I really enjoyed reading in Country Guide all the articles about optimistic young farmers excelling in their operations. Tracy Court, Gary Lenderbeck, and Tyler Devloo have passion for agriculture and are great examples of the opportunity available in our industry for young people.
Then I read Gerald Pilger’s “A farmer’s rant,” and I found it to be full of pessimism and negativity. It bothered me for days.
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I agree with Gerald. There definitely is anger building out in the country coffee shops as each contract month goes by and grain hauling gets further and further behind. We are victims of our own success, harvesting the largest crop in history across the whole of the Prairies, and everyone — including myself — was hoping for that “holy grail” event of high yields and high prices.
I am not going to get into a discussion about why the grain movement is so bad. It is obvious from what has been said so far about railroad capacity, oil shipping, weather, and grain companies, but I would like to think that we all have experienced poor shipping before and what has happened shouldn’t really be such a surprise.
The biggest crop in history, you might expect, would have the worst shipping in history.
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At another time I would love to discuss whether maybe the rail system should be operated in the greater interest of the public good rather than the share price of CP or CN, but that is a whole other discussion. The main point is that we should have seen it coming and protected our cash flow in some way. Even though its response is maybe symbolic, I commend the government for coming down on railways and passing some legislation.
I also take offence at the notion that we are unable to compete in a free and open commodity market. As far as I can tell, canola, peas, lentils etc. have been free for a long time.
I would argue that the Canadian Wheat Board prevented a lot of new entrants from thriving in our environment and created an oligopoly of industry giants that benefited greatly from the guaranteed income that the CWB gave them year after year. Our big farmer-owned co-ops became stagnant and uncompetitive under this system, forcing them to replace their facilities in a very quick period of time when transportation reforms were introduced in the 1990s.
Undercapitalized and under mounting debt, they were forced into the mergers and privatization that happened over the last 20 years. Independent companies are also being sold off because the CWB prevented them from competing in an open and free environment.
Building new facilities and additional storage is not going to solve the problem either. We can easily turn the facilities we have many more times if we can drive some more efficiency and accountability into the system.
I also object to the suggestion that our current industry associations have been ineffective in advocating for farmers. There has been a tremendous amount of effort put into lobbying this past winter and the government has listened to them. Great young and old farmers have been stepping up and having their voices heard with a lot more legitimacy than a very political CWB had.
I believe our industry groups have a great future and with open markets, a lot of optimism abounds among those who choose to get involved.
Canadian agriculture is entering a period of great generational change, and with it are coming new ideas and tremendous innovation.
The old ways of doing things are being questioned, and farming is definitely changing its structure as rationalization continues as well. One of the sad facts is that there will be fewer and fewer of us as time continues, but a new batch of innovative people are taking over and it will be exciting to see how they respond to these challenges. Some will transition into niche markets and direct markets but there is definitely a future for those who remain in commercial large-scale commodity agriculture as well.
Perhaps a different model — one that is more capitalized and more sophisticated in planning for problems like the one we are currently in — will become the new normal.
I also wanted to address a very rampant culture of cynicism that still seems to be alive and well in some older circles. New and innovative ways of doing things are too often met either with an unwillingness to explore them or with negative comments in the coffee shop predicting failure. I visit with Americans from time to time and I believe we can learn something from their entrepreneurial spirit.
Too often we are unwilling to take risks or chances to invest in ideas. We need people to not only innovate but to attract capital and to promote new efforts to enhance our commodity pipelines, taking pressure off the rail system and creating jobs here rather than in China.
This requires not only leadership, which I think we have in abundance, but also some more support from our community of farmers to make things happen and not just pessimistically dismiss them because ideas were tried and failed 25 years ago.
Maybe Gerald was having a bad day when he wrote his article, but I believe we are the greatest country to farm in and will remain so for many years to come. A new group of business-savvy professionals are moving in, a group that certainly cares every bit as much for their communities and neighbours.
Gerald, let me buy you a drink sometime, one that is half full.
