Agriculture committee  My opinion on the Wheat Board is it can stay there, but I like the choice. If they're good at what they do, they'll be competitive and I'll sell my grain to them. The problem with the Wheat Board right now is it's not accountable. There are millions of dollars of losses, and no o

Agriculture committee  Well, they play an important part for the agriculture industry. They are way more flexible than the big banks, right? The programs they have in place are structured such that it does make it affordable for a young farmer like me, for example, to maybe purchase my father's operati

Agriculture committee  It was very responsive this spring. I'm not sure $30 an acre was the right number.

Agriculture committee  I think that's the same question. If you put the right programs in place, you will have an insurance policy in place. For me to make the kind of investment I need to make to be a sustainable farmer, I don't have the appetite for that risk level. My friends who are doing it are do

Agriculture committee  Ultimately, for the producers who are properly insured under crop insurance and AgriStability, it was more or less an advance.

Agriculture committee  Premium-based programs, as long as they're affordable, will drive the right behaviour. Private enterprises are looking at insuring it, and I can give you those examples later.

Agriculture committee  From a tax perspective, I assume you're going down the road of having separate operations or separate corporations. If you separate the corporations, you are going to pay tax on the profitable one for sure. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. As a producer, if I was going to be s

Agriculture committee  I agree, but the taxpayer is going to subsidize. You're talking here today about subsidizing Curtiss here, who is a straight pork producer. So what's the difference if you have a mixed farmer who's doing grain and pork? You're going to subsidize Curtiss, but you're not going to s

Agriculture committee  I'll speak to that as well. It's the exact same thing if you're a mixed farm, with animals and grain. You know, your cows are down, your grain is up. You take the cow loss. You have to take it because you're not going to trigger a payment, and vice versa. If you're specifically i

Agriculture committee  I guess all of those changes are possible to make if you really want them done. Do we need to look at doing a bit of a study on the program? We did it in Saskatchewan with crop insurance. We went out and talked to the producers, got some feedback, and put forth, I think, 14 recom

Agriculture committee  My experience with it as a new producer is that you do get assigned some sort of area average margin to start with. You have to be operating for a couple of years before you build a history. One of the things that could be done to assist with that, and this is being tested right

Agriculture committee  From a young farmer's perspective, expansion is a necessary evil, I guess, if you want to call it that. If I were going to get really big in the grain farming sector, I'd need a lot of cash. I'd need $250 an acre for equipment and $250 an acre to cashflow my inputs. If I wanted t

Agriculture committee  Yes, but there is no backing there.They'll bankrupt you just as quickly as any other bank. AgriStability is great right now for me, but is it always going to be there? I don't want to be sitting here in three years, like these two guys, saying I'm done.

Agriculture committee  Some of them. My comment there is this. You're looking at an Olympic average reference margin, the middle three of your five years. What happens when you have three or four bad years in a row, for example? Now your reference margin goes to nothing. We have information all the wa

Agriculture committee  Thank you, and good morning. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to participate in this discussion today. As some of you are aware, I'm a fourth-generation grain farmer from Saskatchewan, and I'm also an agriculture business advisor. Just to clarify, I attend this meeting