Andres Riofrio

Agriculture has been one of my family’s passions for many generations. I must have been six years old when I closed a deal with a local cheese maker to raise the price of milk produced at my parent’s hobby-farm in my native Ecuador. Although the additional “quarter of a cent” per litre that the cheese maker offered must have been insignificant to what my Dad earned as a lawyer, I certainly believed that I started a successful career in agribusiness.

A few years later, I formalised my education and obtained a B.Sc. degree in Agribusiness (USFQ –Ecuador). My early attempts to increase productivity on our dairy farm awakened my interest in cost-efficient and sustainable food production. This interest was further stimulated while involved in the organic fruit industry in the UK, hence I decided to pursue a degree in Agricultural Economics at McGill University, where I have been working under the shared-supervision of Dr. John Henning (McGill), and Dr. Emmanuel Yiridoe (NSAC).

Currently, I am carrying out an economic analysis of crop rotation systems under transition to organic agriculture. I am using enterprise budgeting to analyse data from a four-year field experiment conducted by other graduate students working with the OACC. The purpose of my study is to investigate the profitability of the three years prior obtaining organic certification and the first year of production under a fully-certified organic operation in Atlantic Canada. The rotations studied are primarily distinguished by the source of soil amendments and the number of years of forage in rotation. Part of my work is to develop a linear programming model to simulate various whole-farm scenarios to determine the most financially viable strategy to convert to organic.

Preliminary results have indicated that forage-based crop rotations under both monogastric and ruminant compost are likely to be better alternatives in the conversion from conventional to organic agriculture. In addition, it is likely that, economic returns generated by ruminant cattle that benefit from forages produced for fertility-building purposes, could ease the financial challenges of the transition to organic.

Dr. Andrew Hammermeister (from the OACC) and Kui Liu, (a PhD candidate at the NSAC) have been collaborating in my study the past year.