The Rural Voice, 1999-05, Page 38Still holding
on
Ontario's remaining
cream producers fight to
continue their way of life
Story and photo
by Keith Roulston
When Chrisljan Ropp opened
his new barn last year there
weren't any builders
advertising opcn houses to show off
the latest developments in dairy
architecture. There weren't any
equipment dealers exhibiting new
technology.
Ropp's barn, built to replace a
barn Idst to fire a year earlier, was
not exactly what the dairy industry.
sees as its future. It's more like a
modern example of the barns of 50
years ago — a central alley with a
few milk cows with pens on either
side for calves and, eventually, for
feeder pigs.
Pcrhaps the fact that Ropp and
other cream producers are so far from
what the dairy industry sees as its
future accounts for the fact cream
producers feel their concerns aren't
being heard by Dairy Farmers of
Ontario or the provincial
government.
"1 think they just regard us as a
nuisance," says Don O'Neill,
secretary -treasurer of the Ontario
Cream Producers' Association, a
voluntary group representing the
interests of those cream producers
who remain in the province.
Dcspitc the amalgamation of the
Ontario's Cream Producers
Marketing Board and Milk Producers
Marketing Board in 1995, there are
still 163 registered cream producers
in the province, about half of them
Old Order Amish or Old Order
Mennonites, says O'Neill. While the
old order communities continue to
expand, it's unlikely there will be
34 THE RURAL VOICE
more cream producers in future.
The problem, O'Neill says, is that
with the amalgamation crcam quota
has disappeared. Cream producers
were given three choices at the time:
to sell their quota, to convert it to
milk quota or to continue producing
cream. The policy benefitted those
who wanted to convert to milk or
those who wanted to sell their quota
but not those who tried to continue in
cream production.
The catch for cream producers
who remain, O'Neill says, is that a
young farmer who wants to get into
shipping cream, or a farmcr who
Cream quota
conversion did
nothing for those
farmers who
wanted to keep
producing
cream
wants to expand, must purchase milk
quota, at a cost in April of $42 per
kg, even though he plans to sell only
the cream.
For a cream producer to enter the
industry he must purchase a
minimum of 200 kg of quota to get a
Canadian Dairy Commission licence.
For his $8,000 - $9,000 investment
he is then enfiticd to sell 200 kg of
butterfat per year (about the output of
one good cow). At a net of $4.90 per
kg (after DFO administration and
promotion costs), he will make $980
a year off that one cow. If he
overproduces, however, there is a
Christian Ropp admires one of his
prized milking Shorthorns.
deduction of $3.77 for cach kg of
over -quota cream, leaving him wjth
$1.13 per kg. J
Ropp, who farms with his wife
Violet and sons Hubert and Rudy
near Brunner, says the milk he keeps
to feed to his calves does have value,
but it's hard to finance the cashflow
of buying whole milk quota when
getting your return on feeding calves
is a two-year process.
There is one Old Order Mcnnonite
and seven Old Order Amish
communities for which the options
offered in the conversion program are
not possible at all, says Ed Bennett, a
Sir Wilfrid Laurier University
professor from Milverton who has
been working on behalf of the Amish
and Mennonite communities. There
isn't a single bulk milk tank in the
eight colonies, he says, because it
gocs against the religious and social
beliefs of the farmers. Indeed when
Ontario Milk Producers Marketing
Board regulations banned the use of .
milk cans for the delivery of milk,
some Old Order colonies sold out
and moved to the U.S. Others
reconciled themselves to producing
cream.
Small scale dairy production is
integral to the Old Order farm
economy, Bennett says. "Five or 10
cows might be perceived as
insignificant to large scale dairy
operators but for them it's very
significant."
The cattle make use of hay and
pasture which, for these farmers who