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HomeMy WebLinkAboutFarming '88, 1988-03-30, Page 28PAGE 4. FARMING ’88, WEDNESDAY. MARCH 30, 1988. April 15 deadline for beef briefs Deadline for written submis­ sions to the Beef Marketing Task Force has been setfor April 15, task force chairman Ken McDermid announced recently. Established to review the chang­ ing marketing needs of Ontario’s beef industry, the task force is scheduled to report to the Ontario Minister of Agriculture and Food, Jack Riddell, in June. “To meet the deadline, the task force will not be holding public hearings,” McDermid said. “But we welcome written submissions from all segments of the beef industry and any other interested organizations or individuals.” Submissions should be sent to: Gervan Fearon, Secretary, Beef Marketing Task Force, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Legislative Buildings, Toronto, M7A 1B6. The 16-member Beef Marketing Task Force was established in February and represents a full cross- section of the province ’ s beef industry from producers to meat packers. The group has been asked to establish its own terms of refer­ ence within the broad mandate of investigatingall the options for marketing beef in Ontario. OMAF helps in many ways Continued from page 2 tion to the five colleges of agricultural technology, the mini­ stry conducts or offers hundreds of courses for adults, regional work­ shops, activities by groups and societies, fairs, exhibitions and the Ontario Agricultural Museum in Milton. •marketing. In addition to work­ ing with the marketing boards, the ministry has an extensive program to promote the sale of Ontario agricultural and food products both inside the province and outside the country. The program includes trade missions and shows, special promotions and the highly successful Foodland Ontario campaign aimed at domes­ tic consumers. •financial assistance. There are programs to assist farmers includ­ ing income stabilization, debt management, financial protection, crop insurance, farmstead im­ provement, municipal tax reduc­ tion and drainage. •information. The ministry of­ fers a full package for press, radio and television plus its own farm market radio news network. In addition, the ministry produces films, technical publications, ex­ hibits and a 10-times-a-year news­ paper for farmers. Regular news­ letters are also provided by staff in field offices and specific program areas. Overall, the ministry plays an important part in the agricultural life of the province. So do many other groups in the agriculture and food sector. By working together, they ensure that Ontario remains a world leader in agriculture and food. Hard times change farming rules but optimism still strong in Huron The rules of the farming game have changed in the 1980’s but the optimism continues among farmers in Huron County says Don Pullen, Agricultural Representative at the Clinton office of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food (OMAF). People have a great confidence in the future of farming in Huron, Mr. Pullen said in a recent interview in his Clinton office. A lot of young people move away from the county to get good jobs but eventually end upcoming back to farm, particularly with the incentive of programs like OMAF’s Farm-Start program which offers cash grants to help young farmers get started. When an information meeting for the project was held in Clinton in January more than 300 packed the Clinton town hall to the doors. About 500 applications are out in the county for the program. Mr. Pullen says he expects that Huron will probably endup with about 10 per cent of the entire number of applications in the province. There ’ s good reason for the confidence, Mr. Pullen says. There is almost no limitation on the kinds of crops that can be grown in the county, and not just grown, but grown with really good yields. “There’s a confidence in what we can get out of the soil,” he said. Almost 90 per cent of the land in the county is in classes 1, 2 or 3. But the crisis of the early 1980’s has changed the way people operate their farms, he said. The days of equity borrowing are over, he said. The days of realistic cash-flow borrowing are here. The problems began in the 1970’s when real estate value rather than agricultural productive value of land became the way of judging a farm’s wealth. Some land in the southern part of the county was going for up to $3,000 an acre when the land was never really worth more than $400 to $500 an acre based on the money that could be recovered from growing crops. People who would never have thought of paying $300 an acre to rent land were willing to buy it at that and never had a hope of paying anything on the principal. Now, Mr. Pullen says, farmers are asking themselves if the land won’t carry itself, why should I buy it? He has never been one to promote people getting into really big operations, Mr. Pullen said. There are differing levels of skills and management and the farmer must work at the level he has. Try to get bigger than you can handle and you get into trouble. High interest and low commodity prices hurt farmers in this decade but a lot of the ills of agriculture stem from the farmer having just too much debt to be able to service it, making the creditors nervous. People struggling to meet heavy debts ran out of time for doing all the work and for their families and for what life was really all about, enjoying themselves. Those hard lessons haven’t been lost on the new young generation of farmers. Economics have changed the direction of fanning. Young farmers won’t get money in loans if they can’t prove they can cashflow the payments, and have a realistic cashflow at that, and few are going to have enough money of their own to get started. There is a trend to smaller and medium-sized equipment, he says instead of the big equipment of a few years back although there are some big operations that still need big equipment. There’s also been a trend to fix equipment rather than trade for new equipment. There has been a tremendous number of people taking advantage of OMAF’s program to repair equipment. It is hard to get a handle on j ust what has happened to land prices because of the isolated nature of farm sales but it seems prices are down about 50 per cent from their peak last decade, he said. Farmers aren’t rushing out to buy land unless it fits with their operation. People are in the mode of trying to hang on and pay down debt, he said. And that seems to be the mood in farming in the spring of 1988: a mixture of caution and hope, a caution not to get caught out on a limb again but an ever-present hope that keeps people coming back to the land. fcj'p'N SA Ve'"clIp”saJe"*CLIP'N SAVE "*cj”N SAVE.”! 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