I'll be talking in French, I guess.
Good morning, my name is Mathieu Gallant. I have a dairy business. We milk about 40 dairy cows. The company has been certified organic for five years. I have a degree in farm management and operations. Our farm is a small family farm and we all work on it. I decided to settle there because it is something I wanted to do, but there is also the fact that when you are working at home...
When you're working at home, you're working for the family heritage. It just goes to show that you want to stay home but there's no money to be made. We're in the dairy industry. We'll say that I'm sacrificing my revenue and my time for the family farm.
What I've been looking at is value-adding the products. I went along and I took a cheese-making course. I went to France for five months, learned how to make cheese, and I've come back just to get stuff rolling. I find it's so hard just to be making a living off of agriculture in general. Once you hit the value-adding stage, it's a whole different ball game where there's no kind of producer/processor kind of link.
Right now I'm at the stage where we're doing business plans and looking at different locations and stuff like that. It's just you're working, say, a minimum of 50 hours a week, and you still have to do all your running around. You're working on the family farm 50 hours a week, and then you're trying to set up your other business as well, but you need to have some income coming in because everybody wants to try to have a normal life. I know quite frankly that in agriculture it's not always easy.
What I find, really, is there's a big void between the producer and the processor stages. Lots of people say, “We're farmers. We know how to sow. We know how to milk cows, and that's what we do best.” But there is, quite frankly, a lot of money to be made on the processing side. I did a few market studies, and I said, “Well, I can work 60 hours a week and get, say, 75¢ a litre, or I can work, say, 20 hours a week, and for that same litre of milk I can get $3.50.”
I love farming and everything, but you have to be able to make a living off of it. Lots of sacrifices were made. It's just to say that if we want to keep farming viable here, especially in rural P.E.I., we're going to have to look at different ways of keeping the young farmers here, to make sure that it can be fun, it can be profitable for everybody to make a living off of.
I know it's pretty basic. I'm just a 25-year-old farm kid working at home and trying to start my own business on the side. I know that I don't want to take anything away from the family farm. I am working in conjunction with it, because hopefully there will be a succession plan and I will be the fourth generation to take it over. But in the meanwhile I can't just sit around kicking boats and waiting for a paycheque. Everybody has to do something and make a living off of it.
Thank you.