If the average Canadian farmer was 40 instead of pushing 65, would we really be giving our governments such a soft ride?
Of course there have been serious political issues in Canadian agriculture in the last five years. A list is easy to rattle off, comprising everything from grain transportation in the West to trade negotiations, plus myriad other issues as well.
Even so, as an industry we have largely let ourselves take our eyes of the political ball. At least, we haven’t been anywhere near as assertive as in previous decades, when stabilization programs and regulatory reform seemed to start every conversation.
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Now, this will have to change.
If there’s one extra job to add to your list for the winter (I’m definitely adding it to mine), it’s to bone back up on national and provincial political issues, and on the lobby organizations — and their leaders — who are the farm voices that politicians and bureaucrats actually hear.
Yes, it’s true that Canada’s farms are healthier than they have been in over a generation, but a good deal of that is due not just to the few recent years of great prices and yields, but also to the age of our farmers. As Maggie Van Camp points out in her must-read “Plan Before You Retire” in our October 2016 issue of Country Guide, the average age of Canada’s farmers is rushing toward 65.
We mustn’t undervalue the courage it took that generation to get this far, but we also need to be mindful of the young farmers that we hope will replace them, and we need to recognize we are asking them to take on the job without the level of government support and protection that their parents had.
In this issue, the article “Deciding on AgriStability” examines just one aspect of this. AgriStability is key to Ottawa’s farm strategy, but it is unsatisfactory at best, and it is in jeopardy. It’s hardly a secret. In a recent survey by the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, 85 per cent of farmers not only said they find AgriStability confusing, they don’t believe their bankers understand it either (and certainly don’t consider it when evaluating loans). Similarly, in Saskatchewan, APAS has found that only 20 per cent of farmers believe AgriStability is helping them, while 35 per cent have completely dropped out.
AgriStability’s margin protection is dwindling, the program is unpredictable, and it punishes diversified farms. And now, even AgriStability is at risk, in part from food processors and others who have lost their Industry Canada funding and are looking for vulnerable government sources to tap.
On top of that, Ottawa has made reform even harder. Under the Conservatives, it gagged the staff at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, which has proved so effective as a political strategy that the Liberals are maintaining it.
Increasingly, a coterie of people at the top make the rules that the country must accept, and too many of us in agriculture have effectively agreed to sit on the sidelines and allow the industry to be managed for us.
Am I getting it right? Are we failing our young and mid-career farmers? Let me know at [email protected].
