Know your customer.
If you don’t, the farm chemicals and machinery you sell to a stranger could end up in a terrorist bomb or attack.
That’s the message the Canadian Association of Agri-Retailers and the Manitoba government are sending to farm supply and equipment dealers.
“Things have changed since Sept. 11,” said Manitoba agriculture minister Rosann Wowchuk about her government’s anti-terrorism bill.
The bill will stop farm supply dealers from selling various potentially dangerous goods, such as ammonium nitrate fertilizers, to people they don’t know and would clamp restrictions on the sale of spray planes and ground foggers.
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The bill will enforce casual rules that dealers have already been using since the terrorist strikes, Wowchuk said.
Daryl Domitruk, Manitoba Agriculture’s manager of crop development, said various fertilizers can be made into bombs. The Oklahoma City bomb that destroyed a government building and killed 168 people in 1995 was made of fertilizer and diesel fuel.
New regulations, which have not been completely formulated, will ban sales of these substances to people who aren’t well known to the dealer.
“They’re going to ask you who you are and where you live and what you’re planning to do with it,” Domitruk said.
Buyers of aerial sprayers and low level foggers will have to wait for up to 10 days while agriculture department officials check them out.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, fears spread that terrorists were considering using aerial crop sprayers to spread biological weapons.
Domitruk said farmers will hardly notice the difference made by the bill.
“The impact is going to be negligible,” he said.
Wowchuk agreed.
“This is not going to hamper agriculture at all.”
But Manitoba equipment dealers are concerned that some of the law’s vague provisions could hit them and farmers at the worst possible time.
Ray Bouchard, president of the Canadian Association of Agri-Retailers, said dealers agree with most of the bill’s provisions.
“I don’t think there’s anything in there that we can’t live with.”
Reg Helwer of Shur-Gro Farm Services in Brandon said some suppliers are worried about a phrase in the bill that makes dealers responsible for dangerous material getting into the wrong people’s hands either “directly or indirectly.”
If it’s indirectly, how can a farm supply dealer protect himself, he wonders.
Domitruk and Wowchuk said the bill won’t cover field sprayers.
“This does not apply to on-farm equipment,” Wowchuk said.
The confusion comes from the difference between the bill and the regulations. The bill itself contains vague references to ground-based sprayers.
But Wowchuk said the regulations will make it clear that field sprayers are not covered or restricted.
“This has nothing to do with high clearance sprayers,” she said.
“Obviously the message isn’t getting through.”
