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SERVING WESTERN CANADIAN FARM FAMILIES SINCE 1923 | W W W . P R O D U C E R . C O M
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2018 VOL. 96 | NO. 46 | $4.25
Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: 1000 - 3530 Millar Avenue
Saskatoon, SK. S7P 0B6
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
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Carbon taxIt’s not as bad as farmers think, says prof. | P. 14
Lost opportunityAn economist says chicken producers are missing out. | P.3
SEE THE GREAT HONEY ROBBERY, PAGE 4 »
BY WILLIAM DEKAYSASKATOON NEWSROOM
The harvest window has closed again after rain followed by sub-zero temperatures and snow swept the Prairies Nov. 4-5.
However, most crops are now in the bin, thanks to a two-week win-dow of warm, dry conditions open-ing up in October.
After multiple weeks of delay, many producers were able to return to their fields and complete harvest.
Depending on location, between 96 and 100 percent of this year’s crop has been harvested in all three prairie provinces, according to weekly crop reports and provincial crop specialists.
Shannon Friesen, the govern-ment crop specialist in Saskatche-
wan, said harvest operations are 99 percent complete with some pock-ets of soybeans, flax, sunflowers and corn remaining.
“We never have 100 percent. There’s always a field somewhere,” she said.
Manitoba crop specialist Anasta-sia Kubinec said most of the major crops are completed except grain corn, which is about 50 percent harvested.
Corn growers will now have to wait for the ground to freeze hard enough to drive combines across now-softened fields.
However, she said some producers in northwestern Manitoba have as much as 25 percent of their crop out.
“They have a bit of canola, wheat and barley, but there are certain producers that the way things worked out got it in late, or had hail
and they had to reseed and still had the majority of their crop out,” she said.
Harry Brook, Alberta’s crop spe-cialist, said the recent cold snap means harvest is again at a stand-still, which provincially is about 96 percent complete.
Weighing down that average is northwestern Alberta, which he said still has many acres left to har-vest.
“They’re probably the worst off and they were the wet spot this year, so there’s pockets where there’s significant amounts of acres left, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was in 2016,” he said.
Brook said September and Octo-ber were the coldest months in more than 50 years (as well as March and April), according to the Alberta Climate Information Service.
Unless there’s a significant warm spell, he thinks field operations will be at a standstill for the rest of the year.
“We’re going to need probably close to a week of temperatures of at least 10 degrees with a wind before it’s going to be dry enough to harvest. The snow insulates and if it melts, then it’ll take longer for that crop to dry.”
Added Friesen: “Some of those crops may have to remain until either the ground freezes and they’re able to really get in there or until next spring.”
However, another upcoming window of warming is forecast, which might be the ticket for some farmers to fire up their combines and tractors — again.
Harvest 2018 almost a wrap across the PrairiesSome crop remains unharvested, but it may have to wait until next spring, say crop specialists
FARMFAIR INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE: PAGES 3 & 56
SASKATOON NEWSROOM
ROBLIN, Man. — The surge of counterfeit honey into global honey supplies has been devastating for Canadian beekeepers.
“It’s been twisting my hand because I can’t stay here,” said Tim Wendell of Wendell Honey.
“I don’t know if the price is coming back or how long it’s going to take. It always has come back, but is it even going to happen this time because no one seems to care.”
Wendell has been in the business a long time. He and his wife, Isabel, officially took over the hives from his father in 1974, but bees have always been part of
his life.“I used to go to school with both eyes swollen
shut from being stung in the eyes,” he said.“That’s the best defensive move for a bee, is to take
out the eyes.”Wendell’s father, John, was fascinated by bees and
started the business in the 1930s after catching a few hives in the late 1920s.
The great honey robbery | Canadian producers are forced to react as the burgeoning trade in counterfeit honey threatens to upend their industry. | BY ROBIN BOOKER
FAKING IT
NOVEMBER 15, 2018 | WWW.PRODUCER.COM | THE WESTERN PRODUCER4 NEWS
Wendell Honey, which is based out of MacNutt, Sask., has experi-enced good years and struggled through times when the price of honey dropped or when a treatment was ineffective against an ever-changing mite population that caused a spike in bee mortality.
Recently, from 2010-12, the price for a pound of honey surged to more than $2 in Canada, and honey producers enjoyed healthy profits.
But the boon was short lived as fraudulent honey flowed into world honey markets.
The extra volume of “honey” on the world market quickly weighed on prices, which fell to as low as $1.10 per lb., well below the cost of produc-tion for Canadian producers.
Today bulk honey returns are showing some strength and it is possible for honey producers to reap a small profit. However, the problem of fraudulent honey per-sists, and how long the price will stay at this level is anyone’s guess.
“(Adulterated honey is) a world-wide problem. What it has done is it’s basically downgraded the price of Canadian honey, of basically all honeys,” said Rod Scarlett, execu-tive director of the Canadian Hon-ey Council.
“They will take honey and they will add corn syrup, rice syrup, or another sweetener to add more bulk. They will sell it as honey, and the corn syrup and rice syrup is very cheap. So they adulterate the product to get more product to sell at a higher price.”
Honey consistently ranks among the top adulterated agricultural products, and a study published this October in Nature , t itled Authenticity and Geographic Ori-gin of Global Honeys Determined Using Carbon Isotope Ratios and
Trace Elements, set out to test world honey supplies.
It confirmed the practice of adul-terating honey is common and widespread.
“We found that 52 percent of Asian honey samples tested were adulter-ated (11 of 21 samples), of which three were from China (3/7), one from South Korea (1/1), one from India (1/2), two from Indonesia (2/2) and four from Iran (4/4),” the study said in its discussion section.
“Six honey samples from Europe, from a total of 21 tested, contained added sugar. These honeys origi-nated from Macedonia (2/3), Romania (1/2), Serbia (1/1), Greece (1/5) and Hungary (1/3). Australia has a lower adulteration rate (18.4 percent in total), with honey from its mainland having an adulteration rate of 17.2 percent (5/29) com-pared to 22.2 percent of samples from Tasmania (2/9). Both New Zealand manuka honey samples tested (2/2) weren’t adulterated.”
Canadian honey is considered
among the safest in the world, largely because the industry has to follow strict rules set out by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. However, this reality doesn’t seem to matter to American processors, which treat Canadian honey the same as honey from areas where adulteration is a known problem.
The U.S. is the world’s top consumer of honey, but there is a large price spread between what’s paid for honey produced in the U.S. and imported honey, partially because of concerns over adulterated honey.
“We receive at least a dollar less than American producers per pound, yet our biosecurity and food safety standards certainly exceed theirs, and everybody that exports to the U.S. can be examined by the USDA,” Scarlett said.
With the use of anti-dumping laws, the U.S. no longer imports honey from China, where much of the adulterated honey is suspected to originate.
However, Chinese honey still makes it into the U.S. through transshipments.
Canada produces much more honey than is consumed in the coun-try, but imported adulterated honey has been found in Canadian stores.
“A few years ago we were able to take a product from Spain off the shelves. It was a Spanish adulterat-ed honey,” Scarlett said.
“I know the CFIA is continuing to do testing on an ongoing basis.”
Before April 1, 2017, the CFIA tested between 64 and 100 samples of imported honey a year for the presence of foreign sugars and found three to nine samples that contained added sugar.
Starting in April 2017, the agency increased the amount of honey it tested and collected 186 samples of imported honey in 2017, 11 of which were found to be adulterated.
Tim Wendell stands in front of honey jars and barrels inside the facility that Wendell Estate Honey is renovating in Roblin, Man. Wendell is also an owner of Wendell Honey, which has a facility in MacNutt, Sask., as well as a workshop on Wendell’s farm located near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, 1 1/2 kilometres east of MacNutt. Wendel said the company has approximately 4,000 hives within a 60-km radius of MacNutt. | ROBIN BOOKER PHOTO
» CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
THE GREAT HONEY ROBBERY(Adulterated honey is) a worldwide problem.
What it has done is it’s basically downgraded the price of Canadian honey, of basically all honeys. They will take honey and they will add corn syrup, rice syrup, or another sweetener to add more bulk. They will sell it as honey, and the corn syrup and rice syrup is very cheap. So they adulterate the product to get more product to sell at a higher price.
ROD SCARLETTCANADIAN HONEY COUNCIL
WHAT WERE THE TOP HONEY PRODUCING COUNTRIES IN 2017?Top 10 honey exporting countries, by value ($millions):
1 China ........................................................................... $350.32 New Zealand ................................................................ $348.73 Argentina ..................................................................... $238.24 Germany ...................................................................... $180.45 Ukraine ........................................................................ $172.66 Brazil ........................................................................... $158.87 Spain ........................................................................... $143.08 Mexico .........................................................................$136.89 India ............................................................................ $135.6
10 Hungary ........................................................................ $116.5All other countries: ................................................................ $987.8Total world honey exports: $2.97 billion
WHICH COUNTRIES DID CANADA IMPORT HONEY FROM IN 2017? Top 10 honey importing countries to Canada, by value ($millions):
1 Brazil ........................................................................ $1,280.02 Spain ........................................................................... $734.83 Mexico ......................................................................... $699.74 India ............................................................................ $505.55 Myanmar ...................................................................... $485.46 Thailand ....................................................................... $483.57 United States ............................................................... $478.88 Vietnam ....................................................................... $381.59 Ukraine ........................................................................ $352.8
10 New Zealand ................................................................ $346.5All other countries ............................................................ $1,185.6Total honey imports into Canada: $6.93 billion
WHERE DID CANADA EXPORT HONEY TO IN 2017? Canada’s top 10 honey export destinations, by value ($):
1 United States ..................................................... $62.37 million2 Japan ..................................................................$12.43 million3 China ................................................................... $1.98 million4 South Korea ..............................................................$550,0005 Hong Kong ............................................................... $460,0006 India .........................................................................$366,0007 Brazil ........................................................................$169,0008 United Arab Emirates .................................................. $77,0009 Barbados ....................................................................$63,00010 Switzerland .................................................................$36,000
All other countries ........................................................... $143,000Total value of 2017 Canadian honey exports: $78.7 million
DID YOU KNOW …
Honey contains little moisture and is naturally
acidic, so it will never spoil if stored in an airtight bottle. Honey dating back several thousand years has been found in Egyptian tombs.
A single worker bee produces 1/10 of a teaspoon of honey during
its lifespan, which is about six weeks. It takes 556 worker bees
to produce one pound of honey.
By summer, a colony usually has 50-80,000 bees, with one queen bee, which can
lay 2,000 eggs per day during her busy season. Most bees are
female worker bees. There will also be several hun-dred male drones. They have no stingers.
Other insects also produce a type of honey, including the honey wasp, aphids and honey ants.A bee’s wings beat 200 times per
second.
Source: staff research | MICHELLE HOULDEN GRAPHIC
Source: Agriculture Canada | MICHELLE HOULDEN GRAPHICS
NEWS THE WESTERN PRODUCER | WWW.PRODUCER.COM | NOVEMBER 15, 2018 5
Thus far in 2018, the CFIA has tested 299 samples of imported honey, and 24 had foreign sugars.
The CFIA uses a technique known as stable isotope ratio analysis to look for C-4 sugars (sugars from cane or corn syrups) in the honey, but these are not the only sugars being added to adul-terated honey.
“The CFIA is aware of reports indicating that sugars other than cane and corn syrups were being added to honey. As a result, the CFIA is investigating the potential to use nuclear magnetic reso-nance spectroscopy (NMR) pro-filing to identify other sugars which may be used to adulterate honey (e.g. C3 sugars from rice and beets),” the agency said in an email.
In 2017 Canadian honey produc-tion was worth approximately $188 million: $79 million of this was exported, while imports of honey into the country were worth $41mil-lion.
Scarlett said the value of import-ed honey is largely made up of high value organic honey and manuka honey from Australia and New Zealand.
“We do have honey coming in from countries like Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam that have a history of transshipping, that is shipping adulterated honey that may have originated in another country and then shipping it again, but the amount of honey that we are receiving is infinitesi-mal compared to the amount of honey that we produce,” he said.
There are two major end uses of honey: pure honey sold on store shelves directly to consumers and the baking and processing market.
The adulterated honey is pri-marily sold in barrels to the pro-cessing market.
Packers in the U.S. seem content to purchase low-price honey regardless of where it comes from, which has Canadian pro-ducers competing with low-priced fraudulent honey for the large American packing market.
“The American packers are try-ing to drive the price down and are buying cheaper honeys from other countries where the honey being produced is not necessarily produced to the same degree of
food safety and biosecurity as Canadian honey,” Scarlett said.
Wendell Honey is a good exam-ple of how Canadian honey pro-ducers are adapting to the times by changing their business model.
The volatility of the bulk honey price has always made Wendell uneasy because it made his busi-ness vulnerable, and there was little he could do about it.
In 2011, during the last price up-swing when there was a little extra money around, the company started to increase the amount of honey it bottled.
Wendell said the company started to develop its own brand and markets because the price it receives for packaged honey is much more stable than bulk sales, and they have more control over the packaged honey price.
When the company began to develop its own brand and mar-ket, it had to find a way to differen-tiate itself in a food market con-sidered one of the world’s most fraudulent.
So the company focused on describing its honey as uniquely pure because of the processes it uses. Its website uses the slogan: “Naturally from the hive to the jar with zero processing. It’s pure Canadian honey from the prairies.”
“There is the standard dyce method of creaming honey, but we don’t use that,” he said.
“Everybody is doing that, but we don’t want to do that. We want to be different and we think we have a superior product because of it.
“The dyce method always uses other honey that gets mixed with it, and I think that takes a little bit away, although it’s still better than most of the stuff the big packers are doing out there.”
Wendell said the process they use moves the honey from the hive to jars as quickly as possible to maintain the flavour bouquet from the hive, without mixing it with other honey.
“We try not to filter our honey,” he said. “It’s really more of a straining process than a filtering process. We try to keep it as natu-ral as we’re allowed by the regula-tions to still meet Canada No. 1 standards.”
Glass jars from Italy were chosen to package the honey to help showcase the product as high end.
Wendell said they focus on pro-ducing and marketing a premium product in countries, primarily in South East Asia, where it’s difficult to source safe and authentic food.
“Our biggest market to date has been China,” he said.
“I listened to some people at a conference I was at years ago who said China is a good market, they are interested in clean food because the people with money in China don’t want to buy food pro-duced in China,” Wendell said.
He said they struggled to estab-lish foreign markets in the begin-ning with some traders taking fewer packages than promised and trying to pay less than origi-nally agreed.
“We packaged too much honey in the beginning and we ended up dumping a bunch of it because I thought it would sell better than it did,” Wendell said.
In 2013 the company made a pitch on the Dragon’s Den televi-sion show but decided not to take the deal that was offered.
However, Wendell said the exposure the company received from being on the show helped open doors that had previously been closed to it.
Eventually perseverance paid off and demand for the honey steadily increased.
“In 2015 we packaged 50 pallets, that’s about 2,000 lb. a pallet. We were sold out by the end of June that year, so we thought we better get geared up,” he said.
“I think that was 2016 — we did 100 pallets. We sold out those 100 pallets by the end of March.”
In 2017 the company again doubled the amount of honey it packaged and 200 pallets were wrapped up, which sold out by the end of February.
Wendell said the demand for honey in the company’s current markets is beginning to soften, so they are looking to develop other markets, including South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
To keep up to its changing busi-ness model, Wendell said the company continues to adjust.
Wendell Honey has brought in three long-term employees as well as Wendell’s son, Nathan, as shareholders.
Another company was formed called Wendell Estate Honey,
which handles the bottling and marketing side of the business. It is managed by Tim, Isabel, their sons, Jeremy and Nathan, and Nathan’s wife, Carolyn Wendell.
During the fall the companies employ up to 55 people, who help bring in the hives and then extract and bottle the honey.
The Roblin Co-op grocery story recently moved into a new build-ing, and Wendell Estate bought the old store and is now in the middle of renovating it.
Wendell said the facility will provide options for the business as it expands.
He said the honey industry has faced significant challenges before, such as in 1987 when bee-keepers were no longer allowed to import queen bees from the U.S.
“There were a group of bee-keepers from Nipawin, Sask., who were quite progressive in their thinking. They sold most Sas-katchewan beekeepers on pre-paring your losses and your needs the season before by mak-ing small units that we call nucle-us colonies,” Wendell said.
Establishing nucleus colonies created more work for beekeep-ers, but it helped them become more self-sufficient and produc-tive in the long run.
“You can select for what works for you and your outfit, you can select the stock you want to breed from,” Wendell said.
“Your stock continually gets a little better and a little better because your stock works in your particular management system, because every beekeeper has a different management system.”
He said with the challenge of counterfeit honey undermining beekeepers’ profits, and in the absence of any sign the issue will be dealt with in the near future, it may be the case that packaging and branding clean Canadian honey is the way forward for the Canadian honey industry.
Similarly to how Canadian bee-keepers became more resilient through sourcing queens from their own nucleus colonies, in the long run they may be better off once their businesses are less reliant on bulk honey prices set by an adulter-ated world supply, he added.
ANNUAL CANADIAN HONEY CONSUMPTION(kg. per person)
2013 0.84
2014 1.06
2015 1.09
2016 0.93
2017 0.85
Source: Stats Canada
HOW TO SPOT FAKE HONEY
Real honey Fake honeythick, moves slowly when tipped from side to side in jar
light, runny consistency
caramelizes quickly and doesn’t foam when heated
bubbles when heated but does not caramelize
settles at the bottom without dissolving when poured into water
dissolves easily when poured into water
a candle wick dipped in honey will still light easily and the honey will burn
a candle wick dipped into fake honey will not light easily because of extra moisture
when spread on dry bread, does not affect bread consistency
when spread on dry bread, will wet the bread surface
Source: mybeeline.co
CANADIAN HONEY STATSIn 2017:• There were a record 789,598
honey bee colonies in Canada. • 10,544 Canadian beekeepers
kept one or more honey bee colonies, up 19 percent from the five-year average.
• Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba accounted for 68 percent of the country’s total bee colonies and for 86 percent of the total honey production.
• Alberta bees produced the most honey with 43 percent of total production, followed by Saskatchewan (24 percent) and Manitoba (19 percent).
• Ontario has the most beekeepers, with 3,331 beekeepers or 32 percent of national total. B.C. and Alberta come in second and third, with 2,640 and 1,360 beekeepers respectively.
• Canada produced 92.1 million pounds of honey in 2017, down three percent from 2016. In 2015 the value of honey produced in Canada fell from $210 million to $169 million in 2016, but prices rebounded in 2017 by 14 percent to $188 million, despite a three percent reduction in total production.
Source: Agriculture Canada
ANNUAL CANADIAN HONEY PRODUCTION(tonnes)
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
34,685
.3
38,847
.5
41,735.5
42,899
.9
41,779
.5
Packers in the U.S. seem content to purchase low-priced honey regardless of where it comes from, which has Canadian producers competing with low-priced fraudulent honey for the large American packing market.
of all honey produced in Canada is exported to the United States.
GETTY IMAGE
79%
