It’s hard to believe that May has come and gone already. This past month was a very busy month for dairy farms, with crops off the field, field prep and hopefully the corn is planted to. While you were busy in your fields, we were / are busy working on updating our website. The changes won't be visible to you yet as the entire site is going under a major renovation. Our current site is still working. The plan is to have the new site running live by this time (or sooner) next month. The web address will still be the same as always www.star-gro-products.ca . Keep checking it for updates.

Its Fact!

I have never been a big fan of reading, unless of course its typed in font 15 and there are lots of pictures to look at. Recently I had an interesting magazine come across my desk called "The Dirt on Farming". It was put out by the Ontario Farm Animal Council. I gather that the motive behind this publication was to raise awareness about the importance of farming to Joe Public. I thought I would share some interesting Farm Facts with you this month.

 

DID YOU KNOW...

-in 2006 the average cost of a glass of milk in a restaurant was $2.00, but the farmer received $0.18 a glass.

-Chicken costs consumers $4.99/kg, while the farmer barely got $1.20 per kilo

-The box of corn flakes that costs us almost $3.54 in the store only paid $0.11 to the farmer who grew the corn

-the beef ranchers received $1.83 for the prime sirloin steak that cost us $14.04 in the store.

 

In the 1900's farmers produced enough food for only 10 people and 50 cents of every dollar earned was spent on food. Today's average farm can feed 120 people, and our food costs have plummeted to a meager 12.5 cents of every dollar earned. According to this article, North Americans have the lowest grocery bills in the world (I think my wife wrote this article)

 

The average age of our Canadian farmer is 52

 

Your dairy cow drinks an average of 80 - 160 liters of water per day while an African elephant drinks 156 liters a day.

 

Organic farms compromise less than 1.5% of total farms across Canada today, but they are also the fastest growing segment of Canadian Agriculture

 

An average chicken weighing 2.2 kg when fully grown will have eaten 4 kg of feed during its life.

 

Dairy farmers provide more than twice as many jobs on farms (50,800) than there are employees at Generals Motors of Canada (22,000) (source: Dairy Farmers of Canada)

 

COW TIPPING MYTH - BUSTED!

Researchers at UBC have recently concluded it would take five people to push a cow over, and that was if the cow was willing to be tipped. (Are we running out of research ideas? hmm) 

 

NO FLY ZONE  

One of these days the sun is going to break through and stick around for a while and the temperatures are going to rise. When it does, we all know that the flies will start coming out in droves. We recently teamed up with Spalding labs to provide the agriculture industry with competitively priced Fly Parasites. This is the most effective and natural way of reducing your farm fly populations. For a free consult or if you have any questions, be sure to contact us by email or call toll free 1-800-798-9204 ext 2.