Someone once said, “Don’t ask stupid questions!” A much smarter person replied, “There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there are many people who freely give answers that are not too well researched!”
As we get older and have asked thousands of questions to many who we regard as “experts” in a field, we begin to realize that many people are much better versed on a subject than others. I was once told, “some experts are nothing but a drip under pressure!”
Canada once had an agriculture minister who I knew as a deputy minister of agriculture that I respected as someone who was quite well informed on many subjects concerning agriculture, but when he became the agriculture minister, he was told to “toe the party line.” Then, when asked a pointed question, he just deflected the question by changing the subject! I knew that he knew the answer but couldn’t give a logical response because of party policy.
Basic agricultural research was, until the late ‘60s, done by either federal or provincial departments of agriculture or one of our leading agricultural universities and mainly funded by the government. Many basic research projects require many years before reliable results can be written into a paper. By that time, often the government was changed and the new government in power takes all the credit for the multi-year study even though it had been the previous government who had funded it.
The federal government then decided to require that private funds had to match any government grant for a project and all research projects must be on a short-term funded basis so that the government who gave the funding could take credit for the study. Private industry soon realized that if they supplied half the funding, the federal government would fund half of their research! Private industry also kept control of the research project until completion. This meant that if the project was not going the way of profit for the private company, they could stop the research before it was finished, and results were never released!
This is how private industry has become so influential in how cropping has been changed to include much more extensive use of chemicals in modern farming. International trade has also been modified to allow the use of some of those chemicals on crops like soy, corn, sugar, cotton, and canola even though some chemical residue which has been linked to serious human diseases remains in those products! Lately some countries have refused to buy some of those agricultural products and many other political reasons have been given for those countries not buying the products.
During the last decade or so, some people have blamed our high food prices on Canada’s supply management system of marketing dairy, chicken, and eggs. Even though for many years, the price of a common “food basket” (items commonly found in the shopping carts of consumers at the checkout, excluding “non-food” items) in Canada and the U.S. have been found to be very similar in price! The exchange rate on the money and conversion from metric to U.S. measurements must also be calculated. Universities have compared the cost of production in similar sized farms in the U.S. and Canada and discovered almost identical costs. When the cost of the 1.3 trillion-dollar U.S. farm bill is added to the U.S. food price, then Canadian food prices are lower.
Before any change is made to what the Canadian farmer is paid for milk, chicken, or eggs, the government, all food processors, wholesalers, retailers, restaurant associations, and the Consumers’ Association of Canada can review the costs used in the cost-of-production formula. This happens twice each year! Yes, when countries that use an open market system of marketing dump over-supply on the world market at below cost prices, that product is cheaper than Canadian price. But when that country is in short supply then their price is much higher than in Canada.
Some people say a farmer must buy that very expensive milk quota or chicken quota to start farming in Canada. Many of our farmers began with a small farm but increased as they needed to. When I started to farm, our first year’s milk check was $19,000. Today, to be a viable dairy farm in the U.S. with a future, you have to have between 700 and 1000 cows milking! For several years there has been a proclaimed food expert that has been seen on TV and heard on radio. He has been a strong critic of supply management and calls the dairy farmers an expense to the Canadian consumer. He has been debunked several times both at debates on TV with real dairy experts and privately by real dairy farmers.
I was recently told that one time his father ran for politics against a dairy farmer and was soundly defeated! Maybe that’s why he still has a hate-on for dairy farmers who have survived?
Never be afraid to ask tough questions and continue until you get a logical, and “true” answer! Why are our bilingual, well educated nurses, doctors, and teachers leaving Quebec for better paying jobs in another province? Why are head offices leaving Quebec? Everyone deserves a well researched, logical answer!
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
