Thank you.
Good morning. We appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee today.
At the provincial level, the NFU-NB consulted with our minister of agriculture before the Calgary meeting in July. Federally, our national organization has provided input at various stages of this consultation process. Given that the Calgary statement is the most recent public document informing the next agricultural policy framework, our presentation today will be focused on a pillar that we believe is missing, new farmers, as well as concrete suggestions to improve the business risk management programs, and in particular, agri-stability.
Farmers are a keystone species in Canadian society. Take the farmer out of the ecosystem, and we would see a dramatic decline in our food security, our economy would shrink, and our rural communities would dwindle. While farmers are a keystone species, they are becoming an extinct species. For hundreds of years, the renewal of the farmer population has been maintained through the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, assets, and land on the family farm.
The majority of new farmers grew up on the farm and learned, alongside their parents, to master the skills and knowledge of farming, but this system is broken. As the profitability of agriculture has steadily declined over the past several decades, farming is no longer accepted by society as a viable career option.
While low profitability may be the biggest barrier for entry of new farmers, when you dig below the surface, the challenges are cultural. Public institutions that once supported the next generation of farmers through extension services and education are now heavily influenced by corporations. Young people going to universities are more likely to become an agricultural professional rather than a farmer.
Even so, when these bright minds graduate from agricultural programs, farming is still not seen as a viable career option, yet never before have we relied on so few people to feed the Canadian population, 1.6%, and never before have we been in a situation where 75% of the farmers say they will sell their land and assets in the next 10 years.
As a society, we are setting ourselves up for failure. If nothing is to occur, this land will be bought up by larger farms pushing farm size ever higher and contributing to a cycle of fewer and fewer farm operators. Where will this lead? For decades the mantra has been get big or get out, but as large farms continue down the path of monoculture, commodity production margins continue to decline, and the cycle of dwindling profitability and increasing debt simply continues.
The amount of information available to today's new generation of farmers is limited, as information on aspiring farmers and those making less than $10,000 a year is not captured in census of agriculture data. In response to a 2015 national questionnaire with over 1,500 respondents, 68% of new and aspiring farmers indicated they did not grow up on a farm. In addition, 73% of them responded that they are interested in farming ecologically. Nearly 80% of those with less than 10 years' experience in farming were into direct marketing.
Even without looking beyond these three simple numbers, we can see there may be policy implications, as a significant group of new and aspiring farmers for whom the traditional passing of farm skills, access to land, and business priorities are not available, and who are not well supported by the current policy framework.
We believe that supporting the next generation of farmers is the work of current farmers, NGOs, civil society, and governments. Our specific recommendations for government to better support new farmers under the new next agricultural policy framework include naming new farmers as one of the main pillars of the next policy framework. Under this pillar, we recommend the following priority areas: prioritize a just and sustainable agricultural and food system, move away from an export-dominated model toward a policy framework based on the principles of food sovereignty, and prioritize policies that incentivize farmers to adopt truly sustainable production.
The new policy framework must address the challenges associated with access to land, capital, and knowledge faced by new farmers by developing a national farmland succession strategy; limiting investment acquisitions, non-agricultural development, and non-occupancy ownership of farmland; providing fiscal and tax incentives for landowners to sell or rent land to new farmers who may or may not be family members; and exempting capital gains tax on farm property in transfers to new farmers, regardless of whether the buyer is the child of the landowner.
To ensure that new farmers can earn a livable income, we need to re-create direct, fair, and transparent distribution chains that support farmer renewal, promote direct marketing and re-evaluate regulatory regimes to reduce obstacles to direct marketing, and mandate supply-managed marketing boards to create systems of entry for new farmers with lower barriers to entry.
You can look at the last page of our submission, page 6, for more information on that.