Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you about my outlook. I would have sent a young farmer. You defined it as under 35; in my area I don't know one. I know two or three farmers in their forties who are working so hard to survive that they couldn't come.
So I'm here in the category that I should be retired. I'll tell you why I'm not retired.
The number one reason is that I'm the eternal optimist. I believe that if I can hang on, maybe there will be something for my grandchildren. That would be one. The other is that if I sell out, where do I put my money that is safe? That makes me very nervous. At least there's no more land being produced. Maybe there's some stability in owning some land. Having worked for 35 years on a mixed farm, doing anything on and off the farm--I also earned a living off the farm--I need to wean myself off a life of hard work. I don't want to be in the category that stops everything and dies. So I will continue. My passion is to make it better for the next generation. I have worked very hard in my life. I've worked hard enough that when people talk about television programs, etc., I don't know what they're talking about because I never have time to watch television.
I see the potential farmers, people like my sons and daughters, not interested in farming because there are other, less risky, less demanding ways of making a living.
I want to highlight this. We talk about the corporations that are controlling our inputs and also about the sale of our product and that they're taking too much. I have no doubt they're taking too much, but my vision is that it's going to continue, and instead of being small farmers—that's almost non-existent, too—we're going to be workers for the big corporations. I'm not so sure that a further lack of control of what we do with our time and how we make our living is going to be good.
In terms of all of us around the table who are eaters, the consequence if the corporations are in charge is that I would see our food prices rising. Perhaps like the garment industry we'll be moving agriculture offshore. I see now we import from Mexico. Now we bring in food from Israel, from Greece, from wherever. Get the corporations owning the land. They're moving into that now. They control the price of the inputs. They're controlling prices that we get for our products. It goes on and on. They will be able to raise the price of food, but the quality probably will go too when we import most of it.
It surprises me, at my age, that I hear eastern Canada is more likely to buy their food product from the States than from western Canada, because of the free trade organization. I'm not convinced that we do better with free trade. I really don't want us to go into free trade with Europe and find that we're losing more of our abilities to look after our own interests. I'm thinking of things like being able to keep our own seed and reuse it, etc. It's one of the few things that still is not too expensive here. But Europe doesn't have that guarantee.
I have submitted my speech and I'm diverging from it. You can look at what I have prepared.
In eastern Canada I have talked to some small farmers who are involved with community-supported agriculture, and that is small landholdings, producing fruits and vegetables, etc., for populated areas. I think that is laudable. They are farmers and they're small scale.
In the west, that small scale doesn't happen and we don't have these CSAs, community supported agriculture, to any extent. We're into a bigger scale, and the bigness of the scale is exactly what is keeping young farmers out. There's just no question. When you've got to start and you budget $15,000 for a tractor, but the smallest tractor you can look at is $150,000, we're talking about a scale that's very hard for young people to get their heads around. How can they raise this kind of capital?
I think there are two potentials right now for people who are going to enter the farm industry. One is if you're a third- or fourth-generation farm and the older generation is backing away from having a fair return on their investments over the years--they're pretty well giving you the machinery and most of the land to operate on. The other potential source of farmers are people who have made it big in some industry, such as the oil industry, and who come back with a pocket full of money, or they're selling their smaller farms in Alberta, for instance--I've heard of that--and coming in to Saskatchewan where the prices are still lower.
Neither of these potentials yields enough to sustain the industry, so we're having to find farmers somewhere else. As Kalissa Regier stressed, we have to make it good for small farmers. I'm upset that the wheat and barley producers have had at least some guarantee that they'll get paid for their grain and that they'll reap the benefit of farmer-controlled monopoly on sales. Certainly the big corporations want the Wheat Board gone because they want the monopoly. They want the bigger profit. It's not hard for me to understand that there is a problem with farmers having the control. That's not how the industry likes to see things. It needs to be the corporation.
So, for goodness' sake, don't do away with the Wheat Board. Farmers have enough of a challenge to grow their product and to get it into the bin, let alone to sit at computers and figure out if they can market their own grain to Egypt or somewhere, and time the market. I don't want to be against my neighbours who got $2 a bushel because he sold this week and I got less because I sold last week. I'll go with some kind of an average price. Let's at least not cut each other's throat in that direction.
I believe if you do away with the Canadian Grain Commission, the quality of Canadian grain will also be gone. They have been the stalwarts that have protected the quality of our wheat and barley. For those who do not like the Wheat Board and their many options for marketing--they've now got it so you can even price your grain in the future, etc.--then don't grow barley and wheat. That's all that's under the Wheat Board.
I see the other structures that have supported the smaller farmers being undermined, the support mechanisms like supply managed production. Lots of people don't want that to stay in the dairy and the egg industry. We absolutely have to have risk management through subsidized insurance programs. The collective marketing, the preservation of farmers' rights to save and reuse seed, concessions to the railways.... We gave them a big one when we gave up the Crow, but now at least we've got some cap on their revenues, and we had the concession that they provide producer car-loading sites--and we need them.
If I'm to wind down now--it looks like your finger might mean that--I'd just like to say that farmers are slowly disappearing. It has been a good lifestyle. If you ask people throughout the integrated industry if they're making profits, they all say no. I don't believe it. I don't believe the retailers aren't, the wholesalers aren't, the railways aren't, the big packers aren't.
Regarding beef, I have cows. There are two packers left in western Canada. Two packers. That is not competition for sales. We're given the sales.
Regarding the CCIA about tags in the ears--now it's buttons--I totally support that. But you know what? If it's good for Canadian beef to have that identification, which it is, then somebody needs to pay for it besides the people who are not making any money. We pay all of it, the expense of tagging, of buying the tags, etc. That's a place where some help could come through to the producers.
I have more.