I just want to make a few comments, but they're not based on our own operation, Carter's and mine.
In our business we deal with a number of producers from across western Canada and into eastern Canada and the U.S. Despite the colour of my hair, in a lot of places when I go in to look at their cattle, I'm the young guy. There's certainly a lack of entrants into the business, and as everybody here has spoken eloquently about, we've got to be profitable. When I got started, one of my good friends in Manitoba told me that he got into business for fun and profit, and it's a hell of a lot more fun when there's some profit. Unfortunately, in this business, it hasn't been a whole lot of fun since 2003.
Some of the things I think we have to look at include, obviously, financing capital. That's a big concern for young farmers. At one point in time, when I started farming, Farm Credit was a source for capital funding. I think we've got to seriously look at getting them involved in operating funding. Right now, they've got what they call industry alliances. I think that's a mistake, because what we're doing is we're going down the same path as the Wheat Board. You've got what we call in the livestock sector “dealer finance”. It limits where these young farmers can purchase their animals and where they can sell them. I think the same thing is somewhat evident on the crop production side, with crop production loans that are funded by Farm Credit but that can only be obtained by going to one of the big multinational companies to get funding.
One of the things we're seeing throughout all of agriculture is that consumers are imposing their values and therefore increased costs of production onto us as producers. Unfortunately, they're not prepared to pay for that additional cost. They still want to source their food products, whether they be at Safeway or at Wal-Mart, for significantly less than what is passed onto the producer, as Carter and everybody else said.
It's obvious from what everybody has talked about that we want to make our living from the marketplace. We don't want to live off government programs. It seems ironic that since the start of government programs such as GRIP in the late seventies, early eighties, we have unfortunately depended upon those subsidies more and more. In actual fact, in 2003, during the BSE crisis, when the government gave a subsidy of $350 a head to the feedlot operators, all we did was launder the money for them, and I think that's happening with all of our programs. We are not subsidizing farmers. In effect, we're subsidizing consumers, and I don't think that's quite right.
I don't think we're going to be able to attract the next generation and generations further down the road into taking up this vocation.
One of the other things that I think has had an adverse effect on agriculture in terms of technology transfer viability is a diminished role of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in the past 20 years. When I moved to this province in 1984, we had all kinds of field people on the ground working with producers, working with industry, to try to make everybody more profitable. I think right now Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has become more of a reporting agency, reporting what the condition is and not working with the industry hand in glove.
We've got to make agriculture not just sustainable economically; it's got to happen environmentally, but we've got to get the funds passed from the consumer through the retailer, a bigger portion of which has got to come to the producers, especially the younger ones.
One of the things I think we can do to get more young people involved is get them involved on our farm boards. They've got to become the leaders. Unfortunately, as we can see today, it's pretty easy to avoid coming to meetings such as this when you're trying to keep the wolf from the door and you've got more pressing things to do that put money in your pocket. If there's some way for the government to have a fund, whether it be an endowment or whatever it may be, so that these guys can hire somebody to be at the home farm when they are going to be involved, whether it be with the Wheat Growers Association, the Cattlemen's Association, or coming to speak to a committee such as this....