WESTLOCK, Alta. – Early on a clear, northern Alberta evening, with the din of tractors and anhydrous feed cultivators only recently silenced for the night, 46 farmers came to hear three candidates vying for the Canadian Wheat Board director position for district one.
And when farmer Gerry Gill, of Legal, Alta., asked a question about contracting grain, the answers summed up differences between the candidates’ philosophies.
“I don’t see any real value in contracts on my farm.” said Gill during a question period at the meeting held in this north-central Alberta town Oct. 19.
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“They time them for the end of October. They often don’t take into account the lateness of harvest up here some years, worse for guys up the Peace. It just doesn’t work well for me and I want to know what you’re going to do about it if you are elected. Can we go back to the acreage system?”
Albert Wagner, a Stony Plain area farmer and CN Rail transportation superintendent for the province, told the crowd he believes a dual market is necessary and the “CWB should have to compete openly with the grain companies and anyone who will buy a farmers’ grain.”
Tom Jackson, a farmer from the Edmonton area and a protester against the CWB monopoly, said “cash pricing contracts and the ability to hedge on the market and sell grain when you need to sell it to an open market will solve that problem once and for all.”
Art Macklin, a Grande Prairie area farmer with experience as CWB advisory board member and president of the National Farmers Union, told the audience that “contracts are working, maybe not well, and they need improvement … but without them the CWB cannot plan to sell farmers’ grain if they don’t know what is out there and what they can count on.”
Macklin told the crowd he would support dual marketing, if it did not damage the pooling system and the CWB’s ability to act as a global marketer.
With the most farming area of any district, District One stretches across nor-thern Alberta into the British Columbia’s Peace River region.
District one producers at the meeting also wanted to talk about barley, a popular crop in the area.
Wagner said the wheat board should bow out of export feed barley sales.
Macklin disagreed, saying the board needs to control malting barley and without export feed barley marketing, the premiums they get for malting barley would suffer.
Jackson maintained the Canadian Wheat Board discounts feed barley to provide a premium price to malting barley growers.
Wagner told the group the CWB should take grain at port rather than at the elevator. He said an arrangement with railways and grain companies would provide producers with a more stable system.
Jackson told the group that “not all grain companies just want to rip you off. Some grain buyers end up going broke trying to be so good to the farmers.”
On this note Macklin disagreed with the other two.
“Single sellers command higher prices. Grain buyers want to buy low and sell high, that is their business. The last thing I want to do is compete with my neighbor down the road through a grain company. I would prefer to work with my neighbor to sell our products than take my chances with the grain industry,” he said.
