Much has changed in ag industry, except farmers’ resiliency

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/08/2021 (1687 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Inside an old scrapbook that surfaced as I was recently exercising a rare urge to clean, I found a clipping dated Aug. 17, 1996, introducing this column to Winnipeg Free Press readers.

I still remember getting a call on a Wednesday afternoon that summer from the city editor, a former colleague from my days as a Free Press staffer, who asked if I’d be interested in writing a weekly column on agriculture for the business section.

I said I’d think about it and asked when he’d want the first one. “Before noon Friday,” came the reply. So it was, and has been ever since.

That very first column was about — who would have guessed — the escalating debate over the Canadian Wheat Board and the dilemma faced by then-federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale.

Farmers opposed to the single-desk marketing system had taken to running the border with their grain trucks and were happily courting martyrdom by going to jail. The popular cartoon of the times was an image of two convicts asking each other why they were incarcerated, with the farmer replying “I sold my own wheat.”

Meanwhile, supporters of the CWB were rallying in the streets and a federally appointed panel was recommending a dual-marketing scenario which while politically expedient, had a snowball’s chance in this hot Prairie summer of succeeding.

“Ultimately, if Goodale moves to diminish the Canadian Wheat Board, it won’t be because there is a shortage of farmers who support it. It will be because he can’t figure out what to do with the ones who won’t. Kind of says something about how democracy functions in a culture that promotes individualism, doesn’t it,” I wrote in that first column.

It took until 2012 for the federal government under Stephen Harper to axe the single desk. Notably, the world didn’t end.

Leading up to that however, the grain handling system underwent massive restructuring. The co-operatives that once controlled over 80 per cent of the grain handling on the Prairies buckled as they confronted a demographic of aging members withdrawing their equity just as it was needed to invest in modernizing their elevator networks. The co-ops first turned to the stock market for the needed capital and then turned on each other before disappearing altogether.

The late 1990s were also when farmers and the public got their first glimpse of genetically modified organisms embedded as herbicide-tolerant traits in canola. Although it was poorly understood at the time, the development radically changed not only how farmers farmed, but how development of new traits would be financed.

Before farmers could purchase these new varieties, they paid a technology-use fee and signed a contract agreeing not to save or sell any of the seed for replanting. It came as an unpleasant surprise to some farmers that Monsanto actually intended to enforce its patents — all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

But the controversy over how farmers should pay for crop varietal improvements continues as the industry debates today whether farmers should pay royalties if they wish to replant seed from the cereals they raise.

In the late 1990s, the global debate was over who would feed China. Today, the concern is what to do about China’s rising dominance over world affairs and its heavy-handed diplomacy.

Farms have become bigger and farmers more technologically savvy. However, the rhetoric around what constitutes an efficient scale has moved beyond the “go big or go home” mantra of those times as interest grows in valuing what farmers do beyond what volumes they produce.

Another change has been the farming community’s growing awareness in this age of social media of the need to court the public’s trust.

Comparing those early columns to today, it’s amazing how fundamentally the industry has changed over the past 25 years and how collectively it’s much more confident, connected and proactive. Farmers increasingly see themselves as part of a value chain instead of standalone entities requiring special attention.

However, what hasn’t changed is their resilience in the face of adversity, and their ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

Laura Rance is vice-president of Content for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com