Behind the Lines - October 2012

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

While farmers and even automotive companies are finding any number of uses for crops such as switchgrass and miscanthus, the market for biofuel still appears to be precarious. Writer Mary Baxter looks at this crop and markets for it from several angles in this month's cover story that begins on page 12.

One angle is that miscanthus could be grown and made into pellets in a plant in Springford for burning in generation facilities in Italy (See "'Fuel pellet maker to supply Italian market" on Better Farming's website, July 4.)

At press time, Ian Moncrieff, the president and CEO of Canadian Biofuel, withdrew a previous offer to make arrangements directly with farmers. He explains that there are plans instead to meet with a biomass producer group in September "to come up with some sort of strategy as to how we're going to move ahead." He says his company's hands are already full just looking after existing export contracts and securing markets.

Letters rarely get mentioned here, but some background is needed for the one we had space for in this issue. The situation is bittersweet. A victim of Lyme disease has sent her congratulations for Mary Baxter's cover story on this devastating disease, published back in May 2011. Janet L. DeCesare of Mineral Ridge, Ohio, sent her letter in response to the recent announcement that, after winning gold at the Canadian Farm Writers Federation competition, Mary's story has been voted best agricultural story in the world by the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists. We would like to add our congratulations to Mary for her tireless efforts to dig out the stories that matter to farmers.

This month, Better Farming is again publishing its annual report on sewage spills and bypasses in Ontario by municipality for 2011 and the first six months of 2012. This year's report will be published on our website in two forms. One is a compilation of the number of times that sewage treatment facilities in Ontario are forced to "pull the plug," usually because of a weather event. The other report is a searchable database where readers can look up municipalities, dates of bypasses and spills and also the type of treatment that sewage received before it was released. The story explaining these databases starts on page 32.

That's not all that's in this issue's environment section, the most extensive by far that we have ever published. There are two stories about drains in the Niagara Peninsula. One is a good news story about the Town of Fort Erie's tenacious drainage engineer's efforts to make farm drains work again, even when they are home to endangered species. That project may become a blueprint for other municipalities in Ontario.

The other story is a cautionary tale about a frustrated farm owner's son, who tried to make drains work using heavy equipment and drew the wrath of the local conservation authority. The Justice of the Peace who heard the case had some advice on how things should have been handled. That story starts on page 52. BF

ROBERT IRWIN & DON STONEMAN