Agriculture Committee on May 5th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Lemieux, seven minutes.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Let me say welcome, and thank you for your presentations.

Certainly in my riding 4-H is very present, and 4-H does good work. When I'm out at the local agricultural fairs, you see 4-H members and they are proud of their participation in the club.

It's also good to see you again.

Just for the knowledge of the committee, I had the pleasure of joining 4-H just about a year ago in P.E.I. for their annual general meeting and dinner that they were hosting, where they were recognizing young farmers as well. I had the pleasure of announcing roughly $3 million for 4-H over four years.

The first question I wanted to ask is directed mostly at Mike or Ken.

What does this funding allow you to do? How does this funding help in your work with young farmers or wanting to cultivate young farmers?

[Mike Nowosad]

A number of years ago the Department of Agriculture did one thing that was of significant benefit to us: they allowed us to utilize some of our funding for administration.

One of the things we're finding, Pierre, is that these days when we talk to corporate sponsors, they want to go into project funding. But they don't realize that you've got to provide support for the people who actually deliver the programs. So it's been quite beneficial for us to actually have a full-time staff in Ottawa.

One thing that I do believe...and I don't know how the heck you can do it from this committee, but there's quite a disparity across the country with the support that some provinces provide to the 4-H program in terms of providing staff. How the heck are you going to be able to deliver new programs into new areas if you've only got one staff? We've got provincial programs in New Brunswick with one staff member; in Quebec, one staff member; and in British Columbia, two staff members. Somehow there has to be some sort of arm-twisting, if that's possible, with provincial colleagues in the departments of agriculture.

What has the program allowed us to do in terms of the additional funding, though? It's allowed us to introduce new programs that relate directly to production. For example, I spoke about the farm mentorship program. When Ashley was talking about sharing success stories, if you talk about Canada's Outstanding Young Farmers program, they are the success stories and they have very compelling examples of how, in fact, you can succeed. So we're able to offer that program.

One program we're going to be introducing through our funding is not directly related to production, so perhaps not pertinent to this committee, but it is one where we're looking at putting 4-H members in Canadian embassies and consulates around the world for internship programs. The whole idea is for them to learn about Canadian exports so that when they come back, and a lot of them are going to come back as young farmers, they know what's out there. That's allowed us to expand some of our programs specifically directed to the business development objectives.

If we had further money, Mr. Lemieux, we could probably do more work, especially in urban centres.

I'm sure you have a number of questions, but one group that we spoke about was aboriginal 4-H. That's a really tough nut to crack, but we're trying to partner right now with the National Association of Friendship Centres--urban--to introduce 4-H to them so that they in fact have exposure to agriculture.

We're looking at partnering with an investment firm that has bought a whole pile of land in Saskatchewan and wants to turn it over to aboriginals for farming.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

That's a great answer. Thank you.

Actually, just to follow up on one of your initiatives regarding the embassy, I think it's a great initiative. In “agri-services”, I'd call them, it's good to have people who understand agriculture in different sectors of the economy. For a farmer to better understand how exports work, how exports will help him in what he or she might need to do to tailor their products to export, I think that's really good knowledge to have.

Also in our tour we were talking, for example, about bankers and the need to have bankers who understand agriculture, because it's different. The financial relationship with a farmer will be different from the financial relationship with a different type of business or a company.

This leads me to my next question. Do you as 4-H do any kind of work with what I would call “agri-related” services to give exposure to people, perhaps youth? For example, they don't want to farm and they go into banking, so maybe you help inform them about agriculture and about how they can bring that knowledge into banking or into accounting or into other areas that would actually help the agricultural sector without their directly being a farmer.

Do you provide any kind of a service like that, or has that entered any kind of discussions?

[Ashley Knapton]

One opportunity that 4-H provides is “Career Mania”. That's actually what it's called. I haven't been able to attend, but I believe it's for senior members and it's where you go and talk about different careers. You talk about how to get jobs, education, and then you talk about various jobs in agriculture and the different routes.

At the University of Guelph, they tell us that we'll be able to get jobs, that agricultural students get jobs. As we go through, they do tell us more and more about the different jobs. Obviously some of us, including me, are just going to go home and farm, but they tell you about the other jobs in crops, genetic modification, research, anything. There's definitely some work in showing you that you can get jobs elsewhere.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Yes, and I think that's really important. That's a great service you're providing.

There's farming, and then there's everything else that supports the farmer in farming.

[Ashley Knapton]

Absolutely.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Those other services need agricultural knowledge as well, I would say, and I can see you providing that to youth so that if they don't choose farming, they choose something related to it.

[Mike Nowosad]

Currently the granddaddy of our conferences—we run four national conferences—is the National 4-H Conference. It started out in 1933, when we put kids on the train in Halifax and Vancouver and they came to the Royal Winter Fair with their livestock. That was the first program we ever ran nationally, when they showed at the Royal Winter Fair.

It has morphed into an agricultural conference that talks about the agrifood sector. We bring people in to give a talk about the theory on one day. It will be a theme day—we have a theme day on production, a theme day on processing, a theme day on careers in agriculture, a theme day on marketing and retailing. We bring the experts in.

For example, for the marketing and retailing day we brought in the president of McDonald's Canada to talk about marketing and retailing. Coincidently, for the processing day we brought the conferees to Caravelle Foods, where they make McDonald's hamburgers.

What did the kids learn at McDonald's? They learned about food safety, about science, about processing, etc. That's one example of something we are currently doing.

We were talking about financing. Quite frankly, if we had more money we'd expand that program beyond the 70 kids we bring in right now annually.

Hopefully that answers your question.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Yes, that's good.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Lemieux.

Now we'll move to Mr.Valeriote for five minutes.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

I want to thank the four of you for coming in today and speaking to us. We are just in the process of crossing Canada, as you know, and examining the farm and agricultural industry.

It was said by one of the witnesses that we wouldn't be on this tour if we didn't fear for the future of the farm industry in Canada. One said that if we don't have a significant, meaningful restructuring of our farm programs, the decline we're in will continue, to the extent that, frankly—and I fear this—rural Canada will become a ghost town.

We have to do something to reduce that trend. You're part of that reversal, as far as I'm concerned, and I appreciate your enthusiasm. But without our help, as you said, you're not going to survive. The numbers speak for themselves—the decline in the numbers in 4-H, the 65% exodus of those under 35 in the last 15 years—and we have to do something about it.

We've heard all of those things that are ailing farming. I'm hopeful that this committee and this government—and if not this one, the next—will be responsive to those.

I want to focus on two things.

One is that it's become clear to me that we have to get involved in non-food agricultural products. If we are going to keep people in the rural areas, we're going to have to have farms that are self-sustaining, that may not only generate food but will also produce those things that could be used for manufacturing. At the University of Guelph, the Guelph area being where I'm proudly from—and Ashley, I'm pleased to see you up here—we saw the making of plastics and things like that, and on farms we saw them using materials for non-food purposes. I want to know to what degree you are encouraging 4-H members to get involved in that kind of sustainable industry.

I also want to know this from you. We're finding that there are a lot of young or new farmers who want to be involved but can't find land, because either it's too expensive or they don't have parents who are going to “succession plan” in such a way that they'll get it. Do you agree that we should have a program that aligns young or new farmers with non-related farmers who are about to exit the industry and that we should provide incentives—tax incentives or otherwise—to encourage that kind of transition?

Those are my two questions: alternative kinds of farming, in the sense of what you produce; and allowing new farmers to become involved.

[Mike Nowosad]

I'll respond to the first question.

Ken and I attended a presentation by Jay Bradshaw from Syngenta last week, and he referred to science and technology in agriculture. It's amazing what my ignorance of agriculture is. I didn't know that they made snow tires out of walnuts these days. That's a pretty interesting thing in terms of how to use different agricultural products for things that really aren't food.

We had Don Floyd, who is the CEO of the 4-H program in the United States, meet with our board of directors last November. The 4-H program in the U.S. has committed, and I'm not sure what the timeframe is, to create one million new scientists in the United States. One of the things we're looking at doing is trying to introduce science and technology into the 4-H program with the express purpose of making people aware of exactly what the opportunities are.

One neat thing that Don Floyd told us about is that the day they launched this “one million new scientists” program, they had 4-H members across the U.S.A. making ethanol. That's unbelievable.

Wayne, I don't know whether you would have done that, back in the old dairy days.

That being said, one of the things we are looking at doing is talking to people in other areas of the industry. We've been in contact with people from crop protection. We were talking last week with the deans of agriculture and veterinary medicine across the country to create an agricultural science summit that would be a sort of launching pad for us to introduce science and technology to the 4-H members. When we talk about more funding, we see a significant amount of money coming from the private sector, but certainly we would support the Government of Canada's providing support in that way.

I don't know whether these guys want to answer that last question, but maybe I'll start off the discussion in that regard.

One thing I referenced in our presentation specifically was a comment from a young lady in her early twenties who was married a year ago. She is from Russell, Ontario. She and her husband just bought a farm in Renfrew. There was some difficulty with the financing, but what she talked specifically about was programs whereby you would do exactly the matching that you're talking about: match people who are going to be exiting the farm with people who want to be farmers and teach them how to do it and give them the opportunity to do it. I keep harping on the urban; there are probably a lot of young people who in fact could enter agriculture that way.

Ladies?

[Gillian MacDougall]

Even in my family, if all of us five kids had decided we wanted to go into the dairy industry, our farm is only 180 acres; there's not enough room for five people, if you bring spouses and children in. Right there, if we had all decided to go into agriculture, we would have needed somewhere to go, if we couldn't buy the land or something like that. We have lots of neighbours who either don't have children who are interested in agriculture or don't have children. So they're stopping. They're 70 years old, and their farm is shut down. Most of the farms on our road are closed down because no one wanted to take them over.

[Ashley Knapton]

I can think of one example in my area specifically in which a kid from a non-agricultural family matched up with an older couple with no kids who had a dairy farm. Basically what they did was hire him on. He worked, and they taught him everything. Now he's set to take over the farm; it's written in. He's going to work on buying it out. Part of the wages went to paying down the purchase, but he's going to buy the quota, he's going to buy cows, he's going to buy the land—which is really key. A lot of land around Almonte is close enough to Ottawa that we're losing a lot of land to development. It's going to get to the point that we won't be able to manage our own farm, because we're not going to be able to feed the cows.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Shipley for five minutes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you.

I also want to thank the witnesses for being here, and particularly for, as was mentioned before, your public speaking--obviously it's been a great part of what you've learned--and your broad knowledge. I also was part of the 4-H, so beware: you may end up in politics. But I did farm, all my life, and I think 4-H was a great foundation for it.

I have a couple of questions. Do you think that farming is a right, that individuals actually have a right to farm, or that it's like a business, which has to meet business plans and the obligations of any other business?

I'm asking either Gillian or Ashley, or both.

[Gillian MacDougall]

I think it's a bit of both. It's a business that you have to be able to succeed in it. I grew up on a farm, and I might not have wanted to get up in the morning as a kid and milk cows--I still might be a little grumpy on Saturday mornings when my mom wants me to get up--but I think it was a privilege to grow up knowing where my food came from, knowing that eggs came from chickens and not trees, and different things like that.

So I think it has been a big privilege, but it's a huge business. My brother went to Macdonald College, did his diploma in farm management technology, and then went to McGill to do his degree in agricultural economics. So he has done a lot of schooling to make this business succeed, and I think it's a big thing.

[Ashley Knapton]

I would absolutely agree; I totally think it's both. I would say that the most successful farmers you see treat it as both a business and a right. They look at the numbers side of things—the bottom line, making the money—but they also take into consideration stuff like animal welfare, the more personal stuff that business people wouldn't participate in.

So, yes, I think it is a bit of both.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I often agree with my colleague across the way, but not always. We aren't doing the study because there is a fear that agriculture is going to collapse; we're doing the study to see how we can assist.

We do hear a lot of very positive things about people coming in. We also do hear large concerns, and they come from different individuals with different scopes, which means that as we go across the country it becomes clearly understandable why it is so difficult to get a national program as we have it struck now.

One concern that keeps coming up is the smaller number of farmers under 35. As you go through your communities, I wonder whether you see this happening. And why do you think it is happening? What we're hearing and seeing is that those who seem to be very successful at it have to have administrative ability within their business to move forward.

We have fewer numbers farming larger amounts of land and milking more cows, raising more chickens, more beef, or more pork, whatever it is, and yet, as Alex has explained, we have smaller farmers who have gone out for markets, and they can be successful in those—not every one; not every business is successful. I think what we are seeing in Canada is that there has to be a blend, and some of that blend occurs across the different parts of the country with different sorts of products, because of our geography.

One thing I wonder about when farmers are growing products—and we have seen some very large ones and some not so large ones—is getting access to capital.

You talked about that, Ashley, in terms of having loans, maybe interest-free loans.

One of the concerns we have right now is that interest will never be lower. Capitalizing sometimes by subsidizing will make capitalization a big concern by driving up land prices, driving up equipment prices sometimes, as we saw also with fertilizer, sometimes driving up rent prices.

Do you see getting access to credit as one of the keys, as young farmers, to why maybe you didn't get in, or are there some other social aspects that affect this?

We have three children. I farmed, enjoyed it, loved it, was successful at it, but they all chose their own careers. That's the way it is. Now there are five farms around our area that are run by one young farmer, and he is doing a great job. The capitalization, though, is an issue.

Do you see that as one of the major ones, getting credit?

[Ashley Knapton]

Yes, absolutely. That was the biggest hurdle for my parents in getting into the industry. They wanted to farm full time, but it was the 12 kilos at $32,000 that just made it impossible for the longest time. It was just a series of factors that came together: BSE hit and the border closed, so cattle prices dropped; one of our start-up costs was greatly reduced. A neighbour of ours was getting out of the industry and wanted to empty his barn, so there, the equipment we needed was reduced.

It was almost lucky that those factors clicked and we were able to get in. Capital is a huge issue, in my opinion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Your time has expired.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I think also Gillian has a comment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

All right.

[Gillian MacDougall]

I asked my dad what would be the easiest type of agriculture for someone to get into right off the bat if they had no connections or family. Every time he said, “Well, it would probably take five years to save up enough money to get into it.” Right off the bat you have that barrier.