The National Farmers Union’s latest report received warm support from rural sociologist Michael Gertler of the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan.
“I think everyone who’s interested in farming should read it,” he said.
The report entitled The Farm Crisis, Bigger Farms and the Myths of Competition and Efficiency says that small farms are just as profitable as large ones.
Gertler’s only criticism is that the 32-page study wasn’t longer. He said some terminology could have been more clearly defined.
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“I think when you’re talking about efficiency, it’s very important to distinguish between market efficiency and technical efficiency. Market efficiency is purely a kind of survival based on ability to muscle others out, which has nothing to do with innovation or labour productivity.
“The big players enjoy the market efficiencies. They pay less for what they buy, and they sell at a premium,” he said.
Gertler also said the NFU report should have promoted economies of scope rather than talking about economies of scale or size.
“Economies of scope are what you achieve when you have a mixed operation – some diversification, more than one product in your portfolio.
“Our system, despite recent lip service to diversification, has for 50 years been moving toward specialization, and in the process, farmers have sacrificed economies of scope. So when you separate livestock from feed production, you lose that. And a lot of those systems had to do with ecological rationality. Our system has become very irrational.”
In an e-mail, Kenton, Man., canola grower Gordon Cormack added that the steady increase in canola seed prices as well as pesticide costs over the past 10 years are as much to blame for the farm income crisis as the fertilizer costs mentioned in the report.
