It’s clear that, in order to fully support our producers so they don’t hesitate to take the risk of increasing the amount of pasture land on their farms, covering that risk from planting through harvest can’t hurt. Today, we insure the harvest, but problems can also arise before that.
We need to be aware then that when a producer decides to increase or decrease their acreage, the risk associated with establishing new pasture is often part of their decision. So, the producer will consider the fact that, if they do more in one area, they could lose it, and that it might be safer to plant another crop instead. They will try to play it safer with the acres already planted with forage crops. That is where they are exposed to greater risks.
So, managing the initial risk would probably be a good start, but then, making the most of every hectare already planted with forage crops could improve things, because if we choose to have more hectares, we risk ending up with surpluses. But what do we do with those surpluses, then? We could end up with surpluses that we can’t bring to market because the entire region is in surplus. Forage, especially wet forage, doesn’t travel well. So, either we encourage producers, through programs, to build their own strategic reserves, or we establish a crisis monitoring system at the provincial or national level that can help move these surpluses. If there’s a surplus in one region and a shortage in another, we need to be able to move these products.
It’s obvious that moving forage isn’t efficient. It’s often wet. It’s heavy and doesn’t transport very well. On the other hand, when someone needs it, they really need it. It can be a disaster for a farm not to have the forage it needs. Access to forage can be the deciding factor between selling the cows and simply reducing their numbers a bit to adapt. We don’t want that to happen. We don’t want to reduce the herd. It’s about our food security and our use of the land. There are farms in every region that contribute to the local economy. When these regions lose their livestock, the agricultural economy suffers.
So, encouraging producers to keep their surplus so they can then move it around the region would, at the very least, be the start of a strategy.