Well, I think the biggest risks on my farm are the weather concerns. I mentioned that in my presentation. To put in an acre of canola basically costs us somewhere between $160 and $200 an acre. We have to have about a 30-bushel crop just to break even, and that can be a major problem.
Right now, crop insurance on my particular farm covers me for $105 an acre. If we have a disaster like the one in 2002, when basically in that year we didn't harvest our crop at all—we didn't even pull the combines out.... Under crop insurance that year, I was covered at $125 an acre, so I had a loss on my farm of $50 an acre.
Those kinds of losses nowadays, and especially when farms have grown and the cost of production is increasing, whether it's for power, or telephone, or communications—all those types of things that cost a lot more than in my father's and grandfather's.... Our farm is over 100 years old now, and farming is really getting tough.
To me, the risks are tremendous out there just to seed an acre, when you look at the seed costs. They're basically $5 a pound. If you seed five pounds to the acre, there's $25 guaranteed as cost there. For any kinds of weather problems at all out there, there's a huge cost and a huge risk to putting it in. The banks don't want to risk lending us money if we have no way of paying it back.
The CAIS program people are not interested in talking to us in those kinds of terms, because they don't know what we're going to get by way of crop production. I can take my crop insurance and say, “I'm covered for this many dollars”, and they can take a look at what I potentially could lose on that farm, if I have something like a 2002 year, when we had no crop.
Again, if you go to 2004, we had frost and tremendous losses again in 2004. If you go into 2005, a number of acres did not get seeded. As well, a number of acres did not come off that year, because it was too wet. So in Saskatchewan we've had tremendous losses because of weather-related problems—not because of poor farming; it's strictly weather. I think that's where the governments can play a tremendous role in working with farmers.
The cost on my premium for crop insurance is 40%. Between the federal and provincial it's 60%, and the federal government has basically taken up 60% of that.
To me, one of the areas that you really have to take a serious look at is our production insurance, whether it's on crops or animals. It's very important to producers to have some kind of security out there. It's just like taking insurance on your house. You hope you never have to use it, but if it's there we would like to have it.