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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
You can learn from other commodities
Winter is farm meeting time. That
bewildered -looking person over in
the corner scribbling in a notebook is
likely a farm reporter.
Reporters of agriculture are at a
disadvantage when we go to
commodity meetings. We can't
possibly know as
much about the
topic as the
farmers present
who are dealing
with the issues
daily. One day
we're liable to be
as a dairy
meeting, the next
at a pork meet-
ing, the next still
as a crops meet-
ing. It takes a
while just to
reintroduce
yourself to the
lingo flying around these meetings:
somatic cell counts, ADG, etc. It's
the fear of every ag reporter that
he/she is going to look ignorant and
foolish when his/her version of a
meeting appears in print and farmers
get to read it.
Yet if reporters are a disadvantage
at these meetings, they also have an
advantage. The fact is that in these
days of specialized agriculture, most
farmers only attend meetings of their
own commodity. At best, a pork or a
milk producer might also go to a crop
day. The pork producer will almost
never be at a milk meeting or the beef
producer at a chicken meeting.
So farmers, even those with a
curious, "big picture" mentality, tend
to see themselves only in the reality
of their own specialty. They fail to
see how the trends influencing their
own industry might already have
been played out in another field.
Recently, within a couple of days
of each other, 1 went to the annual
zone meeting of Gay Lea Foods Co-
operative Limited and the Shake-
speare Competitiveness conference
for pork producers. With the two
meetings so close together some
curious comparisons leapt to mind.
Guest speaker at the pork meeting
was Wayne Snyder from Farmland
Industries Inc., a mid -western U.S.
co-operative that processes pork and
beef. Snyder said the battleground for
competitiveness in pork is now at the
marketing level. It doesn't do any
good for a producer to have the
lowest costs if he doesn't have
shackle space at a packing plant.
That's why many farmers are turning
to contracts, to guarantee they can
sell their pigs.
After being at a dairy meeting that
twigged something for me. Aren't
the contracts, then, a form of quota?
Supply -managed commodities have
always said the cost of quota purch-
ased a piece of the market. In supply
management farmers control the
quota. In the pork model, it's the
packers in control.
Snyder said the drive for vertical
integration in pork is fueled by
buyers like McDonald's Restaurants
who want to be able to trace the
product back to the farm. They want
quality control and so packers want
standards of production.
The product is different but dairy
has had quality control for some time,
with every load of milk tested. While
the company may not control the way
a dairy farmer operates, the milk
marketing board does enforce
regulations, even to the point of
telling producers how wide the lane
on their farm must be so that milk
trucks can turn easily.
With a declining number of
packers in Ontario, there's interest in
the Progressive Pork Producers co-
operative proposal. Snyder represents
a huge co-op in the midwest. Gay Lea
is a co-op with 4,300 members, 20
per cent of all Ontario dairy farmers.
Imagine if 20 per cent if Ontario pork
producers belonged to one co-op?
One farm sector doesn't translate
easily to all others, but crossing the
boundaries from one to another does
bring a certain perspective. Conven-
tional farmers might even learn
something by going to an organic
farmers meeting (including that these
people are very scientific, just
different in their branch of science).
A farmer's greatest asset is an
open mind. Be curious.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice. He
lives near Blyth, ON.