SASKATOON – Farmers who don’t want to contribute to the research checkoff on wheat and barley face a fast-approaching deadline.
If their notice of withdrawal isn’t at the offices of the Western Grains Research Foundation by Nov. 1, they won’t be able to avoid an automatic deduction from their January 1996 final payment.
“It’s not our intention to try to make anyone do anything they don’t wish to do,” said foundation chair Cam Henry. “But we have to have some operating procedures. We can’t deal with everybody individually on their own time frame.”
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There will be no exceptions and no appeal for farmers who miss the deadline.
The checkoff of 20 cents a tonne on wheat and 40 cents on barley has been in place since December 1994. Over the past two years, it has raised $5.9 million for wheat breeding programs and $1.4 million for barley.
Ward off complaints
This is the second notice sent to permit book holders in the last five months, said Henry, adding the producer-run foundation wants to head off complaints by farmers that they didn’t know how to get out of the checkoff.
Farmers must notify the foundation each year if they intend to opt out. The Nov. 1 deadline applies to the final payment on 1995-96 crop year sales.
For the 1996-97 crop year, notices can be sent to the foundation’s Saskatoon office anytime after Jan. 1.
About 23,000 farmers opted out in the first year of the checkoff. That dropped to 6,700 the next year and is expected to dip below 6,000 for 1995-96.
Henry said producers who are considering opting out should think about the potential benefits gained through more research. For example, the checkoff is helping pay for research that could produce a fusarium head blight resistant variety by 2000 and a wheat midge resistant variety by 2001.
“Those are two areas that it seems to me producers should be encouraging work to be done, and in fact through this foundation those are two of the things we have stressed,” he said, adding the government is putting its limited research dollars into areas where the industry shows it is also willing to invest.
The foundation is also mailing a pamphlet outlining research projects supported by the checkoff.
