Episode 20:
Ryan Barrett
For Ryan Barrett, the research and agronomist specialist with the P.E.I. Potato Board, his work is all about doing research that matters and then finding the best ways to teach growers about it.
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Transcript
Toban Dyck 00:03
This is the extensionist conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck and I’m Jay wetter.
Jay Whetter 00:13
Hey, Toban. Hey, Jay. How’s it going? Have you ever been to PEI?
Toban Dyck 00:18
No, but I do like potatoes.
Jay Whetter 00:20
Yeah, potatoes are a big crop there, as we’ll find out from Ryan Barrett, our next guest, I’ve been there a couple of times. I was there with my parents, and then we went with our kids, and it’s lovely. We went, I won’t give too many details, but I’m a prairie boy, right? And we went mackerel fishing like in the ocean, bobbing. Just imagine bobbing on this little boat out in the ocean, rising all anyway, I didn’t I didn’t do it. I didn’t do well. How old were you? Like, 40 something.
Toban Dyck 00:59
So, so a kid? Yeah, yeah,
Jay Whetter 01:01
I get it, yeah, I I’m not great with C I’m okay with a big boat, like a BC ferry, sure, sure. I’m okay on the lakes. But when you get that kind of bobbing and you’re a little boat, and you know, it’s, I’ve done it when you’re motoring, yeah, it’s fine, sure. But when you stop and either Whale Watch or drop a line. Yeah, anyway, but thank goodness this conversation today isn’t there, isn’t about the sea, it’s about the land, a bright red mud.
Toban Dyck 01:30
Did you catch
Jay Whetter 01:32
any? Yeah? Oh, that’s good. Well, we did, right? I’m not sure if I caught him. You were, you were just, you were, yeah, yeah. So mackerel, boat, mackerel, yeah, exactly. Mackerel are a schooling fish. And so you drop a line with a bunch of hooks on it, and then when you’re reeling in, you’re often catching, if you’ve gone through a school, Oh, I see you’re catching five on the same string. Okay, okay,
Toban Dyck 01:59
so you’re like jigging for them, kind of Yeah. You’re not trolling for them. No, no.
Jay Whetter 02:03
We’re jiggy, dropping a line down. And hopefully this school there, and the guy who is in the boat, I guess he knows where the schools are, because we got probably 10 of
Toban Dyck 02:11
them. Oh, yeah. Nice. 20. Nice. Yeah,
Jay Whetter 02:15
yeah. What else we do there? We rented a little cottage on the water. Looked over the are we supposed to wrap up? Okay? Anyway, so Pei go rent a cottage, just hang out by the sea, go to a lobster supper. We went to Cavendish and saw Anne of Green Gables his house, not Yeah, yeah, but just yeah. Go to listen to some music and enjoy the quiet pastoral lifestyle of like Atlantic
Toban Dyck 02:46
Canada. I was just like, last summer was my first time going to the East Coast. Was Halifax, and, yeah, Nova Scotia. And I’m going again with Nova Scotia twice last summer, and going to New Brunswick this summer, so that, yeah, it’s been interesting, but that that’s, like, that’s last summer, being my first time, so just, yeah, I do love it. I feel like it’s, it’s, it is it is magical and pastoral. Is a great, great, a great word to describe it. But no, I’m excited to talk to our next guest.
Jay Whetter 03:19
So our guest is Ryan Barrett. He’s a research and agronomy specialist with the Pei Potato Board, and it’s the extensionists expanding our wings to eastern Canada. Enjoy on to Ryan.
Toban Dyck 03:38
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Toban Dyck 04:01
Well, thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for joining us. You are our first podcast guest from PEI. So that’s exciting. That’s exciting for Jay. And I, Jay, you look like you want to say something. I’m just gonna
Jay Whetter 04:12
say. Ryan Barrett is a research and agronomy specialist with the Pei Potato Board. I got that right? Sure do. I got that right? Oh, man, I’m off to a
Toban Dyck 04:22
good start. Yeah, it’s Monday. It’s Monday.
Jay Whetter 04:25
Yeah, yeah. We usually record on Fridays when our voices are all limbered up. Yeah, yeah, it’s our first Monday. No,
Toban Dyck 04:33
exactly, exactly. So, yeah, welcome here. I don’t know if, do you do? You know, have we ever met Ryan? I don’t, I don’t know if
Ryan Barrett 04:40
we have. I don’t think we have. I think I’ve, I’ve seen some of your work in the past. And yeah, I know Ashley a bit through her past life with spud smart and so no, yeah, more about what burr forest is up to and that sort of thing. So, yeah,
Toban Dyck 04:56
yeah. Well, that’s great. That’s great. And then, yeah, so, Jay.
Jay Whetter 05:00
I’m I Ryan, I’m Jay. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. So Toban and I are podcast partners, and I’m a journalist from the prairies primarily, and I’m not sure I’ve probably done a potato article, because I used to work for the general farm paper in Manitoba, and there’s some potatoes here. So yeah, but it’s been a while,
Ryan Barrett 05:15
Manitoba and Alberta are getting to be bigger and bigger potato country all the time. So
Toban Dyck 05:20
yeah, yeah. And where I’m from, here in the Red River Valley, there’s a few, there’s a few big kind of potato producers, Southern southern potato, and a few few other ones. So that’s kind of break your farms and that sort of crew, yeah, oh, yeah. Crackers. They’re, they’re all around, yeah, for sure. No. So this is, this is really, really exciting. I know Ashley in the pre interview, she mentioned, you know, you know, we had some notes and stuff talking about your your communications background and and how, you know, you, you, you have lots of experience in communications, and now you’re working in a research capacity. So that’s, like, that’s an interesting trajectory, if you want to talk a little bit about
Ryan Barrett 05:56
that, yeah, it’s kind of, it’s funny. So, like I I went to university for dairy genetics, like I did mine. I did Animal Science undergrad because I thought I was going to be a vet, and then I realized I didn’t want to be a vet, and then I went into more of a genetics standpoint. But it was always around. I wanted to work with farmers. I wanted to work with farmers finding solutions and doing things better and that sort of stuff. And then I worked in communications, largely then for a dairy breed association for about seven years, and I was doing a magazine, and I was doing a website, and I was doing, you know, extension events and things and writing articles and and then that kind of it still was doing some more scientific genetic stuff as part of that too, but it was always about communicating with producers, and again, helping solve problems, help identify information and bring it to them. And then when I moved back to Pei, I had the opportunity to come work in the Potato Board, and I was initially hired on that experience in communications. And we were, they were trying to, just getting around to having a more grower facing website. And they were, you know, trying to, trying to do more on the research side. And then that, you know, over time, it morphed from being just comms into, then, you know, research and extension and really focusing on, you know, not just pure research in any way. I wouldn’t call myself a pure researcher by any means, but that plus, then, you know, doing some amount of research, mostly field, scale research, and then bringing that back to the producers and and working with producers on the trials, and then communicating those results back to producers as well. As you know, all the good stuff that’s happening in other places that we don’t necessarily have to replicate here, that can be brought back to producers as well. So building that network with other potato regions and other potato researchers. And, you know, agriculture is a big industry. Parts of agriculture are, can be a small world, and potatoes, particularly, like, you know, there’s probably only 500 potato growers in all of Canada, right? So, you know. And then in terms of the RE, you know, the the agronomists and the and the people that work in that it’s, it’s not a massive world, but it’s important. They’re spread out over a big geography. And then, you know, connecting with people the United States, or connecting people in Europe, and what’s being done in other places. It’s, there’s a lot of need to, we can’t replicate everything. You can’t do every project. You can’t you know, you have to be able to see what’s happening in other places and see how we can bring that back here, too. So that’s kind of how my position sort of evolved over time, and has kind of been where it is.
Jay Whetter 08:53
Now we’re going to get to all that in a sec, Ryan, but I want to go back to something you said at the beginning about how you thought you might want to be a vet, but then you realized he didn’t want to be and I just wanted, like, was there a day or a moment was it when you had to pull down that really long glove? Mind you, you grew up with cattle, so you did that as a
Ryan Barrett 09:11
kid. It wasn’t necessarily, like, it wasn’t one of those, like, you know, light bulb moments. It was a confluence of things at the time. So this is late 90s, early, 2000s at the time here, there was a glut of large animal vets that now people are screaming for large animal vets, but at the time, it seemed like there was a lot of people going through for not a lot of jobs, and it wasn’t a secure path forward. And the amount of, you know, the amount of time and education and, like, you know, on the job, training and everything. It just, it seemed like a it was a long road to hoe, and it was a long road to hoe for being, I wanted to be a large animal that, and a large animal that spends 90% of their day, what their. Arm up a cow’s backside. So it was kind of like, okay, so you really want to do that. And I, I was particularly, you know, my idea was around, I grew up on with purebred dairy, and that was what my interest is. I wanted to be an embryo vet. I wanted to be a guy that, like, did embryo flushes and stuff like that. And that’s like 95% time so, so so it was just like, okay, like, I get that this is important, and I get this is interesting, but do I want to work my guts out to get like, you needed 92% average in university to get into a small amount of seats in vet school, and then 80 hour weeks in vet school, and 80 hour weeks the first four or five years at a vet school, and then for maybe not having job security. And a lot of people I knew that were going to vet school out here were having to go to the States to get jobs. I didn’t want to go to the States. So there’s just a lot of things that kind of come together. You’re like, just maybe a route forward where I do what I want to do. And the big thing is, I wanted to be involved in the dairy industry. I still wanted to be involved in the dairy industry in some fashion, because that was a bit of a passion for me, and it still is. And I was able to find that middle ground by like, I still have an involvement with the milking shorehorn society and a kind of a part time, you know, Communications Secretary role that I do, and that’s the breed of cows we have at home right now or and we’ve had forever. And so I can still maintain that connection to the farm, maintain that connection with the industry, without having that necessarily to be my full time job. And now it actually works out reasonably well, because now I can, you know, I can have my job as potato agronomist and extension officer or whatever, and I can still go home and milk cows in the evening if I want to, or, like, you know, go help them put silage up or whatever. So it’s, it’s kind of a nice balance. Yeah,
Jay Whetter 11:54
that’s fantastic. I mean, cows are pretty cute animals, but from the face side, but when you’re spending 90 95% of your time around the back end. And I was just doing the math, so you said 80 hours times 95% is, what 76 hours a week with your hand up the backside of account. Yeah, yeah.
12:14
Okay,
Jay Whetter 12:16
so potatoes. So you, you’re in Guelph for a bit, and you, you worked in Guelph for a number of years, then moved back home to Pei, yep, and then got the potato job, yeah, after you’d moved home. So what took you home in the first place?
Ryan Barrett 12:30
Oh, it was kind of one of those things, of, I knew I wanted to be away for a bit, because you wanted to, like everybody in PEI goes away for a while, at least, that’s the way it always was, like he, you know, my graduating class from high school, I think two thirds of them went away the university and then either didn’t come back or didn’t come back for a while. And that was just kind of what everybody’s always doing at Pei, go away for a while and move back later. It’s not now. There’s more opportunities at home than there was so posts, Confederation bridge, posts, you know, investments in the industry and that sort of thing. Like PE has got a little more diversified economy than it did 25 or 30 years ago. And so let fewer people have to go away to, you know, make their living or get their start. But that being said, you know, I had the opportunity to come home. I A lot of my Guelph friends that I’d gone through grad school with, or that I’d met in Guelph, all moved on to other jobs too, and left Guelph. And it was, there was a point where I was kind of Last Man Standing of my group. Everybody else had gone to Ottawa or gone to somewhere. And then I was, you know, yeah, I was kind of Yeah, last guy standing a little bit. And then also, like, my boss changed. And then I applied for that manager role. Did not get it. New person hired. New person, lovely person, not necessarily syncing up too well with me in terms of how we worked and how we agreed on things. And I just, there was just a confluence of reasons, just like it might be time to look at going home. And my folks just said, Look, if you want to come home, we’ll put you up as long as you need to put be put up, and you can start looking for jobs, and you don’t have to have something to come home, and I did that. I think I came home in October, and I started working for the board in June. So I had a little bit of time. I had a little bit of time to kind of figure out what I was doing, that sort of thing.
Jay Whetter 14:33
So you said it was, it was a dairy, wasn’t it? But then you said, short horns, yeah, and I didn’t so, so there’s a beef and a dairy,
Ryan Barrett 14:41
that’s correct, yeah, okay, shorter and then there’s milking short horns. And we have
Jay Whetter 14:44
no are there? Okay, I didn’t know about the milking short horns. You also did something with the jersey. With jersey, yeah,
Ryan Barrett 14:50
I worked seven years for Jersey Canada, doing websites, magazine, yeah. Different. Stuff there for them? Yeah,
Toban Dyck 15:01
I think it’s, I think it’s interesting. So a lot of what we’ve done in this podcast, we’ve talked to people who do stuff in we’ve done some livestock, yeah, we’ve had some livestock interviews. Lot of kind of grain, lot of crop, kind of focused extension and and research. Potatoes is interesting. I mean, I’ve grown up around potatoes, like we talked about earlier in the Red River Valley, for sure, like crackers and some of these big producers are all around me, but it is a bit of an interesting crop in Canada. And like, you know, I think Jay and I could both publicly paint a fairly accurate landscape of what the what the grain sector looks like outside of potatoes. But can you talk a little bit about,
Jay Whetter 15:38
like, just wait, why do you say potatoes are interesting because that’s not very, very descriptive word. What do you what makes it interesting to you?
Toban Dyck 15:46
Well, it’s gonna get to that, Jake, come on, this is this whole thing was gonna kind of arrive. I was gonna long arc, long arc, and I was gonna arrive at this thing. Yeah, it is. It is interesting in the sense that, like, the inputs are different. It’s a very kind of involved process. Lots of the big potato producers, at least in my area, are, are into kind of a variety of things that these boards up, these commissions, operate differently, like some of them are supply managed, some of them aren’t. And, you know, and it’s a very the marketing side of it is very, is very unique, too. So I was just wondering for, let’s say, for, like a lay listener, could you paint a bit of a landscape of potato production in Canada, just broad strokes, kind of what that looks like. I know PEI is a big player, and talk that up for sure
Ryan Barrett 16:36
well. And that’s the thing about potatoes like so I come from a place where potatoes is king, you know. So agriculture is the number one industry in in Prince Rhode Island has been forever, still is. And then potatoes are half of net cash receipts in PEI. So like potatoes are, we have lots of other agriculture and lots of successful agriculture, but potatoes is the is, you know, that’s what you set your watch to here, and that’s what demands the attention. And it’s been like that for decades, if not centuries, like we started exporting potatoes from Pei and I think 1824, and we’ve been, you know, Pei has been a key player in potatoes for decades and decades and decades. And it was interesting because it was a crop that you could, you know, in the 40s and 50s and earlier, it was a crop that you could make a living on growing five acres, three acres, you know, like, because it’s a high value crop with high tonnage per field, right, or above per acre. And so, yes, and it’s so specialized, right? And that’s what also makes potatoes like, it’s very, when you say interesting, it is interesting in the fact that it’s incredibly specialized, in that it, it’s, it’s on that border between like it’s a field crop, but it’s not a field crop you can combine and that you can manage like every other field crop. So it’s a field crop that you plant on hundreds of acres, but it requires a specialized planter and a specialized wind rower and a specialized harvester, and maybe eat other specialized equipment besides. And then once it comes back, you need a specialized storage with specialized conveyors and handling equipment and everything else. And then, if you then are into, say, you’re not growing for processing, but you’re have a packing shed, and you’re growing it for, you know, selling it to the grocery store or something, then you need more specialized equipment for grading and sorting and packaging and everything else. So everything about potatoes is you’re on the same scale as a lot of people are for growing soybeans or corn or wheat or something else in Prince Edward Island, but I’m doing it at about 10 times the cost of production. So, you know, like, cost of production to grow an acre of corn and PEI is probably what 400 to $500 an acre, or something like that. You know, like, if I’m not talking about all the land costs being in there, and to grow an acre of potatoes is comfortably 10 times that. So, you know, like a self or a harvester, a brand new potato harvester, easily half a million dollars now, you know, like that sort of thing, and I only get to use it for one crop. And I only get to use it so I only get to use it on if I’m on a three year rotation, I only get to use it on a third of my acres every year, whereas, if I grow corn, soybeans and wheat, I use the same harvester on every acre every year, you know. And so, yes, combines are ridiculously expensive now too, but I get to spread that on all of my acres, you know. So that’s why, like, that’s why some people. Ei that historically have always grown barley or wheat or something out of after potatoes. They’re getting at a growing grain because they can’t afford to keep a combine running anymore. To grow, you know, to grow 700 acres of grain. I how do I have? How do I have a combine that I’m only using on a third of my acres every
Jay Whetter 20:17
year? I was just gonna say, Ryan, it’s just the motivation for the cover crops is that, are they related in some way?
Ryan Barrett 20:22
Where’s the connection there? For sure, like, I think, you know, there’s a lot of interest in cover crop work from a yield improvement side and a soil health improvement side and that sort of things. But I think particularly the last few years, like this year, particularly the price of barley is absolutely cratered here the last little while. And the last two or three years, people have been chasing Fusarium head blight in in wheat and barley and having crops that can’t harvest or that are fail quality, and not getting good crops. And then the price per ton went in the crapper beyond that. So like, there’s lots of people planting barley this year knowing they’re gonna lose money on barley. So do I lose $50 an acre or $100 an acre growing barley? Or do I like if I don’t grow barley and I grow some other beneficial disease suppressant, cash crop or cover crop, or some sort of soil building crop that helps with organic matter and nutrient cycling and that sort of thing. Or I grow a legume that feeds me a little bit more nitrogen. I only have to, I only have to get five or 10 more 100 weight an acre of potatoes to make up the entire profit margin on the grain that I that didn’t grow on the year that it actually made money. So like, especially we’re in PEI again, this is different than some places Alberta, nobody grows cover crops between potato crops, because there’s loads of other crops that they can grow, that have local markets or established commodity markets, and that they have demand for and handling for and everything in PEI, where there’s only 500,000 arable acres in the whole province, and a third of those are in pasture, like there’s only so many, you know, we don’t have the infrastructure to grow 1000s acres of canola and soybeans and everything else. So again, potatoes was something. Potatoes are big in PEI because we were specialized at them. I’ve been specialized at them for a long time, but doing it for a long time. We have the infrastructure build up. We have the handling built up. We have the markets built up. We have, you know, we’ve been able to manage it. But if you’re trying to make money on other commodities in PEI, not saying, people don’t make money and people don’t try, but you make money in Prince Rhode Island agriculture by either adding value or high value crops to begin with. So, like, that’s why, like, number one is potatoes. Number two is dairy, which is supply managed, and which, you know, is about a higher value product. And number three is beef. And the only reason we still have a beef industry is because we do have a federally inspected beef plant here, the only one east of Quebec. And then after that, it’s like blueberries and fruit and veg and stuff. It’s not like most, most, if not almost all, of the grain we grow feeds cattle here, you know, like we’re not sending massive amounts of corn and soybeans to out west, because you lose all the profit margin on it. You lose sending it out of here. Because, you know, we’re there’s only a million and a half to 2 million people live in all of Atlantic Canada. So, like, we don’t have that big market that, you know, it will absorb a lot of those commodities. And so they all have to go somewhere else, whereas, if you’re sending, yeah, we’re sending all of our potatoes somewhere else, but we’re sending a high value product that you can’t get everywhere. Not everybody grows potatoes, especially on this end of the continent, you know, there’s only it, you know, there’s, there’s not as many people that grow
Toban Dyck 24:00
potatoes are you? Is the Pei Potato Board? Is that a supply managed
Ryan Barrett 24:05
board? No. And actually none of the, none of the commodity boards in Canada are true, are really, truly supply managed, and that they don’t. There may be some one desk selling in some cases, like in Manitoba, but even that’s changed now. There was regulatory changes in Manitoba, but like we have a we’re a merc, we’re a commodity board or an association, but we don’t, we don’t restrict or manage how potatoes are sold. We keep track of how potatoes are sold, and we provide market information back to producers. So in PEI for it’s easier for Pei, because everything that leaves here has to leave by boat or by the bridge. So there’s only a couple ways off the island. And so any potatoes that leave the province to leave the province, they have to call us and get a transit number. Or get a marketing number, and when they get that number, they have to tell us how much they’re selling, who they’re selling it to, where it’s going, what pack size is going into, what they’re selling it for. And we maintain the database with that information. Partially, it’s so that we can use that information to collect the levy, which funds our operations, but also we build this market database, which then we provide information back to the producers of this is how much 10 pound bags of potatoes are selling to Toronto, and this is how much they’re selling to Boston. And so that people are making their marketing decisions. They have good information. They have information on, you know, where they should be, in terms of America, we don’t tell them what they should sell their potatoes for, but we tell them what everybody else is selling their potatoes for, so that they can make informed decisions and interesting in a in a commodity that’s quite perishable, and you can’t just sit on and wait six months to see Whether the market gets better. You know, it’s important to have that good information.
Jay Whetter 26:04
How are Pei potatoes marketed? Are they primarily sold as bagged potatoes for grocery stores, or is it french fries or potato chips? We’re
Ryan Barrett 26:13
about 60% of our acreage, or our production would go into processing. So that’s a combination of French fry potato chip. And we have a dehydration plant here as well that mostly takes cull potatoes and makes and then it’s like a, you know, value reclamation project, for the most part. But there is, like, Cavendish Farms has two plants here that they make french fries and they buy, they’re the single, you know, probably half the potatoes and Pei go to them. And then we also, we have a number of growers that supply a potato chip plant, a Frito Lay plant over Nova Scotia. And I’d say 95% of the potatoes go through that plant are from PEI. And then, yeah, we have a few people that grow from McCain’s as well, but not very many. And then about 30% is then fresh. So that’s going either on farm, packed in consumer pack, or maybe going in totes that’s going to get repacked somewhere else, so like and that depends a lot on market, if it’s within Canada. Most of what’s going to grocery stores, you know, is getting packed on in packages, you know, on the at the potato packer, and then they’re going in whatever package is going to the store, and they’re going to store shelves. A lot of what we send to the United States, we send in totes, like ton totes and that sort of thing. And then maybe they get repacked in the US to go, you know, to grocery stores down there. So again, it depends on the market. Depends on the on the relationships and the and the, you know, how things are marketed, and then. And then, about 10% of our acres, or 10% of our production, is seed. So again, that’s another big difference in potatoes versus other crops, potato. We grow potatoes from potatoes, right? We grow vegetative seed. And that vegetative seed has a longer bulk up period in terms of generations to produce seed. And you don’t just buy your seed from Pioneer, or, you know, de COVID, or whoever you’re buying it from the other guy, seed producer two towns over, or whatever. Like, a lot of the time, like, it’s most of the seed that’s grown to produce commercially in PEI comes from another grower, and lot of it’s local. So now it may be partially managed through another company, because there are, you know, the processors are involved with seed. The like managing the sort of the pipeline for seed and which varieties and stuff, so there’s, and there’s lots of variety companies out there, some of them European, some of them American. But it’s, it’s a complex, big conversation for another day, probably, but, yeah, but, but seed is, instead of just, I put in my, you know, my ask for this many bags of seed, and they come in on a truck and, you know, or whatever, it’s a little more of, you know, a lot of people, they would have a relationship with their seed grower, and they might even go and visit those seed fields the year before. And it’s tied to variety and the bulk between, you know, we, we start potatoes start from tissue culture, right? So, and the first generation is in a greenhouse, and then, and then there’s a field generation. And it takes three or four field generations to get to the wards, the seed that’s actually going to be planted by the commercial producer. So it takes a little bit of while. There’s a lot of risk in that process too. Yeah,
Toban Dyck 29:39
it’s almost like, like, buying a, like a like a dog or a horse or something like the the breed and the story become really important. And you, you visit the farm, you develop a relationship, yeah, trust, yeah. That’s interesting.
Jay Whetter 29:52
Ryan, I was, I asked, I mentioned cover crops a few minutes ago, but I just know from the research perspective that’s you’ve got a few kinds. For crop related projects on the go. And it’s kind of a trendy term. There’s not a lot of, I mean, there’s a reasonable amount of talk of cover crop on the prairies, but it’s not actually much, many acres of it. But it seems like there’s a good business case for it. Just what you were describing earlier on, Pei like is that, is that what drives a lot of the decisions to look into cover crop as a research projects for you,
Ryan Barrett 30:25
yeah, like all of my projects that I work on are informed by what the growers are interested in and what the growers set as priority. So my program, if the growers aren’t interested in it, I’m not going to be looking into it so or at least showing some level of interest. And again, cover crops, there’s, you know, I always find there’s, there’s a couple different sides to this. And cover crops are not all like they’re not. They don’t mean the same thing to everybody. I try and divide it into two topics. There’s, there’s full season cover crops, or kind of service crops, which make more sense in a short rotation of high value crops, like in PEI, than they do probably in Alberta or Manitoba, taking a full year at a rotation to grow. You know, sorghum, Sudan, grass, you know, may only make sense here. May not make as much sense. They’re not not saying somebody may not have a reason to do it, but they make the business case, and the rationale is probably higher here. And also, like multi purpose crops, like you know, do you define alfalfa as a cover crop like some people would? Some people say, Oh no, that’s a cash crop because I’m going to sell hay, or I’m going to pasture it or whatever. But, you know, there’s lots of people here growing alfalfa and just mowing it down, you know, as a as a nitrogen source, as a nitrogen credit, or as a compaction fighter, or something else like that, right? So, again, it’s sort of, there’s not one recipe for everybody, but we’ve been growing our standard rotation in PEI for 100 years has been potatoes, small grain forage crop, because the small grain and the straw got fed to or bedded livestock, and then the forage crop got fed to livestock. And when we had fully integrated potato and livestock industry here, that all ran tickety boo. And when my, when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, like my farm had 40 Acres of potatoes and 30 cows, milk cows and 30 beef cows, you know, and that and it was all integrated. Now we don’t grow potatoes. We rent 40 or 50 acres a year out two potato guys, and we have milk 85 cows, and have 30 or 40 beef cows. So the you know, we’ve specialized more on the livestock, and that’s largely those mixed farms. There’s almost none of them left anymore. So people have specialized more, just like they have everywhere else. But those farms still exist, and they still have that sort of connectivity, and there still is a value for those pasture and forage crops. And my, actually, my hope is, is to do more research and do more work on reintegration of livestock and the potato industry, you know, to mutual benefit of everybody. But that’s why I’m doing some work on grazing and different cover crops as well. But it’s an easier stretch to for somebody that’s already growing a crop that’s maybe marginally returning any any cash flow to go from growing Clover to growing some other different cover crop than somebody that says, Oh, I grow a cash crop every year, and now you’re telling me one year I’m not going to grow a cash crop. That’s a more of a stretch. So that rationale, or that business case, is easier to manage in PEI but then also, then there’s what I would call more of the fall cover crop, and that’s where I have probably a greater passion, and it’s about because in Prince Rhode Island, you know, we have longer falls, we have lots of precipitation, and we have highly erodible soils. So how do we preserve our fields? Preserve the production capacity of our fields and the profitability of our farms, keep soil out of the rivers. You know, do things that are both environmentally beneficial but also beneficial to the long term viability of our farms. And that’s keeping the soil in the field. And that’s also, you know is it, can we be retaining soil moisture? Can we be retaining nitrogen, carrying over nitrogen? If we have leftover nitrogen after a potato crop here in our high precipitation, sandy soils, it’s gone like it’s it’s gone. It’s all either leached out or gone as nitrous oxide. So. If you know, 10% of it might be left the next year. So if we can have a cover crop that carries some of that over, there’s benefits to that too. So so we’ve been, I’ve been putting a lot of focus more on the on the fall covers, and building both the business case and the agronomic case for us. Again, it fits in a in a system like ours, with where water is usually not a limitation. Building the case for Fall cover crops is a lot easier.
Jay Whetter 35:28
But what we what we want to get into over Brian is, is like the actual extension of information, those conversations with the farmers on deciding what research to do, right? Yeah. So you have those conversations, and then it’s then, how do you, once you’ve done the research, then how do you extend it?
Ryan Barrett 35:47
You know, when I first started this job, like I wasn’t massively passionate about cover crops or fall covers, but it was getting the experience and working with the producers. There were producers that were doing fall cover cropping here, and they were seeing some benefit from us. And then there was a increasing interest in the industry in Fall covers from an academic and a research side. And then more growers started getting into it. And then we had this living labs project that came to PEI. And then it was, well, here’s an ability to do this work together, with growers taking the lead from growers in what they want us to look at. And one of the things they wanted to look at, look at is we’re getting, we’re hearing a lot about cover crops. We want to see, like, how, what’s the best way to do it, and do they move the needle on anything? And how does that all work? And then, as we, you know, we get into that and start, you know, building some critical, massive trials. And I was doing, you know, multiple trials of multiple growers over a few years, and then we start generating some results that actually were showing that, you know, fall covers before potatoes in our in our system, where normally people were plowing down a forage crop with no cover crop, and having that ground bare to the winter, all you know, and very vulnerable to erosion, very vulnerable to nitrogen loss, changing that by introducing a fall cover. Not only were we seeing some of those, you know, environmental benefits, but we were seeing, you know, eight to 10% yield bump in the potato crop. And we were seeing that, and we were seeing that on most of the trials. Like, I think, if you know, some people talk, if you’re doing lots of trials over multiple years, and they talk about, what’s your win rate on trials, or whatever? We were like 80 85% that were coming out with a benefit on yield, where we had a cover. And I think that’s because, again, it was carrying over nutrients. It was carrying over nitrogen. It was protecting soil. It was maybe, you know, feeding the soil microbial community, that sort of thing. So we were seeing some of this benefit in our system. And so what we saw is that, again, it’s not just it’s not top down, and it’s not all bottom up. I think it’s a combination of both. And what we saw is then, basically from the start of that process, of when we first started talking about and really doing research on cover crops to today, we’ve gone from probably about 25% cover crop acres in the potato rotation to about 50 to 60% so we have seen this big uptick where, you know, growers are the early adopters, are seeing the benefits from the research and from the extension of the research, and then the other growers are listening or seeing their neighbors doing it, and seeing why they’re having successes doing it. And then the early adopters are refining ways to make it how can I do it better, cheaper, easier? So now, like now, a lot of people like if they’re say they’re terminating alfalfa in August, and then they’re going in with their Lemkin or Pottinger, you know, tillage machine, and then they got an APV seeder on the tillage machine that’s seeding the cover crop at the same time. So it’s just one pass. So then I’m not, I don’t have to go in and do it another, you know, another pass in the field. My only cost is the seed. I’m not fertilizing and I’m not doing anything else. So if all my cost is a seed, and I don’t have another guy tied up in another tractor with another piece of gear. It’s a lot easier conversation to have, right? So again, it’s about trying to look at it systemically, like I’m not looking at it academically. I’m not trying to get a paper published. I’m not trying to I’m just trying to see what works for the growers and how does it fit into their systems. And if I talk to the growers, their number one limitation is always time and people. So how do I find a way to make it work in that? You know, if I try and come to them and say, I got this great thing that’s going to save you all, or it’s going to make you $200 an acre, but it’s going to take another person in another piece of gear, or it’s going to take a whole lot more paperwork. They’ll leave money on the table, sure, yeah, because they don’t have time to manage it. Yes, yeah. And so it’s just a lot of the projects that we’ve been trying to look at here, with the Potato Board and with our agronomy initiative that have been really focused on Win Win things. So. So things that can be can be worked into existing pro you know, existing firms, without massive rethinking, without massive change, they’re incremental changes, little bits of things that we can do better, that have both an environmental benefit as well as an economic benefit.
Toban Dyck 40:17
So Ryan,
Jay Whetter 40:18
you said, there’s only 500 potato growers in Canada. How many on the island there? Fewer than 100
Ryan Barrett 40:25
my number might be not 100% right, but I know we have about 150 160 in PIs.
Jay Whetter 40:32
So how do you have those? I mean, it seems like a number where you mean you’re not gonna have necessarily one on one conversations, 150 people. But so when it comes to gathering the research ideas and then and then extending the results, what with that group? What’s the best techniques for both the gathering and the sharing? Is there? Maybe it’s the same technique. Maybe you do different things. But I just want to know what, what are your tactics?
Ryan Barrett 41:00
Well on the gathering side, like on the getting when we started, we did a very comprehensive consultation with producers, trying to kind of get at what their priorities were, what their challenges were, what they thought the opportunities were. And we did that through small group meetings, larger group meetings, email surveys. We kind of tried to come at it from a few different angles, but a pretty decent level of engagement, probably talk to at least half of the potato producers in PEI in some fashion, through one of those four methods, yeah, yeah. And then put a put of a bit of a plan together. And then the really, the big success of our our AIM Program, or our agronomy initiative for marketable yield is we have three different working groups on different sort of topic areas. So we have one around C seed and tuber quality, one around soil and one around science and tech, or kind of it’s a bit of a catch all, but I have growers on each of those working groups as well. So I have technical specialists from different parties, partners like the Department of Ag and Agriculture Canada and cabbage farms. But I also have growers, and so they’re, they’re keen, interested growers who they either have ideas for projects, or they have ideas that other people tell them, or or they just want to put their hand up to try something and try, try a trial, and that sort of thing. So again, it’s tried to be, try not to be top down, try to be as bottom up as we can, but within reason like then there’s, you know, my role is, you know, not every growers get the time to go to meetings and conferences and scour through literature all winter. So then they say, Ryan, I want you to go to such and such conference. I want you to go to Manitoba Potato production days and hear what’s happening out there, and then take home the thing that they’re doing that maybe we should try and run it through our working group and see whether we agree, and if you we agree, we want to put a Pei twist on it and we try things out. So again, it’s a, I think it’s co development. It’s working with the producers to get as many good ideas from them as to what’s going to move what are their biggest challenges, and how can we, with common sense, move the needle for them? But then also, what am I hearing from other people in the network? How do I build the network and then have stuff coming back from the network?
Jay Whetter 43:14
Which of those, which of those methods do you think is the most effective at encouraging adoption of an idea. So you said email, he said survey, and you said small groups, and then large groups, or maybe it was small group, small focus groups, and then more, more of an event. Like, yeah, my gut would say it’s the small focus groups, but, but what do you
Ryan Barrett 43:39
Yeah, what is the, what’s most successful? And I was that list was really focused on the sort of, the the initial, like, data, Intel, getting, you know, like, you know, making a plan right on the push out, on the on the extension, you’re right, it very much is the small groups. So, like, you know, we’ve been doing a potato conference here forever. We’ve been doing, you know, people have been generating Fact Sheets forever, yeah, but what we really found is we need, still need to do those things, because everybody learns in different ways. Everybody takes in information different ways. But where we’ve kind of changed things too, is then doing half day meetings, half day workshops on one topic, where I bring in a speaker from somewhere. They could be local, they could be from elsewhere. Bring in a speaker, and we’re only going to talk about this one thing for for a morning, and I’m going to bring coffee or donuts or whatever, and we’re going to talk about that thing, and you’re going to and it’s only going to be 20 to 40 people in the room, and you’ll have a chance to have asked questions, because when we have a, you know, pi potato conference or potato Expo, and you have great speakers from wherever, but they’re talking for half an hour on a topic, and there’s they usually go over their time, and there’s no time for questions. And people don’t want to stand up in front of 200 people and ask a question, but they will stand up in 20 of their in front of 20 of their neighbors and ask a question, because. They figure all those people all probably have the same question, and if they don’t even want to ask the question, then they’ll at least internalize it, think about it, and ask me about the question on the drive home or the next day or something. So I found those local meetings is where we’ve had definitely more traction in getting BMP adoption and generating more ideas again the next project, or the next iteration of the project, or the next big problem. And I’ve tried to find a good balance in those local meetings of also, like I tried to find a balance between researchers and agronomists and even just producers. So like I, you know, usually the ones where I have a producer is the most attended ones that we do. So last winter, I had Chad Barry from Manitoba. He firms out like, or is it like Desborough area there? And like I had, I had him for half a day, like three meetings over two days. And like, people love that, you know, like people really love being able to just bounce things off of somebody their peer, right, you know, and somebody that they’re that they can kind of associate with, but they also get value from the agronomist and the researcher. That is maybe on a different level, you know.
Jay Whetter 46:17
So, so the, let’s think about like, the structure of that meeting, or that morning. Is there an agenda presentation, presentation? Or is it just like, let’s farmers, you ask whatever questions, and we’ve got these, these experience, this experienced farmer from Manitoba, we’ve got these experts. They’re going to help answer the question like, is it almost like a, like a free for all, no discussion? Or is that a set agenda?
Ryan Barrett 46:41
It comes with an agenda, but it’s not an overly prescribed agenda. So it’s, I have a topic. So the topic today is Colorado potato beetles, or the topic today is, you know, precision agriculture, or something like that. You know, I have a topic, and I asked the my my guest speaker, to come in and talk for, you know, an hour to an hour and a half on that topic, and their experience, their research, their, you know, whatever their relationship to that topic is, where there’s lots of time for questions, and then at the end, I then also then talk for 45 minutes to an hour about the research that we’re doing locally on that same topic. So, and then I can relate to them, you know. So I’ve got this experience or this I’ve got this person from somewhere else, or maybe local, that has lots to share on this topic area, and there’s lots to learn there. And then I can also talk to you, how does that relate to what we’re doing through our program as well. And then hopefully it’s a way of getting, you know, we attract them in with the guest speaker, and then they also get to hear about what we’re doing here locally too. So usually I have, you know, last winter we I had speakers here to talk about a disease in potatoes common scab causes the potatoes to be kind of gross looking. It’s a caused by bacteria. And so I had two speakers in from Agriculture Canada to talk about their research in common scab. But then after the break, after we get top up the coffee, I talk about also the work I’m doing on common scab and soil, like tuber quality projects and stuff like that. So we can kind of bridge the local and the external.
Jay Whetter 48:27
So in the three hour meeting, however, not much time you’ve set aside, would it be an hour of total q, a or, like, do you make sure that? Or, how do you make sure
Ryan Barrett 48:37
there’s probably, there’s probably an hour in there, yeah? Like, we often the the topics. We usually just say, ask questions as you go along, right? And that’s usually the way it goes.
Jay Whetter 48:48
So within 90 minutes for your out, for your then that would just be, like, there may be a few slides, but, but, I mean, it’s, it’s that kind of ongoing conversation, okay, I like that, yeah. And
Ryan Barrett 49:01
again, it’s depends on the speaker. If I get a ag researcher from a university or from Agriculture Canada, they got lots of slides. They got lots of time for good reason, right? And so oftentimes we don’t even get through all the slides. If I bring a farmer, usually what I tell the farmer is, put a slide deck together. That’s just a bunch of pictures from your firm, you know, a bunch of pictures from the field, and let’s talk about them, right? So then, and that’s usually what, how those usually end up going.
Jay Whetter 49:31
You think that the university researchers and the AG, Canada researchers could learn something from that technique?
Toban Dyck 49:37
Yeah? Or just, just add onto that question, like, do you? Do you bring your communications kind of background and interest into into these kinds of into these kinds of meetings? Well,
Ryan Barrett 49:49
I mean, I think we can all learn about how to communicate more effectively and how to make better presentations. Like I I’m still guilty of putting too many words on my decks like you know, because people want us. The slide deck later, and then they want to be able to learn from that if they couldn’t get to the meeting, you know? So there’s, there’s lots of ways we can do things better. I think it’s trying to find the right balance. Sometimes, the, you know, the presentation that’s no words and just pictures is good, but sometimes you’d like to have something to ground it in a little bit too. But it’s all depends on who’s speaking. If I’ve got, if I get somebody in that’s got 30 years experience working in potato research, like, you know, they’ve got a lot to share. They got a lot of wisdom to share, and the growers want to hear that too. So I think it’s, again, it’s it’s fitting, the fitting the format, to the producer, sort of to the presenter, making sure there’s lots of freedom and ability to for people to interact. I’ve now moved to I record all of those at least like so usually we do three half days over two days. So if I’m flying somebody in, I can fly them in on a Monday, they can do sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and I can either fly them home Friday afternoon or or Wednesday afternoon or Thursday. So they’re not doesn’t kill the whole week and, but I usually, usually the third meeting of the three, after we’ve kind of worked at the kinks. We record the last one and, and then I make them available on YouTube. And I mean, 10 people might see it, 100 people might see it like but it’s, you know, if somebody was taking their kid to hockey that day, or somebody was shipping potatoes that day, and they wanted to be able to see it. They can see it. And setting up a camcorder in the back of the room doesn’t cost any money. So it’s, it’s pretty easy, you know, is it top production value? No, but it’s something people can get to access it. But if you’ve got 150
Jay Whetter 51:37
potato farmers on the island and and 10 people watch the recording? I mean, there’s, mean, it doesn’t sound like a lot of people, but that’s a great big percentage of your audience that’s had a chance to see it, that might not have seen it. Otherwise. The numbers can be deceiving when it comes to views of a really key video. I
Ryan Barrett 51:58
you know, like we have firms where, like, okay, there’s four or five principal guys working on one firm, and one guy got to the meeting, the other guys were getting stuff done at home or were away or something. And you know, if you’re having meetings in February and March, you’re competing with, you know, Cancun, and you’re competing with Vegas, and you’re competing with a few other places. So I like to have flexibility so people can access this information, or even the guys that were at the meeting and they want to watch it back to I might have missed something, or I want to, yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t take a picture of that slide I wanted to look at, or something, right?
Toban Dyck 52:32
So one thing I want to just kind of come back to before it gets kind of lost or forgotten, is, Ryan, you said regarding presentations, bidding the format to the presenter. And I think that’s a really, I know you just said it, and it was part of the conversation, and it’s a good but it’s a really, that’s a really good thing, because I’ve talked to people, and Jay and I have run workshops on on presentation skills, right? And we do kind of have a canned like approach to how to create a presentation, but, but the subtext, or what’s not said is exactly what you said. If you are a really good speaker, or if you come in and you got this charisma coming out of, you know, your pores, like you could have, you don’t need a great presentation. Your presentation could be terrible, but, or your slide, your slide deck, could be terrible, but you are really interesting. So I think, I don’t know. I think there’s some, there’s something really there that needs to be, that that needs to be talked we can’t, we can’t just, we can’t just put kind of these, these layers onto these things and assume it works every time. It does depend on who the presenter is. Does depend on who the audience is, I like that,
Ryan Barrett 53:42
and some people are more comfortable presenters than others, right? And like I have, sometimes people come in and present and it’s an interesting topic, but they’re not potato people, and so they’re talking to a group of people they don’t know. Sometimes they’re potato people, and they are very comfortable talking about their subject matter, but they don’t know anything about Pei, or they don’t know maybe it’s something different, like the last winter before last, like I brought in a seed producer from England and had them talk about how they grow seed in particular in England. Well, it’s still potatoes, but it’s there’s a lot of differences between how you grow seed potatoes in England versus growing them in PEI. Lots of commonalities as well, but like so in that case, it’s like, tell us about what you do, tell us about why you do what you do. And it’s these presentations aren’t about coming in and telling firms you shall do this. It’s about, this is what I’m doing, yeah, and or this is what I’ve been finding, or this is what we’ve been seeing in our research, and maybe that could work for you, and maybe this is something we can dig into a little bit more and find the commonalities, or find where, you know, where things might be of you know, there might be a through a common thread that we can latch on, but let, I think,
Jay Whetter 54:56
let the audience kind of put those, make those connections. But if you. Just telling you exactly my experience, my story, etc. I think that, to me, more relate more to the audience than just kind of like a prescriptive list of you shall do this kind of thing.
Ryan Barrett 55:14
And in growers, like you guys would know like there are producers that’s very open minded, and they go to every conference, and they want to hear new ideas, and they want to take those new ideas home and try new things. And then there’s producers that say, How dare you come here and try and tell me how to farm. I’ve been farming for 50 years, and I farm the same way my father farmed, and that’s fine. And so I gotta try and find a way in the middle there of like, okay, I don’t want anybody feeling like I have people coming in and tell them how to farm, but I want people to come in and say, from our experience, that this has worked or this hasn’t worked, and maybe you guys can learn from what we’ve done or haven’t done, and then tinker around with it on your own farms and see what works and doesn’t work. And is it something that you want to try here or something, you want to at least try one field, or part of one field, or, you know, play around with things. So I think that’s how we’ve been trying to approach it, is, try not to be very top down. Try not to be very prescriptive. Where I have seen extension and efforts and BMP adoption efforts fail in the potato industry is when they’ve been too top down and too prescriptive and too formulaic, and you don’t get the grower buy in. And if you don’t get the grower buy in, it just dies. So if you can try and at least start at the bottom, get a certain critical mass of growers that own it and say, there’s value in this. We want to be part of the making the solution. We understand that there are challenges, and we want to be part of that and then build on top of that. And that’s kind of what we’re trying
Jay Whetter 56:50
to do. We we’re getting near to the end, Ryan, but we want to, I want to talk about because you said to our colleague Ashley in the pre interview about you like comedy. And I think comedy actually, I mean, it is, it’s fun, fun, but can also be an effective extension tool. Like, so do you use, do you use comedy in a way to break the ice? Do you tell jokes, or do you try to be self deprecating in humor? Or, like, is not
Ryan Barrett 57:19
a I’m not a good joke teller, like, I have a I love comedy of all kinds, especially stand up comedy and I like that’s probably most of what I watch and a lot of what I listen to comedy podcasts and stuff. But I inherited a gene from my father that makes it unable to properly tell a joke either either say it wrong or I trip over it, or I say the punchline the wrong time or something. I don’t have that comic timing. I’m kind of, if I’m just chatting with my coworkers or whatever, like, I can we can kid around, I can be funny and whatever, but I’d never be a stand up comic because I just can’t I can’t deliver. I don’t have that comic timing down. So I don’t try and be a comedian, I but I try and be humorous, or I try and be make people feel comfortable being there, right? Yeah, try not to be overly officious, and try not to be overly, you know, run by schedule, and try and make people feel comfortable in being in being somewhere, right? Yeah, big part
Toban Dyck 58:25
of it, yeah, no, that’s awesome. Do you have any who is your favorite comedian right now? Oh,
Ryan Barrett 58:31
I mean, I probably have a on my top five. I mean, Chappelle, Tommy Tiernan from the from Ireland is definitely one of my favorites. I’ve seen him a couple times in PEI thankfully, Jim Gaffigan, Patton, Oswalt, John Mulaney, so, yeah, there’s a lot of really top guys. I really, I, I, yeah, I watch a lot of comedy, and I and a lot of, I like dense writing. So I don’t like, you know, formulaic, you know, multi camera, haha, sitcom. I like, you know, dense comedy, like 30 rock and parks and recreation and like those kinds of, like, joke, like, that’s my type of comedy, you know? So, yeah,
Toban Dyck 59:24
yeah, oh, that’s, that’s really interesting. So, barbecue, I mean, we you also talked about, you know, barbecue is a big, you know, you’re a big fan. Do you have, do you have a recipe? Like, do you have a burger recipe that you go to
Ryan Barrett 59:36
nothing, nothing, that you’re like, oh, I have to do this. Try me. I tinker. I tinker and play around. And, you know, I had the luxury of a fairly low cost to free supply of ground beef from home so I can, you know, tinker and play around and that sort of stuff. But I find. I used to make them. I used to be bad. I used to be really bad at them, because I did it like my father. And my father was, if more he if some heat was good, more heat was better, and if just 10 minutes was good, 20 minutes was amazing, and then they should be black light hockey pucks, yeah. And that’s not how I do meat anymore, and I’ve I try and be a little bit better. I think the big thing a little bit of salt to release the flavor in the beef is important. And if you want to be, if you want to play around with that, in terms of where that salt comes from, I actually find a little bit of soy sauce in it is good for that. I don’t think that’s anything new, but that’s how I’ve been doing it. I try not to be too much breadcrumbs or too much filler. I try and stay as much meat as possible, and then, yeah, try and not grill the absolute hell out of it and let it my big thing for burgers is like so Prince Edward Island, every April has a has a promotion, or has a short term restaurant promotion called burger love, Pei burger love. And like dozens and dozens of burgers, all make their burger. And there’s a website. You go on the website and find out all the burgers, and you can go and get them and whatever. And it’s celebration of Pei beef. But every restaurant, most of the restaurants, make the same mistake of just piling more stuff on the burger to the point that the burger is unedible because it’s a foot high, and there’s just so many kinds of goop and everything on it, when they always neglect that the burger is the star of the burger is the burger. Make the burger good, and then add a few things to accompany it. And that’s way more important. I come from the Ron Swanson SCHOOL OF MISSION burger, you know, get your meat and do your meat right. And then if you have cheese and, you know, a few condiments on it, but you don’t have to have 20 things on it.
1:01:58
I never want to see a beak on my hamburger.
Toban Dyck 1:01:59
You’re making me very hungry. I actually would
Jay Whetter 1:02:03
eat a beet on a hamburger. But anyway, I’m just thinking what Ron Swanson would say, right, Ryan, when you think of young farmers on Pei like it’s part of your I’m not gonna say your job, but your passion, trying to, you know, encourage the next generation. Does that come into it at all? And like, is there, is Pei different in that regard? Or is it the same in PEI as anywhere else?
Ryan Barrett 1:02:31
I mean, I think there’s. There’s definitely a common trend over most of agriculture that our primary operators tend to be older, but there are quite a few younger people coming through the industry at the moment, and we’ve just, there’s just been a re energization of the Pei young farmers group here, after a bit of a dormancy around COVID and even a little bit before COVID. And I think it’s re energizing a little bit of passion in the industry and a little bit more interest farming and Pei in general is at a smaller scale than it is in some places like, you know, there aren’t 10,000 acre farms in PEI and that sort of thing. So if you are trying to get in on a, you know, on the ground floor, maybe it’s a little less daunting if you’re growing 500 acres than 5000 but that being said, you know, there’s a lot of risk and a lot of cost that comes with getting into the potato industry and so and it’s tough to just, you know, especially with the capital involved, it is tough. And if your family doesn’t already firm, it’s tough. But we are seeing like I’m seeing examples here of, you know, young guys that come from maybe families that don’t farm themselves, or maybe their grandfather’s farm, but their dads didn’t, and they really want to farm, and then they’re going to work for existing farmers, and then they’re working their way into succession after working for that farmer for five or 10 years or something, right? And so I’ve seen that happening here more than we have in the past, and I think that’s great. Where we also need to focus is on our next generation of agronomists, and in PEI for some reason, we’ve, we’re, oh, we understand, and under, uh, build capacity for agronomy than probably anywhere else in the potato industry. And like, we have some really great agronomists, but they’re 65 plus, with no summer students and no Junior agronomist and nobody working with them. They’re just, they’re just cowboys or just one or two person operations, right? So we’re not building that next generation. So that’s why, like within my here at the board, I have a junior agronomist who, you know, basically, it’s an entry level position, and they’re helping me with my trials, but hopefully we’re building some capacity. They’re mostly straight out of school, and they’re getting some experience. And my hope is, is that in two or three years, they take another job, you know, that they they go and take a job with either a firm or another agronomy firm or. Or supplier, or the government or somebody that, but hopefully we’re retaining them in the industry. So I actually have two working with me at the moment, and you know, my hope is, is that, you know, like we’re building some of that capacity, because we need, as firms get bigger, and often with the same amount of management. There’s not enough hours in the day to do everything. You can’t do everything well, just you’re by yourself. So you need more help, and you need more people. And I am the agronomist for 155 firms, in one way, but I can’t be the agronomist for 155 firms, if you know what I mean. So so they need additional help, and they need additional services. And so I think some farms have seen that, like are all on board, and they’ve hired their own on farm, agronomist, or they hire the services of somebody, and more are trying to kind of figure out how to get there. And so again, but you need the you need the capacity, you need the people, you the human resources to sort of build that So, and we only have one ag school in the Maritimes over in Dalhousie, and there hasn’t been a lot of kids from Pei going there just recently. We’re trying to re energize that as well. But you know, when I went there, probably a quarter of the kids there were from Pei, and now it’s, you know, fraction of that. So hopefully we can build more capacity that then helps make firming a little bit easier, you know, or at least management affirming a little bit easier.
Toban Dyck 1:06:32
Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much, Ryan. I know we’ve covered, like a wide variety of topics here, from burgers and comedy to extension. Is there anything else that you that you’d like to mention that we haven’t, that we haven’t talked about?
Ryan Barrett 1:06:47
No, not really. I mean, just, I don’t comment this as anybody that has got everything all worked out, like I’m figuring things out as we’re going along too. Like, as we said, I came at this when I grew up growing 40 Acres of potatoes at home, I hated potatoes. I because all I associated we grew seed potatoes. I associated with Rogan fields, walking up and down, pulling out diseased plants in the heat of the sun, all I saw was the risk involved. Because at that time, there was a lot of risk in growing seed potatoes. There was years where, you know, with trade embargoes and things and the cost, you know, we weren’t getting the cost of production back, and I was seeing people going out of business. And I just thought, why, in the name of fortune, would anybody go near potatoes? And over time, things improve, things change, things professionalized, things specialize. I come back after being away from that for more than 10 years, and come back and see, oh, you know, my perspective on that’s a little different, you know, and there’s a different side to potatoes, and I can see the value. I mean, it still is a lot of hard work, and it still is a lot of risk, but I think, you know, there is a way, there is a future in it. And I, like, I really enjoy working the industry, but I learned something. I learned something every day. And I think one of the key things in extension is, if you don’t know the answer to something, don’t be as people and don’t don’t try and sound like you know the answer to people say, I don’t know, but I’m going to help you find out, right? So I’m going to talk to someone else in my network who does know the answer, or I’m going to do a little literature search and try and figure that out for you and I, that’s what I learned, especially coming to it without, you know, I didn’t have a crop science degree, you know, I had plant science courses. I did my CCA, you know, I’m an active CCA, that sort of thing. But like, I didn’t feel confident that. Like, every time you ask me, okay, what’s the planning depth I should plant? You know, Sudan grass at I don’t have that off the top of my head. I’m going to find that out, and I’m going to get back to you, but I’m not going to BS you and say, you know, this is, this is what you should go and do, because it erodes trust. People figure that stuff out pretty quick. Most people have a pretty good radar for BS, so you have to, you have to be, you know, you have to say, I’m going to work with you and figure this out.
Toban Dyck 1:09:12
Yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, that’s wonderful. Thanks, Ryan, yes, great. Chatting with you. Thanks so much. Appreciate the invite. You.
Toban Dyck 1:09:27
That was a great conversation. I gotta come back to one thing. You took issue with the fact that I said the word I was calling potatoes Interesting, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to, I just want to kind of dive into that a little
Jay Whetter 1:09:41
bit here, right? Well, I just, I think you had some thoughts in your head, yeah, and just wanted to encourage you to share them, because interesting doesn’t, doesn’t really tell me anything, but I did. I went. I got there. I got I where you’re going to get there without me prompting you. I was okay. Yeah, I was, I think
Toban Dyck 1:10:00
so I don’t know I wanted, I wanted to say yes now to defend myself. But whether I was or not, I don’t
Jay Whetter 1:10:07
know, yeah, I just think, yes, Jay like, and I it’s not like I’m, I’m the guy who never says the word interesting. But I just mean, there’s, it’s not a good expression of, really, anything. It’s
Toban Dyck 1:10:20
not descriptive, no, no, no. And I was, I was going to, I was going to, because part of me bringing up now is that, is that potatoes are interesting kind of amid that, or they’re unique, or they stand out a little bit in this crop grain world, right? Because they like, like he said, it was, you know, your inputs are different. Your machinery is different. The market is different. It’s kind of a bit of an outlier in that, in that grain landscape, like, what, what do they do? Right? I know they’re farmers, and they kind of, they mingle with farmers, but, yeah, their day to day is very different, yeah, like, I never marketing is so different. It’s a very interesting industry that way.
Jay Whetter 1:11:03
Now I’m very they seem to be again, I don’t I haven’t seen the books of a potato grower, but they seem to be successful. Yes, with all the input costs, like I can imagine that a bank or a lender would be very supportive of someone who came in and said, we’re thinking about getting into potatoes, especially if they had a good record already, obviously, but, but I think it would be something that a bank might might jump on, because it seems like it’s a lucrative side of agriculture,
Toban Dyck 1:11:40
it seems like an industry that’s kind of merciless to those who can’t make it like, Oh, yeah. I don’t know that. I’m just saying this is from outside looking again, like, Yeah, you don’t because you don’t see too many that are just kind of, you know, limping along like, it seems like, yeah, yeah. I I
Jay Whetter 1:11:58
wonder you don’t limp along for long before you get no, yeah, chewed up or whatever is spat and then maybe this is one of those classic scenarios where I need to say, I don’t know because, well, no, that is just because Ryan was saying, that’s really important. And extension is to say, You know what, I don’t know, but I’m going to look up, look into that for
Toban Dyck 1:12:16
you. Well, even, even I agree, and even, like the the landscape, the Canadian potato landscape, just it is, yeah, Pei Manitoba, Alberta, BC, like, there are, it’s, it’s, it has its own kind of story to tell, for sure. Yeah, no, I really, I really enjoyed it, right? Ryan, great conversation, very,
Jay Whetter 1:12:42
very informative. I thought, I just think of, you know, at its at its root, hamburger and fries is should be healthier and yeah, you know, right? Because they make it in your home farm. Case they probably is, yeah, because it’s potatoes and it’s and it’s beef, yeah, which are chock full of all kinds of useful nutrients, proteins and and everything else. Go ahead when it’s when? Yeah, all I’m all I’m saying is it I’ve got a bad reputation, maybe because of salt and because of fat and fast food and everything else. But at their cores, they’re both really strong, healthy ingredients. Okay, we need to wrap up. Let’s do it. Larry, did you have I feel like I cut you off, but anyway, that’s a good way to wrap up. Hamburgers and fries are good. Good for you. I
Toban Dyck 1:13:36
think we’re just gonna go get some right away. We should
Jay Whetter 1:13:41
till next time. I’m Jay wetter and I’m Toban Dyck, and this is the extensionists. Thanks for listening. This has been a burr forest group production. We also want to thank the people you don’t see.
Toban Dyck 1:13:53
We’re here. We’re chatting away with our guests, but there’s tons of people who work behind the scenes to make this podcast happen. Brian Sanchez our director, Ashley Robinson is the coordinator, and Abby wall is our producer and editor. You.