A few minutes into his speech, Arlee McGrath had to stop for water.
“Your lips stick together after a while,” explained the Saskatchewan
farmer to a roomful of market analysts and grain industry officials.
“You don’t talk so much when you’re sitting on a tractor.”
McGrath, who farms near Leroy, may not have given the slickest
presentation to the Canadian Wheat Board’s Grain World conference, but
he wasn’t trying to. He was there to give one producer’s story about
Read Also
USDA’s August corn yield estimates are bearish
The yield estimates for wheat and soybeans were neutral to bullish, but these were largely a sideshow when compared with corn.
how he has adapted to change.
“The financial strength of producers in general has deteriorated in
Western Canada considerably over the last 15 to 20 years,” said McGrath.
He told the analysts and officials they need to support farmers in
their attempts to establish a marketplace that makes sense.
He cautioned against glib celebrations of the ending of the Crow
Benefit rail freight subsidy for grain, which many analysts say has
promoted livestock and value-added production on the eastern Prairies.
When the Crow Benefit ended, his farm lost 75 percent of its net
earnings, McGrath said.
“I sure as hell wouldn’t want to see that happen again.”
To adapt, he built a large hog barn and is now building a feeder barn.
That’s a sensible adaptation to economic reality in keeping with
endless government suggestions that farmers move into livestock
production because the eastern Prairies should have the lowest feed
grain prices in the world, McGrath said.
The problem is foreign government subsidies have cut feed grain costs
elsewhere.
Many prairie farmers find themselves in the bizarre situation of
shipping feeder pigs to the United States midwest, where feed grains
should be more expensive but aren’t.
That’s a wake-up call to the visionaries’ dreams of mass
diversification across the West in response to the end of the Crow and
the supposed exposure of farmers to “true” market realities.
McGrath was still hopeful though, saying farmers have always withstood
brutal conditions and will again.
“All those pretty patchwork fields and farms (seen from an airplane)
were established by men and women using horses and steel wheel
tractors,” said McGrath.
“It took tremendous perseverance and work ethic. Those attributes are
still alive and well on the farm.”
