All right.
My name is Jon Stockall. I'm the New Brunswick-P.E.I. board member for the Canadian Young Farmers' Forum.
It's a good thing I changed my speech; I can keep it nice and short.
I currently run a mixed farm with my grandfather in Fredericton, New Brunswick, right in the city, so we do a lot of direct marketing. I attend the Boyce farmers' market every Saturday. With a mixed farm we do mostly fruits and vegetables. We have a big apple orchard. Strawberries and sweet corn would be our other two main crops.
I changed my speech because I knew that a lot of other people would touch on subjects that I was going to touch on. One thing I want to get across, as Cedric was saying, is that we're not asking for money. We're just looking for a change, and by a change I mean nothing positive comes out of being negative.
The reason I say this, and why I am reminded of this, is that Rod Scarlett, who was the general manager of the Canadian Young Farmers, spoke out west, and he told me that a lot of the older generation of farmers didn't want their sons or daughters to take over their farms because of all the negativity that they have seen over their lives. What we're trying to do, from the CYFF perspective, is have a positive spin and outlook on everything.
So that's basically what we have to deal with. The CYFF is a great resource for young farmers to go to. We get to travel across the country, meet with other farmers. As Becky and Cedric mentioned, the BMP workshops are great. I attend them as well. We get to find out what we're having troubles with on our farms and take steps to try to correct them.
But in saying that, in spite of all this positive from travelling nationally, we come back to our kitchen tables and we still have to hear the same negativity from, as Cedric said, the people who are still running the farms--our fathers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles.
So how do we promote farming and provide training? I believe it starts with government. And we're not talking about red-tape programs. We're talking about how the Roman Empire concentrated on their farmers because they knew that they needed to have great food in order to support an amazing army.
So we need the government to step up by being better promoters of our local food economy. We need to see them around our local markets, supporting our “buy local” movement. Speaking as a direct marketer who attends a farmers' market every Saturday, I rarely see a politician at our market. Rarely do politicians understand what goes on in the food industry or visit farms and see how our operations work.
There are a lot of things that we can learn from our older generation. If you go back a hundred years, almost anybody you knew grew crops or knew how to farm and knew about the cycle of different kinds of crops. We can't grow strawberries in February, but we can still buy them in the supermarkets now, so we are really distant from our forefathers.
There are a few things I want to touch on. I believe the two biggest areas that we need to concentrate on are education and health care. We need to teach the people how to eat properly. We need to get back to holistic nutrition, and instead of concentrating on health care, we need to concentrate on prevention, so that we aren't putting money back into health care and the sick. We can prevent that by helping them to eat properly and have healthy bodies. Then we can put more money into our farms and educate people.
Again, I changed my speech, because I knew that a lot of other people were going to concentrate on a few small things.
I do believe that we need to grow more locally. People have become accustomed to eating food that we haven't been able to grow around here for generations, so I think the one thing that we would need as far as money would be infrastructure. In order to grow crops that aren't available, that we don't have the temperature for, we need greenhouses or high tunnels in order to be able to supply the public with pineapples or different kinds of peppers and whatnot that you wouldn't be able to get anywhere else. This will cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions, because then we are not trucking this stuff or flying it from Costa Rica, Mexico, or wherever.
In conclusion, I just want to say that I took eight years of education to be a doctor, and I find myself coming back to the farm to help out my grandfather because I see a lot of potential in farming. With oil going to run out--and it's only going to get more expensive--we're going to have to concentrate more on our local markets.
My family's land in Fredericton is worth a lot more money to be developed as a subdivision than as a farm, but it's going to be farmed for the next 50 or 60 years at least.
Thank you.