Beskorovayny farms near Gronlid, Sask.
Whether we are consumers or producers, the vastness of Canada’s arable land, along with its scant population, makes this country into one of surplus exportable commodities.
Ever since the turn of the last century, history reminds us of the constant battles that farmers faced to protect their productivity from sometimes cheaper imports.
With a sizable electoral voice in rural Canada, governments would listen and impose measures such as tariffs to keep farmers viable and lessen the volume of dissent. Problems of gaining equal access to available markets proved challenging, with fiery debates as to the merits of the free market system being able to dispense any measure of fairness.
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We all know the battles that farmers waged with the elevator companies and railroads when boxcars were allocated at the pleasure of the mighty and at the whims of their local subordinates. In years of surplus production and wild, daily fluctuation in commodity prices, many farmers found themselves disadvantaged.
Visionary farm leaders engaged in battles and eventually, some measure of fairness was achieved by a Canadian Wheat Board and a quota system in the delivery of grains into an often limited international market. Fair or not, these quotas came without cost. Not so with the more perishable commodities like milk, cream, eggs or poultry.
We were never milk producers, but like all homesteaders, we shipped cream from our few cows to the local creamery, as an early version of added value.
We were never on a quota system until margarine came onto the market looking like butter. Dairies in small towns were phased out in the name of centralization while health scientists assaulted the diets that contained butter or eggs as being injurious to health.
Margarine assumed the throne of preference at the dinner table while Canada’s freezer warehouses slowly became inundated with butter surpluses. To add to the dilemma of the cream producer, creameries started to extract the cream from their whole milk deliveries in the nation-wide craze for drinking skim milk. The nation’s cream surplus became even greater.
Recognizing the sanctity of the “ma and pa” cream can operation and the need to maintain the viability of the weekly cream cheque, governments and farm leaders introduced a convertible cream quota, based on one’s traditional production, that encouraged anyone to go into commercial milk production and away from just cream.
While fluid milk quotas were introduced much sooner, the whole dairy quota system soon attained the status of a salable commodity.
Within the umbrella of government subsidies, the dairy industry flourished with the result that any exchange and sale of a quota carried a hefty price tag.
With cream, it was different. It became death by a thousand cuts. Local creameries were forced to close their doors and begin a process of centralization. Those that stuck with cream production were soon forced to see their cream being shipped all the way to Calgary. Cream cans soon lost their “homing instinct” to the detriment of many a furious farmer.
As the older generation began to exit the scene and accepted a modest price for their remaining quota, for the younger generation could not stomach the thought of pulling teats for a living.
It didn’t take long for the cream can to attain the status of antique, leaving the centralized dairy processors the job of making all the butter the nation needed, while in the process, touting skim milk as being quite sufficient for one’s daily intake of the white stuff.
With eggs, the pattern was to become the same. Big chicken farms emerged as perhaps the first of the industrial livestock operations, where millions of chickens in limited quarters gobbled up feed and threw it out as eggs.
By this method, the millions of eggs produced a glut on a limited market. Eggs, like milk, are not like wheat or oats that can be stored indefinitely in suitable facilities. They have to be consumed or manufactured into a preservable product within a reasonable time.
There again, the powers that be introduced a quota system to limit production and erect a barrier to exclude those with limited financial means to butt in on the action.
We live on a farm that used to have a fair-sized egg operation. The previous owners had sold their egg quota for a mint, the buyer caring not a hoot for the cages and apparatus within that had cost thousands to install. His only interest was to buy his way into a larger market volume.
In milk, we are told that milk producers in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley sometimes pay an astronomical price to obtain sufficient quota.
As a consumer who pays for the end product on the grocery shelf, I wonder how much of my dollar goes to pay for the cost of the quota that is built into the cost of production.
Added up over all of Canada, millions of dollars are involved in quota procurement. This needn’t be.
In supply management, every reasonable person knows that some sort of quota regulation is required to limit or allocate production. However, apart from financing the cost of hiring the lackeys who would form the bureaucracy needed to keep tabs on the system, quotas should be free.
Any farmer should be able to access the system for the privilege of selling into the system. Of course, the ones that had the largest quotas would suffer somewhat as someone has to make room for newcomers.
Overall quota numbers need not change, but in reality and fairness to the farming industry, we need more, not fewer, farmers. We do not need so-called empire clubs to create in-house monopolies that limit the ability for others to join.
For a country that prides itself on being a socially minded, tolerant society, a quota system that subjects itself to an auction block is simply wrong.
