Bushel full of trade talk at Keystone Agricultural Producers annual meeting

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This article was published 04/02/2025 (243 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Not surprisingly, the threat of U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods was top of mind Tuesday at the Keystone Agricultural Producers annual meeting.

But that didn’t mean there was panic.

Instead, there was plenty of talk about how the ag industry can do better, with the whole sector working together to streamline logistics and invest more in innovation and value-added developments.

KAP president Jill Verwey is one of the 16 local business leaders on Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s new U.S. Trade Council.

“Sitting around the table with other Manitoba business people and the premier allows Manitoba producers to have a voice,” she said Tuesday in Winnipeg. “The importance of agriculture to the provincial economy is well-understood at that table and we feel very welcomed.”

However, the bottom line is, “there is a new world we live in regarding trade policies south of the border.”

Like so many other industries in North America, the ag sectors of Canada and the U.S. are fully integrated.

Manitoba Agriculture Minister Ron Kostyshyn said he attended three conferences in the U.S. last year.

“The co-operation is amazing,” he said. “Businesses, farmers, people involved in ag industrial development on the U.S. side appreciate Canadian involvement.”

Keith Currie, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, said he was in San Antonio last week at the American Farm Bureau annual convention. The U.S. farmers do not want tariffs either, he relayed.

“They are lobbying very hard,” Currie said, noting the Americans were a little hamstrung at the time because U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the department of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, had not yet gone through the process. (Rollins has since had her nomination advanced to a full U.S. Senate vote, which has yet to be scheduled.)

The KAP meeting was also an occasion to take stock of the way the industry functions.

J.P. Gervais, chief economist at Farm Credit Corp., highlighted the composition of Canadian agriculture production exports to the U.S. (Canola and soybean meal and canola and soybean oil lead the way, making up 50 per cent of the total.)

The imposition of 25 per cent tariffs by the U.S. will thoroughly disrupt the pricing dynamic on both sides of the border, Gervais said.

Even with the U.S. market relying so heavily on canola oil and meal from Canada, it does not mean American buyers will continue to buy the same volumes of Canadian production, he added.

They will seek alternatives, but it remains to be seen just what that will look like.

“The co-operation is amazing. Businesses, farmers, people involved in ag industrial development on the U.S. side appreciate Canadian involvement”–Ron Kostyshyn, Manitoba agriculture minister

“The market will figure out,” Gervais said. “They will have a hard time finding alternatives. They will face pressure. It will create a wedge between Canadian and U.S. prices. How those prices are adjusted will depend on market forces.”

In the meantime, Gervais said it is a good time for the Canadian industry to more seriously look at long-standing issues like export market diversification and increased productivity.

He said finding alternative markets will not be easy.

“It means boots on the ground, finding the buyer, making the case for the quality of Canadian products,” Gervais said. “It takes sweat to actually lead to diversification, but there are solutions.”

Those solutions include working domestically to make sure the Canadian industry is doing its best to make the logistics network work as smoothly as possible so prices at the East and West Coast ports are as affordable as they can be, he said.

Industry co-operation in dealing with the looming U.S. tariffs (they were postponed 30 days by Trump on Monday) was a theme at the KAP meeting.

Colin Hornby, new general manager of KAP, said he speaks daily with his counterparts at the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan and with producer groups in Alberta and British Columbia.

“We want a ‘Team Canada’ approach (in dealing with U.S. tariffs) and, at minimum, Prairie organizations working together,” he said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca