Thank you, Chairman Miller.
Thank you for inviting me back here to speak. I've been here before.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Curtiss Littlejohn. I am a producer from southwestern Ontario. My family and I farm just north of Paris, Ontario.
When I speak of my family, I speak of my wife, Tonny, and I speak of my children--David, Jackie, Christine, and Patricia.
These are kids who have a father who was a city kid. I grew up on Main Street in Cambridge. Agriculture was about the furthest thing from my mind. As I got married and my life evolved, I found that agriculture was a business opportunity for me like any other business opportunity, and if I applied business practices to it, I could succeed and I could flourish.
And indeed I did flourish. We were very fortunate. This industry has treated us well. We've come now to where we have a second generation. I have two children who are in university, both studying agriculture, both wanting to be the next generation that feeds this great nation of ours.
Unfortunately, circumstances beyond their control and beyond my control, and in fact beyond control of the Government of Canada, have made that almost a certain impossibility. The industry in Ontario and across this country of ours has been rocked by such things as circovirus. Four years ago we had this disease called circovirus. At that time there was no vaccine for it. Producers were hauling up to 50% of their livestock out of the barn dead and dying from this disease.
Then there were the outbreaks of PRRS. We had this normal crash of the hog cycle. We had the rapid appreciation of the Canadian dollar. We had record high grain prices. We had record high oil prices. I'm not saying these have impacted our industry any worse or any greater than any other industry, but I ask you this: what other industry in Canada, that feeds the country, that feeds the people who produce the GDP that we all live for, that we all strive for, has been hammered as hard as the hog industry? I think if you did a statistical analysis, you would find that in the last four years, the hurt in the hog industry far exceeds the impact of BSE to the cattle industry and the impact to our national economy.
Let me give you an example of that. In Ontario, in fact across the nation, hog losses for the last four years have averaged in excess of $30 a hog. That sounds like a pretty simple number, but if you look at the average hog farm in Ontario being about 350 sows farrow to finish, or birth to market, each farm has lost in excess of $1 million in equity. That's if they're still in business, if they could find a bank that would lend them money.
On top of that, we've seen that property values have now plummeted. We're in the middle of trying to negotiate settlements with some of our creditors. We just recently had an appraisal done. A barn that two and a half years ago I spent a million and a half dollars on has a contributory value on my property today of less than $200,000. That is the market reality. And I'm an efficient producer. In 2008 I produced almost 1.7 million kilograms of pork. We benchmark ourselves against herds around the world, because we compete with and participate with a genetic supplier that insists that we do that. We ranked in the top 10% of their herds around the globe--the top 10%--and I lost $400,000 that year. I am an efficient producer. I believe in sustainable agriculture. We're very productive. Yet I can't make enough money to feed my family.
The Government of Canada has done some wonderful things. We have some great programs here. We have AgriInvest, we have AgriStability, and we have AgriRecovery, which actually, I believe, should have been used to help us with the circovirus problem. But these programs were not designed, nor was it even considered when they were designed, that we could have what we've gone through. If you asked Stephen King to write a horror story, he couldn't come up with something like this. Unfortunately, I've had friends in Ontario who have chosen to take their own lives over this issue. It's a sad state of affairs.
I'll move on now to the programs that the government and the Canadian Pork Council have consulted on and put in place. For the most part, these programs were well thought out. They were put in place with good intentions. As my grandmother used to always laughingly tell me, when I'd be out boozing with the boys on Friday night and would say that we had good intentions and wouldn't do anything crazy, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
The hog farm transition program has been a hated, wanted thing in this country. At what time have we ever paid people to stop producing food in a world that goes hungry? I agreed it had to be done. I supported the program. As a matter of fact, I sit on the management committee and I help administer the funds.
But when you look at what that does and what that says to the world, it says that this country is not prepared to support sustainable agriculture. It says that this country is not prepared to help send aid around the world when it's needed, because we're letting our national hog herd get to a point where we can't even support our own processors. What does that say?
Fifty percent of the livestock in the transition program will come out of the province of Ontario, the province with the largest population. I was going to say the largest GDP, but I guess that's not true anymore. We're now a have-not instead of a have province, but we have the largest population and we have the largest segment of further processing. Work done by the Ontario pork marketing board shows that in Ontario we probably have an economic advantage in terms of the way we feed our hogs. Most of our farms are small family farms. The transition program is decimating that. Farms that have been producing hogs for generations are going out of business.
We have the hog industry loan loss reserve program. I will compliment the government, and I will compliment this committee, which I am sure put forward some good comments on it.
The best part of that program is that there were no caps. For once, the Government of Canada and Agriculture Canada recognized that we have large farms in this country, and they were not penalized.