Ontario Goat on the ropes

Sunday, October 28, 2012

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Ontario Goat’s days may be numbered if the organization doesn’t find new ways to fund itself. Executive director Jennifer Haley says an end to the organization is “a possibility, very much.”

She says “the board is already in the process of figuring out what resources do we have to carry on some of the things we do. We may not be able, in the new year, to continue to do some of things that we currently do today just because we don’t have the financial resources to support it.”

OG president Tobin Schlegel says OG will exist in a year, “the question is what form it takes.” He says the board is meeting with industry partners to see what to do next.

At a producer expression-of-opinion vote held in June producer support did not meet the threshold established by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission. A positive response to Ontario Goat’s proposal for marketing board status would have resulted in check-off funding from the sale of milk and the marketing of goats for meat. Haley says OG needs about $300,000 a year to maintain current programs. At production levels of 30 million litres of milk a year (projected at the time of the vote), the check-off of $0.0075 per litre would have netted about $225,000. The addition of $2.50 per meat goat marketed, at about 40,000 goats a year, would have added $100,000 in revenue.

“A ‘no vote’ doesn’t mean producers don’t want Ontario Goat,” Schlegel says. “What we’re hearing is it’s primarily a cost issue at this point.” He says the high cost of feed, hay and bedding has left some producers with negative margins. “The timing of the vote was a little unfortunate from that perspective.”

Haley says Ontario Goat is asking producers what it could have done differently with the proposal in terms of costs, benefits and services.

However, a second vote is a distant possibility. Haley says the Commission told them would take a “groundswell” of producer support for the commission to open the file again so soon.

“The commission is pretty clear . . . that if another proposal was to come back to the commission it needs to have an overwhelming amount of support from the industry,” Haley says. She also recalls that the former Ontario Goat Milk Producers’ Association tried 10 years ago to get goat producers organized and failed.

Haley says Ontario Goat – which represents dairy, meat and fibre producers  – gets positive feedback from goat producers all the time. “One thing we’ve heard from everybody,” she says, “is we don’t want to lose what Ontario Goat has built.” However, time is running out.

“From an organizational point of view,” Haley says, “our time lines are pretty short because our funding to have the organization and the partnership that we have with veal and rabbit is winding up at the end of the year.” Haley added they have transitional funding “that will probably take us the next six to nine months.”

Ontario Goat, Ontario Rabbit and Ontario Veal make up the Ontario Livestock Alliance. Each of the three is governed by its own producer-elected board of directors.

Goat and rabbit producers voted in June on the marketing board option but neither hit the threshold for a positive outcome. The commission required that 66.7 per cent of the total number of voters had to support the proposal and those in favour had to represent 50 per cent of the production for each proposal to pass. BF