Annual wheat meeting sidesteps eastern Ontario controversy

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

photo: David Whaley

by BETTER FARMING STAFF
 
After all the controversy this spring about producers in eastern Ontario seceding from the Ontario Wheat Producers Marketing Board, not a word was uttered at the annual meeting in Stratford Tuesday.

“We were prepared for it,” said chairman David Whaley, Essex County. Only one single resolution was on the floor (about the reaffirmation of its policy on genetically modified wheat), and Whaley says he expected a major discussion under the “new business” portion of the meeting “and nobody stepped forward.”

Controversial wheat board director John Vanderspank had already left the meeting. Earlier in the day, he said eastern Ontario farmers were busy combining their crop at home, and he left around 2 p.m. He said a custom operator was baling straw and he had to help him get bales off the field.

“What can you do? It’s dead. It’s the last meeting,” Vanderspank said.

Sometime this fall, the Ontario wheat board will be amalgamated with the marketing board representing soybean growers and the association representing corn producers to form Grain Farmers of Ontario. The date is “up to the minister” of agriculture, Leona Dombrowsky, Whaley says. “There is a lot of regulatory work to be done,” Whaley says.

The groups will go ahead, however, with a launch of the new organization’s brand in Guelph Sept. 1.

Vanderspank hopes the new organization will be more open than the old wheat board. He will not be one of the members of the transition team overseeing the amalgamation.

Vanderspank, who farms near Lanark, got into trouble with the wheat board when his comments were published in a local farm publication. The board said his comments were based on confidential discussions during board meetings. In May, the wheat board passed a non-confidence motion against Vanderspank and he was suspended from committee work.

An Aug. 10 email to Ontario Agriculture Minister Leona Dombrowsky, Whaley and other industry players signed by the district 10 producers asks for the district’s secession from the board, “effective immediately.”

It goes on to say “the checkoff fees will not be forwarded but may be held in trust in separate accounts by licenced elevators until such time as the new or old board can resolve these outstanding issues to the satisfaction of district 10 producers through a majority vote.”

Some eastern Ontario producers were upset because wheat board staff released producer information, before getting the board’s permission, to OnTrace Agri-food Traceability, a non-profit industry group that is developing a database to track food through the production chain. Eastern growers also complain that, as the only growers of hard spring wheat in the province, they are not served well by the marketing board.

District 10 represents Frontenac, Leeds, Lanark, Renfrew, Ottawa-Carleton, Grenville, Dundas, Stormont, Prescott, Glengarry, Russell and any other part of Ontario not included in the board’s other nine districts. BF