Relax Rules, Farmer Urges

Farm marketing boards are blocking the road to success for small farmers, says Sean McGivern, a disgruntled Desboro organic farmer with an entrepreneurial bent who heads a budding alternative farm organization.

Practical Farmers of Ontario promises farmers, particularly those not part of the supply management system, better representation and a more activist approach, he said in an interview this week.

Those running farms not involved in a supply-management system, including beef, pork, sheep and goats are also among the PFO's early supporters, McGivern said.

"We're definitely not trying to alienate anybody," he said in an interview Wednesday. "But at the same time, the supply-managed farms seem to have a lot of people speaking on their behalf. And the rest of agriculture seems to have very little voice."

Supply-managed farms make up 10% of the population, McGivern said. "But when it comes to trade negotiations or government programs, they seem to be the tail that wags the dog."

"I think supply management has to have a readjustment and it needs to learn some respect."

The principle of supply management -- pay the cost of production plus a profit-- is a "good idea." But wealth-creating quota needs to be redistributed more fairly, he said.

McGivern is concerned there's no cap on the amount of quota any one farmer can own, nor on the price of the feather quota, be it turkeys, chickens or laying hens. "If you're Bill Gates and you've got all the money in the world and you want to buy all the chicken quota in Ontario, there's nothing stopping you."

He thinks units of quota should not be sold but rather should be distributed without cost, while the amount of quota any one farm may own should be capped. He said many dairy farmers in the 1960s got their dairy quota for free and now to some producers it's worth "millions."

When marketing boards create new quota, it should be distributed for free to new farmers, rather than to those with quota already, McGivern argues.

Today, the value of one unit of dairy quota, or one dairy cow, is $25,000. "So that eliminates a lot of people, a lot of young farmers out of the system right off the bat," while concentrating ownership into fewer hands.

If there were some "redistribution" of agricultural wealth, people like him wouldn't have to farm so much land to be profitable, he said.

But McGivern said the "main thrust" of Practical Farmers of Ontario is its intention to be an "action-based farm organization, not just a lobby organization like most of the other farm organizations . . .

"So if we have to take our message to the street, if we need to have some tractor rallies, if we need to organize several hundred people to be out front of certain government buildings to promote our rights, then that's what we want to do."

The organization wants to ensure clear representation from farmers across the province, with eastern and western Ontario vice-presidents and advocates for sustainable agriculture, he said.

He said the new farm organization seems to be appealing to farmers in organic agriculture, in growing non-genetically modified crops, specialty crops and selling directly to consumers, like at farmers markets or those who pre-sell meat and produce before they're grown.

McGivern is the acting chair of the new farm organization, which he proposed initially to about 20 other farmers. Now some 200 belong to the group and McGivern said he anticipates that number will grow. PFO's inaugural meeting March 31 in Peterborough at Trent University will select an executive.

A local organizing meeting will take place March 19 at 7:30 p.m. at his Desboro business, Grass Roots Organics.

The new farm organization folds in the Ontario Small Farm Producers Association with agriculture issues of the Ontario Landowners Association, whose Grey-Bruce chapter McGivern once led. Other PFO founding members include Durham raw milk activist Michael Schmidt, Shallow Lake farmer Rae MacIntyre -- a former Grey County NFU president -- and Ottawa farmer Steve Dick, all of whom resigned from the NFU with McGivern.

McGivern is a former Ontario co-ordinator of the National Farmers Union, on which he used to sit as a national director, before a falling out last year over what he said were bylaw matters concerning selection of Ontario representatives. He said the NFU position on supply management was also a factor.

McGivern said the National Farmers Union has "lots of good points" but he still parted ways with the organization.

Indeed, NFU national vice-president Colleen Ross, an Ottawa-area farmer, said everything the PFO is advocating has already been articulated by the NFU and so the disgruntled former members could have worked with it.

" This whole PFO, what we have here are a few disgruntled men, not women, because the NFU is a strong membership of men and women," she said, "who have a different ideology and couldn't get their way in the NFU."

Ross said the NFU is a strong defender of social justice. "Because we believe it's not just about our bottom line. It's about food sovereignty, food justice, food access and it's not just about me and my farm and my bottom line."

She added if there are enough farmers interested, the NFU also supports a tightly regulated raw milk industry, with on-farm processing, making milk available to consumers, within the supply-management system. But there can't be two systems, she said.

McGivern is a 32-year-old farm entrepreneur. He's been farming full-time for more than 10 years and now crops about 2,000 acres. He grows his own seed, plants, grows, harvests, cleans, mills and packages mostly flour for export. He primarily sells spelt flour and spelt flakes, several thousand tonnes per year, mostly to Israel and Australia. He also raises beef cattle and hogs.

All of his production is certified organic. He also grows red fife heritage wheat, coloured beans, barley, oats and non- GMO soy beans. He said more than $1 million has been invested in the farm operation.

"I always tell people we never set out to be the biggest at anything. But we've been forced into that model to be profitable."

He'd like marketing boards to ease up on the rules that he blames for "stifling innovation and opportunities for direct marketing."

For example, he'd like to milk 25 or 30 cows and have an on-farm creamery and sell to the local market, as he did starting out with his grain business. "But the marketing boards just prohibit all those things, or the regulations are just so overwhelming that it's just not possible to do."

He cited other problems he has with supply management systems:

* Farmers may have up to 100 laying hens and 300 meat birds without quota. But to sell eggs at a farmers' market requires them to be graded and cartoned by rules for such a small volume make doing so "too inefficient for farmers to do that."

* McGivern said the broiler marketing board has a rule prohibiting the advertising of meat birds for sale at the end of the farm lane. "And so what's a farmer supposed to do on the backroads of rural Ontario to get his product sold? So they're setting the whole system up so that it works against the small farmer."

* The minimum quota purchase for meat birds is 14,000 units of quota, or about 15,000 chickens. McGivern thinks the quota exemptions, the 100 laying hens, 300 meat birds, should be increased for small farms. "Right now we're not providing a lot of opportunities for young people."

* The price of that quota is negotiated privately in the feather industry. That means price-setting is not transparent and so it's hard to come to a price that's fair, McGivern said. Further, McGivern said, big feed companies that supply chicken farmers tell farmers to tell them when they want to sell quota because the company has other customers looking to buy, leaving new farmers out of the loop.