ROSTHERN, Sask. – The information brochures and complimentary pens were laid out on the registration desk, still untouched.
At the refreshment table, the urn was full of piping hot coffee and giant oatmeal cookies were laid out invitingly on a silver tray.
Meanwhile, a handful of guest speakers and organizers mingled somewhat uncomfortably at the front of the room, casting anxious glances toward the door every few minutes.
Everything was in place for the fourth in a series of seven meetings organized by the Saskatchewan branch of the Prairie Oats Growers Association to talk about plans for a prairie-wide oats checkoff.
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Just one thing was missing. Farmers.
The scheduled starting time of 1 p.m. came and went, and still no farmers showed up. Finally, at around 1:30, the almost disbelieving organizers decided to give up and call it a day.
“I can’t explain it,” said Michael Spilchuk, a farmer from Ituna, Sask., and Saskatchewan president of POGA.
Attendance hadn’t been good at the first three meetings in Balcarres, Yorkton and Foam Lake, which taken together attracted a couple dozen farmers.
But zero?
Spilchuk tried to see some humour in the situation, joking that at least he wouldn’t have to deliver a speech. Nor would the association have to give out its door prizes.
But he also worried about how the sparse attendance might affect the association’s efforts to implement a 50-cents-per-tonne refundable checkoff to fund research and market development.
“There is definitely a concern that if the turnout is that bad it may not satisfy the government,” he said. “The government will want to be sure that farmers are on side. How much weight will those numbers carry?”
It’s challenging to come up with any positive spin when no one shows up for your meeting, but Spilchuk suggested the low turnout might indicate that oat growers have no objection to the check-off proposal, which originated at the annual meeting of Prairie Oats Growers Association in 2000.
“I figure if you’re not in favour of something, you’d show up and say ‘don’t do it.’ That’s human nature,” he said. “But I guess you can read into it whatever you want to read into it.”
Brian Rossnagel, a plant breeder from the University of Saskatchewan and one of the scheduled speakers at the meeting, said farmer support for a checkoff is “incredibly critical” in ensuring an active research program for any commodity.
“When government looks at where to allocate their research dollars and they see that producers don’t want to invest, then why would they put in taxpayers’ money?”
End users in industry are also much more willing to put their own money into research if they see even a small contribution from producers.
But perhaps most importantly for farmers, said Rossnagel, a checkoff gives them direct say in how the research money is spent.
“Customers want research directed at what’s important to them and that’s also important to producers but there are things that are important to producers that may be less important to other funders,” he said. “If you’re not paying the bill, it’s tougher to get your message across.”
