Hi, my name is Rodney Voldeng. I farm with my brother in Naicam, Saskatchewan, about 100 kilometres northeast of here. I'm also the chair of the Saskatchewan Young Ag-Entrepreneurs, an organization in the province that basically considers anyone under 40 as a young person in agriculture these days.
It's funny, because we had a conference where 70 people showed up, and someone there commented to me, “Oh, you have everybody in Saskatchewan show up who's in agriculture.” That is the general opinion, and it's been reiterated by others as well.
I would like to explain why I came back to agriculture when I finished university. The first reason was money, because I saw a lot of opportunity in agriculture. There were no other young people coming back in. They keep advertising that the average age is 60, 55, or 80 maybe. I was thinking, well, there's going to be great opportunity. I've been back farming now for 14 years, since I finished university, which you guys might be amazed by. These people are still farming and haven't left yet—but they will, sooner or later. I still see it as a great opportunity. I guess I'm an eternal optimist from that standpoint. I see opportunity for agriculture and young people as others exit the industry.
Right now it's very difficult for expand when you are loaded heavily with debt, competing against people who have considerably more equity than you do. I guess it comes back to what some of the others have said about accessing more financing. But even if we were to access more financing, we still have to repay the debt. It's a catch-22.
The second reason I came back to farming was partially the lifestyle. I enjoy being a self-directed individual. I looked at the other businesses I could start up, and farming was an opportunity I could get into at the time and continue to see expand.
I'll bring up a few things here that you guys may be able to offer young people to encourage more of them to enter the industry, through advertising and promoting the positiveness of agriculture. We have to stop talking about agriculture and subsidies. That's all we ever hear in the news, but that's not what agriculture is about. We are the environmentalists of the land; we are looking after the land, as others have said already. But we really need to promote a positive picture of agriculture.
I meet with my friends from university days, who are in Edmonton or Saskatoon, and they start asking about agriculture but know nothing about what we do on the farm. They have no idea. So we go out for supper and we try to educate them and we spend $35 for a steak. We come from the cattle industry and spend $35 on a steak.
My farm was a mixed farm of hogs and grain farming. My brother and I emptied our hog farm two years ago before everybody else did, because we did a business plan that said that if we lost money like that for two years, we would be out of business. So we emptied our hog farm before the government had any programs for that, and in retrospect, that was a good thing to do. We're now sitting with a 75,000-square-foot facility that we're trying to figure out what to do with. But that's our own boat.
Another thing we can do in agriculture has to do with the regulatory system. Coming from the hog industry, you guys have probably heard about Paylean, the product that was approved in the United States but took seven or eight years to be approved in Canada. That is just one thing. But the question I had was why were we still willing to import all of that product from the United States if we were not allowed to use it in Canada? We are still consuming that product as Canadians, but we're not allowing our own producers to use it. That includes the grain industry as well, whether it be new types of seeds or different chemicals being used on the farm. We are still importing those products into our own country and are consuming them, but we're not getting them approved through our own regulatory system. I know I've been told before that it is being looked at and worked on, but it still seems to be at a snail's pace.
That also goes to the import standpoint. When I look at this I wonder why we have high levels of traceability in Canada—which is a great thing, a great selling feature—yet we don't hold any other countries to the same standards we have. I guess some of that was coming from the hog industry, where we were doing the levels of quality assurance. Those were required just so we could sell into the packing plants, yet we import product from other countries that do not follow the same standards.
The next point is that I believe we need to encourage secondary production in Canada. We continually export our commodities and want to be able to make more money, but we're competing on a world market where people can produce products more cheaply than we can, because their labour and other stuff are cheaper, when we really need to be encouraging that secondary production. We have a few more canola crushers going up in Saskatchewan, but you still see the boatloads of canola, and the wheat and barley, being shipped out as raw product.
We're leaving a lot of money on the table, and I guess that's what I want to end with, that if we were able to access those extra dollars and produce more dollars for the pockets of farmers, that would encourage more young people to enter the industry and also reduce the dependence on subsidies there seems to be at the current stage.