Thank you.
Good morning, committee members, committee staff, and members of the audience.
I am Gwen Donohoe. I am the youth director of the Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council. To my right is Ted Eastley, who is our executive director.
As well as being the youth director of the Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council, also known as MRAC, I am a young producer and I am in the process of completing a master of science degree at the University of Manitoba. I own and manage a herd of commercial beef cows and participate in the management and daily operation of my family's mixed farm, which is a 300-head commercial cow-calf operation as well as grain and oilseed crops. We are located near Le Pas, Manitoba, which is 600 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. This is where I am also the vice-chair of my local conservation district.
It is very encouraging for young producers like me to know that you are interested in hearing what I have to say about the future of young farmers and the agriculture industry in Canada. Today I am here to tell you how you can help me provide a future for the Canadian agri-food industry, because I believe the solution lies here, with the young producers in this room. We are the solutions you seek. We just need the support and opportunity to provide them.
The MRAC human resource and infrastructure committee, chaired by a young producer named Colin Hudon, has recognized the need to find these solutions, to find a way to attract and retain young farmers. This has resulted in the development of the vibrant rural communities project, a young producer-led initiative with the goal of identifying problems and solutions for rural agricultural production and community succession planning, as young producers see it.
The discussion paper delivered in our brief was also developed by the committee as a means of encouraging discussion with the objective of offering you some solutions. And this is what I am going to be discussing today.
Meetings like this one will be one of the first steps to help us provide these solutions for agriculture, which is to share information. But we need to ensure that this process does not stop here. As young producers, we need to have more opportunities to share our ideas and solutions with you because we do have different ideas, not only different from yours, but different from the senior members in our own industry. And we have our own vision for what the future of agriculture will look like.
We also need, as an industry, to share more information with our consumers and with Canadian society, something that we may have been lacking. We need to provide information so they can make decisions to purchase healthy, safe, and environmentally sustainable food, with what we like to refer to as consumer confidence.
These actions are necessary to promote the farming industry and profession as positive, important, and successful. I am tired of being told that I am too smart or too educated to return to my family farm and that I am stupid to return to the farm. Considering the important public goods and services that I provide to all of you every day, you should be encouraging me to return.
Sharing information can also be used to start removing the current intergovernmental and interprovincial barriers to change that exist right now. There needs to be a breaking down of silos when it comes to agriculture issues. Agriculture is not just about farming, it is about rural communities, transportation, food safety, healthy living, economic development, and the environment. These are top issues for all Canadians, and agriculture and young producers can provide solutions for all of them.
Government departments and provinces need to recognize this interconnectedness and we need to work together in order to allow us to develop a financially stable industry and maintain vibrant rural communities.
Young producers need to have the skills and support to provide these solutions through programs to develop leadership skills, to build confidence in ourselves and our industry, and to provide mentorship, which is all accessible at the farm gate. We may have the solutions, but we do need government support to help us develop into leaders and solution-providers.
These actions have been identified in the rural communities discussion document. Other actions that we have identified include programs to encourage diversification and value-added activities in rural communities and to help us identify areas of rural opportunities that are non-agriculture related, such as tourism or telecommunications, environmental industries, and value-added processing.
We do need financial support, but we need a different form of support, a support system that will provide us with access to capital and short-term credit, and a system that will recognize the importance of agriculture to maintaining a healthy environment, one that supports the agriculture activities that are already in process that are providing everybody with clean water, clean air, and maintaining ecosystem function. This financial support needs to encourage risky ventures with risk mitigation instead of the status quo, risk-aversion approach.
These solutions need to be delivered in a timely, transparent, efficient, and effective manner, free of bureaucracy and political agendas, to ensure our long-term stability. These delivery agencies already exist in the form of non-profit, arm's-length agencies, such as MRAC and Manitoba's conservation districts program. We need to take advantage of them. These programs can turn national funding into a regional reality.
This is my favourite quote from the discussion document:
The entrepreneurial rural person does not want to be looking for regular support for a maintained level of existence. They wish to be provided the tools and overall support and faith that they can have ownership in creating their own destiny rather than having someone hovering over them (the “helicopter generation”) to protect them from making mistakes.
In other words, give us responsibility and teach us to lead, and we will deliver.
We believe these tools are some of the actions the human resource and infrastructure task force committee has identified. We believe they are necessary so that young producers can provide the solutions to improve the profitability of farming and so that young producers can stay on the farm.
I hope we can continue this process of sharing information, and I hope we can establish some action items that are reasonable, timely, measurable, and accountable to ensure the future survival and growth of primary agriculture and rural communities.
Thank you.