Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today.
My name is Phil Tregunno. I'm the chair of the Ontario Tender Fruit Growers. Our organization represents all growers of stone fruit and pears across Ontario, with a farm gate value in 2023 of over $85 million.
I myself am a fruit grower. Our family operates 700 acres of tender fruit and grapes in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and we are fully invested in the future. Our farm is right along the Niagara River
With an outdoor crop, we face many weather challenges and rely primarily on crop insurance to provide a safety net. Frost and freeze are our main perils, with an average of 83% of all claims when things like that happen.
Climate change has resulted in more erratic swings in temperatures, and winter was no exception, with warm February and March temperatures, resulting in full bloom from April 7 to 10. That was days earlier than 2023. It's about a month earlier than when I started farming. We used to have blossom time on Mother's Day and now it seems to be a month earlier.
Temperatures fluctuate a fair bit. On the last full moon, we had negative three degrees Celsius. We expected a bit of damage from that, but luckily everything seems to have come through, and we expect a full crop.
Drought and high heat as a result of climate change are also perils that we face. We definitely have a lot of impact as a result of that. At that point in time, of course, we have all our labour and all our inputs for the season in, so it is a very hard hit for farms.
The big part about this is that a lot of this is site-specific. In some of these cases, you can have freezes or hailstorms or whatever in one site, but the nature of Niagara is that there are a lot of smaller farms that are not necessarily adjoining parcels. Site-specific insurance is something that we've been really pushing for. It's something that's really important.
Agricorp delivers production insurance programs, and we're working with them to make changes to the plans to make them more responsive to our particular risks. We believe that rather than whole-farm coverage, one of our real asks is to get into site-specific coverage. We've been blocked on that, for a number of reasons. Some of the case is the funding between the federal and Ontario governments on that.
They've also said that moral hazard is an issue for having site-specific coverage. We've developed the farm management software Croptracker, and we believe that we would overcome any sort of moral hazard with that.
On our use of AgriStability, it also operates on a whole-farm basis and, really, it's disaster insurance. The nature of Niagara is that we grow multiple crops, and to trigger a benefit on a whole-farm basis is less likely in our sector, so AgriStability has not really been too beneficial for us. Our main.... It really is for crop insurance. That's the real need: a good, working crop insurance system.
We've also received funding from AAFC to continue new variety development with a focus on climate change and import replacement. The funding will take us to 2028, and we hope it will result in some heartier varieties that can better withstand frost, freeze, drought and high heat events. The funding also includes life-cycle analysis, carbon sequestration platform, investigation of potential best management practices and reduction of the on-farm greenhouse gases.
We continue to work at the provincial level for a Niagara region-wide irrigation system. Some of us who are close to things like the Niagara River have some real benefit. Other areas have no access to raw water. It's something that we desperately need to produce fruit across the whole area and to mitigate some climate issues. We're looking for federal infrastructure dollars to construct a region-wide system and make upgrades in the Niagara-on-the-Lake system.
Labour is a really key issue for us. It's very seasonal. Lately we've been informed by ESDC that they're going to make some changes to the seasonal agricultural worker program. That program has been there for 58 years, and we feel there is a tremendous amount of oversight to it and it's very beneficial. We're worried—a little more than worried—that ESDC will lump it in with some of the other temporary programs and not treat us the same way as we have been treated over the years with the seasonal aspect of the nature of growing fruit.