Poll

[farmaholic]

AgriStability:

Who here has allowable expenses higher
than their reference margin? If you
have for any length of time, exit the
industry(as if you had a choice).

Kiss your healthy reference margins
goodbye, they are useless. Your current
year reference margin will have to fall
below 70% of your ALLOWABLE EXPENSES,
not total expenses, before you trigger a
payment. Look at your Calculation of
Benefits statement to see what your
allowable expenses have been over the
last 5 years and take 70% of that, grim
coverage.

Who the **** was representing us?
Wasn't the final ratification meeting in
Whitehorse, Yukon, the farming capital
of Canada? We got hoodwinked.

My ultimate goal was hoping I never
would have needed it but now I know I
won't have any meaningful support from
this program.

[agchat]

Know were you are coming from farmaholic. But
you see, it goes like this. Take away cwb, make
buddy, buddy with lots of farmers. Now axe the
shit out of everything else, who the hell cares.
Harper, Ritz not stupid, they know farmers ain't
a voting for NDP or Liberal anyway, we got rid of
what alot of farmers wanted so we have it
made.Its now time to concentrate on that east
voting, cause we got them western boys happy,
happy, happy. End of story.

[FarmRanger]

....or could it possible be that a disaster assistance program should only kick in when there is a disaster.

[ALLFARMER]

You bet

I received some very nice cheques in the past but
no longer participate.

I have read farmer participation has dropped
significantly.

You'd get a better bang from your participation
fee's by putting that money into lottery tickets.

[farmaholic]

Farmranger. mathematically the old program only
really covered 35% of first full 30%margin decline
because the first 15% wasn't covered. Better
coverage occurred in tier three , 80%.

AgRecovery was for real disasters, AgInvest and
AgStability were for income stabilization in my
opinion

This program never was a cash cow to us but I did
like the protection it offered, now it's useless.

[mbratrud]

farmaholic you are just looking at this now? They made these announcements months ago. You have had time to review Crop Insurance Coverage vs. Private Margin Insurance.

I do think they went a little far but I understand why they changed it. It was way to expensive if there was a major price pull back.

The one bright spot to me is it was way too easy for farms to expand with 85 percent of the old reference Margin Formula. If I had good reference Margins it was very little risk to double my farm size, which has been a significant contributor to the crazy land rents we are seeing today.

Farms are very much going to have to stand on their own merit and to me that is a good thing.

I have done a lot of homework on this, Insurance like Global Ag Risk and Crop Insurance are adequate replacements but they do cost more. Every farm depending on their particular situation will find that one or the other fits for them.

In our case we went with 80% Crop Insurance because of how the math worked out with our Crop Basket this year (we grow 8 different crops). Had we had a different line up of Crops (2 or 3) GARS may have looked better. Some of our Neighbors went GARS for other reasons.

Crop Insurance deadline has already passed but I think GARS goes to the end of April so if you are feeling under insured you should give them a call.

Unfortunately all too often this happens that guys don’t look at this stuff seriously until they are worried about a claim. Some of us were trying to engage guys to have this debate 5 months ago when these announcements were made.

[farmaholic]

mbratrud: with all due respect, if you could find
them, I've made posts in the past regarding this
very issue. The word I used was gutted.
I did a crop insurance analysis for our farm,
getting in on the ground floor is expensive with
poor coverage. Because of this we decided never
to participate. We farmed and grew our farm
without it so I am sure we will be fine.
My intent was to make people aware of how bad
their margin will have to drop before there is any
support

[farmaholic]

mbratrud: I don't claim to be a guru of
this program, but doesn't the structural
change component of it prevent payouts by
simply increasing the farm size? If you
know otherwise please explain.

[bgmb]

This is the most un conservative move the
conservatives could make with respect to support
programs for farmers. They cut the reference
margins of the growers who had the best history
and who have probably taken the least money out
of the program over the years the most.

If they wanted to cut why not cut agri invest which
makes no sense, just paying a farmer cash no
strings attached every year no matter what.

Another alternative would have been to raise the
premiums on agristability that would have made
more sense vs. singling out the ones with high
margins and taking a shot at them.

What it amounts to is now good farmers will have
the same margin as shitty ones.

[mbratrud]

farmaholic, the structural change made it very easy for expansion, maybe not perfect but enough to embolden many expansion plans.

bgmb, I absolutely agree with you. Why didn't they leave the program as it was but charge a premium more reflective of the Private Market. If they would have looked at something like $5 for 65% Coverage, $10 for 75% and $15 for 85% using the old math they would have had a program that made money and provided stabilty.

I did hear that when they were running scenerios of $9 Canola with the old program it was very unsettling the Billions of dollars in cost.

Regardless it is what it is, time to move on and not worry about a government safety net but rather the tools that are available in the Market place.

To me this was a very fiscally Conservative move. Wish they were actually this conservative in many other sectors.