Farmers Need Better Policy, Not To Export More

Jan 23, 2024

BY ANTHONY PAHNKE

This is what my grandfather told me when describing why we made changes to our farm over the years, whether it was replacing horses with tractors, learning how to apply the latest pesticide technology to reduce weeds or buying more cows for our herd.

The mantra instilled into us by elites was to produce, produce, produce.

Farmers like us heeded the call as we increasingly sent our products to other countries. In 1990, just over $45 billion dollars in sales came from overseas, which soared to more than $196 billion in 2022—a record year.

But here’s the rub—increasing exports will not keep farmers in business.

Just look at the dairy sector.

Wisconsin ranked second in the country—behind California—for most dairy farm bankruptcies from 2000 to 2019. The dairy state held the dubious distinction of being home to the greatest number of farm bankruptcies in 2019 and 2020 before leveling off in 2022. During roughly that same time from 2003 to 2021, according to the US Dairy Export Council, dairy exports steadily increased.

These facts should make our legislators rethink how their policies affect farmers.

A group of congressional representatives recently sent a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai denouncing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) dispute settlement ruling that continues to allow the Canadian government to limit dairy imports into their market.

Central to the USMCA, a product of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, involved ensuring increased access to Canadian markets for U.S. dairy exports. A 2022 decision by the same panel sided with the United States, ruling that Canada was unfairly protecting its dairy industry. As a result, our neighbors to the north made changes to improve market access for U.S. interests. The more recent ruling holds that such changes are sufficient.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”