Their voices may carry the lilt of Jamaica or New Brunswick, but young farmers everywhere share common concerns about their ability to survive in the agriculture business.
Whether it is struggling against hurricanes that flatten a year’s work in minutes or learning to work co-operatively on a multi-generation farm, these young people want to stay on the land and continue producing food for a profit.
Those were some of the messages at the Canadian Young Farmers’ Forum held in Calgary Dec. 8-10. It offered an international leadership training program to 150 people between the ages of 18 and 40 from the western hemisphere.
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Four young farmers from Canada, the United States and Jamaica talked about their passion for food production mingled with common issues facing all agricultural producers.
“A lot of the challenges that young farmers face are universal, whether it is in Jamaica or Canada or the United States,” said Suzanne Vold of Minnesota. She and her husband, Brad, run a 300-cow dairy with his family. Not only do they feel the pressure to develop a smooth farm succession plan with the in-laws, but they are constantly looking for ways to impress upon the urban public the importance of what they do to feed the world.
For all the speakers, money issues were at the top of the list of challenges.
High land prices make it difficult for young people with limited credit to buy or expand. Further, bankers need to understand that investing in agriculture is a long-term investment with slow payback, said Brad Vold.
That access to credit rang a bell for Mark Mead, named an outstanding young farmer in Jamaica. He produces sugar cane and cattle and recently expanded into the greenhouse business.
There are 200,000 farmers in Jamaica representing 82 percent of the island’s workforce but most are older than 50 and few young people are interested in agriculture as a career. There are no obvious succession plans.
Jamaican farmers are frustrated by their inability to compete against cheap food imports from off the island.
However, Mead remains passionate about farming, although noting, “we have to balance passion with our budgets. Passion will blind you into bankruptcy.”
The Jamaican government has improved extension services providing more marketing staff in each of the 14 parishes on the island. However, there is still a lack of technology and training for young people to help them become more competitive in a global market.
In Quebec, dairy farmer Benoit Martin also wants better training for young farmers.
He wants better access to capital and improved safety nets while still farming in a socially responsible manner where producers are respected for what they do.
Martin noted the importance of food sovereignty where farmers make their own decisions and develop policy while providing local, safe food.
“We need to reconcile the principles of the individual right to trade and the responsibility of the country to assure food safety for their country,” he said.
Cedric MacLeod, a New Brunswick farmer, produces grass finished beef and also works as an agronomy and environmental consultant. He wants young farmers to break with tradition and think about forming co-operatives to share expensive equipment and adopt better environmental practices like conservation tillage.
Some of those ideas are hard to introduce because farmers tend to be bound by tradition.
“As a group we have not been very good at adopting change. We are still building barns like we did in 1985,” he said.
“There is way too much trust in Mom and Dad. Maybe there will be a fist fight in the middle of the yard,” he said.
“We have to move forward. We have to get beyond it and we have to force change.”
MacLeod also recognizes the problem of cash flow as a constant challenge for farmers of all ages, yet many do not know their own costs of production and do not have enough economics training. If people want improved safety nets they need to establish the cost of production by farm, not by the industry average.
“When we go to government with our hand out, we have to know our cost of production,” he said.
All the speakers wanted their governments to appreciate the need to promote locally grown foods rather than pushing farmers to consolidate and grow larger for efficiency.
However, they insist much of the responsibility rests with farmers to become better public speakers and learn to tell the story of how food is produced because consumers do not want to hear this from the government.
