Ontario Berry Growers Association pushes ahead with berry marketing board plan

Thursday, November 5, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

After taking a hiatus to deal with farm work and concerns raised from a small group of growers, the Ontario Berry Growers Association is back on track to finalizing plans for a berry marketing board in the province.

“We’re hoping to get a proposal into the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission ideally before Christmas,” says association executive director Kevin Schooley. He says the association’s board took the summer off from working on the proposal so they could do their farm work.

In addition, there is a small group of growers that has concerns about the proposal calling for major changes to fees collected from growers. Currently those fees of $150 annually are voluntary. Under the new proposal, all growers with more than two acres of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries would pay licence fees.

Schooley outlined an initial proposal on what the licence fees would be in a March 20 BetterFarming.com story. The new fee proposal would be different than what Schooley previously outlined. But he says he can’t provide specific details yet because the farm products marketing commission has to review and approve the proposal first before details are made public.

The loose-knit association called the Ontario Highbush Blueberry Growers Association has expressed concerns about the original proposal and is providing input to the Berry Growers Association board.

“We’ve been working with them (the Ontario Highbush Blueberry Growers) and they have been participating in our meetings,” Schooley says. “We just met on Tuesday and we’re going to update our proposal and make the changes that have been agreed upon.”

Some of the changes to the initial proposal include “governance and how that would be put together and then the licence fees is always very important,” Schooley says. “We have two or three different ideas for licence fees. We think after this week’s meeting we have come to an agreement to go with one of them.”

The Berry Growers Association wants to establish a marketing board so it can get a stable and reliable source of funding to pay for research, marketing and promotional projects. And “to be one voice for Ontario berry growers,” Schooley notes. The berry marketing board, if it were established, would not set prices or regulate growers’ production levels.

If a producer vote were held on the proposal, it would be the Ontario farm products marketing commission that would organize and conduct the vote. The vote would only be held “if the commission is supportive of the proposal,” Schooley explains, noting that before there’s a vote, there has to be an education campaign to inform growers of the proposal. BF