Agriculture Committee on May 11th, 2010

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. MacLeod, you mentioned the carbon tax. I am from Quebec, and I support the tax, but westerners are much more vocal in opposing it. They do not like it, and I understand that.

I agree with you. It would be worthwhile if the carbon tax were properly invested in renewable energy. But I am a bit hesitant to let the federal government administer the carbon tax because I would not want the tax to be hidden, as with employment insurance. I think it would probably be the provincial government's job to impose the tax directly, in the provinces, and to administer it directly to help the agricultural industry. You have a supporter in me.

Furthermore, given New Brunswick's mountains, have you thought about developing wind energy? You are surrounded by mountains, and it is quite beautiful here—it reminds me a bit of the Eastern Townships, where I am from. I think you could do a lot in terms of wind energy. And there are federal wind energy programs to help you reduce your dependence on oil. What do you think of developing wind energy?

[Cedric MacLeod]

Personally, I'm a big fan. It makes a lot of sense.

The challenge we have in New Brunswick is the way that NB Power has procured their renewable electricity. They've said they need 10% on the grid. So they did it by RFPs, requests for proposals. Basically, what we got was TransAlta out of Alberta and Suez Energy out of Spain, two very large companies with very deep pockets, who came in and said, well, we can produce power for 9.5¢; we have staff people who can access federal programs; we have endless access to capital.

So if we came in as a farm group and said, yes, we can put up a wind tower—a $3 million investment, fair enough—we would be competing against large companies who can under-bid us. We don't have access to the capital and the transportation they do.

When it comes down to renewable energy policy, if John's going to do it, he's going to put up a 10 kilowatt turbine, not a 3 megawatt unit. So that's where comprehensive policy becomes very important, because it is going to cost him 15¢ to do that. If he has to compete with Suez, it's not going to happen.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

What is interesting in Quebec is that Hydro-Québec takes care of wind turbines. So we have started competing with the world's giants.

What I admire the most is your age. I am very interested in seeing the new generation. I am referring to young women such as you, Ms. Perry. In my riding, many young women are going into agriculture, and it is happening more and more. I admire you greatly.

As I said, I am new. I am not familiar with New Brunswick's farming policies—it is pretty complicated in Quebec. I am learning them slowly. None of you talked about supply management.

Does that exist here? It is helpful financially when you need money from banks or cooperatives and such. Have you bought supply management quotas here? Does that exist?

[Richard VanOord]

I'm a dairy farmer, so we do have supply management—

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Okay.

[Richard VanOord]

—and we are very thankful in the dairy community to have supply management. It means certain stabilities can take place that are not found in other commodities. We have heard that pork is actually thinking about going to some type of supply management to help with their financial concerns.

As far as going to the bank is concerned, it's a lot easier going to the bank when you have a quota there and they can say, well, we know what type of income is going to come in based on that quota. There's still management involved. A poor manager is not going to do well whether there's supply management or not, but supply management does help you; it does help you with financing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Ms. Perry, do you have any comments?

[Becky Perry]

My comments would be along the lines of Richard's. Being in the dairy industry, I'm very thankful that we have supply management. If we didn't have it, I sometimes wonder if we would be in the same shape as some of the beef farmers--sorry, Cedric. Right now the beef industry seems to be more like a dying breed rather than something that's growing larger, and it's a real shame.

I'm glad I have the dairy. I enjoy sheep farming and beef farming, but it's going to take my dairy industry to pay for my hobbies, I guess.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

I have just seven minutes to tell you about Quebec's experience. There are farms—the producers visited us yesterday—that do secondary and tertiary processing. They do it directly on the farm.

In Quebec, there is an organization called Les Amis de la Terre, the friends of the earth. They are farmers, such as yourself, with a Web site. People in the city can go to the site and buy from the farmers directly. Once a week, farmers bring their products to points of service, and consumers buy them.

That started in 2005—I was elected in 2004. It started with 5 producers and around 20 customers. Today, there are 80 producers and more than 2,000 customers. More and more, people in the city are realizing that their food is coming from the outside. But it requires marketing. It is a matter of food sovereignty, that is very important.

Would you be interested in creating a friends of the earth type system? The advantage of such a system is that it is region-based. So the Quebec City region cannot sell to the Eastern Townships, which cannot sell to the Gaspé Peninsula. It is local. Products are bought locally. The educational information is local, as are the explanations of the greenhouse gases, survival and product quality.

Would you not be tempted to get a similar system going to educate people in your cities?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Ms. Bonsant, can you let her answer the question? You're out of time.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Yes. I got carried away, I apologize. I will come back to it later. Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Do you want to answer that, Becky?

[Becky Perry]

I think that's a very good tool. It would definitely be worthwhile, but I don't think it would hugely benefit me as a dairy farmer. My commodity is milk, so it has to be further processed before it can leave the farm. I like the idea, and I think it's great for the people in Quebec that they've been able to get themselves up to 2,000 clients. You're obviously reaching people.

That could be a huge opportunity for someone like Jonathan, living in the city, producing fruits and vegetables, and being able to sell them locally through the Internet. That is a growing force in the market these days.

I guess the Internet is a great way to market. My biggest thing is public awareness. I wanted to try to get across today that when we're out milking our cows every day, there are still people in the city and urban areas who believe we can't produce chocolate milk because our cows are all white. So it's hard--not trying to sell our products, but getting the message across about what we have and what we produce in the agricultural industry as farmers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Allen, you have seven minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all.

Rather than going back to the energy piece, which is extremely important, let me talk more along the lines of “buying local”. In fact a number of you raised the issue, which I found extremely refreshing.

I actually live in Niagara Peninsula. For those who are not sure where it is, it's close to Niagara Falls; it's the easiest way to describe things, I think. We live in the middle of one of the greatest fruit-producing countrysides across this entire nation. It's a fabulous place. We also face the same challenges about things like buying local. For instance, we saw the last cannery east of the Rocky Mountains pull out three years ago--we no longer can peaches in the Niagara Peninsula--which meant that peach farmers pulled their trees out. Anyone who grew klingstone peaches in the peninsula basically said they were done and they pulled them out.

I'm fascinated by what you said earlier, Becky, about how we integrate. We're betraying your age, and I know someone mentioned earlier mature members of boards, and I would be one of those members, I suppose. Mr. Richards would not, of course. It's nice to have younger participation, and others as well.

Needless to say, I do remember a time when young women--when I went to school--took what they called “home ec” class. You've termed it “ag food science” in school. I wonder if you could sort of explain a little bit. I like the fact that you said “both” and “all”--meaning that young boys as well should learn--because I think you are right. There is a generation that doesn't know how to cook in a lot of ways, because for people like me--parents who get busy--it hasn't been passed along.

I'm interested in talking about that and about the local market aspect. I'll ask Jonathan to talk about the local aspect, as he seems to be the city one. I don't know if you know about what they do in Detroit, because Detroit is a dying city. One third of it is vacant, and they are turning it into inner city farms; not outside to the farm and bring it in, but actually in the inner city itself.

First, then, perhaps Becky can talk about that educational piece, and Jonathan can talk about farming close to the city and selling internally to the city itself as a local.

[Becky Perry]

With regard to the agriculture food science course, I went to Sussex Regional High School, just over the way here. Agriculture was an elective. In the run of a year, you had approximately 45 kids who took the agriculture course. Home economics was an elective as well. As you said, it was all girls. You know, if you were a man, you took automotive; if you were a girl, you took home economics. It's that generation thing.

What I would like to see is a mandatory curriculum in which you have to take English, you have to take history, and you have to take math to graduate. I'd like to see something in there that is mandatory, that you take an agriculture food science course, in order to graduate high school.

Maybe high school might be a little bit too late to bring this in. Maybe we need to bring curriculum into the elementary school, but I do believe that somewhere along the line you should have to experience within the course what happens at the farm level to get the food produced, because of course it has to start somewhere. It would be great to be able to see how the food is produced, talk to farmers, see processes, bring farmers in as guest speakers. Many of us sitting on this board, I know, would be very willing to go into the school system and give a talk to a group of students to teach them about what we do.

It's also very important to food preparation, how to store food, how to handle it, what to look for when you're buying it. Right now when you walk into the grocery store, as Jonathan mentioned earlier, and see strawberries, you don't look at where they're grown or how they were grown. You simply buy strawberries because they're $1.75, and you know you love them. If you had a little bit more knowledge and background of what happens with that food and where it comes from, you would look a little bit closer and try to buy something that would support your local farmers and keep everything going.

So I think it is very important to have a curriculum out there that goes over the processes of how food is planted, how food is grown, how you prepare it, how you store it, and how you cook it before you eat it. I think you'd see a big difference in society if we had something like that in the school system.

[Jonathan Stockall]

Speaking about local markets, with my farm being right in the city of Fredericton, there's no other farm closer than 30 miles from me. I feel very fortunate. The way I view the world is that the Europeans had it very correct. They built communities around small little farms, there wasn't anything for 50 more miles, and then you had a small farm, maybe a dairy farm, somebody who grew this and somebody who grew that. I think that is the way....

When I first joined the CYFF, I had only ever seen what went on at my farm, or my grandfather's farm. I wasn't really into the agricultural sector and I didn't really understand it. I've started to understand more about commodities, the grains out west and whatnot. When we were at our AGM this year and we went on our farm tours, there was a guy who was growing grapes in the Niagara region. He talked about Welch's and how people started to cut down a lot of their vines because they actually got paid more money to take the vines out than to try to sell them. I totally understand that; it's hard.

To touch on what Becky was saying, it was hard, because for years a lot of people pushed going to university. They got away from our trades and away from just basic living and what human beings had been doing for 3,000 years. Because of the Industrial Revolution and cheap food, people started to want things faster and faster. I'm not a big fan of social media, things like Facebook and Twitter, but it is the way of the future, as much as it wastes our children's time to be looking on the computer when they could be, I don't know, doing work.

I'm not sure if that quite answers your question, but to touch on Ms. Bonsant's question, which Becky started to talk about, we do have some of those programs here. We have “Fresh From the Farm”, the Really Local Co-operative, the buy local New Brunswick movement, and the 100-mile diet. I don't know if that's around your area as well, but it's a big movement here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Allen.

Mr. Lemieux, seven minutes.

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

Thanks, Chair.

Thank you, each of you, for being here this morning.

This is a very important study that we're doing. Our committee has been all across Canada. We've been into B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, here today, Nova Scotia tomorrow, and then P.E.I. We are trying to cover all of Canada, and as many commodities as we can. We're also visiting sites so that we get a feel for exactly what is happening on the ground--it's not all just “committee work”--and have discussions like this, so thank you for your input.

To follow up on that discussion about buying locally, I think that is key. It comes back to the profitability that Richard was talking about. That's a key motivator for young people to get involved in farming. But that's also linked to people buying local produce. As Becky was saying, it's not always apparent; when people are used to buying strawberries all year round, and yet it's very seasonal here in Canada, they don't necessarily notice the transition: “Oh; the strawberries I purchased in February aren't the same strawberries I could purchase in June.” They don't look for those differences, they just buy strawberries. So I think there is education that could go on there, and I think that will help with profitability.

To Karl, in your opening remarks you mentioned that you went from 11 dairy cows to 200. I want to ask what challenges you faced in doing that. This is part of the buy-in, how young farmers buy into farming. You bought in with 11 cows, I guess, and you grew it up to 200. How did you manage to grow it up to 200 with the cost of quota, the cost of cattle, etc.?

[Karl Von Waldow]

To begin with, it was my father who started. He started here in 1973. He had moved here from Germany. They had had a farm over there as well, but not a dairy farm. Before the Second World War they actually cropped 16,000 acres in Poland, but the Russians took that away from them.

He was supposed to inherit that, and he came to this country with $5,000. Actually, the location we're in now was his last pick to buy a farm: it was the only one he could afford. The farm cost $40,000 for 11 milk cows and 40 acres. He had never wanted to go into dairy farming; he had always wanted to do beef. The beef sector went downhill, so he bought his first 11 dairy cows. From that point on, he kept expanding his land base. He went in with another farmer, who lent him the money so that he could have a few more cows and eventually pay him off.

I think that's the way it's going to be. The quota system is expensive, but it works. It works for us. I think some farmers are going to have to open their doors to other younger farmers and take them in as partners and then divide off so that the person can start on their own.

It hasn't been an easy go for our family. Most of my father's income has gone right back into farming throughout his entire farming career. We've been growing slowly, but we've spent more on land than anything, because you really don't want the complaining citizens coming in when you're trying to grow a good-quality product for the people around you.

My dad sits on the board of Northumberland, and they push very strongly to buy locally. Northumberland is a New Brunswick company. All their milk is bought from New Brunswick, and they're beginning to get a 50% market share in this province for the dairy sector.

We have just expanded our herd. We were milking about 180. We just built a brand new barn for 400 cows, and we plan on going there in the future. The reason for that is that we wanted to set up a methane digester. The funding is not here. As Cedric said, the contracts are not here to pay for power systems. He said it takes 17¢ to 19¢ to make a go of it, and that's about right. They pay 18¢ to 19¢ in Ontario and they pay 45¢ in Europe.

I haven't looked at any systems here, really. It's been in Europe, California, Wisconsin. They're way more ahead of the game than we are.

I think as young farmers we have to look outside this province, because for so many years our heads have been in one area. There are so many other places around the world that have very good ideas about where to go with things.

Everywhere I've gone, I've heard from so many people that we should get rid of quota systems. I think they are what keeps us farmers in a good product, in a quality product, because we get the price for it. In any place I've travelled across the world, they're getting rid of quota systems; then they want to bring them in, but now they've sold out everything they have, and this is making it harder for people to make a quality product for the industry.

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

Yes, I'm a big fan of supply management. We have lots of dairy farming in my riding. Certainly over these past few years you see the stability that it brings to the agricultural sector.

Let me just turn to Becky for a moment. You basically have three generations on your farm; am I right? Well, it's four, if you count your children, who are feeding the cows.

I want to ask how this transition is taking place. For example, do you own a part of this farm, or are you working the farm but it will transition to you at some point? How is this working on your farm today, and where do you see it going? Is it a model that is quite common among your peers, people who are your age?

[Becky Perry]

Right now, our farm is owned by my husband's parents. I actually married into farming, so to speak. My husband, Dwayne, and I are working on the farm with his parents. They represent the fourth generation; we'll be the fifth; then my little boy would be the sixth.

So there are kind of three generations, in a way, but Dylan is not two years old yet.

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

There are two working there now.

[Becky Perry]

I don't know if we can count him for sure, but he's a good help.

Right now the way things are working is that the BMP groups gave us a bit of help to sit down and decide.... Succession planning is not something where you can just one day say, “Hey, I guess we're going to retire tomorrow, so good luck.” It doesn't really work like that.

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

No, that's right. That's why I'm asking how you see a transition.