WETASKIWIN, Alta. – Trying to get farmers to attend meetings that will affect their future isn’t easy.
They don’t like politics, they don’t like meetings and they don’t like the reports that are generated by the meetings.
But there are a few farmers and politicians willing to spend a day around a table discussing how to improve their business.
“You’ve got to make time,” said Adam Campbell, a Rosalind, Alta., farmer at the Ag Summit meeting in Wetaskiwin. He also plans to go to the next Ag Summit in Vermilion.
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“You can’t criticize if you haven’t been there,” said Campbell, looking around at the 60 people in the basement meeting room of a Wetaskiwin hotel.
“There should be 600 people here.”
David Stollery of Armena, Alta., wasn’t going to come to the meeting, but his daughter, Sharon Homeniuk, who works for Alberta Agriculture and was a facilitator at the meeting, convinced him to come.
“We’re busy and I wasn’t going to come,” said Stollery, but he’s glad he did. The discussion around his table focused on farm profitability. They didn’t come up with any solutions to improve farm profits, but he came up with a few ideas for his own farm.
After spending a day discussing farm profitability, Robert Camp, a loans officer with the Wetaskiwin Credit Union, had more appreciation for his farm customers and their problems.
“I see more of the farmers’ side of it,” said Camp, although he doesn’t think it will be any easier to get farm loans. Customers still need to prove there is enough cash flow to cover their bills.
A long-term plan
The Wetaskiwin meeting was Liberal agriculture critic Ken Nicol’s sixth Ag Summit. He plans to attend all 12 meetings, which are designed to help guide the future direction of agriculture in Alberta.
The issues have been similar at all the summits, but farmers’ discussions are directed by what’s happening in their area, he said.
Farmers at the meeting in Taber, surrounded by sugar beet and potato processors, took a proactive approach to diversity and wanted to know how to take advantage of value-added industries.
The meeting in Claresholm focused on the cattle industry and trade irritants. The discussion at Olds had a mixed-farming tone. The grain sector dominated discussion at Drum-heller and intensive livestock was the focus in Stettler, after the county recently turned down an intensive hog operation.
“That’s why it’s so good to go,” said Nicol, who took notes and listened over the shoulder of participants.
“I want to be able to judge the final report and does it reflect what I heard when I went around.”
Brian Heidecker, Alberta’s agriculture and food council chair and an Ag Summit co-chair, said the biggest concern is money. Farmers want to know how they can make their farms more profitable given low grain prices and high input costs.
“There’s still a lot of optimism out there,” the Coronation, Alta., farmer said.
“There are a lot of people coping with very adverse situations with relatively innovative ways.”
Charlie Mayer, former federal agriculture minister and co-chair of the summit, said while many of the farmers had concerns about the industry, they weren’t looking to the government to be a Mr. Fix-It.
“Nobody expects the government to do it all.”
But Gerald Pilger of Ohaton, Alta., said the provincial and federal governments need a clear policy on agriculture to guide their decisions. Pilger made a point of sitting at one of two tables dedicated to public policy and spent the day discussing Alberta’s farm policy or lack of it.
“We have no idea what it is,” he said.”By default we decided it must be a cheap food policy.”
He said without a clear policy, governments design piecemeal solutions like handing out $4.29 an acre to all farmers regardless of whether they’re in trouble or not.
“How do we know where we’re going when we don’t know where we are?”
Rick Cole, a New Norway, Alta., farmer who sat at a different farm policy discussion table, said the government needs to outline some “fundamental principles” of what it wants the province’s agriculture industry to look like if it doesn’t want to lurch from crisis to crisis.
