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: Plot Day

Border View Farms is a mid-sized family farm that sits on the Ohio-Michigan border. My name is Nathan. I make and edit all of the videos posted here. I farm with my dad, Mark and uncle, Phil. We also have a part-time employee, Brock. My dad started the farm in 1980. Since then we have grown the operation from just a couple hundred acres to over 3,000. Watch my 500th video for a history of our farm I filmed with my dad.

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