Farmers could be saved by research that gives them top-performing varieties, says Grain Growers of Canada.
They won’t be saved by getting a small refund cheque from last year’s rail charges.
That’s why the organization is lobbying for at least some of the $68 million railway refund and penalty money to be put immediately into crop variety research.
And not just into the Western Grains Research Foundation’s trust fund. The Grain Growers group wants money put immediately into increasing the number of researchers across the Prairies. Putting all the money into the trust fund will not relieve the present critical shortage of researchers.
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“There have been cutbacks everywhere,” said Grain Growers executive director Richard Phillips.
“There’s been a big pullback both federally, and in many cases, especially Alberta, provincially, in dollars for public research.”
Phillips said the cuts that have occurred over more than a decade have left many of the major prairie crops with only one or a handful of people to do all of the variety, agronomic and comparative research.
“This is insane,” said Phillips.
In cereal grain and pulses, the private sector has not taken over the government role and it is unlikely that it will.
“Because of farmer-saved seed in those crops, you don’t see the private sector coming in there and investing big dollars,” said Phillips, noting the difference with canola.
“They can’t recoup their costs, and that’s just reality.”
Even in canola, which has had huge amounts of private research money spent to develop herbicide tolerance, and specialty oil plants, little research on agronomics and management has been occurring.
“The private research really just focuses on varieties,” said Phillips.
“There’s not much general agronomics done by the private companies. That stuff doesn’t get done by the private sector. There’s no return for them.”
Phillips said he has been talking to many prairie crop commodity organizations about this problem. All agree that it is important to get more money into university and agriculture department research.
He has been raising different ways to get more money quickly into research programs.
He thinks the present railway repayment would help farmers much more if it was directed into crop research than if it was divided up and sent out to individual growers.
“If history is any teacher, it’s telling us that it would be an administrative nightmare trying to get the money back to every farmer,” Phillips said.
It would help even more if the federal government would match the railway money.
Phillips said the shortage of researchers is critical, and “let’s get these new breeders up and running now.”
To do that, it would be a good idea to put a big lump of cash into research funding immediately. Perhaps the railway money could go into the research trust fund, but matching money from the federal government could be used right away to hire new researchers and expand programs.
“We agree with other farm groups that somehow farmers need to see that money back or they need to see value for it quickly,” said Phillips.
