Western Canadian farmers who take business and marketing courses tend to take more than one, say people in the training area.
Anita Lunden, the Alberta co-ordinator of a federal-provincial program called the Farm Business Management Initiative, says 15,489 people registered in its courses from October 1992 to April 1996. That represented 11,169 individual farm managers. The difference in numbers is due to people registering in more than one course.
The Agriculture Institute of Management in Saskatchewan has had about 16,000 register in courses in its seven years of existence. However, that really represents 9,000 individual farmers, said AIMS executive director Michelle Kuxhauf.
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A report on another joint federal-provincial program, the Manitoba Agricultural Training Project, shows more than 7,000 farmers have been sponsored for its farm business management and production skills training since the fall of 1989.
Helpfulness hard to gauge
In British Columbia, Lawrence Hurd, who manages the joint government training program for farm business, said about 4,000 of the province’s 19,000 farmers have taken its courses since 1992.
While about one in five farmers actually takes training, there are few numbers to justify it and only anecdotes to show how the courses have helped.
Hurd uses a 15-year-old study done by the University of British Columbia that found training increases net farming income by a one-time three percent. He extrapolated that number into present-day B.C. to find that $1 spent on farm business training yields about $3 on the farm.
It is less clear in other provinces.
“We can’t measure an economic benefit as yet,” said Kuxhauf. The only sense of the courses’ usefulness is the demand for training which is focused on marketing, financial planning and overall business planning.
“Agriculture is a changing industry,” said Alberta’s Lunden. “And we feel it is vitally important for farmers to keep pace with that change.
“It is widely accepted that training, learning and exploring new concepts have become tools for effective farm management in the ’90s.”
In follow-up interviews, one farmer in the Edmonton area said the training plus membership in a marketing club increased his profits by 10 to 15 percent.
Another farmer near Olds said he used to believe that to get ahead you just worked a little longer. He said that is no longer true and, “farming today requires that you look at a number of different alternatives to generate income.”
Manitoba’s most popular
In Manitoba the most popular training has been for computers, where rural women dominated total enrolments at 58 percent. Men made up 89 to 100 percent of the registrations for other courses such as traditional production-related, marketing and farm maintenance and management training.
A survey by the Rural Development Institute in Brandon, Man. noted four impacts of the training:
- Increased efficiency for farm management may reduce the need for off-farm income.
- Knowledge acquired may help diversify agriculturally related activity, creating either new opportunities for on-farm endeavors or employment for others.
- Training may provide the skills necessary to work for others in agriculture.
- New skills may help farm family members attain employment in other industries.
