COVER STORY
Their first-ever peola crop – an
intercropping of peas and canola.
“We’re kind of experimenting sort of
people,” said Marg.
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advance their business and 3D printers promise speedier
delivery of broken equipment.
It’s mostly Jason who toys with it, making Dungeons and
Dragons action figures for his kids, but he also finds practical
uses. He recently printed off a bracket for mounting a camera
on their grain cart to make it easier to line up the auger. (Their
3D printer uses a material called polyactic acid filament, or
PLA – a biodegradable plastic made from corn starch that’s fed
into the printer from a spool the size of a deep-sea fishing reel.)
“You look back over the past decade and equipment
dealers are carrying less inventory in terms of parts,” said
Marg. “Perhaps in the future, when you need to replace a broken
shaft, we’ll be able to print one out.”
“That’s the dream,” added Jason, but with a dash of
skepticism because he doesn’t see equipment manufacturers
ceding control of repair parts easily.
He recently paid $200 for a packet of rubber O-rings for
the hydraulic motor on his swather. He doesn’t see why he
shouldn’t be able to make them, or other smaller parts like a
sheer pin, on a home 3D printer in the future – at a fraction of
the cost and with faster delivery.
Their other crops this year were wheat, barley, grain corn,
canola, and soybeans – and they often grow oats and alfalfa,
too. The dry spring influenced their crop choices; there was no
substantial rain until the week of July 8 to 15 when they had
five inches, then just a quarter inch after that until late August.
On the day of my visit, Marg had just made a fresh batch
of pig-shaped cookies with pink icing. They were for a staff
barbecue she was hosting that evening. Rempelco Acres has
three full-time employees. The longest tenured has been
there 16 years, and the shortest tenured is eight years. So
maybe the cookies are working!
The side of their business that sells meat goats directly
to consumers will often sell them live. Their customers for
live animals are people who emigrated from other countries
where they ate parts of the animal that conventional
processors discard.
These consumers may be from the Filipino population in
nearby Steinbach, but also people in Winnipeg who emigrated
from places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Pakistan.
They want parts of the animal like the spleen, pancreas,
lungs, and stomach.
The Rempels enjoy the exchange with the different
cultures and deeply respects how little of the animal is wasted
in their diets.
“It is an underserved population in terms of some of the
meats they consumed in their home countries,” Marg said.
In terms of direct meat sales of pork, they take orders on
consignment to a federally inspected Country Meats plant
in Blumenort. They also produce a variety of sausages made
to their recipes by Country Style Meats in New Bothwell, >>
Manitoba Farmers’ Voice § Fall 2019 § 5
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