Agriculture committee  Good afternoon. My name is Arden Schneckenburger, and I farm in eastern Ontario at Morrisburg, which is approximately 65 kilometres south of here. I farm with my wife, Rhonda, my son, Warren, and several employees. My parents are of German descent and ours is a second-generation

Agriculture committee  I've been thinking about this for a number of years. That's why I picked fairly high numbers, like $250,000 to $400,000. I was thinking it would have to be an entity that would stand as a full-time farming operation on its own—be it a feedlot, cash crop, horticulture business, or

Agriculture committee  Again, I'm going to argue that the bigger the business, the more sophisticated the accounting packages. I don't think it's any more of a burden than it is for a part-time farmer who's spending $1,000 on an accountant to have the accountant do it. I think on a larger farm we spend

Agriculture committee  If we go to 2% on AgriInvest and.... I have a belief that farmers will be more successful down the road with things like market development, trade, research, and innovation; you can maybe save that other half a percent if you invest it in on-farm research or innovation and trying

Agriculture committee  I'm pretty sure it's arm's-length ownership of the businesses, so I don't think you can.

Agriculture committee  I think you pointed out that out of 100,000 small farms, there were only 5%.... Don't write programs for those people. Yes, they should be in the program. I have no problem with that. Maybe the programs should be written for what I call commercial farms. Then make it so the other

Agriculture committee  When I was looking at this, I saw some figures. Ontario has approximately 23.25% of the non-supply managed agriculture production in Canada. We are presently getting 16.5% of AgriInvest, AgriRecovery, and AgriStability funding.

Agriculture committee  That was going to be the answer to my question. That's why I was looking at 2% or so, because I figured that was a better way for Ontario farmers to have more money to be put into a program. I would up the caps. Right now it's 22.5%. I would up it to 30%, 35%, or 40% so farmers c

Agriculture committee  On the whole issue of caps, I would say the farms who are bigger want higher caps. In the future, I would see a need to keep raising the caps as farm sizes increase. I would maybe make it an ongoing thing, not that you have to go to legislation all the time. If you say the top 10

Agriculture committee  Again, what I would like to see is multi-enterprise coverage. I also would like to see compensating farmers somehow so that we don't have our declining margins due to what I call political interference, such as when the BSE hit us and they wouldn't open the borders for us, etc. I

Agriculture committee  I'll answer that. As I pointed out in my presentation, something like AgriInsurance is in all provinces. Basically it's crop insurance, but it's different in each province. As you know, it's 60% from the feds and 40% from the provinces, and for crop insurance, in our case a large

Agriculture committee  There are two things I'd like to add to that. One is that we are establishing a very good traceability process in this country of the products we're producing. I think that will help us. Another one is to put more bodies on the ground in those countries, more embassy staff who ar

Agriculture committee  There have been sufficient incentives. I think you can always use more. I agree with you. Just being a base commodity producer in this day and age I don't think can differentiate you in the global marketplace from somebody like the U.S. growing corn. If we can value-add more here

Agriculture committee  We basically have a program—well, it's being implemented at the present time—in Ontario. It's just an Ontario-based program called RMP, risk management program, for cattle. Time will tell. There are some concerns about it being manipulated. I don't know. I think if it's properly

Agriculture committee  I think we're doing a lot of the right things. We're putting money into international trade. We're putting money into trying to get rid of what I call the politics—you know, people coming up with any excuse why we can't sell another product. I think farmers are participating in t