My name is Jason Ranger. I have a farm in a town called Leask, which is about an hour north of Saskatoon.
I'd like to thank you guys for taking the time to come here and meet with us.
I feel that one of the most important factors to encourage young people to start farming is the profitability of the farm. Farmers have to be able to earn good wages in order to encourage young people to start farming again. You're taking a big risk to farm now. You need to have a reward that goes with the risk.
Another big concern is obtaining the capital that's required to get started in farming, but it again comes back to profitability. If the farm makes good money, you have no problem convincing a banker to give you a loan. Everything always comes back to making a good margin. If you can do that and you have a good business plan, the banks will give you money.
Another factor for young people wanting to start farming is the lack of land in some areas. We have a lot of very old farmers who are still farming. I read a survey that was conducted in Iowa. It was the international farm transfer survey. It revealed that 30% of farmers plan to never retire. It means they plan to farm until they die.
If we could figure out some type of program to encourage the over-65 crowd to sell or rent land to young farmers, or if there was some type of benefit for them to sell to young people, maybe it would be one way to encourage more young people and new entrants into farming.
I also read that Iowa has designed a program that links a pool of young farmers to retiring farmers who don't have anybody to take over the land. Maybe we could think about a program that links the younger farmers to the retiring farmers.
One topic that I really want to touch on is the fact that the majority of young farmers are not supporters of the Canadian Wheat Board. As farmers, we need to be given the choice on whether or not to market through the CWB. We're capable of marketing our own canola, oats, etc. We're also capable of marketing our own wheat and barley. Young farmers today have good marketing abilities, and it's something we enjoy doing. If some farmers still want to sell through the Canadian Wheat Board, that's fine, but give others the choice.
We're not really on a level playing field across Canada. The west is under the reign of the Wheat Board, whereas the east is not. There are others programs, such as crop insurance programs, that are different all across Canada. Some provinces insure up to 90% of production and some provinces only insure up to 80%. Some provinces also have minimum price guarantees and other provinces do not.
Risk management is a big factor for young farmers because we don't have the equity behind us to sustain a hit. I think redesigning the crop insurance programs to benefit young farmers would be a good thing.
One of the major problems I had starting out was with the fact that there's an area average for yield coverage and it takes 10 years to fully transition to an individual yield. Most of the top producers are producing about 50% above the area average, and the young farmers tend to be the high-end producers. Why are we stuck with an area average that is 50% below our production? It doesn't really work.
Thankfully, over the last four years, I haven't had to use the crop insurance program. I'm slowly building up an average, but it would be a lot better if the average could be set faster than that.
One other consideration is this. The reason you get into farming is that you enjoy the lifestyle, but the lifestyle alone is not enough to convince young people to start farming.
Some other people have said that basically small towns are getting older and older. There are fewer and fewer young families, schools are shutting down, so it's getting harder and harder to encourage young people to move back to rural areas. It's kind of funny. It tends to be the same old guys who are still plugging away at farming who are complaining about the demise of their small towns and there's not enough kids in the schools any more to keep them open. Maybe if they retired and let somebody young take over, it would also help to revitalize the communities.
That's about all I've got for now. I'd like to thank you guys again for your time.