Gas bills
Re: Irrigation key to future food supply, WP, July 22.
It may well be but what will pay the bill? Natural gas has jumped from 80 cents to $9 a gigajoule or a 90 percent increase since Peter Lougheed went to Ottawa to drink champagne and deregulate natural gas because it was too cheap.
I have not heard from Peter lately as to when natural gas is going to be too expensive. Looks like the sky is the limit.
He is now concerned about water supply and not natural gas to be affordable.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
– John Pokorney,
Tilley, Alta.
Optimism fading
Having farmed for 35 plus years, reflecting back, my optimism has served me well.
Today, maybe because of my age and having experienced the farm’s many ups and downs along with many conversations with older farmers, nobody is happy with the direction of this business.
There was a time if you did most everything right, got very lucky with the weather, a good profit could be expected.
Today things are much different. We have so much money tied up in these crops. The crop prospects at this time are excellent but because of this so called big crop, prices are falling like a rock.
What is the future for my son and others like him who are just starting out? Are machinery prices going to come down? Are input costs going to become lower? Are the crop prices going to rise?
These are big problems and what is the solution? Alan Greenspan (chair of the United States Federal Reserve) says overproduction worldwide is the problem.
The only way to fix that is to become an agriculture OPEC (Oil Producing Exporting Countries.)
Remember, OPEC raised the price of oil 50 percent in six months and has kept the prices there.
We as farmers try to grow our way out of the problem. Our share of the food dollar continues to get smaller. A cheap food policy remains in place even though I believe our job as farmers is important and honourable.
As you see, I don’t think our future is that bright. Hopefully I am wrong and China steps up to solve some of our overproduction.
– Brian Kiss,
Shaunavon, Sask.
CWB & wheat
In a recent issue of the Western Producer, Craig Shaw of the Alberta Winter Wheat Producers’ Commission suggested the CWB has been actively preventing development and approval of varieties of white winter wheat. I would like to take this opportunity to correct this misconception.
New grain varieties are developed in Western Canada through a breeding network of which the Western Grains Research Foundation is but one part. Within the WGRF the CWB is only one member participating in the consultative process that leads to these decisions.
In fact there are a total of 18 voting members on the WGRF board, 12 of which are farmers. This includes the CWB representative, Allan Oberg of Forestburg, Alta.
Through this process the following industry consensus is emerging:
- End-use customers have not specifically requested white wheat traits in winter wheat varieties. While all types of winter wheat varieties could theoretically be marketed, there is no specific market pull for hard white winter or soft white winter classes, as opposed to their spring wheat equivalents.
- Soft wheat markets tend to be low-price markets, making soft wheat varieties a lower priority for research and development initiatives relative to higher-value hard wheat types that are agronomically suited to Western Canada.
- Limited dollars are available for variety research and development. Though it appears the hard and soft white traits could be bred into winter wheat lines, the potential investment must be weighed against other alternative research investments. …
- Overall winter wheat already receives a larger share of the breeding research effort relative to its total acreage when compared to other wheat classes. Increased funding for winter wheat breeding would come at the expense of other classes. This dilution of breeding investment would pose a problem regardless of the marketing system in place….
The CWB endorses the ongoing, industry-wide consultative process to determine the direction of breeding research within Western Canada.
Scarce research dollars must clearly be targeted toward breeding programs that will provide the best return on investment for farmers.
– Adrian C. Measner,
President and CEO,
Canadian Wheat Board,
Winnipeg, Man.
Health premiums
Health care became (the) No. 1 (issue) in our recent federal election. … Health becomes a personal concern when we see the waiting lines growing, despite the fact money is being poured into the system at ever increasing amounts. More money is obviously not the answer.
The health-care problem from my thinking is human action based on the fact the demand side is absolutely free. Waiting for services becomes the only way to ration the supply.
Just imagine, if all groceries were supplied free, based on our needs and paid by our taxes, how long the waiting lines would be. Just like health care, food is an essential of life but we have a system in our food supply to ration supply and that is price. Price works for everything we consume except health.
I believe I have a very simple solution that would turn the health system around (and) also bring relief to our conscientious front line, overworked health-care workers.
The solution is to replace the health-care premiums with reasonable user fees.
Ideas have consequences. It’s not the amount you pay to use the services but to bring home to each of us the idea it costs money to use the system.
– Walter Sandusky,
Sylvan Lake, Alta.
Health & choice
I could not believe what I read in a paper the other day. An associate professor in one of our universities considers it immoral for a person to pay for a health service he or she might require because it might be making a sicker person who does not have money wait a little longer.
I consider it immoral not to allow people to pay for medical services. Is this man aware of what is happening in this country or is he buried so deep in socialist propaganda that his logic has become flawed?
This country has medical waiting lists because our politicians choose to create them by restricting money to certain areas of the medical system. We do not have problems with dentists, optometrists, chiropractors, or any other medical services that are not hobbled by government bureaucracy and money restrictions.
There is another very important although poorly publicized reason that these other medical services do not have long waiting lists. This is the theory of supply and demand.
This idea does have shortcomings but it has very strong advantages, which overcome a lot of its weaknesses. It sets the price of services at a level that insures the supply will meet the demand.
If you change the price, you change the supply-demand equilibrium.
This is why the waiting lists are so short in the United States. Yes, the private system does cost more, but if you choose to pay for the service, you are not going to die waiting for it….
We are relying on our politicians to solve our waiting list problems. Is this wise? These are the people who created the problem in the first place. They are trying to solve the problem by throwing more money at it. This is relatively painless to them because it is our money that they are chucking around. …
How can politicians sleep at night knowing that their policies are denying sick and disabled people prompt medical services? It is even more disgusting because it is so obvious that there is a solution south of our border that is working and our politicians refuse to try it….
Wouldn’t it be interesting if our governments allowed free secret votes on these policies? Our politicians might be able to vote according to their constituents needs rather than party policy.
Right now, it seems that we only have a choice as to which dictator we would like to run the country.
– Jim Rogers,
Edgeley, Sask.
