Hashtags, farm meetings and items in file 13
As I sit in the Banff Centre hotel contemplating what to write for this column, several things come to mind.
While still attending a few key farm meetings and conventions, it is certainly not possible for me to attend the shear numbers I did when back as a young farm journalist.
However, it is easier to get updates from the ones I can’t make because of hashtags on Twitter and people tweeting from those events as was the case in January. While reporting, tweeting and podcasting from the Banff Pork Seminar, I kept up through the hashtag #agdays2015 on what people were doing at Ag Days in Brandon.
So far in 2015, the Wheat Growers in Winnipeg and the BPS in Banff. At both conventions, it was truly exciting to see several things. First, there are still younger farmers excited about the business producing food going forward, and secondly, sitting at a table with fellow farm journalists, tweeting and retweeting comments speakers were making, in almost real time, including pictures.
Wow producing food is the place to be as the most basic industry mankind has going for itself, and to be part of it, as a journalist first, and an advocate, a close second makes me feel real good.
That doesn’t exclude tough questions like the one Les Routledge, the small retiring farmer from Killarney asked me recently. While often attaching my name to the answers I write, most come from spending time at these meetings, and asking the same questions of others, over and over again.
Where do the estimates of billions of dollars of losses come from that some organizations still keep raising when it comes to the short time period following the demise of the CWB? Were those actual losses or were the figures based on sales that have been delayed by a few months, asks Les.
Here is my answer to that question.
On the grain transportation issue, in my opinion, (IMO), delayed delivery, bigger crops, and some fabrication. The fabrication figures come from an organization that is long in the tooth, as witnessed by their annual meeting in Saskatoon in December where ‘relevance’ as an organization is still able to attract younger members focused on a logo change.
Yes, I agree there were too many delays and yes the grain companies took advantage of farmers, but in the end I believe it will even out. “Come out in the wash’, as the saying goes.
While not so in all areas, farmers within a couple of 100 miles from the U.S. border hauled south big time. Several farmer-owned trucking companies quickly formed and grew and now with fuel prices dropping, things get even better.
After the harvest of 2013 crop, some farmers called local elevators early on, little room, and the freight basis widened, indicating grain companies really weren’t interested in the farmers’ grain at that point. Brokers found markets, truckers found trucks, and grain moved south without a hitch, mostly, if the required paperwork was concise and complete.
Later those same elevator managers called to say they could now take the grain; sorry said many farmers, we just shipped, almost in some cases with glee in their voices.
The CWB monopoly bulldozed, ploughed, and turned over stuff  for 70 years. The transportation and marketing systems need a little time to adjust, and it will.
Levi Wood, a farmer from Regina, and president of the Wheat Growers says issues crop up almost daily, almost daily, many of which were there before but the CWB would often massage them always to their benefit, and in some cases filed them away. Today as the transparency opens up the system, and in some cases dust off those file 13 items, the system has to deal with them, too going forward.  •