Absolutely.
Evidence of meeting #56 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was farmers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #56 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was farmers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
I only have four minutes, so I want to go to Heather here for a second.
Heather, you mentioned a couple of things. We're not taking the good times to prepare for the bad times, in terms of when you make profits to set aside for the other part. Then you mentioned a study that had been done on risk management on business plans, but most don't....
How do you promote? The idea is that we encourage the business part of that to include a business risk management plan. How do you prepare, or how do you support the preparation for families you're talking about in farming so that they do build a business plan? We know of some who actually can tell you from day to day what their costs of production are, and then obviously there are many others who don't.
12:45 p.m.
Executive Director, Farm Management Canada
Thank you for the question. It's a good one and one we ask ourselves quite often, wondering what is the secret to success here.
What comes to mind is, in anything, how do we change the adoption of practices? In agriculture and anything else, you kind of think there's the stick, and there's the carrot. The dollars and cents study is that here are seven practices, here's your recipe for success, and here's the financial gain, do it. It's going to be wonderful; we have the stats to prove it.
We find in our studies in talking to farmers that there's.... I have a study in front of me here with the Agri-Food Management Institute, and really the change in behaviour came from regulations, lenders, and from other people or incentive programs. For some farmers, say for the top 25%, it's because they fundamentally believe in improvement and better practices, and they want to adopt those practices.
For the remaining side, we need to get the rest of industry around this. There's a significant lack of profile for and value of farm business management in just the rhetoric of the industry. From government to lending institutions, we need them to support that idea too.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
Just help this committee with some recommendations of what we could do to help instigate those types of—
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Perhaps you can leave that until the next round, Mr. Shipley.
Perhaps we could ask you to forward that document if you want, and we'll read it.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and it's good to be back on your committee here.
As a farmer for 20 years, growing vegetables in Cape Breton, you learn a lot about the challenges, whether it's the marketplace or the growing conditions. I remember being on this committee before, and every farmer is different, every commodity is different, and how they make their money is different. We've seen operations where they're doing alternative energy, there is tourism in farming, and it's very complex. There is no single one that is a model, but at the end of the day it's an expensive business and it's a risky business.
I have two questions. One is on the co-operatives. Our farm, even as we got larger, still relied on co-operatives to buy our products. We had our own co-operative farm store, and we also sold to a co-operative, and it was very good. The people we sold to appreciated that constant supply. My first question is around how the federal government can help foster these co-operatives, especially when you're starting out and you can't afford all the equipment.
The second part is on access to land. We used to have to rent a lot of our land, and what frustrated me was that there were people who had good farmland but who weren't farmers, and they weren't letting anybody farm it. I know this is probably more on a municipal level, but should there be some way we can encourage these municipalities, so that this farmland is not taxed as farmland if they're not using it for farming?
Those are the two questions I have. How can we, as the federal government, help foster those co-operatives? They not only help farmers starting out, but also keep their debt load down.
The second is all about land usage and how we can get good agricultural land in production, whether it's federally or more on a municipal level. I'm asking anyone who wants to answer those questions.
12:45 p.m.
Director, Farm Management Canada
If I may, I could take the piece on the land, and someone else can deal with the co-operative piece.
Things are different in different jurisdictions, from what I've come to learn. Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, in 1978 there was really a watershed day in terms of crossing that line on ownership of land. During that time, a statute was established by government that for all land used for agriculture in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, you could only obtain a lease, and that lease was contingent upon doing all the things that you would consider doing with whatever commodity you were dealing with.
We are not seeing even a hint of the increased farmland values that are being talked about in other parts of Canada. We don't like to concede to government intervention to large degrees, but I think this case is a perfect illustration of how we can keep it under control, keep everybody happy out there, and be able to utilize the land the way it was meant to be used without accruing the large values.
That's my take from where I come from.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
You're talking about a different situation in Newfoundland. You're dealing mostly with crown land that's being leased to farmers now, right?
12:50 p.m.
Director, Farm Management Canada
Yes, that's right.
The other part is that it was freehold land before 1978, when the act came into play. Yes, there is a significant amount of land that's there, but all the land in the various sectors of the province has been zoned for agriculture. So if someone might want to move good, valuable agricultural land into some other kind of construction activity, or housing and so on, they're prohibited from doing it because it has to have agricultural activity attached to the zoning regulations. That's the other way in the back door, you know?
12:50 p.m.
NDP
Ruth Ellen Brosseau NDP Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
I'd like to thank the witnesses today for their presentations.
As was mentioned earlier, over the next 10 years we expect 75% of Canada's farms to change hands. In my constituency I have a lot of dairy farms and a lot of chicken, and a lot of those farmers are thinking about retirement and what their future holds. A lot of them had hoped to see a legislative change to facilitate the transfer of family farms to their children.
I wonder if I can get some comments around the importance of making it easier to transfer a farm and to keep it in the family. At earlier committee meetings we even had some people who suggested enlarging the definition of family. I wonder if we can get some comments around the importance of making it easier and rectifying this injustice at the federal level.
12:50 p.m.
Executive Director, Farm Management Canada
I appreciate the question. I'm a little bit familiar with that bill. From the work we do in transferring a farm, that's essential to business continuity, so it comes with business planning as well.
We definitely see a need to expand our traditional thinking around farm transfers not to just the children, including siblings, including whatever the definition of family is. There are cousins involved, there are in-laws involved, and there are grandchildren involved. Actually, I'm glad your farmers are thinking about retirement and talking about retirement because oftentimes farmers don't even want to talk about retirement. So that's a positive thing.
When you look at transferring the farm forward, you have a lot of different models and a lot of different options, so I think the more options we can give farmers the better. And whether you want to keep it in the family or not is really up to the farmers and up to the family and who can best carry on that legacy for the farm.
Oftentimes the family is interested. Some farmers don't have that option, so it's important not to put all our eggs in that basket, but I do think when it comes to family intergenerational transfer, we have done a lot of work in succession planning and we see that oftentimes it skips a generation. It's the grandchildren taking over because they have left it too long for the parents to have and hold that piece. I would be totally in support of anything that expands that definition and makes it easier to keep that legacy going, for whatever makes sense for the farm business.
May 9th, 2017 / 12:50 p.m.
NDP
12:50 p.m.
Executive Director, FarmStart
I would just echo that a lot of the farms are going to be transferred out of the family. Some of it is because farmers farm until they are so old that their kids have grown up and have their own careers. Then they are ready to pass on the farm, but they won't let go. A number of people talk about the struggle; they just can't farm with their parents. I think that's just a reality. That's not a bad thing. But then there need to be other opportunities for them to farm in their communities. Then there need to be transfer strategies once that farm is going to be transferred out of their hands.
We have created a platform, farmlink.net, which is designed to link landowners with farm seekers. We've actually been working a lot with the municipalities about what they could do, because they see this happening, and they see farm consolidations, and they see people moving out of their communities, which means that the fabric of these rural communities starts to disintegrate.
They want to know how to bring new people in. It doesn't mean there won't be farm family transfers, but there will be other new people in the mix, and there are lots of ways to encourage it. I probably can't detail them all today, but there are financial interventions, there are capital gains tax breaks that could be created, there are incentives for succession planning, because we get phone callers who say they want to sell their farm by the end of the weekend. “It's $5 million; find me a new farmer.” I'm not kidding. That's who calls us. They really should have started 10 years ago, because it has to be a progression.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Thank you, Ms. Young.
Thank you, Ms. Brosseau.
Ms. Lockhart, you have four minutes.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Alaina Lockhart Liberal Fundy Royal, NB
Thanks to each of you for bringing your perspectives on this.
One of the things we've been talking about a lot in this committee is the ambitious goal to grow agriculture exports in the next many years or few years.
If I heard you right, and correct me if I didn't, we need to be focusing as much on farm management as we do on the debt, I guess. Is that a fair takeaway from your testimony?
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Alaina Lockhart Liberal Fundy Royal, NB
Can you expand on that a little bit?
I guess I'll add another anecdote that I heard. It was from a supplier of robotics, actually. He said he can tell when he drives into a farm whether or not the robotics are going to be successful, basically by what he sees with the management of the farm.
Would you say the same as far as growth is concerned?
12:55 p.m.
Executive Director, Farm Management Canada
I think it's fundamental. I'm glad you bring up the export and the market access piece, because when we look at the next policy framework—and I know you have already done a study on that—we see emphasis on market access, innovation, and all these things, but really you need a fundamental system to make sure that the farm is capable of entering those markets, or capable of taking on an innovation and maintaining, sustaining, and growing that.
Our fear is that, without proper planning, that foundational piece, and with 25% of the farmers having a business management plan—which is really a fundamental piece for success and maybe we've gotten lucky so far—it's really hard to know whether we have the capacity to succeed.
The opportunities open up to those farmers who do those practices, but again, it's hard because we don't exactly see the support in the rest of the industry for business management, and business management is as important as everything else. They think a really nice dichotomy and where we need to dovetail is business risk management programs and farm business management.
So could there be some sort of an incentivized piece where we say if they're accessing business risk management programs, maybe there are some incentives if they can demonstrate these farm business management practices? Then we know they're doing everything they can in their capacity to manage the risks that are in their control and then we on the other side, the government, are there to help them along the way for the rest of the risks.
We would love to see that profile and the value of business management raised in that way as a fundamental contributor to ongoing success, long-term success, and back to the business continuity and succession piece.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Alaina Lockhart Liberal Fundy Royal, NB
I sometimes like to ask this question because we talk a lot about what we should be doing and what we could be doing.
What is working now? What policies are in place now that are fostering growth, and what shouldn't we be throwing out with the bathwater?
12:55 p.m.
Executive Director, Farm Management Canada
I guess I'll be biased and say that one thing we see working really well is this.
There is a bit of a process in place, in terms of encouraging farmers to do the assessment piece and then getting access to...and some provinces are all different.
Some provinces are incentivized. Some are voluntary, and some are not voluntary, but we see a process for assessing the business, assessing where you want to go, where the market will go, and where there are different structures like co-operatives that might be available to you.
Then there is funding for skills development and for advisory services available to the farmer, because they're not used to paying for those services, to be quite frank, and we're still facing a lot of, “Why should we be paying for this? This is where our tax dollars go.”
In terms of education and providing some incentive for advisory services, which are, again, the best practices of farmers, I think that's where we're doing something right. We're appreciating the continuous learning—life-long learning—as well as the notion that it's okay to ask for help and to get outside help for our businesses, because that's what every other business sector does.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Thank you.
That just about takes all the time we have today. I want to thank Mr. Wiseman from Newfoundland. I hope things are good there, Mr. Wiseman, and thank you for joining us.