Urban business “dragons” still can’t take agriculture seriously. Their loss
It’s hard to believe, but once I was an ignorant Eastern urbanite. Sure, I knew that most of my food came from the ground somehow (though I’m still not sure about Diet Pepsi or Oreos). But even as a business journalist for 20 years, I rarely gave thought to agriculture. My only farm visits were occasional pilgrimages to pick apples at a former family farm that now survives mainly on apple crumble pie, tractor rides and a gift shop. In southern Ontario, where some of Canada’s best farmland now grows mainly homes and parking lots, farming is considered a quaint custom, not a significant industry.
My personal epiphany occurred a few years ago in Saskatoon. At a reception, I was asked if I would like to meet Saskatchewan’s outstanding young farmers of the year. Don’t they know what goes through an urban Easterner’s mind when given a straight line like that?
At their farm in Churchbridge, east of Regina, Warren and Carla Kaeding grow wheat, oats, canola, peas and beans and specialty crops such as sunflowers and soybeans. In addition, I learned, they research and propagate seeds, and welcome delegations from foreign seed companies. They buy and sell commodity futures to lock in prices, as well as broker commodities.
So I learned – first-hand – never to underestimate the capable, creative people running “agribusinesses.” But few normal Easterners ever get their nose rubbed in it like I did – so the disrespect lives on.
Case in point: a new CBC “reality” show called Dragons’ Den, which debuts this month. Based on a show out of Britain that was licensed from Japanese TV, and probably copied from American Idol (you see now how the media elite define creativity), the program assembled five self-made businesspeople to accept pitches for funding from dreamers, inventors and other early-stage entrepreneurs. The five dragons included a Toronto software entrepreneur (now resident in Boston), the president of Boston Pizza (now living in Dallas, but with a solid B.C.-Alberta pedigree), a debonair Brit from a Montreal fashion house, a Toronto tech titan, and a woman from Saskatchewan now ranching in Alberta.
Encouraging business people to act like dragons won’t exactly bring out the best in them. Even so, at the show’s taping in August, I was shocked by the lack of respect some of her colleagues (all men) showed for Edmonton-based Jennifer Wood and her cattle-related businesses.
>When an entrepreneur showed off an ingenious pool toy that simulates lumberjack-style log-rolling, one of the dragons asked teasingly if it could be used to wash cows. When an inventor demonstrated his one-handed doggy pooper-scooper, a colleague asked if he had a model for cleaning up after 50,000 head. And when Wood expressed distaste for an artwork produced by two Vancouver entrepreneurs, another dragon quipped that the only art she liked was pictures of cattle.
Wood accepted the ribbing with grace. None of the dragons had met each other prior to the taping session, so maybe her colleagues just didn’t understand her business. Cattle & Co. owns between 10,000 and 20,000 head of cattle, and is creating a new business model by boarding its herds at other people’s feedlots, setting out precise templates for how the cattle should be fed and cared for. And they probably don’t know that her other company, Viewtrak, has computerized tracking systems to answer heightened concerns about livestock diseases and identification. Indeed, they might be surprised to learn that Viewtrak has clients in the U.S., the U.K., Mexico and China, or that it’s looking into tracking other livestock such as hogs, and crops such as mushrooms.
To preserve national unity (or because it shot more tape than it could ever use), the CBC will probably edit out those nasty jibes. It will take much more than that to bridge the gulf between East and West, city and farm. But eventually our choice will become clear: crumble pie, or humble pie.
Rick Spence is a Toronto-based writer and marketing consultant. He doesn’t even know the difference between oats, barley and wheat. Well, do you?
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