Thank you.
I'm very glad to be here today, and I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to take part in your discussions today.
A little background on myself: I've always been involved in agriculture. I grew up on a mixed farm in southeast Saskatchewan. I attended university at the University of Saskatchewan and got a bachelor's degree in agriculture, as well as a master's in ruminant nutrition. Today I currently operate a 250-head cow herd. As well, I manage a community-owned 12,000-head custom feedlot called Border Line Feeders at Ceylon, Saskatchewan.
Given the opportunity to talk about young farmers, I think this fits very well with me, as well as with a number of organizations I represent. I'm currently the vice-chair of the Saskatchewan Cattlemen's Association, which represents all the cattle producers in Saskatchewan; I sit on the Youth Economic Engagement Council of Enterprise, Saskatchewan; and as well, I represent the beef producers on a committee of the university tasked with relocating and renewing the beef research unit at the University of Saskatchewan. I believe all these groups have a vested interest in the discussions today.
We heard lots about the grain industry. I want to talk mostly about the beef industry today. That's my area of expertise. Obviously, we're very concerned about the average age of our producers and the lack of young people coming back into our industry. Our industry has been struggling for a number of years now. We all know that. Getting young people excited about coming into this industry is difficult. So there are a number of things I think we need to address. There are a number of huge global economic factors that affect our industry that we're not going to fix here today, and I'm not going to talk about those, but there are a number of things where I think we need to focus our resources.
The first one is training. We've heard from a number of our people today that education is important. I think we need to train our leaders and foster young entrepreneurs. I think we need to go all the way back to high school. There need to be additions to the curriculum. Teach some of these young people financial literacy. Let them know that being an entrepreneur and starting your own business is a legitimate way to make a living; you don't have to go out and work for somebody. So I think we need to really focus our training on this. These young people understand what it takes to run a business and understand that it's okay to do that. I think we can bring some of these fresh, young, aggressive thinkers into our industry.
We need to focus on infrastructure required for training. I mentioned that I'm on a committee tasked with relocating the beef research unit at the university. That particular research unit is almost 50 years old. How are we going to attract young students at the university to come into the business of beef when a research facility doesn't even reflect current practices and current industry? These are places where we really need to focus. If we can get state-of-the-art facilities and attract these young people, train them, they'll be forever in our industry. So I think funding for initiatives such as that is huge. I know a number of you may be aware of it already, and there will be some applications coming through a number of different programs that I'm sure some of you will see, and certainly we would love to see support from a national level for those types of initiatives.
A number of the other people today talked about risk. Risk is a huge issue in the beef industry. You know, years ago there weren't the fluctuations, but there are huge market fluctuations now. The fluctuation in the currency market alone can put overwhelming strain on a young start-up farmer. They can't handle some of those fluctuations. We saw it just the other day when the Canadian dollar lost 1.5¢ versus the U.S. That's huge when we start talking about the value of our products. Huge.
The current business risk management programs don't work for beef producers. I'll talk about a couple of things. The AgriStability program—one of the other fellows talked about it—actually penalizes guys who want to diversify their operation, and it actually promotes people doing one thing, building up margins, taking a big hit to collect a payment. We don't need programs like that. That doesn't help our industry.
I believe we need to be having more focused programs. We heard about crop insurance, a program that's worked for a lot of years for the crop industry. We want a program similar to that for the beef industry. We've put together--and we worked with government extensively--an insurance program for beef that's a bankable program. Young farmers can use it to manage operating lines; it's responsive: you get payments in a week or two, rather than the two or three years that we see with the current programs. It's simple. No matter what size farmer you are, whether you're start-up or have been at it for a while, anybody can use it. It's cost-effective, and most of all, it's going to create some confidence that these people can manage their risk and run their operations the way they need to.
One other thing I'd like to mention is the current disaster program we have. No one's really sure what triggers it and where it comes out. We need to have set triggers so that people know when it's going to work and when it's going to come into effect. We've had some situations in Alberta and Saskatchewan over the last year, some severe droughts and feed shortages, and nobody seems to know if anybody qualifies for any assistance. That's unfortunate. We've got to address those issues.
I won't go into a lot of detail, but financing has come up a number of times. To get young farmers into the business, we need some help with financing. Lending institutions are scared of the beef industry and don't want to lend young people money. They won't even look at a business plan any more. They just look at your net worth, and we all know everybody's net worth coming out of university is negative. If we could get some of these lending institutions to look at business plans and the merit of businesses, if we need some small government grants or some loan guarantees to do that, I think that's where we really need to focus. If we're truly committed to attracting these young people to come back into our industry, we've got to make it a viable option for these people.
To wrap up, there are a pile of issues that need to be addressed in the beef industry, and we can't get into them all today. We need to ensure this remains a viable part of the Canadian economy. Ultimately, if we can build a profitable industry and address some of these concerns and attract these young people to our industry, we won't have to be here again. These young people will take these businesses and run with them, and they'll ensure the future of agriculture in Saskatchewan.
Thanks again for your time. I appreciate the opportunity.