Most of you typically digest an entire print version of The Western Producer in about 2.5 hours a week. Often we hear there is “too much” to read, and I know our coverage is both detailed and broad.
If you grow cash crops, we cover more of that than anybody in the industry. If you have beef cattle, we are the biggest in that market, too. Pigs, ovines, caprines and feathers, we are fairly comprehensive. With dairy we stick mainly to policy and trade, but we also do business and farm profiles as well as bio-energy and manure management.
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Farm groups are too amiable with the federal government
Farm groups and commodity groups in Canada often strike a conciliatory tone, rather than aggressively criticizing the government.
Not every story is going to be for you, unless you are a multi-generational dairy farmer with sheep, goats, hogs, bison, horses, elk and chickens who backgrounds her bull calves, raises purebred beef cattle, farmgates the meat and grows grain and oilseeds for exports, cleans seed and feeds the screenings and has a trucking company, a greenhouse and a food processing side.
But then again, every story might interest you. Agriculture shares a lot more than most people might think. If you exclusively grow grain and oilseeds, does any of it go to feed use? I guarantee you it does. There are a million hungry dairy cows in this nation, which is one-quarter the number of beef cows. In total, that’s about 12 million commercial bovines.
Hogs number 14 million, while there are 700 million chickens, 25 million turkeys and 815 million sheep.
That means the crush from your canola and soybeans, the screenings from your grain and all that off-grade material from the two million or so acres that didn’t make it into the bin last fall are disappearing into that market. If they didn’t exist, you would have to convince the Americans to take it. We are linked together in trade.
Think about that if you are a grain grower and believe the dairy and feather folks shouldn’t have the market advantages that supply management enjoy or that country-of-origin labelling doesn’t apply to you because you grow durum.
If you are in livestock and think fumigation of pulse crops and restrictions of canola sales to China are only going to lower feed costs, imagine the effect of all those poor grain producers looking to diversify their operations.
It’s in our best interest for Canadian agriculture to stand together, whether in trade or with consumers.
