Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning honourable members. It's a pleasure to appear before the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food on behalf of Farm Credit Canada, FCC. My name is Michael Hoffort. I am the president and CEO of FCC. With me today is Jean-Philippe Ger

Agriculture committee  I'll turn that over to our economist, J.P. Gervais. We do some work in that area.

Agriculture committee  Yes, it's something we also do work on in terms of stress-testing loans that we would make for producers and our overall portfolio. The answer to that question really revolves around how far it goes and how fast it moves. If there's very little time to adjust, I think that crea

Agriculture committee  Agreed. But going from three to four up to six to seven would be a significant adjustment, without even getting close to some of those double digits we would have experienced back in those days.

Agriculture committee  We have a few products in that category. One that we would have marketed in years past is called plant now, pay later. Think of a vineyard that's getting established. We would do the financing. It would be interest-only for a period of say three years, as an example. Principal

Agriculture committee  I can address that, Mr. Chair, to start. We would see differences in terms of farm debt levels, based on industry as well as on geographic location and income potential. Typically it all revolves, though, around that income potential. You'll see it in ridings. The Lower Mainland

Agriculture committee  From a farm debt perspective, sector-wise, as I say, it does come a little bit more into the structure of the industry. You might find that a dairy operation or a poultry operation might have a little bit higher leverage ratio, just because of the consistency of some of the incom

Agriculture committee  Regarding FCC and why we exist, it really goes back to where we came from. The first organization that was part of our organization was the Farm Loan Board, and it was established after the dirty thirties. There were no mortgages available to farmers post that period from the pri

Agriculture committee  In terms of our lending practices, we have our own policies and processes that we establish based on our knowledge and expertise in the industry. In some cases, they differ slightly from the banks. With our young farmer loan, we've intentionally gone with a lower down payment tha

Agriculture committee  That's a great question. One reality is that 95% of new entrants typically are connected to an established farm. A really nice number of new entrants are getting into agriculture; it's just as you'd want it to be. Whether those are intergenerational farms—many times three genera

Agriculture committee  Yes, it's clearly helpful to have a parent who supports them with that strong backing, whether it's from assets, or perhaps for security on loans, and who has that management capability and the experience that comes with multiple generations of seeing highs and lows and all the t

Agriculture committee  From the co-operative perspective, the credit unions would be a key factor on the finance side. Their service to rural Canada in particular is very strong. We've done a lot of work with the credit union system to work more co-operatively and in a more coordinated fashion to hel

Agriculture committee  I don't have the stats you're looking at, so I don't know if I can comment. I'd be happy to follow up with you afterwards if you wanted to, just to look into the information.

Agriculture committee  That's a good question.

Agriculture committee  Yes, one of the exciting things in agriculture in terms of the seeking out of knowledge is that the agriculture colleges are full to the brim. There are 12,000 students right now in Canada studying agriculture, in either a university or a college, which is really good because we'