Garlic is rumoured to entice cattle to consume more minerals, have anti-fungal properties and even discourage horn flies from pestering them.

“You would find these anecdotes on blogs,” said Obioha Durunna, a livestock researcher at Lakeland College. “Most of them were just anecdotal.”

Durunna started looking into garlic’s merits as a feed supplement in 2016 when he was working for Saskatchewan’s agriculture ministry. Over the years, he’s been quizzed by a lot of producers.

“The majority of the questions that we had gotten from producers were ‘Do I feed garlic to my cows?’ to ‘How much do I feed?’ to ‘Are they going to get better growth performance from eating it or will it adversely affect their health?’”

Durunna heard from producers who swore by garlic supplements, as well as from others who said the claims were bogus. Unable to find science-based information after scouring the literature, he decided to do his own study.

In his first trial at a community pasture in Saskatchewan, participating ranchers divided cattle into three groups. Some were given a greater amount of garlic, some less and some none at all.

“We weren’t able to collect intake and performance outcomes because of the area. There was no power source there, and very limited handling equipment,” he said.

“All we could do was track fly abundance on the animals. We could also track mineral salt refills. What we had was garlic infused salt supplements — not the mineral, per se, but just pasture salt that had garlic infused in it.”

Durunna noticed a significant decrease in horn fly abundance during the study in 2016 and 2017.

The following year, he joined Lakeland College and took advantage of its automatic feeding equipment to do a follow-up garlic study in a confined setting. In 2019 and 2020, garlic was fed to cattle as part of a mineral supplement.

“There was a significant increase in terms of supplement intake, especially in the first year,” he said. “The first year’s result was like magic.”

The groups receiving a garlic supplement in that first year consumed 40 to 50 per cent more supplement compared to the control group. But the second year was different.

“We observed a mix of what some producers reported,” said Durunna. “It stimulated supplemented intake in some years, but not so much in others.”

The test involved 104 steers that were divided into four groups. One group received minerals with 2.5 per cent garlic included in the total mix, another received minerals with five per cent garlic, and a third received minerals with 0.3 per cent garlic oil infused in the total mineral mix. The last group received a regular garlic-free mix, and all mineral was given free choice.

It came down to something that matters very much to humans: freshness.

“We saw the reduced consumption almost every other year,” he said. “When we looked at the batch of the garlic, we saw that it was over a year or two old.

“This is one thing that I am telling producers. If they are using (garlic), they have to pay attention to the manufacturing date.”

Cattle consumption of garlic and minerals will drop if the garlic is older than one year, he said.

“The big picture is this: the fresher it is, the more intake, and the more it will stimulate the animals to consume more minerals.”

When cattle consumed garlic at the 2.5 per cent or five per cent level, there was no negative impact or outcome on growth or blood work, he said.

Durunna, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Saskatchewan, has published papers about the work, as has a master’s student with whom he works.

Numerous companies manufacture minerals supplemented with garlic. While it can cause anemia in horses and is not recommended for dogs, garlic does not have a similar impact on cattle, said Durunna.

The post Bovine Gastronomy: It turns out that garlic pairs well with minerals appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“It was so different from the garlic we got in the store,” said Lorraine Bannister, who operates Garlic Goodness with husband Kevin near Innisfail.

“My mom was a really great cook, but she used garlic salt and garlic powder, so I thought having fresh garlic from the store was an improvement over that. But farm-grown garlic is just a different product altogether.

“We said, ‘Wow, we should be growing this.’”

And that’s just what the pair of cattle ranchers did.

After a half-dozen years of growing it for themselves, the couple decided to start selling their garlic as a retirement pro­ject once they got out of the commercial cattle business.

For the past seven years, garlic has been the flagship crop of their operation, which includes vegetables and just enough Highland cattle to eat the grass they have.

“There’s great demand for local, fresh, Alberta-grown produce, and garlic is one of those crops that grows really well here. That’s been our mainstay,” said Bannister. “We try to grow enough varieties that, whatever a person’s taste is, there’s something for everyone.”

Right now, the couple sells all their garlic, produce, and beef off the farm, and the demand from local buyers for their products — especially the garlic — just keeps increasing. In the last three years, the couple has oversold their crop and has had to sell their own seed stock to meet the demand.

“Our production has grown every year,” she said. “Every time someone new tastes it, we get new customers. So every year, we try and grow more, and every year, we wish we’d grown more.”

And not surprisingly, the pandemic only boosted sales further.

“I think the pandemic has people starting to think about supporting local and knowing where their food comes from,” said Bannister.

“People like to see it growing. They like to see the operation. It’s not that they’re skeptical — I think they just like to support the kind of practices that they value. They like to be part of it.”

The trend was already gathering steam, she said, “but the pandemic increased it and I don’t think we’re going back.”

On the Bannisters’ farm, all of the garlic is planted and picked by hand and also grown without any chemical inputs.

“We’re very conscious of things being grown naturally,” said Bannister. “When we moved here, there was nothing here. It was just a hayfield, so there were very few chemical inputs. We’ve maintained that.

“We want to keep the soil robust and healthy because I think it’s reflected in the taste.”

Despite the extra effort it takes to grow, the garlic performs very well in Alberta’s “tough conditions,” she added. The cold-tolerant hard-necked varieties they grow are seeded before the end of September and start to emerge in May. And it doesn’t take much space to grow a good garlic crop.

“I don’t even know how big the plot is,” Bannister said with a laugh. “That’s the thing with garlic — you can have a productive farm with a small number of acres. It is really different.

“This year, we’ll plant about 15,000 bulbs, but the amount of land and inputs it takes isn’t much.”

And while there is a bit of a learning curve to growing it, Bannister’s advice for anyone considering the crop is to just plunge in.

“It’s like any other type of gardening — the best way to learn about doing it is to just do it,” she said.

“There’s something great about growing things. There’s something kind of back to nature about farming, no matter what your scale.”

The post Growing garlic a tasty retirement project appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Sales of California-grown garlic are now increasing after decades of losing ground to cheaper Chinese imports. Sales are poised to get even better as Chinese garlic faces even higher tariffs, with no end to the trade war in sight.

“In a perfect world, we’d love to see the tariffs stay on forever,” said Ken Christopher, executive vice-president of family owned Christopher Ranch, the largest of three remaining commercial garlic producers in the United States.

While many farmers are suffering through the trade war because they relied heavily on imports to China, U.S. garlic growers benefit because they rely overwhelmingly on domestic sales.

Tariffs on Chinese garlic increased from 10 to 25 per cent on May 9, when the U.S. hiked tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods and dashed hopes that a U.S.-China trade deal could come soon (all figures US$).

While soybean farmers in the U.S. Midwest watched silos fill with unsold crops as top buyer China all but stopped purchases, Christopher Ranch saw domestic garlic sales rise 15 per cent in the last quarter of 2018 after the U.S. applied a 10 per cent tariff on imports of Chinese garlic in September.

Then Trump ordered even higher tariffs this month after trade talks broke down when China backtracked on a host of issues crucial to U.S. officials.

The escalation came just a few weeks before the U.S. garlic harvest.

“The timing couldn’t be better for us,” Christopher said. “We anticipate a surge in demand for California garlic in the coming weeks.”

Christopher, 33, whose farm has 5,900 acres of grass-like garlic fields at Gilroy, traveled to Washington, D.C. in July to urge the Trump administration to include garlic in the list of imports that would face tariffs.

In lobbying for tariffs, Christopher follows in the footsteps of his grandfather, who fought to implement an anti-dumping duty of up to 400 per cent on Chinese garlic in the 1990s.

“We understand in a broader economic sense that a trade war is not in the U.S. best interest,” he said, “But since the tariffs were happening anyway, we needed to be sure that garlic was part of the equation.”

Not everyone is a fan of the garlic tariff. While Christopher was testifying in favour of tariffs to the U.S. International Trade Commission, executives from one of the world’s top seasoning companies, McCormick and Co., were arguing against them.

McCormick says its recipes mostly rely on Chinese garlic, calling it a different product from what is grown in the U.S.

“They’re not substitutable,” CEO Lawrence Kurzius told Reuters in an interview. “Just like wine, origin matters and terroir matter.”

Taste differences aside, California garlic has traditionally sold at far higher prices than Chinese garlic. It now sells for about $60 per 30-lb. box on the wholesale market, according to Christopher. Until recently, Chinese garlic sold for $20 per box, but that has risen to $40 with tariffs and will likely soon rise further, he said.

The new profits U.S. garlic farmers have enjoyed from tariffs are an exception in the U.S. farm sector.

China last year retaliated to Trump’s tariffs with duties on U.S. goods including soybeans, corn and pork. Farm incomes in U.S. Midwest and mid-southern states continued to decline in the first quarter of 2019, according to banker surveys released this month by regional federal reserve banks.

Trump has pledged up to an additional $20 billion in aid to help U.S. farmers hurt by the prolonged dispute after groups such as the American Soybean Association criticized the failure to reach a deal. That’s on top of $12 billion the administration promised last year to compensate farmers for trade-war losses.

The trade war has also left many West Coast specialty crop farmers, like nut and cherry growers, scrambling to find alternative markets after China imposed steep duties on imports that made their products too expensive to sell there.

Jamie Johansson, an olive farmer and president of the California farm bureau — which represents 400 crops and 36,000 members — said the Trump administration had put California farmers in the middle of tariff wars with four of the state’s five top markets, including China.

“Among our members, I have not heard of anyone benefiting from the current trade war and tariffs,” Johansson said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Lucy Nicholson and Richa Naidu; additional reporting and writing by Caroline Stauffer.

The post U.S. garlic growers profit from trade war as most farmers struggle appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Plant and soil samples collected from across the province in the last two years have found a number of diseases, including aster yellows, white rot (sclerotinia), fusarium basal plate rot, and embellisia blotch.

This year, a provincial surveillance team will be testing samples for a number of fungal pathogens that normally occur on garlic and onions, but will also include testing for the aster yellows phytoplasma and specific nematodes that affect garlic and onions.

Growers of garlic and onions are asked to contact Alberta Agriculture and Forestry if they observe an issue with their crops. Call Rob Spencer or Dustin Morton at 310-FARM (3276) to make arrangements for submitting a sample for testing. AAF staff will also be conducting their own sampling program this year.

The post Garlic and onion disease survey underway appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“It’s just grown tremendously,” said Carri Hrehorets, president of the Andrew Agricultural Society in the village of 400 located an hour’s drive northeast of Edmonton.

“We get about 1,000 to 1,200 people out for the day.”

The Andrew Garlic Festival, held on the second Saturday in October, doesn’t just showcase garlic, it also celebrates the village’s Ukrainian heritage.

“Garlic has been known to be linked to Ukrainians and cooking, growing and gardens,” she said.

• More ‘Heartland’ on the Alberta Farmer Express: Battle of the Breeds still going strong after 25 years

The agricultural society and its seven members have run the festival for the past five years. There are local garlic growers and a huge farmers’ market with 80 vendors, as well as items such as garlic popcorn, cooked cloves, dips and garlic beans. The evening banquet has a Ukrainian theme, centred around the garlic dishes.

Other events include a garlic-peeling contest, a bench show, local entertainment featuring fiddlers and Ukrainian dancers, a dance party and scavenger hunt, and numerous kids’ activities.

The local chamber of commerce started the event after hearing about the success of the Smoky Lake Pumpkin Festival.

“Originally our festival was just a basic little farmers’ market and bench show display. I think it started with 20 people showing up that first year,” said Hrehorets.

But word spread far and wide, and it now attracts visitors from across Alberta and even neighbouring provinces.

The agricultural society operates the volunteer-run arena in Andrew, and some of the funds collected during the garlic festival go to its maintenance.

“The garlic festival is just one of the events we do to put funds back into the building,” said Hrehorets.

The post Garlic festival a joyous (and odorous) celebration appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.