Trump, in a statement announcing the new round of tariffs, warned that if China takes retaliatory action against U.S. farmers or industries, “we will immediately pursue phase three, which is tariffs on approximately $267 billion of additional imports.”

China replied Tuesday it has no choice but to retaliate against the new U.S. tariffs, risking even stronger action from President Donald Trump in an escalation of the trade war between the world’s largest economies.

“To protect its legitimate rights and interests and order in international free trade, China is left with no choice but to retaliate simultaneously,” the commerce ministry said in a brief statement, without specifying what action it would take.

Apple’s iPhone was not among the “wide range” of products that the company told regulators would be hit by the $200 billion round of tariffs in a Sept. 5 comment letter to trade officials (all figures US$).

But if the Trump administration enacts a further $267 billion round of tariffs, the iPhone, along with all other smart phones, are likely to be included in the list.

Collection of tariffs on the long-anticipated list will start Sept. 24 but the rate will increase to 25 per cent by the end of 2018, allowing U.S. companies some time to adjust their supply chains to alternate countries, a senior administration official said.

So far, the U.S. has imposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese products to pressure China to make sweeping changes to its trade, technology transfer and high-tech industrial subsidy policies.

The escalation of Trump’s tariffs on China comes after talks between the world’s two largest economies to resolve their trade differences have produced no results. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last week invited top Chinese officials to a new round of talks, but thus far nothing has been scheduled.

A senior Trump administration official told reporters that the U.S. was open to further talks with Beijing, but offered no immediate details on when any new meetings may occur.

“This is not an effort to constrain China, but this is an effort to work with China and say, ‘It’s time you address these unfair trade practices that we’ve identified that others have identified and that have harmed the entire trading system,'” the official said.

China has vowed to retaliate further against any new U.S. tariffs, with state-run media arguing for an aggressive “counterattack.”

China’s yuan currency has weakened by about six per cent against the U.S. dollar since mid-June, offsetting the 10 per cent tariff rate by a considerable margin.

Consumer tech trimmed

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office eliminated about 300 product categories from the proposed tariff list, along with some subsets of other categories, but administration officials said the total value of the revised list would still be “approximately $200 billion.”

A broad, $23 billion category of internet-connected devices will remain subject to tariffs, but some products, such as smart watches, Bluetooth devices, and other consumer-focused technology products were removed following a lengthy public vetting period during which more than 6,000 comments were received.

Also spared from the tariffs were Chinese inputs for U.S.-produced chemicals used in manufacturing, textiles and agriculture.

Consumer safety products made in China, such as bicycle helmets sold by Vista Outdoor and baby car seats and other products from Graco also were taken off the list.

But the adjustments did little to appease technology and retail groups who argued that the tariffs would hit consumers hard.

“President Trump’s decision to impose an additional $200 billion is reckless and will create lasting harm to communities across the country,” said Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents major tech firms.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association pointed out that the new tariffs would still hit more than $1 billion worth of gas grills from China, $843 million worth of luggage and travel bags, $825 million worth of mattresses, and $1.9 billion worth of vacuum cleaners.

“Tariffs are a tax on American families, period,” said Hun Quach, RILA’s vice president for international trade. “Consumers — not China — will bear the brunt of these tariffs and American farmers and ranchers will see the harmful effects of retaliation worsen.”

Earlier on Monday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the U.S. was ready to negotiate a trade deal with China if Beijing was ready for serious discussions.

“We are ready to negotiate and talk with China any time that they are ready for serious and substantive negotiations towards free trade, to reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers, to open markets and allow the most competitive economy in the world — ours — to export more and more goods and services to China,” Kudlow said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Steve Holland, David Lawder, Ginger Gibson and Eric Beech in Washington.

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The Crop Protection book (as it is officially known) is updated annually for previously registered products and includes newly registered pesticide products — herbicides, pesticides, seed treatments, and foliar fungicides.

But this year’s edition has been converted to an app by the AAAF (Association of Alberta Agricultural Fieldmen). The Crop Protection 2018 app comes in both iPhone and Android versions, allowing farmers to get information on the go.

When it comes to chemical crop protection, the writeups for all product registrations in the Blue Book app make finding information easy. App users can narrow down results using filters through a specific crop type and pest to find applicable pesticides for weed, insect, and disease controls. These pesticides can then be saved as a favourite for quick and easy access at any time.

For more information on pesticide use or invasive plants, please contact your local agricultural fieldman. A searchable directory of fieldmen can be found at the Association of Alberta Agricultural Fieldmen website.

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“Most people have a phone with them at any given time,” said Jeff Fleischer, a member of the communications committee for the Association of Alberta Agricultural Fieldmen.

“We prepared the app so that people could have a list of all of the noxious weeds in Alberta readily available.”

Most farmers aren’t familiar with the 75 different species of noxious weeds found in Alberta — especially the prohibited noxious weeds, he said.

“Some of these you don’t see every day,” said Fleischer, who works for the Municipal District of Rocky View.

“Let’s face it, Canada thistle would be the only one on the app that we see regularly. People are unsure of them, so this way, people will have them at hand.”

The app allows users to search by keyword, type (noxious or prohibited noxious), and colour.

“If you just know the colour of the weed that you’re looking at, you would then be able to filter it down by flower colour, and it would show you all the weeds with, say, yellow flowers in Alberta,” said Fleischer, adding the app also links to the full Alberta Invasive Plant Identification Guide.

But the thing the fieldmen “like most” about the app is its reporting capabilities.

“If you wanted to report an unknown weed, you can actually click the ‘Report’ button on the app, attach a photo of it, and send it to your local municipal fieldmen to help identify it,” he said.

“If someone is unsure about a weed, they can just attach that photo and send it off, and someone will be able to ID it for them.”

The hope is that farmers will use the app to report noxious weeds when scouting so municipal fieldmen can map the weeds and monitor their spread.

“These are the weeds that we don’t want in Alberta. The more we know about them, the more we can help people with controlling them and reducing their spread.”

The app is available for free in the Google Play Store for Android smartphones and on iTunes for iPhones by searching ‘alberta agriculture fieldmen.’

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The new website, created by the Alberta Wheat Commission with $743,000 in federal funding, aims to give farmers timely and accurate pricing data for grains and oilseeds.

“We feel strongly that this project has the potential to change the way farmers market their crops through access to better and more timely information,” said Kent Erickson, chair of the commission.

“Our ultimate goal is a more transparent market, one that enables producers to be able to capture the marketing opportunities available to them.”

Currently it’s hard for grain farmers to get a firm handle on prices being offered for their crops, said federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, who flew to Edmonton to announce the pro-ject at FarmTech.

“There are a number of websites that are up there now, including some of the grain companies, that claim to be price transparent,” said Ritz. “The problem is a lot of them are two or three weeks out of date. So this will be very timely (and) updated daily or on our half-day basis.”

“There is a varying degree of where farmers are looking for price,” added Erickson, who farms near Irma. “It is currently very fragmented. The new website gives a good benchmark and more accountability is going to make the website better.”

The website — pdq stands for “price & data quotes” — is currently in pilot mode and offers just a single price for four crops: Canada Western Red Spring, Canada Western Amber durum, Canada Prairie Spring, and canola. The website covers eight zones (three in Alberta, four in Saskatchewan and one in Manitoba) and offers a price for each zone. Additional crops and more detailed pricing will be added in the coming weeks and months, said Erickson.

“The more companies that get involved and contribute to the background of the website, it will make the website that much more robust,” he said.

And there will be a mobile version, too, added Ritz.

“It will be an app on your iPhone or Android or whatever you have, and if you’re looking for a certain price, it will ping you when the market hits that price — that’s the ultimate goal,” said Ritz.

Producers need to have a clear idea of what the current “benchmark” price is before they start calling their elevators, said Erickson.

And any substantial change in that price will alert them that something is moving the market.

“In the environment we’re in right now, a lot of farmers really could use a good benchmark to find out what kind of prices are out there,” he said, adding the new site will “definitely be a time saver” for farmers.

“We all have favourites and we all have good relationships with two or three different companies in our areas,” said Erickson. “Now (producers) really only need to make a couple of phone calls to find out where their prices are at.

“It just makes it a little more transparent and open in where the price is.”

In many cases, he said, farmers are selling their grain on the fly to solve cash flow issues — and they don’t have time to call “six or seven different places to find out what kind of price is realistic.”

“When a guy’s looking to sell a load, it’s going to make it a little easier for them to understand what prices are out there,” Erickson said. “They want to be able to get up to speed as fast as possible, and a tool like this will get them up to speed quicker.”

The new site could also reduce the risk of leaving money on the table when marketing grain, he said.

“I think it keeps everybody more realistic and more competitive, and for farmers, any time you can be more competitive and save time marketing your product is going to benefit you,” he said.

“We just want to give farmers options and the ability to make better, quicker decisions.”

The pricing data will be supplied voluntarily by a cross-section of buyers and sellers, said Ritz, and both he and Erickson said getting their participation will be critical to the success of the initiative.

“The discussions have been ongoing with a lot of them,” said Ritz. “Of course, the smaller and mid-range players like this idea because it lets them show they’re in the game. The bigger ones will tell you, ‘We have our own websites,’ and they do — but it comes down to the accuracy and timeliness of those websites.”

— with files from Jennifer Blair 

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“I wouldn’t want to run our business without BioLinks,” said Tim Hofer, manager of the Pine Haven Colony Meat shop.

The meat shop was a participant in the pilot project, and worked with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development and a private software developer in the creation of the program. BioLinks uses a basic bar-code system to track every cut of meat from a carcass, which allows meat processors to simultaneously track sales and manage inventory while having full traceability.

There are similar systems out there, but they are larger, more expensive, and more difficult to run, said Hofer.

“This program would meet the needs of small or large processors,” he said. “It’s not that large processors would run out of capacity. It’s more suited to small processors because it is affordable to them.”

• More from the Alberta Farmer Express: Verified Beef Production program gives producers an edge

The system costs about $1,500 to set up, and that’s key, said provincial business development specialist Vince McConnell.

“A lot of the systems that the big boys like Cargill have, they’re $250,000 systems,” he said.

“Now we’ve made a system that can perform as well as their systems, but a small-scale guy can use it and get some information back.”

BioLinks became commercially available earlier this year and is now being used by small processors in several provinces. The meat shop at Olds College, the Viking Hutterite Colony, and Spragg Meat Shops are some of the Alberta companies using BioLinks, which is being distributed by BIO, a company from Guelph.

The team at Pine Haven worked closely with McConnell and his Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development colleague Bert Dening and Drevertech, a programmer out of Camrose, to perfect the system. Government funds paid for years of program development.

To run the system, an iPhone is slipped into a sleeve called a “sled,” which contains a bar-code reader. It also connects the iPhone to a web-based database for managing inventory and sales (the phone uses Bluetooth technology to connect to a printer to print receipts).

“The fact that it is web based and can be shared with a computer is a very important feature,” said Hofer.

The technology allowed him to hire an assistant who can take phone orders, handle inquiries, and generate data about inventory all from her home.

The program has cut down on a lot of paper waste.

“We can fill orders online, fill orders with a scanner and email an invoice to the customer requesting payment,” said Hofer. “The customer will then give us a call and pay over the phone using a credit card.”

Processors using the system are finding unique ways to manage some of their data. For example, QR codes on packaging allow customers to trace information right back to an animal.

• Second version of beef database BIXS 2.0 launched

“A person who is eating that steak can actually take his iPhone, scan the package, and it brings him to the producer’s website,” said McConnell. “If he doesn’t like that meat, he can comment on it, and it automatically drops into the database, where the animal and production information is stored.”

Some processors are making marketing decisions based on the information they have gleaned from the system, said McConnell. VG Meats, a meat processor from Ontario, has been taking pictures of rib-eyes and tracking meat tenderness. The owner has created a price grid which reflects the true value of the cuts.

“He’s actually rewarding the producers who have true tender steaks and also, he’s doing a discount for the extra fat,” said McConnell. “We’re really getting some solid data on how the actual animals performed. And because we can collect the actual invoices from the sales of these animals, we get the true story. We get the true bottom line.”

The technology has been designed so it can one day be linked to the Beef InfoXchange System (BIXS).

Transitioning from manual data entry to a scanning technology does take some time, but is worth the effort, said McConnell.

“The data collected gives us some real good information for key production indicators on the farm for retail and for processing plants,” he said.

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“We had to make BIXS more user friendly,” said Larry Thomas. “It had to be compact, fast and on a different platform, and the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association needed to own it outright.”

A reliable and easy-to-use database to capture data from pasture to packing plant is considered by many to be critical to the future success of the Canadian beef sector, and was one of the key recommendations of the Straw Man Beef Industry Initiative task force.

“It is imperative that the common repository be operational, efficient and sustainable,” the task force said in its December report Building a Stronger Canadian Beef Industry.

More from the Alberta Farmer Express:
FAQs on BIXS 2.0

The report recommended the creators of the system be given “until March 2014 to demonstrate that this database and service offering will meet the requirements of the industry.”

The launch of BIXS 2.0 was quietly announced March 28, and Thomas said it is performing well.

The database logs data linked to RFID tags and can include birth dates, premise ID (if the producer chooses to enter it), weight at arrival of a feedlot and departure, slaughter date, hot carcass weight, and grading information. In some cases, “tens of thousands of pieces of information” are uploaded at a time, said Thomas. BIXS 1.0 had trouble handling such volumes. That also prevented many producers who didn’t have high-speed Internet access from using the system.

“That (old) process sometimes would take hours or days,” he said. “In our case (with BIXS 2.0), we’ve seen 3,000 or 4,000 head come over in 15 seconds.”

Old system discontinued

After a lengthy review, the old system was put on hiatus in December 2013.

“We got it to the point where we were getting carcass data to producers linked to that CCIA tag ID,” said Thomas. “But it wasn’t fulfilling what we hoped it would, and we weren’t getting the uptake that we needed.”

Arcurve, a software company from Calgary, was hired to build the new version and did testing with some producers prior to the March 28 soft launch.

The program is free and all of the old BIXS 1.0 accounts have been moved to the new system, which can be accessed by going to www.bixs.cattle.ca. First-time users should email info@bixs2.ca for sign-up information.

There is currently data from about 460,000 animals in the BIXS 2.0 system submitted by cow-calf producers and feedlots, and about 2.8 million detailed carcass records, provided by Cargill’s High River and Guelph plants as well as the JBS plant in Brooks.

The latter contains data such as rib-eye marbling area, carcass score, quality grade, fat thickness, and hot carcass weight.

“This is information that a lot of cow-calf producers have never seen on their animal,” said Thomas.

That data holds the promise of allowing producers to select genetics and make changes in their management to produce higher-value cattle — although getting a premium is still uncharted territory.

“BIXS enables better communication between the cow-calf, feedlot, packing and distribution sectors on an individual animal basis and offers a way for producers to develop business relationships,” states the BIXS website.

“As those business relationships form, premiums may indeed come. The Sourcer Utility query function built into BIXS will spur the development of these business relationships and may well pave the way to premiums being paid for animals meeting a certain spec BIXS member feedlots, buyers, packer/processors and distributors are seeking.”

The system could also connect producers with buyers of premium beef, said Thomas.

“If I’m a boutique retailer and I’m looking for something specific, how can I use BIXS to get in touch with those who produce it?” he said.

“In other words, there’s never really been anything in the industry on a national basis anywhere, that I know of, that would enable blind query of a database in a confidential manner, that would enable me to link up with suppliers for stuff I actually need,” said Thomas.

BIXS 2.0 works on most browsers. The project team is currently making BIXS 2.0 applications for iPhone, iPad and mobile Android systems.

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