Farmers should expect to see their ballots in the mail starting this week as they prepare for a historic — and possibly fruitless — vote on the future of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB).
Board chair Allen Oberg announced in late June that the board would hold a plebiscite on single-desk marketing this summer, one that would cover both wheat and barley. The single-desk system requires all Western Canadian farmers to sell their wheat and barley through the board so it can market the grain as a pool. The board does not deal with feed grains or grains grown elsewhere in Canada.
Ballots were mailed out this week, Oberg said in an interview, and should arrive at local farms around July 22. Anyone who is 18 or older and has grown wheat or barley during the last five years is eligible to vote. Anyone who shipped grain to the board in the last five years will automatically get a ballot.
The ballot question is simple, Oberg said, and asks voters to choose the single-desk or an open market for wheat and/or barley. “This is an opportunity for farmers to express their views and opinions on the future of the board.”
The ballot will have one question if you grow just wheat or barley and two if you grow both.
The vote could be a moot point, he acknowledged, as the federal government has said it would introduce legislation this year to end the single-desk no matter what steps the board takes. The government has made several attempts to get rid of the single-desk before, and has said that its recent majority government justifies this step.
But board polls show that about 75 per cent of farmers say they, not the government, should have the final say on the single-desk. “This will be the clearest expression of all of what farmers think,” Oberg said, and the government should respect the results of this vote. “If farmers are first in this debate, [the minister] should respect what they want.”
This vote will give board supporters a chance to send a message to the government, said Terry Bokenfohr, who farms wheat and canola near Morinville. “The government seems to be setting a fairly hard line on the existence of the board,” he said. “If they wish to go to a voluntary board, there has to be negotiations on both sides.”
Ballots are due Aug. 24. Results will be announced in early September. For details, call 1-877-780-8683 or visit www.cwbvote.ca.
It’s a mud-bog out there, say local farmers, and that has agronomists worried about a surge in crop disease.
Frequent thunderstorms over the last 30 days have drenched Sturgeon County with about 100 to 160 millimetres of rain, according to Alberta Agriculture, or about 120 to 200 per cent of what it would normally get.
That’s turned many fields into mud, Bokenfohr said, making it tough to spray fields, harvest hay or even get last year’s crop out of the silo. “With all the rain we’re having, crop disease is going to be very severe this year.”
Roger Barron, an agronomist with Sturgeon Valley Fertilizer, estimated that about 10 per cent of the county’s fields were too soaked to plant. “There’s water everywhere.”
The whole province is saturated with moisture and humidity, said Harry Brook, crop specialist with Alberta Agriculture, and many farmers are running super-tight crop rotations. “It’s kind of like a perfect storm for disease to develop.”
The big concern around here is sclerotinia, Brook said, which is a white-gray fungus that rots the stems of canola, causing them to topple over and ripen prematurely. “It’s a disease you see no sign of until it’s too late to spray.”
If you have canola, in other words, you should probably go out and spray it with fungicide right now. The problem with spraying at this point is that the rain is likely to wash off the chemicals, Bokenfohr said. “We haven’t been able to even get into the fields,” he said. “There’s nothing you can really do.”
Farmers should scout their fields at least once a week for these and other diseases, Brook said.
