I just phoned the embassy in Tokyo and asked to talk to somebody who might be interested in buying organic products or products from Prince Edward Island. The guy at the embassy said, what's your company profile and what's your product list? And I said, I don't have a company profile, I'm a farmer, and I don't have a product list because I want to go over with a blank piece of paper, see what someone wants to buy, and then see if we can grow it. So the guy said, businessmen in Japan are very busy, when you get more information, call me back. That was the end of that.
But I'm stubborn so I phoned the consulate in Osaka, which has since been closed but at the time it was there. The guy there was just as confused but much more polite, and he set me up with three business names I could contact. So I just bought a plane ticket and flew to Japan. I spent 10 days in a Buddhist temple actually. There was a woman who had volunteered at our farm who said she'd put me up. I met three different businesses there. We're now doing business with them, and I ended up meeting a partner. One of the guys has since become my partner, and he's working full time selling P.E.I. products in P.E.I.
What we've done is we started out.... He asked me if we could grow black currants. As an island that's famous for potatoes, most people didn't know what black currants were. I came back and scratched my head for a little while before I decided I wanted to try that. We now have about 60 acres of organic black currants growing in P.E.I. I think we have the largest block in Canada for sure. We started off selling jams to Japan. We sold about $20,000 worth of jam with the first shipment of stuff. Last year, we were up to about $1 million worth of identity-preserved canola, buckwheat, organic soya beans, dried dandelion roots. A lot of people think dandelions are weeds, but we can sell them over as a tea, for making teas. We're one of the only dandelion farmers now.
A fellow phoned me up in June and said, can you grow dandelions in P.E.I.? I looked out and the whole island is yellow, so I said, if I can find seed.
My son, when I was weeding the dandelions one day, said, don't tell too many people you have weed in the dandelions. They'll think you're weirder than just being an organic farmer. I'm now selling dried dandelions to Japan. I have a partnership with a company there. The owner has been back and forth to P.E.I. a couple of times, and the tsunami actually has given us a big opportunity to sell a lot more because people are scared of the Fukushima power plant radiation damage. I've been back and forth to Japan for the last eight years.
The market in Japan is a very developed market. It requires really high-quality products. There's very little room for error. We found that out having made some errors. We've attended the Foodex trade show in Japan for the last five years. We feel that the market in Japan is very important for other reasons besides just direct sales. It also gives us the opportunity to penetrate other markets that watch Japan and see it as the toughest market in the world to get into. It gives us an opportunity to look at Korea and other markets.
Like I said, we started work with some companies in central Japan. One of the things that is causing us a problem is that we need to have equivalency with the Japanese agriculture standards from an organic perspective. We also sell conventional. I don't want to make it sound like we're just selling organic products. There's a lot of conventional products going as well. The United States with the national organic program has equivalency with the Japanese standards and we don't. So an American farmer can pay $50, and they can have equivalency. They can put JAS on their product. It cost me last year about $1,800 to do the same thing and an awful lot of paperwork. So it's a huge disadvantage, especially if you're a small producer, to try and ship into the Japanese market. So that's one of the top things.
There needs to be a close relationship between the embassy staff in Tokyo and the agriculture trade staff in Japan. We've experienced some poor communication in the past so that we've shown up at functions at the embassy and almost been turned out because there was somehow a miscommunication. I had my buyers with me, and it didn't work out very well.
We need to see our government working closely with the Japanese government to try to reduce the tariffs on cold-pressed canola oil and other food products, recognizing of course that Japan is not going to do something that's going to adversely impact its own producers. We see that as one of the things that's stopping us from really expanding that market.
I think the Canadian pavilion at trade shows should be more interested in actually promoting trade and not just filling booths. Our experience is that they really want to fill the booths. When we took some buyers in there this summer, I actually got kicked out from underneath the Canadian flag because we didn't have a booth this year—we did the four previous years—and they sent us out to a restaurant. We weren't using anybody else's space—it was empty—but because we weren't there, we had to leave, and that was really embarrassing when we had the buyers there.
One of the things we have to do is a lot of residue testing, pesticide residue testing and GMO residue testing. It's very expensive to have that done in Canada so we have to send all of our samples to Japan and have them tested there, because they can do it much less expensively than we can have it done here. We feel that's a disadvantage as well because it's time-consuming, and there's always room for error if you have poor communications of some sort, which can cause problems.
I'm just quickly covering some of the issues, and I'm hoping that we can cover more in the questions.
One thing I will say is that Japan is known as the toughest market to penetrate, but once you're in there, they're absolutely.... Once you shake hands on a deal, it's been our experience that they're very good about paying and they're as good as their word. It's a really good country to be dealing with.