GFO's farm registration numbers holding
Monday, October 18, 2010
by BETTER FARMING STAFF
If farmers were upset by an increase in fees charged to join general farm organizations this year, they didn’t showing it by asking for their fees back, says the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s director of finance.
To Aug. 31, the organization’s year end, fees charged to belong to the province’s largest general farm organization rose in 2010, but the refund rate barely rose, says Lori Perkes.
Refunds on the membership were sent to 1,902 farmers who registered originally with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. That’s a refund rate of 4.96 per cent on the original 38,319 farmers who were signed up with the organization.
The refund rate a year ago was 4.71 per cent on 38,612 signed up members, with 1,819 requesting a refund.
The refund rate has been running at about five per cent for a number of years, Perkes told the OFA board on Thursday. Her conclusion: an expected “backlash” to a raised farm business registration fee “didn’t happen.”
The $150 fee charged to farmers was raised to $195 in January of this year. It’s the first increase since legislation establishing the farm business registration fee was passed in 1993. Farmers with gross incomes of $7,000 or more must register with Agricorp and pick one of three groups to receive their payment. After registering and paying the fee farmers can ask the farm group they selected for a refund.
Time of use’ didn’t impact hydro bill
Farmers shouldn’t blame time of use billing for higher hydro charges, says Ontario Federation of Agriculture researcher Ted Cowan, who made a presentation at a board meeting last week.
Cowan says almost no farms are currently on time of use billing. If a farm’s hydro bill went up by 20 per cent in the last year it’s for other reasons: new meters have been installed and are likely more accurate than the old ones; transmission and delivery costs rose nine per cent; HST added eight per cent to the bill.
High-priced green energy isn’t going to increase costs much either, according to Cowan. Even when all of the planned schemes go on line, there won’t be enough the percentage of power generated and paid for high prices won’t be enough to skew the price. A greater contributor to higher prices is power from Quebec, Manitoba and the United States imported to meet demand and paid for at high, spot market prices. It was a hot summer, increasing the demand for hydro power.
The new time of use billing isn’t going to affect grain drying costs much this fall, says Cowan.
Most dryer operators are “demand” customers and aren’t affected by time of use billing, he says. Farmers who dry corn for example, for 40 days over three months are going to get stuck with three big monthly demand charges. Each bill will be for $2-3,000. If drying can be squeezed into two months there will be only two demand bills.
Cowan says the best advice he can give farmers running their grain dryers this fall is to try to do their drying in two months instead of three to reduce the number of bills that will contain a demand charge, which he describes as “paying for the size of the pipe” used to deliver electricity when it is needed, rather than paying for the volume of electricity delivered. BF