While district farmers likely have their own problems to worry about, they aren’t facing the same plight as those on the Prairies, where poor growing conditions and low prices are threatening to finish them off.
That’s because virtually all farmers in Rainy River District, who once counted on grain sales for income, got out of crop production three years ago when the cost of shipping it through the Ontario Wheat Board (a mandatory rule) to southern Ontario no longer was profitable.
Fortunately, they already had livestock inventory–making the transition possible.
Prairie farmers, on the other hand, have big bucks invested in their crop farms and so the option of switching to a more reliable income just isn’t feasible.
“There’s nobody left [here] any more,” Amos Brielmann of Stratton noted Monday. Once in wheat production, he’s now a cattleman.
“The Ontario Wheat Board used to pay $90 a ton for wheat but it would cost us $55 a ton to ship it–where is the reality in that?” he said. “It wasn’t feasible, it wasn’t worth it, [and] it was always a pain in the butt.
“But [the Prairie farmers] can’t just switch [production]. They have machinery, technology, liquid inventory–some of them have a million dollars sitting there on a farm,” he added.
“If you’re going to change your land over to pasture, it takes seven years to build up a sod and during that time it just costs you more money,” Brielmann explained.
“You have to have deep pockets to make these changes [and] a lot of them can’t do that,” he said.
Gary Sliworsky, area rep with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs office in Emo, couldn’t be reached for comment. But his counterpart in Dryden, Dan Ramer, said there are no similarities between area producers and those in the Prairies.
“It’s like night and day,” he noted yesterday. “Producers with livestock are largely self-sufficient and grow grain strictly for feed consumption by their livestock.
“It’s hard for agricultural producers to decide overnight ‘Hey, I’m going to go into hog production from grain production’ and then start refitting their farms,” he remarked.
Rigo Wittich, who owns Northend Farms in Rainy River, once made a business out of milling wheat production but he also found freight costs to southern Ontario ate up his profits.
With livestock already on the go, he kept a couple hundred acres of wheat in production for feed and switched to barley and oats to supplement his income.
He knew he could market them himself, and now sells those grains within Rainy River District and into Baudette, Mn.
“I used to grow wheat for human consumption and ship it to Port Colbourne [but] we can’t compete with farmers who are closer to elevators in the east,” he said Monday.
“Now I turn wheat into meat, instead of fooling around with the Ontario Wheat Board,” he added.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
