Agriculture Committee on May 3rd, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We're going to call this meeting to order.

First, I'm happy to say that we're in Ilderton, Ontario. We're about halfway through our tour across the country doing hearings into the future of agriculture and, in particular, how we attract and keep young people in agriculture.

To all of our witnesses, thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here today. Being a farmer myself, I know how hard that is to do sometimes, so we appreciate that. No time is a good time, but we thought it was easier to come to you than to expect you to come to Ottawa to appear before us.

We have two hours here, and I understand there will be eight, or possibly nine presentations.

I understand that we have Jamie and Adam Robson, who I guess are brothers....

Oh, you're father and son.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I don't know who that was a compliment for, but....

I would ask everybody to keep their presentations to five minutes. At five minutes, I will give you a two-minute warning. The reason for this is that the presentations alone will eat up an hour. It's not that we don't want to hear what you have to say, but we want to leave some time for questioning. You can enlarge on anything else.

Also, if any of you have a written presentation, we would appreciate it if you could give that to the clerk afterwards so that if there were a few points in it that you didn't get to speak about, at least we can get it translated and give it to all the members, so that we still have it.

I'll just go by the list that's been prepared for me, which means I'll start off with Brian Lewis.

Thanks, Brian.

[Brian Lewis, As an Individual]

Good afternoon.

My name is Brian Lewis. I'll give you a bit of background. I come from a poultry and cash crop operation nearby.

I have just a couple of points here.

I'll begin with some of the challenges. There are a number of them, but a lot of them circle right back to return on investment. It's true; it's cashflows from our farms. Producers--we're price-takers, and that's part of the problem. We go and say, “What will you give me for my product?” It has nothing to do with input cost. It has nothing to do with return on investments. Other industries set their price. We seem to take it, and we have to work within that framework. We can't set our price of corn at, say, $5.50 a bushel. It's whatever the futures are, and the basis, and that's it--supply and demand. It makes investment decisions difficult when you're looking at what to do. You just don't have that power.

Primary agricultural production's return on investment is low compared to that of other industries. Because of that, it's a game of economies of scale. We all know that. Bigger isn't always better, but it's just something you have to do to pay the bills; we have to get those economies of scale. Agriculture is a very capital-intensive industry, which just makes it that much more difficult to work with.

You really need to take a peek at the levels in having such a small percentage of income on our side versus the end-user price, whether it's consumers, whether it's another broker, or what have you. You can do that on the grain side by taking a look at the percentage of the input costs on a box of cornflakes versus what we get and what the end-user pays. You can do it on beef. You can do it on pork. You can do it on chicken. I'll just speak to chicken, because I know we get paid about $1.40 per live kilogram. If you look at breast meat in the store, it's $20 or $22 per kilogram, anywhere around in there. That's a big gap. Supply management is the only thing that allows us to get our $1.40. It's not the be-all and end-all, but it does help us to get some of that return on investment. I think it actually does work for family farms, and I think it does need to be supported through the trade talks.

Input costs are another challenge that we have. Costs of production, whether those be seed, fertilizer, chemicals, or labour, can change without any reflection on our selling costs. Our cost of a bag of corn is $200-and-some. Chicago says supply and demand, and the price goes up or it goes down regardless of what our inputs are, and usually our inputs are contracted long before we sell them.

With regard to the concentration of power within Canadian agriculture, this happens with both input suppliers and end-users. When you get into the retail side of things, there are only a few players that you can sell to. I know on the livestock side, either you can sell it or you can't. There's not a lot of competition out there, and it makes it difficult.

Labour is an interesting one. It's getting more and more difficult for us to find qualified people. Part of it is because agriculture isn't necessarily a glamorous job. We know that with some of the job descriptions.

The other thing--again, this goes back to being a price-taker--we have to compete with other industries that can afford higher wages; there's no question about it. Because it's difficult for us to pass those costs along to the end user, that all comes out of our return on investment, so it is something that definitely needs to be looked at.

Self-sufficiency in our food supply is another issue. It comes back to supply management. Exporting as a form of growth is fine, but we must create a sustainable agricultural industry here in Canada to ensure a stable food supply for our citizens. It's absolutely true, but to have an industry based solely on exports is dangerous, because political squabbles can cause anything to happen. You can see COOL as being an artificial trade barrier, you can see it with BSE and the U.S. They close the borders and who pays the price? It's the primary producers, there's no question about it.

With regard to government regulations and level playing fields, we on the chicken side have an OFFSP program on farm food safety. It's certainly a good program, but there are additional costs to it. We have nutrient management plans that some of us are involved in. It's added costs, no question. I think we need to really look at exports coming into Canada. Are they subjected to the same costs, the same standards we are subject to? I'm not so sure they are. At times they may be, at times they may not.

That's really the big thing with imports on our side; I'll speak to the livestock. We have to watch the veterinary agreements as well. I don't have all the details, but I know in the past there were veterinary agreements signed with other companies that effectively allowed their chicken into Canada. The question is are they set to the same standards that we have? I know that we have increased standards since then. Is that being looked at, or is that something that was taken ten years ago? That's a level playing field that I think we all need to take a peek at, and it's not necessarily on the broiler side, it's with any inputs. To hold us to a higher standard than somebody else who can bring it in at a cheaper cost, and think that we can compete, simply isn't fair, and it doesn't work.

That were just a bunch of concerns I had. I'm sure most of them will come in, roundabout, but it effectively gets down to ROI: being price-takers rather than price-setters.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Brian.

I'll now move to Marie-Anne Hendrickx.

[Marie-Anne Hendrikx, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Let me first outline who I am and why I'm here. Some people will know me from different farm organizations, but I am here representing my family.

I have farmed with my husband for 32 years in hogs and cash crops. Both of us grew up on mixed farms, so we had a pretty good idea of what we were getting ourselves into. We have five children, and three of them have started farming, from 2001 to 2008. However, due to the situation in hog farming, we are now highly leveraged. The only thing that's got us in business is the equity we've built up over this time.

The agricultural situation in Canada, as I see it, is that basically agriculture is totally undervalued by Canadians as a whole, especially as the farming population shrinks. There are misunderstandings, even in rural areas amongst our neighbours. And the cost of food is the smallest part of a Canadian's personal budget, especially when you compare it with the rest of the world.

Historically, agriculture has renewed itself with immigration. We've brought in people willing to import new technology, as they did after the Second World War, and they make huge sacrifices in their lives to build a better life for themselves and their kids. They basically work for next to nothing until they get there.

As Brian talked about, people have to expand because the margins keep shrinking, and you need to make a living. We have inequities among commodities. The capital start-up costs are prohibitive. When I asked my kids what the government could do for them, they just kind of shrugged and said, “It costs millions to start in farming. What can anybody do about that?”

Diversification is good risk mitigation, but all the government risk-management programs that are out there, such as CAIS, favour specialized operations. Established farmers have a better chance of getting value out of the programs than beginning farmers and farmers trying to grow their business.

Canadian labour and technological and utility costs are non-competitive worldwide, and huge variations exist across the country. We have huge variations in the type and scale of farming. We have very rural populations out west and we have very urban populations in Ontario, and probably in B.C. Even in Ontario, not everybody has good access to the niche marketing you can do with an urban population.

Given that, why would we even want to encourage farmers to get into farming? And what can government do about it?

Primarily, I think we have to keep agriculture at the forefront. Mention it more often in speeches, such as speeches from the throne. Develop a vision for Canadian food production and make it readily available. I went on Agriculture Canada's website today, and I didn't see anything that made me think there was a vision of what this government believes agriculture is to the country.

Make agriculture seem like the valuable and exciting career that it is. Make us Olympic athletes. We do it 365 days a year, every year. The brand “In Canada” needs to happen domestically.

If you really want a future in farming in Canada, you have to make it something that kids want to get into. Communicate your policies to the agriculture communities so that more than just us politically active people understand what the government wants or expects from its farmers.

Let the rest of the population know that cheap food is not a long-term, viable expectation that we can continue to have--unless you want to keep trying to find immigrants from around the world who can revitalize agriculture.

I think the government has to make some decisions about direct producer supports. Either make them fair or just eliminate them.

If there are valuable incentives to be paid out, such as what has been done for food safety programs or environmental concerns, please make sure the programs are properly funded so that everybody who wants to can take part in them. Don't make them so heavily burdened in administration that the money gets sucked up in office jobs.

Encouraging innovation in all areas is a good thing, but what we've seen.... Ontario just did give out some awards for innovation, but what struck me was the huge amount of investment that comes with innovation. That can't always come up from the farm, in upfront investment.

I'd also like to say that the investment this government has made in the processing sector has been really good to ensure that our customers have the best tools to market what we do such a great job of producing in this country.

On a personal note, back when we were starting to get established, we took some bad advice from our accountant and we incorporated. What we have found now is that succession planning is a nightmare. Those people who aren't incorporated have other issues, but in some cases it's a lot easier.

Also, I have observed that generally it's pretty common that farming comes from the children of farmers. I see now that our friends who have kids farming....

We're not sure when we're going to retire, but our friends who don't have kids farming are making retirement plans, buying lots. There is no foreseeable future for people whose kids are farming right now.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Marie-Anne.

We'll go to Joe Dickenson.

[Joe Dickenson, As an Individual]

Hi. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.

I come to you as somebody who has covered a fair number of different commodities, from dairy to beef to organics and conventionals. I'm also sitting here as the Ontario-Quebec representative of the Canadian Young Farmers' Forum and a director with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

One of the things we have to do is we have to understand exactly what the scope of the problem is. The way we're going to have to do that is we have to sit down and have some sort of census, whether it be of young and beginning farmers, or whether it also looks at those who would like to get in. We need to find out what programs are working and what programs aren't. I think when you speak to most beginning farmers, you'll find that most programs are not working for them, and that has been alluded to in the past. But we also have to be looking at programs going in other provinces as well.

With the opportunity to work with Quebec, I see a vast number of beginning farmers there. What has happened there is that the province has done a very good job in encouraging young producers to get involved. We have to look and see if we can't possibly bring some of these programs out across the country, but we also have to understand that agriculture is a very big and diverse industry and there's no such thing as one size fits all.

One thing I would strongly encourage you, as the standing committee, to keep an eye on is the capital patient program that's coming out in Quebec through the work of the FRAQ. If this does come out and work the way they expect it to, this is something we should be looking at on a national level. It's something that's going to allow financial resources to get to beginning farmers and allow them to build up some sort of cashflow before they have to start paying back money.

We've also alluded to the concerns with return on investment. It doesn't matter what industry we're looking at, we need to have a return on investment if we're going to have investment coming in.

When I go and sit at meetings of dairy farmers, there is a much greater percentage of young producers there than when I'm sitting in at a beef producers meeting. Even though it's much cheaper to get into the beef industry, they aren't seeing a return on investments. If they want to get into the beef industry, they're taking on two or three other jobs, and those two or three other jobs could have gone to somebody else if they didn't have to pay for their “hobby”, shall we say, of farming. None of them want to do that, but they have to in order to feed their families.

Something else we need to look at is educational opportunities. Agriculture is the number one industry now in Ontario, and yet when we look at post-secondary institutions, we have two that deal with agriculture: the University of Guelph, with its satellite campuses, and Trent University, as a small one. When we look at Ontario, it's a very diverse province. Concerns in the north are different from those in the west, and this is the same in all provinces. It's not just Ontario. We need to encourage the different provinces to look into this.

In regard to curriculum, I remember taking courses in grade 9 where they had a rundown of the average income of different industries. Agriculture was listed as having an average income of $12,000. Who wants to get into that? When you're in grade 9 and you're starting to stream towards the industry that you want to get into, why would you want to look at an industry where you're going to make well below the poverty line?

We also need to make sure that when we're going into other programs.... For example, the environmental farm plan; I would strongly encourage us to look at creating a second sleeve that would provide 100% funding for young and beginning farmers, because they have other financial resources they have to put money to, but they're going to be more apt to be supportive of taking on that different technology and more environmentally sustainable practices. We need to encourage that, not discourage it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks very much, Joe.

We now move to Jamie and Adam.

[Jamie Robson, As an Individual]

Adam and I are going to kind of tag-team here.

I want to thank Bev for the opportunity to be here today.

Just to give you a little background on who we are, we're a multi-generational farm, mostly cash crop. We're multiple partners. That may sound bad, but it's a good thing. So we're mostly cash crop but we also are a seed toller for a major seed company. We also are a maple syrup producer. So we are fairly diversified.

I've done a lot of thinking about this. We had ten people together in a room this morning, and everybody had a different opinion on what government should do. I think that, unfortunately, is how things have gone probably for a long time.

My grandfather was a UFO. Most of you probably don't know what that means. He was a member of the United Farmers of Ontario. He was a member of Parliament here in Ontario. I looked back on some of his speeches starting at about World War II, and the problems we have today have existed since then. At that time a lot of people went overseas, they came back, and they didn't go back to the farm, but took a job somewhere else. I think this change in agriculture has been coming on for 70 years.

I think my dad had the first biggest problem, because he had four boys who wanted to farm. I would bet anybody who's speaking on agriculture here today was probably born on a farm, because if you weren't I think the odds of getting into agriculture are pretty low--zero--unless you win a lottery or you're absolutely brilliant.

Our problem these days is still the ability to remain profitable year in and year out. Obviously we couldn't farm unless we were born into it. Our problem is the ability to be able to pay, as an employer, the next generation to farm.

My boys have all had post-secondary education. My oldest son got a job where he makes three times the amount of money that I could ever afford to pay him. I told him he'd be a fool to come home. He still wants to, but I said to him, “In the short term, look at the big world, see what's out there, and if you still want to, feel free to come home.”

[Adam Robson, As an Individual]

It's not just the salary; it's the benefits and everything else that goes along with an off-farm job.

[Jamie Robson]

And Adam will tell you that the benefits we offer are unlimited hours and...you know.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Jamie Robson]

Feel free: the longer you work, the harder you work, the more you can make.

In the last few years, I think what we're seeing is that if you're a farmer who's probably in his mid-forties and up, you went through the early 1980s at 20% interest rates, and it wasn't just agriculture, every business did. Some never recovered from it, as we're aware. I think the worst thing that could happen today would be a large fluctuation in interest rates. I just don't think agriculture--or, as far as that goes, the economy--could take it.

I think some of the best farm managers out there are the ones who existed through that time. If you could afford to pay 20% interest rates and you're still here today, you did something right.

I also think we're looking at a world market. I don't think we're the only country with these problems. I think it's a worldwide thing. I think we can solve some problems here for ourselves, but we have to be very careful what we do when it comes to world trade negotiations.

I also think there are a lot of problems even between federal and provincial governments. We would like to see more streamlining of programs. In the syrup industry we were federally inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. We are federally registered. The provincial government came out with a program, and the only way to get in on it was to drop your federal registration. We did, because we thought it was a good deal, but at the end we wrote a letter to both levels of government saying they need to work together.

Adam is going to speak on a few things.

[Adam Robson]

I was going to talk a lot about the education in agriculture. Joe already made a lot of good points there.

It's very important to keep that going, since there is only the University of Guelph pretty well in this area, and Trenton. I'd have to say that probably only 10% or 15% of the students I graduated with actually came home to farm. I've talked to a lot of them, and they're in big-time trouble, shuffling, going to do relief milking, and so on. None of them have purchased their own farm. And if they have told me they purchased their own farm, then...it's just not feasible at all.

I'd also have to say that one thing to look at, too, is definitely, when you're younger, everybody wants to do it on their own. One thing is to spread it out, and you have to get the word out. I mean, I bought a farm with my brother and my cousins and we all have off-farm jobs. My off-farm job is working for my dad on the farm, but I consider it an off-farm job. You've got to have it and you've got to do it.

In terms of protecting interest rates, I know that even with our Agricore bills, the profit margins fluctuate so much with the inputs and what we're getting for our crop, it's hard to come up with those timely payments. You can't plan each year. It jumps all around. I'm not saying every other business doesn't have those challenges and risks, but it is very tough.

[Jamie Robson]

For Adam's generation, crop insurance and some of the programs the government has--those are well run and well needed. Don't change a lot of what's there now. Maybe they could use some fine-tuning, but....

Our opinion is that if we're probably stupid enough to spend $600 or $700 an acre to plant a crop to make $25 or $30 an acre, I think we'd better insure it. I don't think the bank is going to really think you're too bright to start with.

I'm not sure the next generation will have the luck we've had. Inflation has really taken care of us, and some people have commented on that already. It isn't that we've made 20% return on our investment; inflation has helped us considerably. That really doesn't matter until you go to sell, but the last two or three generations of farmers have had it pretty good that way.

On what to do to fix agriculture, as I said, if we put ten farmers together, there are ten different opinions.

I talked to a guy this morning who is not in farming at all. I was getting a hydraulic hose fixed at a construction guy's place. He said, “You know, the problem is, you should call it a food subsidy, because that's really what it is--a worldwide food subsidy. It's not a grant; there are no grants to farmers.” And I thought, well, hey, here's a guy who has not a cent invested: good point.

Anything else, Adam?

[Adam Robson]

No; that's pretty good.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Just on that point, we had somebody last week, in either Saskatchewan or Manitoba--I can't remember, it's a blur--who basically told us the same thing, that it was not a subsidy to farmers, it was a subsidy to consumers. That's the way he put it, and I think the same thing.

You're our second father-son group. We had one in Saskatchewan last week. I think that's good--although it would be nice to have had more.

We appreciate your comments, especially with regard to the interest. That hit home with me. I was just starting farming in the eighties with the 20% interest, and if I hadn't been farming with my father, I probably wouldn't have made it. It was very tough.

[Jamie Robson]

In the eighties we called it “COD”--call on Dad--if you got in trouble.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Jamie Robson]

That doesn't work anymore.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, fellows.

We'll now move to Hugh Aerts.

[Hugh Aerts, As an Individual]

I'd like to thank Bev for inviting me. I think he invited me because he knows that what I'm going to say is going to be completely off the wall.

My parents came to Canada in the early fifties. They were part of the Dutch wave of immigrants who came looking for the opportunity for a better life. They arrived with the clothes they wore, and over time they learned to speak, read, and write English.

I have a sister who was born in 1957. When she was 18, she was gone. Country girls either stay or they leave, and she left.

I was born in 1960. I have a grade 13 education, no wife and no children.

I have a brother who was born in 1963 and has a grade 12 education. He is married, with four boys, ages 9 to 15. I think two of them want to farm.

My youngest brother was born in 1968. He did four years at Guelph, and he was a 1991 grad. He's married, with a girl and two boys, ages 10 to 15.

When we were growing up, it was understood that our parents would help us out if we wanted to continue our education. If we showed an interest in farming, they said they'd help get us started.

My brothers and I have a partnership that we formed in 1992. Today we farm approximately 2,600 acres, and we do another 500 acres of custom work. We grow corn, identity preserved soybeans, soft white and soft red wheat, white beans, and kidney beans. We have a dryer set up to handle our own crops, and we also grass and finish off about 100 head of cattle. But we had a barn fire last fall, so something is going to change.

I've seen a lot of programs come and go, and, you know, with a little bit of tweaking, we still should have had GRIP and NISA. But for some reason they didn't decide to fix them, they just decided to get rid of them.

My number one beef is that targeted programs do not work. They create more inequities than they solve; it's whoever has the best accountant, or has done something a little different. They disrupt the playing field and they reward bad business decisions.

Several years ago we had a bad drought. We have crop insurance--that's why we've always carried crop insurance, to cover for that--and the federal government, in their infinite wisdom, came out with a disaster relief program. Basically, it helped out the guys who never carried crop insurance.

You know, I don't blame those guys for getting the money, but it made the rest of us look like chumps for always covering our back end that way.

If you're going to have support prices, I think you go by a 10-year average price and don't factor in cost of production. If the average price for soybeans the last year has been $8 per bushel, you'd better figure out how to grow them for $8 per bushel. Because the more money you give us.... You know what the price of land is doing. People just increase their operating expenses.

We need reasonable caps. They have to be tied to social security numbers so that people cannot hide behind multiple corporations, and they also must prove that they are actual farmers. Set the cap somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Anything more than $100,000, it just creates more problems than it solves.

Do a bit of research on some of the farmers who you quote and interview for your policies. I'm sick and tired of hearing people on the news or in the paper complain about tough times, when you know they just spent $1.5 million on a farm the month before. Credibility is definitely an issue.

I was once at a meeting and the person beside me said the problem with agriculture was the panel of farmers who were out front pushing for a new program because it was going to benefit them. If you want to introduce a new program, show an honest group of farmers and accountants and ask them how they're going to budget to make it work for them. Need I say more about the tobacco quota buyout? Somebody wasn't doing their homework on that one.

By becoming farmers, my brothers and I cost our parents a lot of money. And if some of their children wish to farm, they're going to cost my brothers and I a lot more money. That's just the way it is.

I'm beginning to think that the best chance for any young farmer is what New Zealand did in the eighties: just get rid of all the programs. Government programs, if they're not regulated right, help the larger ones get larger. The smaller ones can't get in because they just get squeezed out.

On a final note, all the farmers this year entered the spring with.... I knew what the programs were, and we budgeted accordingly. If we have something go wrong, don't give us money this year, because all that's going to do is reward the people who didn't do enough of their homework to start with.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Hugh; a very different perspective.

We'll now move to Steve Twynstra.

[Steve Twynstra, As an Individual]

Good morning, folks.

My name is Steve Twynstra. I farm in Middlesex County, around the city of London. As a result, a lot of the issues that were addressed here hit me directly. We have seen tremendous appreciation in our land values, and I'd like to think that's probably one of the main things that has kept us going for the better half of the last decade.

The problems that I see in agriculture--I'm going to cover a lot of ground here--are, first, there's way too much sharing of jurisdictions. There needs to be one person in charge or one organization in charge of the agricultural portfolio. Having ten provinces with veto power over the federal government, and a mishmash back and forth, is a recipe for inaction. I think that's been the biggest travesty that agriculture in Canada has faced in the last decade, the inaction on major issues that needed to be taken care of because decisions could not be reached. It's just been stonewalling from one jurisdiction to another.

As a result, things like the APF, that put that in the forefront, set us back ten years. The debt level of Canadian farmers is nothing short of astounding compared to our major competing jurisdictions, or areas that we compete against.

Growing Forward, despite the change that was promised, has just maintained the status quo, if anything. It has not moved ahead. It has just maintained the status quo, and I don't think that's an option going forward.

Just last week your counterparts in the U.S. held their hearings in Iowa on their 2012 Farm Bill. These guys are moving ahead. They have a focus. They have a mission and they have a vision statement in agriculture for the U.S.

In Canada, as was reiterated earlier, we do not have that vision. It's a mishmash of jurisdictions competing for special interests, and I think that's what Hugh was alluding to earlier.

I think part of the problem, and this was addressed by Brian, are the dysfunctional markets that we deal with, both on the input side and on the output side. There's too much concentration in our retail sector, in our packers, and in our fertilizer distribution systems. It's created a situation in which, as Brian mentioned, we're price-takers, not price-makers. That is something that has been a problem for Canadian agriculture since day one, but our Competition Bureau was absolutely spineless to allow some of these concentrations to occur.

I do appreciate and realize that we work in a globalized economy; however, I deal locally for a lot of my inputs and I think that's a problem. As a result, we're taking imports. The CFIA does not do nearly enough testing on MRLs, and we just seem to take anything the world will dump at us. Some of the problems we experienced at the turn of the century with depressed prices in agriculture in Ontario occurred because of the dumping of StarLink corn out of the U.S. The Europeans and the Asians didn't want it, and the rest of the world didn't want it, but we sure took it in Ontario. That severely depressed our prices. Then, combining an APF program with a set of farm policy programs, or BRM programs, that did not work for diversified farms was a recipe for disaster and increased our debt load, which we're still struggling to get out of.

As a result, I think there are some other misguided intentions out there currently that need to be addressed. We are an export-dependent nation, so even though we are taking in all these imports with dubious food safety standards, I would suggest that we're really hindering our export-oriented agricultural sector when we start taking non-science-based information and making it a policy to determine things like genetically enhanced crops. I think it is a travesty for Ontario and for Canadian producers in general to suddenly have to consider export markets in deciding when to register a new technology here. We need to have immediate access to the latest technology available any place in the world. It would be better if the technology were home-grown; however, it will not happen if we start taking non-science-based approaches to our export markets.

As a result, I'd like to see much more investment in our domestic universities and agricultural institutions to create the infrastructure that's required for us to compete internationally and to be, first and foremost, exporters. Things like the University of Guelph are severely underutilized, for a number of reasons, and we can go into that later.

A lot of talk is about innovation. As producers we have to be innovative to survive; this is what governments at all levels have been telling us. It would be great if our governments were actually innovative themselves.

I consider myself an innovative producer. We've grown a number of crops that are not domestic to the area on the dry bean side, on the winter wheat side, and on the spring wheat side. We've been trying to put that through a bureaucratic crop insurance system and trying to say that we'd like to have a little bit of consideration for being innovators, rather than just taking it on the hoof ourselves. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose; that's part of being innovative, but we shouldn't have to take on 110% of the risks ourselves.

In terms of beginning farmers, I think a lot of things that can be done there do not have to deal with direct out-of-pocket expenses, such as significant tax breaks. Again, I've got a number of examples if we have more time. Part of the problem is we already have too much debt, so at the end of the day just adding more debt onto a beginning farmer does not create a farmer who's going to be a positive benefit to the industry. I'd like to see extended terms there, and education.

I'll come back to our BRM programs. Every single jurisdiction that I know of that we compete against or that competes against us, whether it's the U.S., China, or Brazil, has minimum prices for their products listed. We have a program that says if you're diversified, you're screwed, basically.

You asked what happened to MRI, the market revenue insurance program we had. It was a revenue insurance program. The U.S. has ACRE; China subsidizes its producers, as does Brazil, and we're out here expecting to compete against that with two hands tied behind our backs.

The other big issue we have with our current BRM program is that if you're incorporated and treat your business as a business--as you should--you're treated differently. I have a non-calendar year end and I'm incorporated. As a result, I finally got my 2010 AgriStability fee just two weeks ago. Everyone else, with a December year end, got theirs months before. They're well ahead of the game.

It's an unlikely event that there might have been money. I've never got any money out of AgriStability, but with AgriInvest I've been waiting two years to get my 2008 application. I just got it last week.

Like, what's going on here? I'm told that's because I'm a non-calendar incorporated business. Those with calendar year-ends, the normal farmers with normal year-ends, are being treated much differently from me. So I really take exception to saying that we have a program now that treats everybody the same way.

A lot of issues need to be discussed, but my time is up. I look forward to visiting with you later.

Thank you.