It's worth noticing that Grey County farm policy reformer Sean McGivern prefers to talk these days about a "readjustment" in agricultural supply management.
Considering the direction from which he has come, the Desboro-based founder of a proposed new general farm organization could be talking instead about scrapping the controversial Canadian system for controlling farm production of some commodities.
An energetic, entrepreneurial, organic farmer who has run up against the system's production limitations personally, McGivern might have joined the chorus of high profile non-farm commentators seeking to dismantle supply management.
Philosophical opponents of the supply management system have sensed a political opening with the election last spring of Stephen Harper's majority Conservative government. That no member of Harper's government has joined the supply-management bashing binge is beside the point.
A discussion has begun and McGivern has joined it cautiously at a time when he might have found support for more radical proposals.
Even so, his recent departure from an active role in the National Farmers Union's Ontario wing to establish a new group, Practical Farmers of Ontario (PFO), involves a challenge to the status quo and a few key platforms in addition to his call for limited supply management reform to make room for new participants.
Indeed, the other issues may turn out to have provided the prime motivation for PFO's organizational drive this winter. Prominent among supporters of the new group is another high-profile Grey County organic farmer -- raw milk advocate Michael Schmidt, whose challenges to food safety regulations are well known.
With McGivern as acting chair, Practical Farmers is to hold its inaugural annual meeting March 31 in Peterborough.
In a recent interview with Sun Times reporter Scott Dunn, McGivern spoke of the "main thrust" of PFO as "an action-based farm organization, not just as a lobby organization like most of the other farm organizations."
The group's 200 or so inaugural members come mainly from what once was described as "alternative agriculture." Many grow, process and sell food directly to consumers.
The greatest potential for PFO may be as a voice for small-scale growers serving the local food movement. These are people whose concerns about government inspection and non-quota production of milk, eggs and poultry don't coincide necessarily with larger-scale commercial growers.
Farm groups are a bit like religious ones; they arise to address schisms and organizational challenges. Supply management arose in the early 1960s as a way to address a variety of long-standing financial challenges among farmers of poultry and dairy cattle.
Many leaders in the push for supply management came from the same territory of Grey and Bruce counties where McGivern and Schmidt now farm. It's a tradition of the regional culture that seems willing to embrace independent thinking.
When inflationary interest rates reached unsustainable levels beyond 20% in the early 1980s, leadership for a national wave of farm protests came from Grey-Bruce.
In those days membership and even some leaders of existing farm organizations -- the Federations of Agriculture, the NFU and Christian Farmers Federation -- provided tacit support for a campaign of civil disobedience from what its founders grandly called the Canadian Farm Survival Movement.
The rise of Practical Farmers seems different. For one thing, the rallying issues are less generalized across the range of Canadian agriculture, which is doing rather well financially these days because of surprisingly strong commodity markets.
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