Agriculture Committee on June 5th, 2020

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thanks, Ms. House.

I know many of us have stock contractors, show-jumping horse facilities in our ridings that are in a desperate situation. It really comes around to, as you said, covering the costs of feed, maintaining their animals.

This is maybe a question for you, Ms. House, and for Ms. Braun-Pollon from CFIB.

There's a lot of discussion around a business risk management program, but with AgriStability, for example, the payouts were never designed for a pandemic. Even if you were to enrol by the July 3 deadline, you may not see a payment for up to two years. That does not address your immediate situation.

Am I correct that you're needing something immediately?

[Kristy House]

Yes.

We've received a lot of testimonials from our members. We've reached out to them on a weekly basis to find out what's going on, how current programs are working. The most common theme is that they are seeing between a 60% to 100% reduction in their income. Most have been running at a deficit since this began. Our industry has slim margins to begin with, so in bearing the ongoing costs, with now additional costs in terms of getting set to reopen, they're running at a deficit.

We need something that is reactive as quickly as possible.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Certainly for my area of the world, there are no rodeos, no chuckwagon races, no show-jumping events. A lot of these businesses earn their money through the summer. It's a very, very difficult time. I appreciate your taking the opportunity to speak with us on this.

To CFIB, I find it interesting that one of your proposals is exempting the carbon tax.... What has been the response from your members to not only not having an exemption of the carbon tax for agriculture but to seeing that carbon tax increased by 50% on April 1? What has the impact been on your members?

[Marilyn Braun-Pollon]

Thanks for the question.

You're correct. April 1 saw a 50% increase, during a pandemic, of a tax when farmers can least afford it.

It's an ineffective tax. It punishes farmers with significant costs, making them less profitable and competitive on the world stage. I talked to farmers just a couple of weeks ago who were taking off their 2019 harvest. If it was damp, they had to dry it. Also, if you look at the inability of them to pass that on.... They're price-takers, and so they find the cost of that carbon tax throughout the whole supply chain as well.

We did some research. Minister Bibeau was looking for some data, and so we did some research. It was very compelling. We found that 83% of our members were saying it has a negative impact. It's also very clear that farmers care about the environment. They're stewards of the environment, but they're not being recognized for the work they're doing to protect the environment. Instead, they're being punished.

I think a common-sense approach would be to at least delay increases, postpone the carbon tax at a time when they can least afford it. We all know that the rebate.... We know that residents paid 50%—

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Ms. Braun-Pollon. Sorry, but we're out of time.

Now we'll go to Mr. Blois, for up to six minutes.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Mr. Chair, I see that Mr. Bishop has arrived.

Perhaps we could allow him five minutes or something.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Mr. Bishop, go ahead for your opening statement of up to seven minutes.

[Andrew Bishop, Owner, Noggins Corner Farm II Ltd]

Noggins Corner Farm is situated in the Annapolis Valley. It's a sixth generation family-owned Nova Scotia company. We grow fruits and vegetables. We operate 468 acres of tree fruits, the majority of which are apples. We also grow peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, raspberries and sweet cherries.

We also have a 3,000 bin CA storage. We just completed a new 29,860 square foot processing, packaging and additional 1,200 bin storage for our apples. We also have a retail facility onsite. This enables us to store our fruit year round in a climate controlled environment, which protects our fruit quality and enables us to sell 12 months a year.

We also have an agri-entertainment experience on our farm, which allows students to get a farm environment. Families come for farm tours, “you pick” venues and corn mazes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Chair, on a point of order, I'm on the English channel and I'm getting French overlapping the English testimony for some reason.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Mr. Chair, the interpretation has stopped. Perhaps he chose the English channel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Can we look into this, monsieur le greffier?

It's working now.

Try it again, Mr. Bishop. Go ahead.

[Andrew Bishop]

I will continue on from where I left off.

We market our products through two primary channels: wholesale, with marketing and distribution through major and minor grocery chains, accounts for about 75% of our sales; and retail, through our farm market and farmers' markets in Nova Scotia, makes up the remaining 25%. Geographically, we sell to Atlantic Canada, to Ontario wholesale clients, and to a major U.S. distributor.

We employ over 90 full-time and part-time personnel throughout the year to staff our processing, warehousing and distribution operations. To give you an idea, gross sales range from $6.5 million to $7.5 million.

Over the last couple of years, we've experienced several economic threatening events. In 2018, there was a devastating late frost in our valley, something we've never seen before. In 2019, we had a very cold, wet spring that put stress on our trees, which were already in shock from the 2018 frost. In September 2019, hurricane Dorian took 30% to 40% of our crop off the trees and also left a lot of our crop damaged on the trees.

I'm not here to complain today, but just to give you a feel for the situation on our farm and other farms in our area.

We look at things from a positive sense and try to work with adverse conditions. An example of that would be the hurricane losses we incurred. We found a way to make up some of that loss through our vertically integrated operation by making cider out of windfall apples. We called this “Hurrican”. It was put in a can, not in a bottle. It became an instant success because our customers in the Halifax and metro regions were all affected by this hurricane. They lost power for over a week, and out of sympathy we had tremendous success out of a terrible, devastating hurricane to our trees.

Moving forward very quickly to 2020, COVID arrived in March, as we all know. I'm going to state very quickly some of the ongoing things that are happening, or what's happened. As a result of COVID, we suddenly lost several of our employees for various reasons, especially on the retail side, mostly from fear of catching it, contact with customers and so on. We've had to cut our hours of operation to cope. Three of our farm markets we attend all closed down, which is fairly significant for us.

We took that sad scenario, and we moved quickly to online sales. We were able to capture some of that business. However, the future of our farm markets is up in the air, and we're not sure what this will mean as we move forward into our busy season. It's starting now. It's going to ramp up in August, and be in full swing in September and October.

The online sales required a different skill set, and we had to hire several more people to be able to cope with the new challenges of our business.

Along with all that happening we had to keep up with all the current regulations and new things happening, making sure we protect our employees, making huge changes to our processing or packing line to be able to keep distance and to keep some kind of flow. It has proved very stressful and very time-consuming from a management point.

We've gone through that. I will add that we were able to get our seasonal workers in. I thank the government very much for stepping up and helping us in various ways to get them here, but they came in a month late. In our business, the tree fruit business, the trees move along. As the season progressed, we missed a lot of events as far as what we needed to do in our orchards was concerned, but—

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Mr. Bishop, the time is up, but you'll have a chance to answer questions.

[Andrew Bishop]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Mr. Blois, you have up to six minutes for your questions.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Andrew, it's great to see you. You gave me a bit of a scare that we weren't going to get you on here. We'll have to keep working on rural Internet down our way, won't we?

[Andrew Bishop]

Excellent. Thank you.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Thank you for your testimony, and thank you to all the witnesses for their testimony.

You mentioned temporary foreign workers. I know, Andrew, that you and your family treat your temporary foreign workers basically as an extension of your family. Can you express to this committee how important it is to have those workers and how important the additional funding from the government was in helping with those additional costs you mentioned?

[Andrew Bishop]

They're not really farm workers. We get our workers from Jamaica. They're skilled Jamaican farmers. They have a skill set. Some of them have been here for 14 to 16 years. They know a farm as well or better than I do, so it's very important to us. It's very important that they're here, because they also add to our ability to hire extra local help. We've witnessed, of course, the isolation and the extra costs, and we're thankful for the money and the support that the government has given us so far.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I want to ask you about hiring locals, because you mentioned that there was some attrition from your workforce because of workers' concerns about the resulting COVID-19. Can you quickly provide an update on how you were able to get those local workers and how they're functioning?

[Andrew Bishop]

They're functioning very well. There are challenges. We suddenly lost key people, as I mentioned. We were able to replace them. Training in the COVID environment was very much a challenge, but when we changed some of our sales techniques, in net we added another six employees to our workforce locally.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Perfect.

You mentioned—and in Nova Scotia we know this to be true—the challenges around the frost and Dorian and things of that nature. We are studying business risk management, and we were before. This is obviously a COVID-related panel, but it goes hand in hand with business risk management.

We have a thing called an Olympic average that helps to set the reference margin limits. Can you explain why in Nova Scotia that might be a little lower and how this is impacting the ability for producers to perhaps benefit from programs like AgriStability?

[Andrew Bishop]

Well, for me and for other farmers...I'm diverse in my operation. When I do well in one crop and maybe poorly in another crop, our change is not as significant. It has an effect, and we still have all those costs. We need to work on something that's going to be a little more forgiving for a diverse operation.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

That's perfect. What I'm understanding, then, is that the higher we can get the reference margin, the more likely it is that farmers like you, who are very diversified in nature, might be able to take advantage of and actually benefit from these programs.

[Andrew Bishop]

That's correct. We've always participated in AgriStability, and we've never been able to make a claim through our day-to-day activities or our yearly activities in how we address our business.