Agriculture Committee on April 29th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, thank you.

Mr. Atamanenko, for five minutes.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

I'll just echo my colleagues and say thank you very much for taking the time to be here.

I have a very quick question for you, Fred, before I move on. You mentioned low input, that we should going toward low input. I know that when my cousin and her husband, for example, who are large-scale farmers farming north of Saskatoon, went organic, they saved $120,000 in the first year in chemicals. But not everybody is organic. Not everybody wants to go that way. I'm wondering what you mean and how you can see moving into getting even less input in conventional farming.

I'll pose my second question to Luke, and maybe others would like to comment. You mentioned the catastrophe in the flax industry because of GM Triffid flax. You are probably aware of Bill C-474, my private member's bill, which looks at assessing the economic risk to farmers before introducing alfalfa and GM wheat. There has been some pushback and criticism that the bill might stifle innovation and that it's not science-based, so I would appreciate hearing your comments and concerns, and maybe suggestions from all of you on that, because we want to make it work.

Maybe, Fred, just give a quick answer and then we will move on to the other topic.

[Fred Tait]

When I spoke about low-input agriculture, I was thinking of some of the very interesting work done by Martin Entz at the University of Manitoba, who has been looking at doing this through capturing nitrogen from the atmosphere, and so on. The results have shown a return as good as, if not better than, conventional farming. This type of farming also releases the farmer from being dependent on the input supplier.

Unfortunately, given the skill level required, there is a steep learning curve involved. This is usually done through peer mentoring.

I think as a society we should be investing more money in doing this through the official education process, including for the added value of protecting society before the point where we pass peak oil.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you.

Luke.

[Luke Lelond]

First of all, I would like to say that math is a science, and when you are looking at all of the science of this, you should look at the math too. Research doesn't help us if it destroys our markets; we're better off without research if we can't sell our product. We have not been very successful in forcing these markets to take our product. In any dispute we've had, I haven't ever seen that being really successful.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you.

Are there any other comments?

[Larry Black]

I would like to comment on that as well.

I failed to mention in my earlier presentation that I am an organic producer and that the introduction of some GMO canola products eliminated my ability to grow organic canola because of the gene transfers through the air or whatever methods are used. The certification agency can no longer guarantee that I won't have contamination of my fields, so they won't allow me to grow it.

I was told by a foreign specialist that if GM alfalfa were introduced, the wind would take that pollen 10 miles. How can anybody reasonably expect to be able to contain that sort of new technology within 10 miles? It will destroy the organic industry, because all aspects of the organic industry use alfalfa, either as a product to sell or as a soil builder. For me, my dairy is also organic, so I won't be able to feed that to my cows. It will just destroy the whole organic industry, and for what? It will be something else for Monsanto to put in their pocket.

So I think it's critical that we consider farmers first, including in other policies going forward. That's going to be the way we turn this ship around, by revamping our priorities. Instead of looking after what big business wants first and then if anything is left over, farmers can have it, I think we need to turn that around and put farmers' priorities first.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

There are 30 seconds left.

Go ahead.

[Beverly Stow]

I was just going to congratulate Mr. Atamanenko on his bill. I was very glad to see it drafted, very glad to see it presented, and extremely relieved to see it pass second reading. I hope it survives committee.

I think it will be a great step forward for producers if we can get that inserted into the seed regulatory system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move on to Mr. Richards for five minutes.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you.

I want to really quickly start out by touching on something. I think there seems to be a bit of a misconception that I'm hearing today on our government's position on the Canadian Wheat Board.

I want to make it very clear that our position is to allow western Canadian farmers--wheat and barley farmers--marketing choice: nothing more, nothing less. That means that if a farmer chooses to sell their products to the Canadian Wheat Board, we support that. If that means that a farmer chooses to sell their products another way, on their own, marketing their own product, we support that. So it's the choice for farmers that's important.

It fits into an overall theme that I think is very important in terms of the future of farming and is very important in terms of attracting young farmers to the industry. I think the farming of today is very different for folks like Gwen, and for folks like Luke, who are getting started in farming. It's very different today, modern farming, than it was in their parents' generation or in their grandparents' generation.

We've heard it a lot as we've travelled across the country. It seems to be that farming--rightfully so--is moving more to where it's not as simple as just working hard, putting in that crop, and you'll make a profit. To make sure there's profitability in farming now, it needs to be run like a business.

I think most young farmers are recognizing that and that's how they want to approach their farming. They want to run it like a business. They're educated people. They're smart people. They are some of our brightest young people and they want to run their farms like a business.

So they want to be able to have that choice to market their products. They have those options with the Internet, with all the connections that can be made nowadays--not only all over Canada and all over North America but all over the world. Farmers want to have those markets open up to them. That's whether it be the work that our government has done to open up market access all across the world for various agricultural products, whether it be through free trade agreements that we're working on, whether it be the opportunity to have a choice in how they market their products through things like marketing choice for wheat and barley farmers.

So that's what I'm hearing from our young farmers. They want to be able to approach their farms like a business. They want to be able to make their own choices. I think that's an important point to make. I think what it ties into....

I'd like to ask Gwen and Luke, our two youngest farmers in the room today, to make some comments on this. It kind of goes back to what you were saying, Gwen, about the way people kind of looked down on the decision that you made to continue with farming and to be on the farm. It's a “Why the heck would you want to do that?” kind of a comment. It's from a real misconception out there of farming, I think, in the public. You hear it all the time. We need to somehow find a way to counteract that. We need to figure out how to show people that, you know what? A farm is a business, and it's something that can be profitable and something that an educated person who has a lot of business sense wants to be involved in. So how do we change that perception?

It's not only that, but there's another misconception out there that's very common among the public. Just to give an example, I represent a riding in Alberta that's very largely a rural riding. All the towns in my riding rely very heavily on agriculture; it was built by agriculture. Yet I border the city of Calgary on the north and west edges of that city. So you don't have to go very far. As a matter of fact, you can drive about 15 or 20 minutes from the farm on the edge of my riding into downtown Calgary. You can go into downtown Calgary, and even though they're 15 to 20 minutes' drive away from farms that are all around them, most people, when you ask them where their food comes from, say it's from the grocery store. Clearly there's something that needs to happen for us to change that perception out there.

First of all there's the idea that farming is not a career that a young person--someone who is educated, someone who is smart and has a business sense--should want to get into. Also, there's a lack of understanding of where their food actually comes from and the fact that there are a lot of farmers out there working really hard to make sure they've got a product that they can buy in the grocery store. Yet it doesn't seem as though those farmers who are working hard to produce that product are benefiting from the hard work that they have done in terms of their share of the price of that product.

I'd like to just ask the two young farmers in the room here what they think we need to do to change those perceptions among the public.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You're just about out of time, but I'm going to allow the two respondents.

Ms. Donohoe.

[Gwen Donohoe]

Thank you.

I think one of the biggest things we can do to start changing the attitudes of society on their perception of agriculture is that, as producers, we need to start getting together more and being more proactive. We need to start letting people know what we do, what our production practices are, what public goods and services we provide, how we're benefiting the environment, and what it would be like if we weren't around. There would be a very small handful of people managing a very large portion of the land in Canada.

We need to do that. That should be part of our job. We need to do that better. Maybe we need some support to help us start doing that.

[Luke Lelond]

I guess they should probably start teaching in schools that beef comes from cows. That wasn't needed 50 years ago, but now it is.

She said we need to band together more, and I guess we do. We have some institutions that are together, and we should use them instead of taking them apart, I would say.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Easter, five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I thank all the presenters for their presentations. I think there's something we can take away from each and every one.

Bev, I just want to make a point of this. You mentioned that you now ship cattle one and a half hours. When we look at the country as a whole, in my neck of the woods, other than 350 cattle that are killed at a small local plant, federally inspected, we had to ship our cattle either to the United States or to Ontario—18 hours. We don't have a hog plant left in Atlantic Canada. It's gone. We had to ship to Quebec.

That's what's happening. We're seriously losing that strong mixed economy. It's going to happen here, too, if we stay on this same trend.

Larry, you mentioned the report Empowering Canadian Farmers in the Marketplace. That was drafted as a sitting member of government. It was a considerable challenge to our own government, as it is to these guys. But the bottom line is that what is in that report is what farmers recommended. And I agree with you; it needs to be dusted off. We need to bring it up to date and we need to move forward with some of those recommendations.

This leads me to the point that I think most people made, and that's the Competition Bureau. We've done a study on competition. We can't talk about it yet, but I think there are some decent recommendations in that report and we certainly need to deal with the Competition Bureau. The problem is that it doesn't end there. We're not the only country in the world losing farmers. Every country is. The European Union is now really starting to massively lose farmers.

Is the solution even bigger than us? I can tell you that we announced, as a party, a national food policy last Monday. There's a lot of work to be done on it yet, but you're always up against people who say, “No, we can't do that. No, we can't do this.” I'm in favour of fair trade, but we in the farm sector always seem to be up against something because it's breaking a trade rule or because we can't do this in Canada or whatever.

I will ask each of you this: what one thing do you see as a priority in terms of being able to build the agriculture industry from a standpoint of profitability and/or allowing young farmers a stake in the industry and giving them a leg up to get in the industry and maintain it and stay there?

In addition, Gwen made a good point earlier in terms of the silos. I don't know if she said “silos” or not, but I know from being on the government side--and those guys would agree if they'd admit it--that Agriculture Canada....

Finance runs Ottawa. We're implemented by about 11 different departments in Agriculture. Agriculture has no say. The deputy minister--he's just there passing through until the next fellow comes along. We haven't had a deputy minister who made any sense and worked for farmers since Sid Williams in the 1970s.

Anyway, to my question. Sorry.

[Larry Black]

I'll talk on that one first.

In your document, you talked about some of the answers being international, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. Already a lot of rights by our government to control policy within this country have been signed away. The debate is how many more are we going to do?

I think we might have to go back to create some alliances with other like-minded countries that are experiencing these same problems. If the EU is losing that many farmers, they might be able to see the wisdom of revamping and backtracking on some of the agreements that have been signed. Some drastic action has to take place or this big ship is not going to get turned around. You have to decide how important food security is here in Canada.

I think you'd be very surprised by how many other countries you could get to sign on with you and say forget about going forward. We need to take about four steps back and rethink some of the rights we've already signed away. Let's find a way to make farmers a higher priority. Let's find a way to make policy within our own country by our government. If there is enough sincerity within the government to actually do it, I think we will all have the legal right to go forward.

That's my thought.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Very briefly, please.

[Ian Wishart]

I'll give you a very brief philosophical statement. What farmers need is a tool to get more value back from the value chain, and that varies from value chain to value chain.

That's a pretty general statement, but there is enough money in the marketplace. We're simply not getting what we traditionally got and it's declining even faster. It's a long slope. We need some tools to do that and they vary. There are some out there and we need to develop them further.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks Ian. That's a good comment.

Fred, would you be very brief.

[Fred Tait]

What we have to do is recapture the sovereignty that was lost over a period of decades in negotiating trade agreements and the like, because when we regain sovereignty, then those people we elect to the House of Commons in Ottawa will be able to focus on developing an agricultural policy that serves the needs of the constituency that elected them. The way it is now, you're serving the needs of a trade agreement. You're serving the wrong cause.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Tweed, for five minutes.

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you again to our guests here today.

Just to touch on your comment about education, Luke, there is a farm program available to schools but they have a choice of whether to present it or not. I'm not sure further strengthening that to implement it would help in our case as far as helping people to understand.

I can remember starting in our family business with my father. At that time, a lot of young guys my age were getting into that business. We probably couldn't have done it without the help of our families and the strength of the company at the time.; it's so important. One thing I do remember about it is that we were facing 14%, 15%, 18% interest rates. Things were a real challenge. It would have been very easy--very easy--for me and my brothers to have just thrown up our hands and walked away. In fact, there were probably several times where we sat down and decided that was what we should do, then slept on it and said we would keep plowing ahead.

So I am very conscious of the challenges that young people have getting into business, be it agriculture or be it in any other type. We were in agricultural machinery, so we were very reliant on the farm gate.

The thing I am hearing...and I'm not trying to ignore the other guests, but Luke and Gwen, you are the future, and I believe that. Whatever is in front of you, you have to deal with that and move forward. I would have to disagree with other statements that....

You know, we can look back forever, but if we don't look ahead and start planning and addressing those issues as they come to us, we are going to be forever looking backwards. I think that's what has happened in a lot of industries in the last several years.

If the government came to you today--obviously you're young, you've started, and you understand some of the challenges, probably a lot of them--and there was one change we could make in policy, just one change that would benefit you personally, and probably everybody in your generation, what would that be?

Gwen.

[Gwen Donohoe]

In my opinion, one of the biggest policy changes we could do is implement a system where farmers are paid not only for the physical product they produce but for all the other goods and services we provide. That would benefit not only us but all other Canadians at the same time.

We're a country with high costs of production, and that's probably not going to change. We need to find a way to be able to keep people on the landscape and give value to their production practices, whether that be just providing beautiful landscape for scenery when you drive by or providing clean water or native habitat. We need some kind of ecological goods and services program, and that program needs to be designed to help us become more profitable and not just designed to help or improve the environment.

I think that would be my suggestion.

[Luke Lelond]

I don't know if this would immediately solve everything--there are so many things--but I do know that....

You've all heard of One Earth? They're going to be a million acres, publicly traded. There are individuals who could afford all the dirt in western Canada, so we need to be protected from these guys, or else let them have it, because there are actually people who could afford to farm Canada. So how do you compete with that?