I've still got mine.
I've been farming for 35 years at a dairy farm in Stewiacke, Nova Scotia. We milk 200 cows. I've also been a livestock broker/cattle dealer for 41 years. My son came into the operation in 2003, and we made a major expansion of over $3 million six weeks before BSE hit. Our gate sales in 2002 were $3.8 million with our cattle sales, and since 2004 they've been down to $1.7 million to $2.1 million, but we still have this loan to pay for, and the interest and so on.
My son is in the business right now, but he's worried, and so am I. We've had a pile of debt and interest to pay. We've had no programs to help us in that respect. There's CAIS, NISA, whatever you call it. It's four years behind when you pay into it before you receive a cheque back on the program, so your money's tied up for four years, with no interest or nothing in it. There's no way in heck that young people can get into the farms today because of the cost. The bottom line, the same as the rest of the panel has spoken about, is the profitability.
I can prove that in the last 10 years we're getting pretty near the same price a litre for our milk, but our input costs have doubled: fuel, grains, labour, machinery--the whole nine yards. So we're not getting a fair return for our dollar.
I have one son on the farm with me. I have one who left. I think he's doing better than the one who's on the farm, but he's a diehard like me; he likes farming. I have three grandchildren coming. One of them is thinking about coming into the farm; the other two are possibilities. I can't see a future for them.
If we want to keep these young farmers on the farm, there are going to have to be programs put back in place. We used to have a lot of programs. We had staff at the Nova Scotia Department of Agriculture in Truro. They closed that all out about five to ten years ago. We used to have people we could contact for various things. We had a lot of programs for land clearing, building ponds, and so on. They've taken that all away. Just this year they cut out land clearing. So if a person wanted to expand on his farm and clear some land, there are no grants. They've taken all our apples and carrots away, but the bottom line is they're still costs to us.
Since BSE hit, our cull cows are worth nothing. I ship cull cows every week to Quebec. That's the only federal plant around now. Dairy cows--I was exporting dairy cows to Newfoundland, the United States. I was a buyer for China. That market has crashed. We were getting $1,800 to $2,500 for our heifers. You're lucky if you can sell a heifer today for $1,000, but our costs to raise that heifer are $2,000. So we're robbing our assets trying to pay interest and so on.
The solution I came up with in my own mind is that in order to get these young fellas on the farm, there are going to have to be programs put in place where they have government guaranteed loans or they have interest-free loans for the first 10 years. A committee would be set up of retired farmers or government staff to monitor these people when they start.
If we don't keep Canada farming—we've been talking about this for 30 years—we're going to have produce come in from other countries. I feel our standards in Canada are very strong. Our milk standards, our meat inspection standards, are all high. The quality of the product that's going to come into this country from other countries is a lot less, and the first thing is you're going to have another outbreak of sickness, I think.
Going back to the tourist industry, if you don't have the grassroots farmers, and all the land for your tourists and the beautification and so on, as they call it... I feel that with farmers you have the spinoff for veterinarians, feed salesmen, all the people who work around the industry relate back to that farmer. You close that farm up, he's done.
In my livestock broker business in the last five years, 50% of my dairy clients have closed operations. They said it wasn't feasible or profitable to keep going. They had sons involved. They couldn't afford to get into it to give their parents retirement plans.
So the whole industry is collapsing. I think, personally, for the beef and the pork, it's too late. The dairy industry is struggling. If we don't pick up now, in another five to 10 years we will have no industry left—that's my opinion—unless we get help with programs, grants, and interest forgiveness loans, an incentive to keep these young people on the farms and show them that there's going to be profitability at the end of the road.
That's it for me. Thank you.