Bruce Chern can’t quite yet bring himself to cheer for the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
“My blood doesn’t flow green yet,” said the Stockholm, Sask., farmer on a recent November morning.
But more than anyone else, he seems to believe that his area of the eastern Prairies – one of the areas most affected by the ending of the Crow Benefit rail transportation subsidy in 1995 – has a bright, glowing future.
“There is unbelievable potential here,” said Chern, who is reeve of his rural municipality.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
What’s odd about this enthusiasm is that Chern is an Albertan who three years ago sold his ranch near Edmonton – home to his beloved Eskimos and Oilers – to tie his fate to a region of Saskatchewan that has seen an exodus of farmers giving up on the hope of farming profitably in the middle of the country. It’s an area that’s had to undergo a massive transition away from grain farming and into livestock production.
Eleven years ago The Western Producer visited the Stockholm area to talk to farmers about what they thought the end of the Crow Benefit would mean for them.
Today, all have been profoundly affected by that 1995 event.
Kim Persson is one of those who left agriculture.
“I pretty near well went completely broke,” said Persson, who sold his grain farm in 1997 while he still had equity left. “I was too small. I was forced to do the smart thing.”
In 1995, Persson told the Producer that he knew he’d have to convert his farm to cattle to survive the increase in grain shipping costs, but he didn’t know where he could find the money to pay for the change.
A couple of years later he suffered a bug infestation in his canola, had a lot of pressure from his bank and decided to leap from a life of farming under the sun to labouring in the electric-lit darkness below the soil.
“I was lucky,” said Persson, as he prepared himself for a night shift. “I got a job underground in the potash mine here and I’ve been happy ever since.”
Morris Croswell was more fortunate and is still farming. Unlike Persson, Croswell had a small pile of investment equity beyond his land base, but he had to shut down his dairy operation to get it.
Croswell, who didn’t think his small dairy and grain operation could support his family after the Crow, sold his quota, seeded his eight quarter sections of grain land to grass and became a cattle producer.
He survived, although he misses that bi-weekly dairy cheque. His son, Jason, has returned to the farm to work with his father and hopefully take over a viable beef operation one day.
“We’ve gone full circle,” said 27-year-old Jason about his family farm’s radical switch from grain and dairy to only beef production.
“This whole area has made a big circle change.”
In 1995, when he spoke to The Western Producer, Morris Cros-well said the dairy was carrying the operation. Growing grain, even at 1995-96 prices that were strong due to a global grain shortage, was becoming a losing proposition. That continued.
“We just kept falling a little further behind and a little further behind and we couldn’t afford to upgrade our machinery,” he said.
But by selling the dairy quota, Croswell was able to pay off the farm’s debts and make the conversion from grain land to pasture and hay in 2001.
He was helped by the BSE outbreak, because the price of cows collapsed just as his money came in from the quota sales, so his capital went a long way as he built his beef herd.
Mike Halyk, another local farmer, didn’t have the benefit of a capital base. He supported his grain operation only by working off the farm and owning a small cow herd.
In 1995 he considered going into the seed potato business, but lack of capital made that impossible. He broadened his crop roster, but that hasn’t necessarily freed him from transportation costs that went up by $30 to $60 per acre.
“We’ve diversified, diversified, diversified (with more pulse crops and oilseeds),” Halyk said. “But we still have to export 60 to 80 percent of those.”
Halyk, who became a Canadian Wheat Board director, is now an economic development officer for his rural area and for the city of Melville. He’s pleased to see value-added plans being announced for his area, such as an ethanol plant for Melville and the two canola crushers for Yorkton.
But he’s sad that farmers have been unable to make many more value-added investments, which he says is due to the federal government’s paltry $1.6 billion Crow Benefit payout in 1995.
“Who’s supposed to do it with no money?”
Halyk said grain farmers like him have hung on, but they’re not getting ahead.
“In the 11 years (since the Crow ended) there have been maybe two profitable years, and I don’t think any business can survive or prosper with that.”
The huge transition in the Stockholm area out of grain production and into cattle production hasn’t been easy, and some grain farmers have been replaced by beef producers from elsewhere.
But Chern, the transplanted Albertan, thinks the mood is finally changing in the area after years of wrenching change, even if there is still a bitter aftertaste from the end of the Crow.
“If you think you’ve got it so damned bad, take a look at the rest of the world. We’ve got it the best. We just need to start looking at it that way,” said Chern.
“There’s a big pocket of land here (in eastern Saskatchewan and western Manitoba) where you can actually earn a living.”
Croswell said he never thought he’d be a beef rancher, but it’s not a bad switch.
“This isn’t a rich operation, but it’s a nice family enterprise,” he said.
