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.