CFA in Action - Pollinator Award, CFA Summer Board Meeting...

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Pollinator Award Nominations Close on Friday

Don't forget - the nomination deadline for the 2015 Canadian Farmer-Rancher Pollinator Conservation Award is this Friday (July 24).

The award, which is made possible by the Pollinator Partnership, Canadian Forage and Grassland Association and the CFA, recognizes an individual or family in the farm and ranch community in Canada who has contributed significantly to pollinator species protection and conservation.

Recipients will be recognized during a reception at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington D.C. later this year.

More information about the award, including the nomination form, can be found here.

Stand Up for Dairy Farmers

The TPP negotiations will be reaching their most critical point in the coming week at the Ministerial (Hawaii, July 28-31). The time is ripe. We would like to encourage CFA members to support a fellow member and dairy farmers across Canada by visiting www.milkledowneffect.ca and sharing the information with your membership, networks and social media channels. Here, the Dairy Farmers of Canada provide a template letter - that you can adapt and make your own - to send to your MP. We encourage CFA members to express their support for the trade deal, but to voice their concern and disapproval around the risks to Canada's dairy farmers.

CFA Summer Board Meeting

The Canadian Federation of Agriculture Board of Directors met in Charlottetown, PEI July 13-15 to discuss challenges and recommendations for a range of priorities for the sector, including: risk management, trade, climate change and federal election priorities for agriculture.

Much of the discussion centered on CFA's election priorities - maintaining a workforce on Canadian farms and ensuring farmers have access to proper risk management tools. Denis Landreville, Canada's lead agriculture negotiator, updated CFA on a number of negotiations, including the much anticipated Trans-Pacific Partnership. The CFA was also pleased to hear from PEI Agriculture Minister, Honourable Alan McIsaac. The Minister spoke to social license in agriculture and government/industry cooperation, among other topics.

Following the Board of Directors meeting, the CFA hosted its annual roundtable with Canada's Agriculture Ministers on July 15. Farm leaders and Ministers participated in an engaging two-hour session to discuss the pressing issue of social license for Canadian agriculture. David Hyink, CFA Board member for the Canadian Chicken Farmers, began the session by presenting the issue of social license and how it affects all of agriculture. He also summarized the recommendations that were highlighted in CFA's discussion paper on social license - "Building Trust and Transparency."

Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz voiced support for the first recommendation of a social license roundtable that would discuss and direct implementation of actions to strengthen agriculture's social license. There was agreement from the other Ministers that such a forum is needed to coordinate an industry/government wide response.

CFA will be following up on the discussions from this roundtable session to establish concrete next steps and formalize the working relationship with government to address social license in a manner that builds public trust in agriculture.

APF Committee Meeting

On July 13, the CFA's Agriculture Policy Framework Committee met to review the progress of its technical working groups on Risk Management and Strategic Investments. Reg Ens, chair of the Strategic Investments Working Group, and Drew Black, CFA staff, provided an overview of draft policy text that the Strategic Investments Working Group have put together in four policy areas: labour sustainability, food safety, tracking consumer perceptions, and animal care. The committee agreed with the general direction that the working group was taking to address strategic investment areas. The committee felt that the food safety policy text should address the concern that imports are not held to the same standards as Canadian produced food, even though this may fall outside the purview of the APF. In regards to animal welfare, there was agreement from the committee that small lot producers should be included within the APF for communications purposes to ensure they are aware of codes of practice and knowledge on how to implement the codes to ensure proper animal care.

A discussion was then held on the role the APF can take in improving access to capital for young and beginning farmers. Scott Ross, CFA staff, presented an overview of the programs and tools available in Canada and abroad that provide capital to young farmers. Members of the committee highlighted the turnaround time for loan applications, insufficient capital available through most existing programs, and the need for government to provide young farmers with more flexibility in generating revenue from their land in the early years. Based on this discussion, the working groups will each continue to pursue young farmer issues in their respective areas, but the committee recommended to the CFA Board that a new committee be formed to develop policy on access to land and the role of private equity.

For more information on this committee meeting, please contact Scott Ross at [email protected] or Drew Black at [email protected].

Pre-budget Submission

The CFA Board approved the following items for inclusion in the CFA's pre-budget submission to the Standing Committee on Finance for the 2016 federal election:

1. Tax policy amendments conducive to intergenerational farm transfers, including:

a) Ensuring access to tax deferred reorganizations for corporations under joint sibling ownership;

b) Permitting farm families to access the lifetime capital gains exemption while using holding corporations;

c) Reinterpreting the restriction on claiming farm losses to align with the recent Supreme Court decision in Craig v. the Queen to reflect a more holistic test on income; and

d) Replacing the word 'child' with a broader definition of 'family member' in subsection 73(3) of the Income Tax Act.

2. Modifications to AgriInvest to encourage proactive investments into the future competitiveness of Canadian agriculture by allowing account holders to withdraw producer contributions (Fund 1) without withdrawing taxable government contributions (Fund 2).

3. Investments in Implementation of the recommendations laid out in the Canadian Agriculture & Agrifood Workforce Action Plan, including:

a) Dedicate increased funding to the collection of regional agricultural workforce supply and demand information;

b) Create a dedicated Canadian Agriculture and Agri-food Workforce Program to provide consistent and efficient access to international agriculture workers to support industry productivity, growth and future success;

c) Improve and expand pathways to permanent residency for agriculture and agri-food workers;

d) Seasonality of agriculture needs to be recognised by removing existing caps on the duration of stay for those agriculture stream workers brought in to address acute, seasonal labour needs that can't be filled through the domestic workforce; and

e) Create a single office for agriculture and agri-food Labour Market Information Assessments to ensure knowledgeable staff, timely Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) processing, and consistent treatment of these applications.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Scott Ross at [email protected].

MNP Farm Financial Software

Steve Funk, CA and Director of Farm Income Programs at MNP LLP, gave the CFA Board an overview of risk management programs available to Canadian producers, while providing a demonstration of new software MNP has developed, named the "Agriculture Risk Management Projector" (ARMP). Following from the changes to BRM programs under Growing Forward 2, many producers continue to express concerns with the level of support available under AgriStability and difficulty in deciding whether to remain within the program. For many, this decision-making process is further complicated by the availability of private sector risk management tools and limited understandings of AgriStability calculations.

ARMP is newly developed software from MNP that provides producers the ability to see, graphically, the levels of support available to them through different programs and/or combinations of programs. In doing so, it provides assistance to producers in determining which insurance programs they should include in their risk management strategy for the upcoming year. Through demonstrations of the software, based on real-life examples, the software illustrates that AgriStability is still usually the first program to trigger benefits in the event of a whole farm loss, that reference margin limitations are not adequately targeting or addressing the issues of paying into profitable situations on an individual farm basis, and that while AgriStability payment frequency has reduced considerably, benefits of program participation are still likely to exceed costs but over a longer time horizon.

Nomination to Plant Breeders' Rights Advisory Committee

Following Bill C-18 bringing the Plant Breeders' Rights (PBR) Act into conformity with the 1991 Convention of the International Union for the Protection of new Varieties of Plants (UPOV 91), Minister Ritz has appointed the Canadian Federation of Agriculture to the PBR Advisory Committee for a three-year term. Dr. Keith Degenhardt, 1st Vice President at the Alberta Federation of Agriculture, was nominated by the CFA Board to sit on the committee for the three-year term.

The committee's mandate is to provide advice to the PBR Commissioner with respect to the effective application of the PBR intellectual property regime. The function of the advisory committee is to assist the Commissioner in the application of this Act, including:

a) the manner in which the Act is to be applied in respect of each product category;

b) the requirements applicable in respect of each category, including those requirements relating to licensing; and

c) the interpretation of the expressions "reasonable prices", "widely distributed" and "reasonable remuneration" for the purposes of compulsory licensing under the PBR Act.

Dr. Degenhardt has a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology and extensive experience in agricultural research and plant breeding via his works as Vice Chair of the Western Grains Research Foundation and chairmanship of their research committee.

For more information on CFA's involvement, or the role of the PBR Advisory Committee, please contact Scott Ross at [email protected].

Market Power Assurance Presentation

For information, Bob Friesen from Farmers of North America's Strategic Agriculture Institute provided an overview of a new accounts receivable insurance tool they have developed called 'Market Power Assurance', which provides transaction-specific insurance policies to producers and processors against non-payment. This unique tool can cover any Canadian farm product sale at 90% of the sales value on a transaction-to-transaction and buyer-to-buyer basis. Further information on this product is available at marketpowerassurance.ca .

Discussion on Sustainable Development Goals

Drew Black, CFA Director of Environment and Science Policy, was in New York City July 6 to 8 to participate in the High-Level Political Forum at the United Nations on behalf of the World Farmers' Organization. This meeting served as an opportunity to discuss implementation, review and follow-up of the Sustainable Development Goals . The Sustainable Development Goals will be adopted during the UN General Assembly this September and will require reporting and review of all countries, including Canada, on the 17 goals and more than 100 indicators.

If you would like more information on this meeting or the Sustainable Development Goals, please contact Drew Black at [email protected].

Seed Sector Roundtable

The Seed Sector Value Chain Roundtable (VCR) met in Ottawa on July 21 to discuss the future of the seed industry and scope out challenges for the roundtable to address in the short and medium term. This included a visioning exercise regarding what the seed sector will look like in 2025 and a lengthy discussion about regulatory modernization for the seed sector, what the potential scope could be, what industry's priorities would be, and the possibility of using incorporation by reference.

The one-day session also included a discussion on social license and whether the roundtable members felt the issue needed to be incorporated into the Seed Sector VCR strategic plan.

For more information on the discussions that took place at the Seed Sector VCR, please contact Drew Black at [email protected].

2015 Canadian Ag Hall of Fame Inductees

Five accomplished Canadians will join the prestigious Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame in 2015. Dr. Ron DePauw, the Hon. Grant Devine, the late E. Ward Jones, Anthony von Mandl and the late Ovila Lebel will be formally inducted into the national Hall of Fame at a ceremony on Sunday, November 22, 2015 in Regina, Saskatchewan.

The 2015 induction ceremony will be held in conjunction with the Canadian Western Agribition at The Hotel Saskatchewan Radisson in Regina. This will be the first time the ceremony has been held in Western Canada.

The Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame Association (CAHFA) honours and celebrates Canadians for outstanding contributions to the agriculture and food industry. Portraits are on display in the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame Gallery located at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. Information about this year's ceremony and inductees can be found at www.cahfa.com.

Photos - CFA Summer Board Meeting

Recognizing John MacDonald for his years of service as CFA representative to the Canadian 4-H Council. The gift presented was painted by CFA staff, Suzanne Lamirande.

Alvin Keenan, PEIFA, presenting an overview of agriculture on the Island.

The Honourable Alan McIsaac, Minister of Agriculture for PEI, addressing the CFA Board of Directors. Beside him, a familiar face - John Jamieson - former PEIFA Executive Director and newly appointed Deputy Minister of Agriculture, PEI.

The CFA hosted Industry/FPT Roundtable underway. Agriculture Ministers from every province and CFA's farm leaders discussing trust and transparency between the agriculture industry and consumers.

Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz addressing the Roundtable.

CFA Board member, David Hyink, presenting CFA's Social License Discussion paper at the Roundtable.

CFA members and Minister Ritz at reception following the Roundtable.

Delicious PEI potato martinis enjoyed at the reception.