Thank you.
Good morning, members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food. I appreciate the opportunity to offer some comments concerning the topic of young farmers and the future of farming.
Let me begin by giving you a snapshot of my life. My name is Tim Ansems. I am 32 years old, and a third-generation poultry and grain farmer from Port Williams. My grandparents on my father's side immigrated with their 11 children from the Netherlands in the 1950s to a dairy farm that my father eventually turned into a tobacco and poultry farm. The tobacco is gone, but my sister still operates the original farm as a poultry operation with my father.
I grew up on a tobacco and poultry farm, and my summer memories are of the physically demanding work of transplanting, weeding, and harvesting the tobacco fields. I had the joy of cleaning the manure out of the poultry barns by shovel. I spent my university summers working for two different local farmers, one on a large-scale crop farm and the other on a small labour-intensive vegetable farm.
In my third year of university, when I was 21, I purchased turkey quota, and during my fourth year of university I purchased a 170-acre farm across the road from the original family farm. After five years of university, I obtained a degree in biosystems engineering with emphasis on agriculture from Dalhousie University. After finishing my degree in 2001, I moved to the farm that I had purchased. I purchased chicken quota and a barn in 2003, and in 2008 I built a turkey barn with a heating system that burns straw.
I have a wife, who arrived on the farm with $30,000 in student debt. We have three children—Caelin, Russell, and Tobi.
I currently grow 25,000 turkeys a year, and 125,000 broiler chickens annually. We also crop 400 acres of wheat, corn, and soybeans, and we rent land to local potato growers.
My wife runs an online retail store—the Valley Cloth Diaper Company—and she operates that on the farm. We used to run a charitable organization—the Brochet Exchange—which provided a summer program for aboriginal youth from a remote community in northern Manitoba. I am currently chairman of the Chicken Farmers of Nova Scotia, and have been a director for the past four years.
I struggle with what to say today. I'm going to try to keep it positive. I won't spend my time stressing the importance of supply management to you today, but I still take the opportunity to let you know that it is important. Pricing control, production control, and import control are three pillars a producer needs to be successful. I stress the producer part. It's all about the producer. If you lose focus on the producer, then there is no future. If you want a future for young farmers, protect supply management.
I am fortunate to be in supply management, and most of my fellow farmers tell me life is good as a poultry farmer. However, the reality for me as a young farmer is that even with supply management, we are struggling to create a sustainable operation. I have only paid income taxes once in ten years, and that was because Angela and I both worked off-farm for income. I have my credit line maxed out, and I have a debt load of $1.5 million. I do have assets in excess of $2 million, but lending institutions and financial programs do not recognize our assets.
Through the use of CASS funding, which was a program for agricultural skills development a couple of years ago, we had an opportunity to work with a business consultant. After she gathered all of our financial information and learned about the industry, she wanted to know what the hell I was doing farming. Clearly, on paper, I wasn't going to survive, but what we did identify is the value that our family places on sustainability, best practices, and stewardship, values that are difficult to turn into short-term profit. Farming is not a traditional business, and very few programs or services are capable of recognizing our unique situation.
Over the past year, Angela has struggled with a health issue for which there are no services or support. We have been relying on credit cards and lines of credit to meet our basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter. Now that Angela is becoming capable of working towards recovering her business and earning an income again, we would like to consolidate our credit card debt to avoid the administrative challenges of making five high-interest payments on different days each month. However, we have not been able to find any lending institution willing to help us simplify and reduce our payments, because on paper we are credit risks. The traditional lending formula does not reflect our reality on the farm. We could sell our quota, pay off all our debt, and still live on the farm. While we may have $2 million in assets, it's not helping us get a $25,000 loan to simplify credit card payments.
This is where it's difficult to avoid feeling some resentment. We consider ourselves stewards of the land, and we enjoy and feel blessed to be working in agriculture, but we also know that we are providing an essential service. We work the land and assume all the risk of food production so that members of society can devote their time to tasks outside of sustenance.
When we are struggling and no one is willing to help, it causes us to wonder why we continue to strive to produce safe, high-quality food for people who don't value or appreciate the importance of local food. Given the statistics and the reality of how few young farmers are entering the profession, it is clear that most people are not interested in the lifestyle of high debt, high risk, low profit. To make agriculture appealing to young farmers, this financial burden needs to be shared by all people who benefit from agriculture.
So why do I want to farm? Independence, self-reliance, innovation, education, lifestyle, experimentation, being stewards of the land, the air, the water. Here on the farm we don't like to whine. We have made the decisions and choices that have gotten us to where we are. Lots of people in different businesses make mistakes and need time to learn before they are successful. Some businesses fail. Some succeed. That's life, but if we continue to treat farmers as independent businessmen who are independently responsible for their successes, we risk losing skilled workers and local producers and we make it easy for a few large companies to assume control of our food.
To make agriculture more appealing for my family, we need financial support now. We need assistance now so we can enjoy a reasonable quality of life. We know we have assets. We know we will make money eventually, we hope. We know it is our responsibility to run a financially sound business, but we'd like to see programs that recognize the public's responsibility to agriculture. We would like to know that our customers, our shareholders, value the services we provide.
Thank you.