After a week in Western Canada listening to complaints about barriers facing young and beginning farmers, Conservative MP Larry Miller is beginning to develop ideas on what must be done.
The Ontario cattle producer and chair of the House of Commons agriculture committee said he accepts the repeated testimony that domestic farm support programs are not working for young farmers concentrating on local markets.
“I don’t think we should or can subsidize exports, but I do believe we have to find a way to support domestic producers with another avenue to deal with exports,” he said.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
“I don’t know how you do that, but it is something we have to think about.”
Miller also said a week of evidence from farmers convinces him that overregulation and poor regulation also are part of the problem.
“One of the things we heard over and over again is overregulation, particularly aimed at the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency),” he said.
“I think we really have to look at how CFIA does its job.”
Many witnesses also took aim at what they considered a toothless Competition Bureau, unable or unwilling to deal with the growing market power of farm input suppliers and commodity buyers.
Regulation and its cost to producers was a theme that Miller said the committee will have to consider when it writes its report on young farmer issues later this spring.
The agriculture committee is travelling across the country on the young farmer issue, visiting Ontario this week and Eastern Canada next week.
The committee heard strong language during its opening western swing.
“It’s like the government has put us in a box, it’s sitting on the lid and we can’t get out,” Margo Staniforth told MPs during their April 27 meeting in Crossfield, Alta.
She said the regulatory burden makes farming an unattractive option for people such as her 27-year-old who would like to return to the farm.
Fellow Albertan Gordon Butler complained to MPs about the rule-setting power that the department of fisheries and oceans has over prairie farmers if they have waterways on their land.
He said federal navigable waterways legislation applies to creeks that may have fish when it is meant to deal with waterways that have ship traffic.
“I see ships going up and down all the time,” Butler said sarcastically.
Regulation was one of the constant themes.
The other was that farm cash flow is not strong enough to sustain beginning farmers with high debt loads and competition from established farmers. Existing farm support programs are not designed to help young farmers.
Miller said he was impressed by evidence that the way to deal with poor or unpredictable farm income is to diversify.
In Lanigan, Sask., committee members toured the Pound-Maker feedlot and ethanol plant and heard president Brad Wildeman argue that his operation is diversified to reduce vulnerability to the instability of the food economy.
In Manitoba April 29, the committee toured the Rock Lake Hutterite colony at Grosse Isle and heard that the colony cannot make a living from agriculture, even though it has 6,000 acres, markets 27,000 hogs annually and has quota for turkey production and 12,000 layer hens.
Two-thirds of the colony income comes from industrial offshoots including a laser steel-cutting plant, said manager Ben Hofer.
“I found it surprising,” Miller said. “But their attitude surprised me even more. When he said they could not make a living from agriculture, he shrugged his shoulders and said they will do what they have to do. Diversification seems to be the answer in many cases.”
