best practices.
I suspect the best farmers right now have minimal changes to make whereas the ones who you have to drag to handle chemical properly have a long way to go. Like any profession there is a wide variety of skill level.
|
I married into a family of farmers and I can tell you straight up that it very much is like a profession that continually seeks improvement in yields, better crops and cheaper inputs… obviously. Less fertilizer and pesticides is less operating costs and more yields is more revenue so absolutely they do this. It’s actually a very complex business if you sit down and get into the nitty gritty details with a farmer. Maybe not as wide ranging in terms of technical skill as oil and gas but I bet you’d be very surprised at how much and how often these farmers are investigating new adaptations into their craft. How much research and science and discussion and strategy goes into their job and crops and farming. It gets highly technical. Of course it does! Think about it… think about all the #### that can go wrong operating a farm, and how many products and operating expenses you’d have. How much there is to know about, literally everything.
My wife’s cousin is an agronomist. Literally a business degree concentration offered out of U of S that focuses on these sciences and is like a consultant for farmers to optimize results and yields based on the least amount of inputs possible. There’s also, like oil and gas, a very complex futures and pricing / marketing component to the business where farmers have to understand which crop to plant based on meteorological forecasting, prior year harvests / crops, ensuring proper rotation to maximize soil efficacy, where crop pricing for various products will be when harvest and sale arrives, which location to haul your #### to to sell into which market (a good friend of ours one year had to go drive semi trucks all winter over 800kms away to get better pricing), etc etc etc. this was a farmer who also flew to India to learn better practices there and to swap farming strategies and is part of a huge farming board wheee workshops and ideas and best practices are all shared. These are not people that are just your run of the mill country bumpkin morons although I’m sure there are a handful of them. But guess what? In my experience there’s more than a handful of them in oil and gas.
It’s actually quite an insult to say farmers should try to be like other professionals and try to be better, and it’s beyond the point of a joke / usual Trudeau insanity to be pushing this height-of-idiocy fertilizer ban especially at this time with massive global food shortages. You know I actually was just reviewing for my work global food shortages and worldwide pricing on key global staple foods. You should take a gander at the FAO worldwide food index and observe that pricing is climbing quite a bit. With Pakistan flooding and Russia / Ukraine set to keep ongoing, plus gas prices in Europe about to skyrocket (and therefore, fertilizer in Europe will skyrocket…), I don’t anticipate food prices dropping anytime soon.
Sounds like the perfect time to install a fertilizer ban in Canada. Climate change or bust, except for Justin Trudeau, who
flies from Kelowna to Vernon.