Farm Protests?

[cowman]

Caught a bit on the news last night where these farmers were doing a protest in Ontario...I think Toronto? Anyway they were sort of tying things up by driving tractors around.
I wonder, do you think this is effective? Does it get the message out that there is a problem or does it just get the drivers PO'ed at the farmers for tying up traffic?
A couple of years ago I caught a show on French farmers protesting in Paris? Now those boys brought it right down town dumping loads of hog manure in the streets, dumping and cutting big straw bales and shooting calves on the steps of city hall! When the police came to round them up a regular old punch them up brawl took place! Apparently the French government got the message and started whistling a different tune real fast!
Now do you think it would be helpful if farmers did the same sort of thing on Parliment hill on opening day?

[wilagro]

Now do you think it would be helpful if farmers did the same sort of thing on Parliament hill on opening day? - cowman

Doubtful if it would help here. Our politicians are TOUGH. After all...we elected a whole raft of westerners didn't we?

Besides, by the time that they get around to dealing with the 'agricultural crisis' it will have solved it's self and most of the farmers will be bankrupt. Problem solved.

[wanaka]

We as producers are seen as not contributing to the economy. Has anybody done a count as to the number of people who rely on us to put a crop in this spring. This would include our equipment dealers input suppliers maufacturing industries and so on and so on. Just look at the number of civl servants who are employed to keep track of our crop insurance programs to compiling stats to tell the world how much grain we have to sell.
I have not seen or heard one of my suppliers stand up and say they have a large work force who rely on agriculture. These are the people who we need to have involved in the protest to let people know we producers are needed.

[skhadenuf]

You are absolutely right, I think if we want something changed in agricultural policy we as farmers have to make the country as a whole aware of how many people are making a good living off our industry and within our industry while at the same time it 's just not feasable for the primary producer to continue.

Why aren't the swp, pioneer grain, agricore, dreyfus, monsanto, dow, john deere, case ih, new holland, fuel dealers, sask crop employees, ag reps, cais employees, mayors of cities and towns, and all the others, out not just asking but publicly demanding support for us the primary producer.

I think we almost need some type of public advertised forum where we list businesses and people that make a decent living off of our activities.
These people either start lobbying for us or we list those not supporting us and start maybe randomly stopping all business with these people. It wouldn't take all of us doing this to make a point either. Even a 50% drop in business would make enough of a point.

Our delima is this, people are starving throughout the world, yet experts tell us we produce too much of our commodities abroad to support a price. At the same time some people are becoming wealthy off of the cheap products that we produce. To me globally there is a leadership disaster for that scenerio to be happenning.

I think there are two ways for our situation to be solved.

1. Cancel cais, and pay farmers to summerfallow 50% of our acres. Payment would need to be enough for incentive to do, pay 90 to 100 an acre. Because of lower production there should be higher prices. For subsequent years as prices for commodities go up lower the payment per acre to summerfallow therefore a balance in production and price should occur over time. Problem with this is that if this happenned at the same time as a production disaster there would be more than african people starving, but I guess our value would be appreciated a whole lot more.

2. Cancel Cais, replace it with a cost of production formula, guarantee x amount of bushels with guaranteed price to cover all costs within the current crop insurance program and privatize it, eliminate the bureacracy in crop insurance by getting rid of the individual production averages, these don't work especially during disasters and are the same reason cais doesn't work.

[Ooofty]

Yes we really need to start protesting to get people to look and see what is happening to farms in Canada.