Yes.
I have a beef farm in this area. I farm about 600 head.
I have been involved with the Ontario feeder finance program for about 16 years. As Steve just mentioned, it is a good program. It's been a great thing for producers.
I don't know whether you're all familiar with it. It is designed for and geared toward young farmers. We don't lend just to young farmers, but it is there because they are able to come to us with little equity. They have to have a knowledge of how to feed cattle, but they don't have to have a credit history. They can come in to us and get a sizeable amount of money and start farming and work from there.
Because of this, I've seen a lot of young people come in to ask for money from our program. You have mixed feelings about it. They come in and they have hope in their eyes. They have a willingness to start off farming. But because of the beef industry, the way it is, these young people come in, and you see that sometimes they make a good living on it. And it's not their fault—some of them are very good feeders—but sometimes they come back at the end of the year to pay off their loans and there really is no profit margin for them at all. You ask yourself, how did that person do that? They spent all that money on their expenses during the year and at the end of the year they walk out of the office with very little money to take home to their family. It can be very discouraging that way.
Because of this, and the contact with these young farmers, I just have to realize that if you are a young person and are thinking about farming, or you're a young person who is farming, the thing you're up against is.... Personally, my feelings on it are that you have older farmers receiving large subsidy cheques in some cases. When a lot of these older farmers started, way back in the fifties and the early sixties, there were no programs. There was a junior farmer mortgage program that young farmers could take advantage of, and there were farm improvement loans, but that wasn't a great deal—for the most part, all you had to compete against was the marketplace. You have corporations that receive large government assistance that are getting into farming.
To be honest with you, there are people who work for five months of the year, go on unemployment insurance benefits, and make far more than a young farmer would make, and that's very discouraging.
Mention was made earlier, in the first segment, about diversifying. I'm talking about the beef industry. It is virtually impossible for anyone to diversify in the beef industry, because the bureaucrats are shutting down small abattoirs right and left, and that just makes it impossible for any size of operation to get better access to the consumer dollar. Instead of directly marketing your beef to the consumers, the bureaucrats are virtually shutting that down and trying to prevent any farmer from accessing the consumer dollar directly.
Again, you're a young person and you think you're doing the right thing; you go out to farm and you see your friends and classmates from school going out and getting good jobs, and you ask yourself.... Personally, when I sit back and watch these people coming into our organization for money, I ask myself, does that person really know what he's doing, given the state the agriculture and beef industries are in today?
There actually is an army of young people out there who would love to farm. They're out working at other jobs. They're not happy with it. They've been brought up on a farm in a lot of cases; they know how to farm, and yet those young people just can't see their way to farm. Once they leave the farm for one generation, you're going to lose those people. You're going to have to do what was suggested today: you're going to have to go to the cities; you're going to have to go to the non-farm people and try to bring people back.
You're at a crossroads now; it's time something was done to keep those people on the farm, because once you lose that generation to the city and to good-paying jobs, it's very hard to get them to come back.
Some of the things I would like to see done for young farmers is creating a level playing field as far as the subsidy programs are concerned. It was mentioned this morning that some of these programs can't be accessed by young farmers. That's wrong. The tax dollars that are put into these programs should be directed toward young people. We need a cap on these subsidies. It's totally ridiculous that some of these subsidy cheques are going out, anywhere from $500,000 to $1.5 million to some of these people. Those tax dollars are hard to come by. It's time the government said enough is enough and put a cap on these.
I'd like to see a cap of $50,000 on these programs to give the young people a chance. Use these tax dollars in a more constructive way to try to keep young people in farming. Big corporations don't need this money. If they can't make a dollar on it, let them step aside and let a bunch of young people come in and do the job. The government can do certain things. The APP has been a good thing, with $100,000 interest free. Certain things could maybe be enhanced in that program.
Farm Credit needs to get back to its mandate to lend money to young people. From what I've learned these last few years, Farm Credit seems to be getting more interested in lending to the large corporations, such as the Cargills and whatnot, which makes it more difficult for young people to borrow money. It shouldn't be that way. Farm Credit was there for a purpose, and I don't think they're living up to their mandate.
There needs to be some relaxing of the rules for the local abattoirs, so that if someone did want to start up direct marketing of their beef and whatnot, there's an abattoir there that can handle it so they're not consistently being put out of business. Again, we need some direct government programs geared to young farmers. Everyone needs to start small. You can't start out with 10,000 acres. You have to have something there to get these people interested. These young families deserve a decent living. They deserve to have a somewhat equal living to what their friends have in other jobs.
In the feeder finance program there are two carriers of the APP program in Ontario. Feeder finance was able to lend money, $100,000 interest free, and all those people in feeder finance had to repay that money when that money came due. People even went to ACC in Guelph and borrowed their money, the $100,000 interest free, and they haven't repaid that money. That's not right.
Those people in our organizations have stepped up and borrowed that money. They dug down, they got some money, and they repaid that money. The people who borrowed the money from ACC didn't have to repay it. There are even rumblings about forgiving those loans, and that's not right. If you borrowed that money, you need to repay it in some form. If you don't have the money now, it needs to be turned into a mortgage or something, but that money has to be repaid to make it fair all across Ontario and all across Canada.
That's everything I have to say. I thank you people for coming all this way to listen to our concerns. I'm very happy to be able to come here and speak to you in this manner.