Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members.
My name is Don Bettle and I have a farm in Kings Country, New Brunswick. I'm a former chairman of the Dairy Farmers of New Brunswick, and also a director of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
What I'd like to talk to today is monetary issues. We've seen the dollar appreciate 20%, and with farms that comes right out of your margins, the same as for other processors in the country and manufacturers. Also, we see that there's potential for the credit rate to go up. And most of us have been through the early 1980s, when we saw our credit costing us 20% or 22% or 23%. Back then we had fairly good margins and right now the margins aren't so good, so we have to be very careful that we don't allow credit for farms to go back up that way.
Right now, the average age of a farmer in Canada is 58. Within the next five to 10 years, we're going to see $200 billion worth of assets roll over to the next generation. To allow that to happen, as a country, we're going to have to come up with some innovative and very flexible financing plans with our banks and lending institutions to allow the next generation of farmers in this country to take over the existing farms without a debt load that makes it impossible for them to be successful.
We see the number of farms going down, and mostly that's farmers expanding and growing their farms to be more efficient and to produce more of whatever they're producing because the margin keeps going down on that product. We've seen subsidized products come in from other countries, and there seems to be, we say, a reluctance on the part of the consumer of Canada—the cheaper they can get the product, the better they like it.
But there are demands, as I think Ray has mentioned, on Canadian producers to be more and more conscious of food quality. I go home and I see a bottle of relish on the table, and it says “Product of India”. What kind of food quality do they have in India? They sell milk on the streets in open containers. But that product comes into Canada and competes with local vegetable producers. That's just one example.
They're just some of the issues that I wanted to bring up. I'm just an individual representative here, so I won't take a lot of time from the guys who are representing their producers.
Thank you.