Column railed against the wrong threat
Kevin Hursh’s column of Dec. 1, 2022, called “NFU receives undeserved credibility from media” brought back memories of a farm policy cartoon from the previous century.
It displayed the image of a farmer standing in the doorway of his home as a hailstorm devastates his crop and his livelihood. That caption reads, “God damn the CPR.”
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All farms are subject to the ever-present environmental risks. However, today we have new storm systems that appear annually in the form of plant breeders’ rights legislation and technology use agreements, delivery contracts, the abandonment of farmland protection legislation and near monopolies that exist among the purchasers of farm production and the suppliers of farm inputs.
The onset of these non-environmental storms were accurately forecast by the National Farmers Union in numerous published reports, warning producers of dark and menacing corporate storm clouds forming on the horizon.
The NFU forecast that these storms would not destroy crops, but extract the wealth from them, reducing margins and forcing farm consolidation. Taxpayers would be called upon to provide financial support to the dwindling number of survivors. Rural communities that agriculture once supported would become victims of the same corporate storm fronts.
I believe Kevin was fully aware of the NFU forecasts of dark corporate storm clouds on the horizon. He responded by producing and publishing numerous forecasts of his own, predicting that innovation, the adoption of technology and the development of marketing skills were all that was required to take full advantage of everything the approaching corporate storm fronts had to offer. The adoption of this strategy would lead the true believers to survive the storm and prosper.
As Kevin viewed the world outside his door in November 2022, he saw before him the devastation that had and is still being administered to rural Canada by the accelerating and intensifying frequency of corporate storm fronts. He closed the door on that reality, sat down in front of his keyboard and wrote the Dec. 1, 2022, Western Producer column: “God Damn the NFU.”
Fred Tait,
Rossendale, Man.
