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.