Alberta agriculture minister Verlyn Olson helped make agricultural policy history in September as one of a dozen ministers signing a new national agriculture policy framework.
Olson, a rural lawyer new to the cabinet table, said in an interview the Growing Forward 2 five-year agreement signed in Whitehorse is the vision of the future: less hands-on government and more farmer self-reliance.
“With the Growing Forward agreement that we have now, in Alberta something like 90 percent of money is focused on business risk management,” he said.
“Using a hockey analogy, we’re playing defence when we’re talking about BRM. We don’t have the puck. The best time is when you have the puck and you are on offence, so it is exciting to talk to the industry about possibilities beyond BRM that are before us in innovation and marketing.”
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However, his vision for the agricultural portfolio extends beyond the farmgate. It involves more processing plants in rural Alberta and more of an emphasis on adding value to raw agricultural products in the province.
It also involves a higher profile for agriculture in a province where many see the energy sector as the economic driver.
“Agriculture really is underplayed as a driver of Alberta’s economy, and yet we are the second biggest industry in the province and the largest renewable resource sector,” he said.
“As a lawyer in rural Alberta, most of my clients were farmers or rural and I am very passionate about rural development and it was one of the themes premier (Alison) Redford stressed when she appointed me minister.”
Olson said there is angst in Alberta about the amount of oil and gas that is shipped out of the province as a raw resource for refining or product development elsewhere.
“If you applied the standards of the energy industry to agriculture, we are nowhere near where they are for value-adding,” he said.
“You just have to look at all the rail cars taking grain out of the province and the country to be processed elsewhere. This is one of my goals, to see more value added done in rural Alberta. In rural Alberta, we can talk to each other about the need for development, but if we only talk to ourselves we are talking to the converted, so I want to take that conversation to urban Alberta to make them recognize how important we are.”
He said this fall’s E. coli meat contamination at the XL Foods plant in Brooks could end up being a catalyst for more urban interest in where their food comes from and how the system works to keep it safe.
Olson said Alberta producers will be adaptable in the face of climate change, but insurance policies will have to be strengthened to help them cope with less climate predictability.
And while not the traditional financial backstop, he said governments will continue to supply important support to farmers.
“We need to rely on the initiative and the entrepreneurial spirit of our farmers, but there is a role for government, and I hear that from producers all the time,” he said.
“Government needs to do things that individual producers can’t do. A farmer told me, ‘ I don’t need government to help me build something on my farm, but I need government to help me find markets for what I grow because I can’t go to Korea myself and open a market.’ ”
Olson said he does not expect to “pull levers in Edmonton and get things done” to direct future farm conditions, but government is not abandoning farmers.
