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The Rural Voice, 1987-05, Page 6SHOP & PORTABLE CUSTOM WELDING • Repairs to all makes of lawn mowers, chainsaws & tillers • Hog confinement pens & crates T\ HACKETT WELDING & SMALL ENGINES Lucknow 519-528-3835 provides SALES Breeding Stock: Performance Home -tested Boars & Gilts from Health Monitored Herds Feeder Pigs: Large volume of uniform, top quality, healthy feeder pigs with a 24-hour guarantee SUPPLIES Animal Health Care Products SERVICES Identification, backfat, probing, pregnancy checking, and feed testing Sway J' 0 © 0 a0 Norm Wilson Ivan Wolfe Fordwich Mitchell 519-335-3127 519-348-6543 QUALITY SWINE CO-OP Headquarters Box 53, Shedden,Ont. 519-764-2300 4 THE RURAL VOICE FARM LEADERSHIP: THE BUCK STOPS HERE In preceding articles, I have tried to zero in on what I believe to be the two most important points for the pros- perity of Ontario agriculture. These points are leadership and an agricul- tural policy which would give a price to the farmer at the farm gate based on input costs and return on investment. Those knowledgeable in agricultur- al affairs have had access to informa- tion which, if it had been used correct- ly, would have shown the direction in which we have been heading since the 1960s. Doug Mutch, economist for the Livestock Feed Board, has stated that since 1960 global grain output has shown a constant increase, with very little increasing demand from those able to pay for it. The rise in grain production from 1970 to 1985 was largely stimulated by the U.S. farm policy. If grain had been marketed through the traditional livestock sector rather than as a cash crop, animals would have been main- tained at traditional levels. We, as farmers, do not always have access to the mass of statistics that allow the proper decisions to be made about the future, but bureaucrats and banks do, and it is this lack of perception on our part that gives us the problems that we have now. This is the policy side of our think- ing: using all the statistical forces available to project realistically into the future. Of course, some of the neg- ative thinkers will say that this cannot be done. But isn't it rather extraordin- ary that the dairy and feather industries can make fairly accurate predictions? Now let us tum to the second vital component of a viable industry, that of leadership. When George McLaughlin predicts that 15,000 of Ontario's far- mers (out of a total of 50,000) will be forced off the land in the next five years, it is a terrible indictment of the state of our society and will put an intolerable burden on the welfare organ- ization in our province. There are two things that we have had a surfeit of. One is band-aid pol- icies. The other is "passing the buck." By "passing the buck" I mean delays in decisions in the hope that problems will go away or resolve themselves. The other day I was going through my files, and what did I find? Report after report from task forces — we can go back to the "Challenge of Abun- dance" of the 1960s (its name tells you something we have ignored). We have had beef inquiries in the '70s, the OFA task force on "kick -backs" in the super- market industry, the OFA task force on agriculture, the Senate inquiry into "Soil at Risk." More recently we had the "right to farm" study and now we have the crop insurance task force. Many of these studies have never been acted on and give the politician an excuse to do nothing. What happens to the farmer in the meantime? You do not draw your lines for bat- tle and then go off for a year's conflab. You act and you act decisively, com- mitting your forces accordingly. The results may not always be in your favour, but at least you have dared. I would make one suggestion, and that is that the minister call together all farm leaders for one day and not allow any bureaucrats or academics to attend, keeping the participants there until they come up with a common working plan that will enable us to climb out of the morass and set out on the road to profitability. May I add a Churchillian quota- tion: "The desirable qualification for a politician is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen."0 Barnie Evans, P. Ag., owns a beef farm near Embro and is well-known for his work on agricultural policy.