The Federal Government has invested close to one million dollars to expand and develop new markets for Canadian barley and barley products.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Agri-Food announced an investment of over $960,000 for the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC).
Through the AgriMarketing Program, CMBTC will undertake marketing and promotional initiatives in major export markets and prospective countries with this funding.
It will also provide technical services to optimize the quality and performance of Canadian barley and education and training to help customers gain acceptance of the unique qualities and special processing attributes of new malting barley varieties.
Jill McDonald, the executive director for SaskBarley, said that the announcement is excellent news.
“We find at SaskBarley that CMBTC is a really valuable organization for barley farmers in the provinces because it is a unique organization in the world,” she said. “It is helping provide a competitive advantage for Canadian barley because of the unique technical support services that it provides and the market development programming.”
McDonald said that the CMBTC is really giving Canadian barley an advantage.
“One of the main benefits we are getting right now is through the CMBTC; it is really driving some of the acceptance of the new malting varieties within both our domestic matters and our international customers as well. It is just providing better yielding varieties to producers with better agronomic characteristics through those variety acceptance programs.”
