A pilot program didn’t turn out the way it had hoped, but a Saskatchewan organic group is calling on the Canadian Wheat Board to take a more active role in the marketing of organic wheat and barley.
“We’d like to pool the organic premium and have all our sales go through the board,” said Bill Rosher, secretary of the Canadian Organic Certification Co-operative Ltd.
Members of the group, which represents 200 growers, handlers and processors, passed a resolution at their 2007 annual meeting to petition the board to initiate an organic wheat pool for the crop year beginning Aug. 1, 2007.
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The COCC has some experience with such a system. Last summer it entered into a partnership with the CWB to conduct a test run of an organic pool. Members of the organization received a conventional initial payment plus an initial organic premium upon delivery, with adjustments and final payments to follow.
Rosher said the 40 members who signed up are still awaiting their final payments but are expecting somewhere in the range of $8 to $8.50 per bushel for their wheat. An estimated 2,000 tonnes of grain were marketed by the board through the program.
He said that was a disappointing volume. Whenever the board was bidding for grain, conventional brokers would step into the fray and offer more attractive trucking premiums growers could not refuse.
John Husband, spokesperson for the Organic Special Products Group, a loosely affiliated coalition of about 150 prairie farmers pushing for marketing choice, had a different take on the pilot program.
“I heard word it was a disaster,” he said.
Husband’s group is pushing for the board to grant no-cost export licences to farmers who want to opt out of the board’s export monopoly, the same as they do for organic growers in Eastern Canada.
“The wheat board has the opportunity to let us go at any point,” said Husband.
That way farmers who want out of the single desk would be granted a licence, while those who don’t could pool their grain.
“Then both sides should be, theoretically, happy.”
He noted that a 2005 study by the University of Saskatchewan’s department of agricultural economics shows three-quarters of the 58 organic producers surveyed did not want the board to become more involved in marketing organic grains, results that were mirrored by comments made by marketers and processors.
Rosher said that two-year-old survey does not reflect the views of COCC members, who feel the board is more transparent in its dealings with farmers than brokers are.
“I just feel there is more money in this game than (brokers) are letting on to us,” he said.
He estimates farmers could earn an extra $2 to $4 per bu. if they sold all their wheat through the board’s single desk system.
Husband doesn’t accept that analysis.
“It’s the same old wheat board garbage that we’ve been hearing for years and years that is backed up with nothing but, ‘trust us,’ ” he said.
The CWB will solicit views about its future role in the organic industry from a cross-section of farmers in the three prairie provinces this spring.
Five focus group meetings are scheduled in April.
“These focus group sessions will provide input on a number of options for the CWB organic policy related to both CWB marketing of organic grain and the producer direct sale policy,” said the board in a letter to grain companies, processors, certification bodies and producer groups from which it solicited delegates for the meetings.
CWB spokesperson Maureen Fitzhenry said the board is considering everything from cancelling the pilot program to extending it to create a full-blown organic pool.
“We don’t know yet exactly what we’re going to do,” she said.
