Coping with the growing burden of farm inspections
Monday, March 7, 2016
These days, government and industry-related inspections can take as much as a month of a farmer's time. But they are here to stay and, say some producers, focusing on the benefits can help ease the frustration
by SUSAN MANN and MARY BAXTER
In his 40 years of farming, Norfolk County apple and lavender grower Harold Schooley has seen the number of inspections on his farm operation skyrocket.
Some inspections are connected to the 50 acres of apples that he and his wife, Jan, grow and to the offshore seasonal workers they employ to pick them. Others relate to the vehicles used to truck the apples, the pesticides that protect the crops or the fires periodically needed to burn apple tree bush.
The number of inspections is rising, too, on the 2,000-acre cash crop operation of Jim and Judy Gowland north of Teeswater, Bruce County. Each year, they can expect to deal with seven inspections and, over a five-year period, they dealt with at least five other ad hoc ones.
Those numbers don't include on-road inspections of farm trucks or the six inspections during this year's construction of an equipment shed, among them a site visit from engineers to gather details for a mandatory engineering report, several visits by the local building inspector to review construction at different stages and a surprise call by a Municipal Property Assessment Corporation assessor.
Inspections, such as crop inspection, farm business registration or income tax filing, require self-reporting that might only result in a second or third party inspection if a question arises. Others can involve days of preparation, hours to execute and even more time to address follow-up actions.
For example, it took the Gowlands nearly a week to prepare for and undergo their first Round Table for Responsible Soy international certification audit last year. (Crop productions, labour codes, health and safety as well as social well being in the community are some of the areas the certification evaluates.) Indeed, the couple estimates that they spend the equivalent of one full month a year in dealing with all of the inspections and related activities.
That farmers are encountering more inspections on the farm and on the road comes as no surprise to Mandy D'Autremont, senior policy analyst with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which represents the interests of small business.
"We are definitely seeing a difference between agriculture and other sectors," she says. Along with dealing with the agencies all businesses must work with, such as the Canada Revenue Agency, "farmers have to deal with an additional alphabet soup of regulations," she notes. These include land use restrictions and bylaws, product labelling, traceability and animal age verification requirements, and regulations implemented by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency or the Canada Border Services Agency if they're transporting products outside the country.
Having to accommodate so many different assessments is affecting business. Results of a red tape survey that the federation released in January indicated 63 per cent of agribusiness owners say they experience delays caused by regulations compared to 56 per cent for all sectors.
Schooley, who spent five years as an auditor for the horticultural industry's CanadaGAP food safety program, says he knows of older farmers who decided to quit because they didn't understand the need for the food safety inspections, and vegetable growers who switched to corn and soybean production to avoid dealing with all the paperwork.
He, too, initially questioned the need for so many food safety inspections on the farm where his family has grown food for more than a century. The CanadaGAP audit takes five hours to complete, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Farmers must keep year-round records of a multitude of items – for example, where plants and fertilizers are sourced, the spray program, water tests, equipment and washroom cleaning, equipment calibration and storage documents.
Schooley attributes the rise in the number of inspections to food travelling greater distances than in the past and an increase in the number of people involved all along the production chain. With all of that movement, when a food safety problem materializes, it can affect a large geographic area. "It's a big problem," he says.
Continuous record-keeping
Government regulation is behind the majority of inspections, but industry is increasingly playing a role.
At Clearview Poultry Farms in Clearview Township, Simcoe, continuous record-keeping to satisfy an annual audit is all part and parcel of participating in the Chicken Farmers of Canada's mandatory on-farm food safety assurance and animal care program. Ted and Laurie van den Hurk and their son, Alex, own the 200-acre farm that produces 200,000 broiler chickens annually.
"We spend quite a bit of time keeping track" of barn and bird conditions, says Ted van den Hurk. Preparation for the audit not only involves paperwork. Water must be sampled annually and there are a pile of extra jobs on the farm since the program was rolled out in 1998, such as washing the outside of the barn and barn floors at least once a year.
They've had to make improvements, too, such as adding second feed tanks in each barn to separate medicated from non-medicated feed and introducing safety handrails around load-out platforms and by their steps.
At Mountainoak Farm and Mountainoak Cheese Ltd. in New Hamburg, owners Adam and Hannie van Bergeijk, their son, Arjo, and his wife, Baukje, not only must undergo inspections related to several different food production and processing regulations and the dairy industry's Canadian Quality Milk on-farm food safety program, but also an annual inspection of their cheese plant by retailer Loblaw. The Loblaw inspection might not be mandatory in the legal sense, but it is a condition of supplying the company's grocery brand stores.
Undergoing second or third party inspections for the sake of establishing a marketing edge somewhere along the supply chain is rapidly becoming the norm for producers. Gowland uses the example of identity-preserved soybean production audits. "Our buyer and subsequently their end users or processors, they may not come on farm every year, but typically the buyer, contractor, processor will come to the farm and do random inspections and stuff like that – if not complete inspections," he says. Sometimes these inspections start out as voluntary, such as the CanadaGAP, only to be made a condition of sale by retailers. Then even more conditions are added, generating more scrutiny of farm practices. "It hasn't happened to me, but I know of growers around here who have a Costco addendum on top of the CanadaGAP, which is a separate audit," says Schooley.
These inspections can also cost money. For instance, Lawrence Andres, who owns certified organic dairy farm Anbros Farms Inc. near Kincardine in Bruce County and the fluid milk and cream processor Harmony Organic Dairy Products Inc., says his organic certification costs $1,800 a year. Money also becomes a factor if you have to do significant upgrades to comply with programs, Andres notes, although he points out that time spent keeping records is by far the main challenge of inspections.
Adding to the difficulty, he says, is that many of the inspections can't be streamlined because different agencies require them. Those agencies are also being audited by whatever department oversees them.
Inspections here to stay
While supply-managed farmers can offset some of the time and money spent in relation to crop-related inspections and certifications, most Ontario farmers operate outside supply management and, like Schooley and Gowland, must absorb the costs themselves.
There are plenty of other reasons why farmers are frustrated with the growth in on-farm inspections. Yet there's a growing acceptance in Ontario's farm community that on-farm inspections are here to stay. The task at hand, then, becomes how best to tackle them.
For instance, Mike Whittamore, who owns a mixed farm and retail operation with his brother, Frank, near Markham, focuses on maintaining a good working relationship with the agencies who send inspectors.
When inspectors come to their farm, Whittamore says they make the time to meet with them and "we try to be as open and transparent as we can. We take their constructive criticisms and try to make our place safer or whatever they're looking for." There's no sense in being obstructive. "If you obstruct their work, they can make your life miserable," he says.
When a problem is detected, fix it – and make sure you have the proof that it's been corrected, say others.
If inspectors find any problems with food safety or handling procedures in dairy or cheese production, those matters must be addressed right away, Bergeijk says. Inspectors return to the farm to ensure that the changes they wanted are done, he explains.
Sometimes, notes Andres, inspectors might not be knowledgeable and can be very nosey and invasive. So make sure you know what the boundaries are for what they can and cannot inspect. For example, they're not supposed to open drawers and poke around in the farm's private areas.
To keep a positive attitude, recognize and quantify the payoffs, most of those interviewed advised. Andres recalls a recent inspection by his insurance company that included the use of a heat-sensitive camera to check for faults in electrical breaker panels. If the inspection generates a lower risk assessment of his operation, he gets a better rate.
Gowland adds that, even though inspections such as those for Round Table for Responsible Soy certification might take time, "at the end of the day, it represents maintaining in our operation tens of thousands of dollars of premium, so there's some value to us doing that."
He acknowledges that some other inspections "are just really negative" and don't appear to offer a lot of benefit. Nevertheless, there's a silver lining even in these if they help to strengthen the financial and administrative sides of an operation.
"We accept the fact that we are not just farmers, we are a farm business," he says. "I know that a lot of farmers say ‘why do we have to bother doing paperwork, I'm a farmer.' No, you're a business person. You need to adhere to the business discipline that is required to run a business."
Van den Hurk recommends voicing practical concerns regarding industry-related inspections to your commodity organization. He points out Chicken Farmers of Canada has been receptive to farmers' concerns about unworkable procedures in the food safety program and has removed these over the years.
Producer feedback needed
Don McCabe, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, says it's important to hear from producers on the issue. The federation is concerned about the number of inspections that are out there, "especially if they're duplicates," he says. What's needed is more information drawn directly from farmers "about what regulation it is they're running into." The specifics can help the organization tackle the problem, he explains.
Of course, there's plenty governments can do, too. McCabe notes that, over the past five years, the federation has been part of the Ontario government's Open for Business project aimed at trimming away unnecessary regulations. The meetings were held more frequently at the beginning, but now "the number of meetings has dropped off," he says.
It's good that there's a process in place, he says, but "the process needs to be in continuous improvement because we need to illustrate that we are removing barriers to business in this province."
Al Mussell, owner of the independent economic research organization Agri-Food Economic Systems, says technology now offers agencies enforcing regulations many options to streamline the process, such as using formats that would allow a farmer to complete a form once and add periodic updates, or programs that can digitally aggregate already-existing information.
D'Autremont suggests that what's needed ultimately is for government officials to become more aware about the realities of day-to-day farming. "They're implementing regulations without that understanding," she says.
But maybe the answer to reducing the amount of on-farm inspections lies in a change in location and commodity. Take the enviable situation of Jeff Pollard, a cow-calf operator in Morley Township near Stratton in the Rainy River District.
Ask Pollard to name one annual inspection his operation must undergo and he's stumped.
Stratton, he explains, is one of the last municipalities in Canada that doesn't require building permits.
"When you build a garage, you just build it," Pollard says. "We get no permits, no nothing – unless it affects the environment, like a septic field."
He can't think of any inspections his animals must undergo.
He does have to do some reporting for his crop insurance so, if there are production problems, he can expect a visit from his Agricorp representative.
Last year, though, he had unseeded acres, which meant automatic qualification under Agricorp's unseeded acreage benefit program. No inspection, just a report. And completing that, he says, only took a few minutes.
With the idea of food traceability now well entrenched and an industry-wide farm sustainability plan in the works, Pollard knows, however, that sooner or later his nearly regulatory-free bubble will break and more inspections will be headed his way. BF
The high cost of CFIA red tape
by SUSAN MANN
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business recently took a closer look at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after its farmer members identified the agency as generating the most red tape. The federation found that compliance is costing farmers $20,396 and 28 days of work annually.
"The total cost for the whole agricultural sector in Canada is $657 million a year (to comply with agency regulations)," says Mandy D'Autremont, senior policy analyst for the federation. It released the report in 2014.
The federation used an online survey conducted between October 2012 and February 2013 to gather its information. Of the 583 people completing it, 73 per cent (402 respondents) indicated that they deal with the CFIA, D'Autremont says.
CFIA spokesman Denis Schryburt said by email in early October that the agency accepts the federation's findings and work is already underway to address the concerns.
"We continuously look for ways to reduce the red tape burden and improve service delivery to regulated parties" while maintaining the highest food safety standards, he writes.
In its report, the federation uncovered an interesting anomaly: inspectors received more favourable ratings from survey respondents than the "CFIA as an agency," D'Autremont says. She attributes this partly to farmers building a rapport with inspectors as they interact with them.
However, there is still a need for improvement in inspectors' work, particularly in their knowledge of regulations and their consistency of rulings. "The consistency of rulings is where a lot of farmers are having issues with inspectors," she says.
Agency spokesperson Tammy Jarbeau says by email that inspections linked directly to verification or compliance with regulatory requirements are mandatory, as are ones needed to meet export market requirements. Other inspections are voluntary, such as seed crop inspections when farmers want to get certification of the seed they produce.
Private companies accredited by CFIA do some of the seed crop inspections. The agency may do "a check inspection to verify that the private inspector did the inspection properly," she says.
The agency spokespeople note that, during the inspection, the farmer must supply items requested by the inspector, such as the element being inspected and records.
Inspection length, the number of inspectors involved and the frequency of inspection depend on variables such as the size of the farm and crops, number of animals and the condition of records and supporting documents. BF
By the numbers
Of the total number of 54 different types of requirements the seven farmers above listed, 74.1 per cent were for the purpose of determining regulatory compliance, indicating farmers could expect government regulation to be behind nearly three quarters of the inspections that take place on their farms or in connection with their farm business.
Of the 54 types, roughly 24 are specific to farm or food-specific regulations; that's 44 per cent. BF
"You have to basically write down everything you do." – Lawrence Andres, organic dairy farmer and owner of Harmony Organic Dairy Products Inc., Bruce County (near Kincardine)
Number of inspections listed: 6
"I understand consumers are asking for that (more inspections) and I'm okay with that, but product coming over the border should comply with the same rules and regulations."
– Adam van Bergeijk, dairy producer and cheese maker, New Hamburg, Region of Waterloo
Number of inspections listed: 7
"It's a part of our business operation that has to be done."
– Jim Gowland, cash and seed crops grower, municipality of South Bruce.
Number of inspections listed: 27
"There are a lot of programs, but unless you get an audit type, you don't get inspected."
– Jeff Pollard, cow calf producer, Morley Township, Rainy River District.
Number of inspections listed: 1
"We're starting to get talk about sustainable farming. That gets a little scary because people are beginning to blame farmers for birds disappearing and things like that."
– Harold Schooley, apple and lavender grower, Norfolk County.
Number of inspections listed: 9
"Clearview Township understands that it's a farming community and its regulations pass much more quickly than for building a house in one of the towns in the township."
– Ted van den Hurk, broiler chicken producer, Clearview Township, Simcoe County.
Number of inspections listed: 7
The inspections and recordkeeping required in farming "take up a lot of time. But it is a reality and we just have to live with it."
– Mike Whittamore, pick-your-own, market garden, on-farm market, bakery and Fun Farm Yard, York Region (near Markham).
Number of inspections listed: 13