PC Agriculture Critic Urges Min. McMeekin to Address Issues Relating to AgriStability

Jan 23, 2013

MPP Ernie Hardeman: There Is No Proper Appeal Process for AgriStability

Ontario PC Agriculture Critic Ernie Hardeman MPP (Oxford) wrote an open letter to Agriculture Minister Ted McMeekin expressing his concerns that farmers don’t have a proper appeal process if they disagree with decisions related to AgriStability. The open letter urges the minister to respond to his concerns, which he had expressed a month prior to his second letter.

Hardeman explains that there have been a number of complaints that he has received from farmers who felt that Agricrop had made an error in calculating AgriStability for their farm. Through this process, the farmer appealed to the Ontario AgriStability Review Committee (OARC) – which sided with the farmer. However, despite this ruling, Agricorp has ignored the decision made by the committee and has since refused to make changes to their original decision.

Hardeman asks Min. McMeekin to publicly report the number of cases that Agricrop has ignored, commit to review Agricrop’s decisions made on these cases, and also outline the steps he will take to make sure that farmers have a real appeal process that’s fair.

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.