WINNIPEG (Staff) – If you requested your wheat and barley checkoff money back, and are now wondering where it is, rest assured Herman Austenson is not sitting on it.
He is more likely buried in it.
Austenson is the executive director and sole employee of the Western Grains Research Foundation. He works only half-days. And he has been finding it “physically impossible” to deal with the volume of letters coming into his office.
Although he said only 10 percent of farmers want their money back, that works out to about 13,000 pieces of paper.
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“People just don’t realize what 10,000 letters or faxes look like,” Austenson said from his three metre by three metre Saskatoon office. “It’s more mail than I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Luckily, he has enlisted his wife to help him open the mail. One day, they were flooded with 1,000 letters. Last week, it had tapered down to about 200 a day.
They sort the letters with Canadian Wheat Board numbers, putting them in filing cabinets and boxes. The letters they can’t read or that don’t include the permit numbers will have to wait until the end of the process.
Austenson said he hopes to have all the cheques sent out by the end of the month. Last week, he got computer software for the task.
And once it’s set up, he has “somebody with real fast fingers” to do the rest. “Otherwise, it would be next year this time before I got them half out.”
