The Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan has launched a weekly online survey to collect information on how COVID-19 is impacting producers at the farm gate.
President Todd Lewis says while the survey is based in Saskatchewan he welcomes input from all farmers/ranchers wherever they live.
"The more data they can collect the more likely it will be for government support measures to actually meet producer needs. We thought this would be something helpful that we could get some good information and get it tabulated and put together. That it’s something we could present to the different bureaucrats and ministers and all the other people that are involved in making these decisions. You know, it’s changing daily a lot of the different programs that are announced. Lots of announcements are made and then details are short or just hadn't been released yet and all these kinds of things.”
Lewis says they thought this would be the best way to get stories from the grassroots like concerns over inputs.
“If farmers aren't able to have their inputs in place, we need to hear about that, so we can notify the proper people that there is an issue. Another good example would be credit the FCC, you know $5 billion, that was announced last week. Is that something that producers are able to access? If producers aren't able to access that or are having difficulties, we need to hear about that. We've said that's a good start, do we need some other programming as well. Also from other credit facilitators banks and credit unions and so on. Are they pulling back on credit? Are they calling in production loans and those kinds of things.”
The survey is available to farmers across Western Canada.
Lewis says the survey questions will be updated each week and will change every Wednesday with the first survey set to close April 1.
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