The forces wanting to put up barriers to international trade include shades of xenophobia that I don’t agree with, but I have to say that the scale and depth of globalized trade can be disturbing too.
Another of our publications, a trade magazine for the arborist industry, Tree Service Canada, has a steady stream of stories on nasty, native tree-destroying bugs that find their way into Canada on pallets, or wooden crates. A container of coffee makers ships from Malaysia to Mississauga. The bug-infested pallets are left outside the warehouse. The bug hops onto a nearby hedge. Next thing you know the Carolinian forest is infested.
Last week I received an update on efforts to limit damage in Alberta hog barns caused by porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED), an aggressive virus that kills piglets en masse. The update included the following:
Feed ingredients have also been tested, as all four of the infected farms mix their own feed. The ingredients they used came from 10 countries in total, five different provinces, and four American states, including ones with PEDv infections. But testing those ingredients has been “really, really difficult.”
Let’s review:
--10 countries
--5 provinces
--4 states
The feed ingredients have been to more places than most travel agents!
Forgive me if I am being too small-townish, or not worldy enough, but is it puzzling at all that diseases are spreading when something as straightforward as hog feed is accessing ingredients from all over the world? Someone in Vietnam sneezes and someone in Red Deer gets a cold. And visa versa.
It was a butcher friend of mine who introduced me to the idea of firing customers. His business was doing well enough that he sacked two of his most difficult clients—the ones who showed up with three moose without calling ahead, or the ones who called ahead and didn’t show up…you know, the jerks. The Dirty 7% he called them. They amounted to 7% of his revenues but accounted for 80% of the hassles. So: pink slip.
Our farm currently has a customer that is in the Dirty 7%. They order late, don’t pay when they say they will, pay invoices out of order; they take up a disproportionate amount of our fretting bandwidth for what we get in revenues. If there is any room in the operation of a farm, or any business for that matter, to take into account peace and quiet then the idea of giving some customers the boot may have merit.
Vaguely related to the item above about globalization: one of the great pleasures of working in the office here at Small Farm Canada is listening to Deb and Doug take calls on the subscription line. Doug, our circulation manager, still has remnants of a mid-western Wisconsin drawl, and a sense of humour as dry as a martini; Deb, our office manager, is a problem-solver extraordinaire and easy to talk with; both are comfortable chatting about the weather or listening to an old timer in Nova Scotia carry on because he’s lonesome and the winters are long.
No international call center staff here, limited by what they can do when your magazine doesn’t arrive. Let’s say your issue is late. You call Doug. He puts another in the mail the same day, no charge. Then he calls to tell you it is on the way. Teressa from Swift Current calls to say that her grandchildren in Woodstock were pictured in an article on goats. Can she get extra copies? You bet. Shipped the same day. Anything else? Have a good day.
Glen says he thinks we ran an article on hops a few years back. Can he get it? Yes. Shipped the same day. Anything else? Have a good day.
Special-people call, lonely people, people that need someone to talk with. Jimmy likes to reminisce about horse logging. Paul can’t get enough of farm books, and wants to talk about each one at length. Sometimes we renew their subscriptions, sometimes all they need is an ear. Winter is long, the wife died a year ago. How’s the weather there? Pretty bad, How about where you are?
As one of the owners of this company, it gives me great pride to be part of an operation that puts committed, caring people on the end of the phone, and gives them enough rope to deal with problems however they see fit, and to take time to have a chat too.
There’s only one thing I’ve forbidden staff to talk about: daffodils. In the early years of SFC we’d take subscription calls in February and March at our office here on southern Vancouver Island and people would ask about the weather. “Oh the daffodils are out. Grass is up, “ we’d say. It was so damned irritating to folks from the rest of snowbound Canada that renewal rates plummeted. So: no daffs.