NFO-199 (AV10701): A Look at Agriculture

[music] welcome to us farm report a public information program brought you in the interest of agriculture rural business and the well-being of our nation by members of the national farmers organization in this area and others interested in having agriculture received cost of production plus a reasonable profit the American farmers and ranchers are building a brighter future for agriculture through the national farmers organization the organization that awoke America and represents the leadership of Agriculture u.s. farm report features a look at agriculture with Walter Miller president of Ontario Farmers Union Ontario Canada O. L. Evans avocado growers bargaining Council of Tobruk California and Monsignor Webber of the National Catholic Rural life here now is Ed Shima farm reporters this is Ed Shima reporting for us forum report our today's program is entitled a look at agriculture we had three men on the program today from quite a cross-section of American agriculture and certainly quite a cross-section as far as geography is concerned in the map starting off we'll introduce real briefly the three men we have next to me is Monsignor Weber who is with the Atlantic rural life conference he is the executive secretary it was and the Catholic Rural life conference is headquartered at Des Moines Iowa sitting next to him is mr. Evans who is with the avocado growers bargaining Council at Fallbrook California and certainly California is quite a ways off for most of you viewers that are watching us farm report today then going on we have Walter Miller who is president of the Ontario Farmers Union who is clear on the other side of the continent almost for mr. Evans and I think at this point we will discuss with each of them just real briefly there general areas and situations and so on and we'll start off with Monsignor Weber and how you got involved in the Catholic rural life conference and what the Catholic rural life conference is and so on well to answer your first question first Ed I got involved by simple request from my bishop out in the Salina diocese in western Kansas by asking me to be rural life director for for the Salina diocese that was back in 1958 and then in 1960 I was requested to be executive secretary of the National Catholic Rural Life conference in Des Moines and so I've been working in that office ever since 1960 now the National Catholic Rural Life conference has as its general objective to try to improve the spiritual conditions the spiritual life and values of the people in the rural areas and rural communities and then also these social conditions and the economic conditions you know you can't separate the economic conditions from your social conditions or your spiritual conditions they all tie together in making a living man and when you try to separate the soul from the body well you know you're dead and we certainly don't want that that's right and going on to mr. Evans first of all I think mr. Evans we have two things we'd like to have you do here first of all is to explain just exactly what avocados are quite a few people I in this general area of the United States aren't too acquainted with them actually this is an avocado and an avocado is a fruit you might turn it a salad fruit grows on a tree compared to an apple tree or a pear tree you harvest it one problem we have with it it is a so-called green fruit and it must be harvested and ripened in the kitchen and it is ripe when you can touch it and it gently gives to the pressure then you cut it in half and peel it take out the large stone in the center and use it either on the half shell as a they term it with salad dressing in the or you can slice it and use it in a salad it is delicious with grapefruit many people use it that way so this is an avocado and what time the year do you harvest oh then this is an hour year crop we have several varieties there's two primary varieties this is a Fuerte which we turn the winter variety this would come into production about the 1st of October stay on the tree until roughly the end of April then we have the summer variety called a Hass that is somewhat different in color than this many people call it a black avocado but it's in principle is the same now how did you get involved in the avocado growing in California well I got tired of having to close neighbors so I wanted to go out where I could have a little room around myself and hear the coyotes howl so I moved to Fallbrook California and I understand you were in business in Los Angeles before you before we went into and then the California avocado growers set up an association to do to do a better job of marketing the avocados yes we were most fortunate and having a fellow by the name of Homer Smothers whom many of you may know he was with the University at Ames Iowa and he was acquainted with the NFO until mr. smothers came to Fallbrook about two years ago none of us in Fallbrook had heard about the NFO so through mr. smothers understanding of how the NFO operates he was able to get some growers together and organize the avocado growers bargaining council and we'll go on to Walter Miller from Canada though I guess I don't know if your farther away from the Middle West hanmr. Evans is there now but I suppose you are both about the same distance probably and off the directions why don't you explain just real briefly Walter your farming operation in Canada and what you do do in your area of Ontario and so on yeah so we have a wide variety of farming carried on in Canada we grow everything from cereal grains livestock vegetables tobacco etc dependent because of the tremendous variety of climate that we have mind you Canada also extends all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific from the 49th parallel to the Arctic and so we've got pretty near all the varieties that there are going my own particular operation is a beef cattle operation and a stocker cattle operation it's not maybe as large as some that we'll find out here I know it isn't but then of course it's been geared and organized in such a way over the years which would enable me to devote a great deal of my time to organization I've been in the farmer the farm movement now for close to 20 years ever since it started and any farm organization man that is traveling the continent and devoting his energies and time to this kind of work I don't care where he's from he can't manage his farm operation with the same skill that he could if he was at home I imagine quite a few of the viewers that have helped the national farmers organization and organizing in United States here quite aware of what you're saying and the problems they're involved in the fact that you do have to make a lot of sacrifices in order to help out your fellow man in terms of empowering the farm situation yeah I think there's one point that I would like to make and that is that we in the farmers union in Canada are very comparable to the national farmers organization in the States that is to say we are not in business we do not own facilities we are bargaining on behalf of our members and in this regards there can be some confusion developed as we go from one side of the border to the other I think this is a point that I'd like to make ed because we're in the process now in Canada as a matter of fact in our convention recently we were given a green light to go ahead and integrate our organization into a national structure comparable to the national farmers organization because we recognize that with the changing nature of business today on the whole North American continent that no group can effectively bargain in in isolation that they have got to reach out and be able to meet the people at the marketplace operating on the same basis as the industrial sector with whom we must deal I understand it as far as your area is concerned you've had problem with feed grains and so on and trying to do very much about it because of this stuff well international situation oh yes we have a 49th parallel up here you knowthe divides Canada in the United States and it's been a very handy tool for to keep the farmers divided and thus pitting them one against the other but the corporation's didn't let it stop them they they formed their subsidiaries on both sides of the border are able to move goods back and forth across the border and and thus manipulate supply and demand to their advantage and we have a situation now for example we've just had a were engaged in a continual battle I should say on corn and American corn is shipped up to the north of the 49th parallel fed to steers and the meat is shipped back down here which I'm told forces your beef prices down and we have a similar situation I understand where potatoes are growing in the Maritimes and sent down into mean and have a depressing effect on the price and this is simply a question that the farmers I think on a whole continent have got to realize that they are not different fundamentally different that they're basically the same they're being exploited by the same people and for this reason I think we have to think in terms of bargaining on a much broader scale than we have ever dared to imagine before could I throw in a comment here on this point Monsignor Lagoni as you know was in the National Catholic for a life conference for many years and he's over in Rome now representing the FAO it well for the Vatican and he made this statement here several years ago and he said the problems of the world and he does a lot of traveling around the world he said the problems of the world are the problems of the land and the pea on the land and he said the problems of the people on the land is production and price for their production he said that holds true around the whole world their production and price for their production well I would have to agree with this I haven't travelled around the whole world although I've traveled quite a bit of it and I can honestly say there are not many problems in Canadian agriculture today that better prices wouldn't cure we find this true in agriculture here also could I ask are we being someone used the term exploited are we being exploited because we do not have any contract for our product we have no price for it well this now this I'm sure it's been a quite a problem in our major problem well we had proved that in one easy lesson one summer by getting a contract for our avocados why don't you go into some details on this and how you went about it and your successes and problems and so on I'm sure mr. Evans and the listeners in the audience that are watching us farm report would be interested in what the avocado growers have done in California and how they've done it and so well we organized the avocado growers bargaining council and through the membership we were able to go to a handler or a processor and get a contract with him that he would guarantee us a floor price of 25 cents per pound by doing that what was the regular what was the price what's your normal price that's a very good word normal because there is no normal price for an avocado that's whatever the handler wants to give to grower when he takes the avocado down to the handler so by establishing the floor price of 25 cents per pound with the one handler naturally the other handlers had to come in in order to get a product to sell to their candidates and it was rather interesting because when we got this contract his floor price at 25 cents per pound we seemed to have the handlers competing with each other to get the avocado so that meant the one handler was saying I will give you 26 cents another said I will give you 27 cents and by having this floor prior of 25 cents per pound we were able to finally end up the season with avocados selling for 40 cents per pound I think that's quite an accomplishment yes but when you when you were selling these at 8 cents were they selling correspondingly that much less in the stores to the public the answer is no they were still selling four for a dollar four for a dollar regardless to what you get they tell about that backorder and then if avocado is selling for 25 cents per pound for the grower that means that actually an avocado that is selling for 25 cents is bringing 50 cents per pound because an avocado never coddled this size will weigh approximately 8 ounces very so if we get 25 cents for two of these and one of these sells for 25 cents that means that they in other words if they're marketing they're they're making as much off of it if you are for all of the production that's involved that's correct they're making a hundred percent and we did it all with contract going on then to the avocado growers what sort of system did you use in in setting up this 25 cent for price how did you go about establishing we had a meeting of the members of the avocado Council and agreed on what price we want to propound for the avocado the price agreed upon is 25 cents so we turned that our floor price and then at that point the avocado buyer didn't want to pay that at that right they more or less hazed and hemmed around but they're not going out of business they have to have something to sell are your sales maintaining their regular volume after your price after you've raised your price do you sell as many as you did before I would say that we sold more because the chain store who is buying the avocado knew what he had to pay for pound to get that avocado therefore he in turn could price the product in other words he had a more stable price and able to run it on that's right he could take on more avocados and sell more for us because he knew what price he had to pay for them and what price he could get for them in the market going on back to Walter what have you done at this point as far as the Canadian Farmers Union is concerned to try to tie together farmers in terms of doing something for the Canadian farmers in terms of getting a better price well we have been as I said operating under what we consider to be somewhat of an obsolete system in that we are organized provincially by provincial organizations and we have been endeavoring to fight through this and and in spite of this weakness still do something now over the last two or three years we have been very successful concentrating on one commodity at a time and a couple of years ago or two or three years ago I should say we concentrated on milk and our industrial milk for example was selling at that time at around two dollars and sixty-five cents a hundred you may have read in the papers you know or a bunch of our farmers become very unconventional and after desperate attempts to move the government in the country and and with no results at all decided to take their tractors out of the highway and and rouse public opinion the general public wouldn't listen to a normal broadcast you know they said sure we sympathize with you're too bad fellas good luck and that was the end of it but but I have a parade well they the farmers took their tractors out and maintained a rolling picket line for several weeks and as the general public were hanging for their cottages and we're heading for their summer resorts and got slowed down for a few hours all of a sudden that struck them that maybe this was their problem and that they had some concern and with thousands of farmers doing this you can imagine what happened well the government then was put under tremendous pressure by public opinion with the result they reversed the decision they had made earlier and we established a pipeline of communication with government that we hadn't had prior to this and in those two years or a little over two years we have raised the price of industrial milk to the farmer from two dollars and sixty five cents a hundredweight to four dollars and seventy five cents a hundredweight and we're anticipating another raise this year and we don't get her there could be trouble because our costs are there and our farmers have been studying somewhat of what their costs are and when they see everybody else getting a big increase for example like our banks got in Canada this year a 50% increase net and a farmer sitting there taking a little less or nothing at all they they reach a point then where they decide that if ours is to be a country where people are equal then some shouldn't be more equal than others could I get back to this contract this price for our crop last year mm-hmm now this year as I pointed out the winter variety comes on about the 1st of October we do not have any contracts with the handlers as a result you've seen the price of avocados go from at the beginning of the season when they're Rather's few to market from 47 cents a pound down to 10 cents a pound and what I might ask why weren't you able to to maintain the contract it's a contact that should be renewed and must be renewed every year and they refuse to renew it this year the council is in the process of negotiating with them at the present time I think an interesting thing along this line is that several years ago Monsignor Webber you may remember Dr. [unclear] he had some counsel for the NFO and for farmers in terms of bargaining and getting better prices and so on and he was primarily a historian and he looked into the past history of other organizations and what they had done in there and their successes and failures and why and so on and one thing that he was quite at evident to him that he had told us at that time was that it was not the first success that was a problem it was the second one getting that in other words the second contract or the second year you might sort of slip up on this person you're dealing with the process or whoever it might be the first time but the second time he was going to be really organized enough to fight you with all he had and the second go-around was going to be your real problem and I suppose maybe this is my be evident in your situation there also I think we're gonna regroup your forces to combat the extra effort the opposition is making to you there well we are regrouping the forces in this way that was in the last year we have increased our membership by over a hundred percent and I think that is all of can can be contributed to the fact that we had a contract last year in other words what this points out is what farmers can do if they put their heart to it and if they have an interest in what they're growing yes well I think what you point out here Ed is that the need for farm leaders to maintain flexibility so that can change their strategy because once you have let's face it we're an economic war and if we're going to be nice guys we're going to come out second-best nice guys just don't win ballgames in this continent and when we talk about collective bargaining and we talk about farmers putting a price in their product we should recognize that that is a responsibility or an opportunity or a privilege enjoyed by the industrial sector today and what we're really talking about is transferring from the industrial sector to the farmer the power to set his price and if any one of us was sitting in the corporation president's chair and somebody tried to take that part away from us we'd fight back and if they succeeded in the first round we try to plan our strategy so as to stop 'em the second time and I think farm organizations have got to be flexible enough to be prepared for this too to project themselves into that president's chair and try to anticipate the next move and and we've got the power there's no question that the production of the North American continent is so fantastic there isn't a corporation in business today that can hold a candle for us it's just a question of putting it together and I sometimes tell the Canadian farmers we looked all over the world for the solution to the farm problem and we found it with the road gate all we gotta do is close it and say that's it boys the product is here you can have her as soon as you're ready to pay the price there's that amazing well we can see when we open our eyes but there's one other point I like to go back if I may Ed you ask the question I don't to leave the interpreter the suggestion with the public but all we talk about is milk because this is one area that we've worked on but there's another area that we're working on now which I think the American public will find interesting and that is our corn we've we've just within the past year we've embarked on a program a real collective bargaining for our corn and we find that the reason that our price is driven down is not because of supply and demand because we have a shortage of corn we have to import corn but the price is still going down and it's going down because of the availability of your reserve supplies here are being used to manipulate the prices so we have in the last year our farmers have been signing contracts legal contracts literally signing that corn over to us to bargain on their behalf and we find of course that there is a problem here as long as it's available and I hope that we can be successful in persuading the and I don't anticipate any problem the the American farmers collectively to bargain to think in terms of bargaining on an international basis that I think if we can tie this corn on both sides of the border and the people look well that have to have it then have to bargain with us I think the National Farmers Organization found out years ago that in order to bargain successfully you had to be over a large area and at that time they were thinking in terms of well you'd need all of the states in the United States or the country and other works pretty well organized to be successful and I suppose what we're finding out now that you need to go continental in other words and and have the whole continent working together on this I think Monsignor Weber that job that well they raised a question here that is of quite a lot of concern to a lot of people I know you hear farmers talk about this yes it's fine for businesspeople corporations and so on to set a price on their product and hold it for that price as every businessman in town does he holds for that price but it's morally wrong and it's wrong for farmers to do this they shouldn't do this it's morally wrong for them to do it is a person that's involved in church affairs and closely associated with what a person a Christian person should be doing and thinking and so on what's your answer to this problem or question my answer would be that it goes back to the principle of justice and so we look at the farmer and he has the expenses of producing his investment his labor and so on and he is entitled to a fair return on what he has there vested and the labor he puts in and so the principle of justice so the farmer is entitled to a fair return on all that and if he isn't getting justice other words a fair return a fair price well then he not only has a right to get that justice but he has a duty to go out and seek it and that's where his organization with the other with his fellow farmers it's very important and vital that he goes out seeks a just price and very he produces and in doing this then there's nothing morally wrong with the farmer operating just as any business manager he has a duty to operate on a basis where he can support himself and his family as far as the Catholic rural life conference is concerned I know that you've studied the farm situation for a long time and they're quite acquainted with it and so on and as far as the farmers that are in the audience today watching us farm report what would be some of your suggestions and recommendations that they should do in terms of improving their economic and social life and so on well I think the first thing you have to do is to change some attitudes and one of the basic changes that is required is that we have to work together God made us that way you know we didn't just come from nowhere we came from somebody else depending on somebody else and so the same way throughout our whole life we're always dependent on somebody else and even if you drop dead right here and now well you're you'd be a stinking mess after a while nobody else came along a big gift and gave you a nice funeral and so we are we are depending on somebody else and so in our social attitudes we have to change those and apply them in working with each other and solving our problems and that's the only way that we can solve them I think that would be the greatest achievement that they can do now is to get these attitudes change that working together and cooperating on a really open-minded basis the this is true I think also going now we're you're with the Catholic rural life conference of course and as we know you've been not only you as the priests but the Catholic were like conference has been vitally interested in American not in rural America and I think we find that quite a few of the other church groups are quite concerned too I know the dr. Mueller with the Lutheran Church of the Imperial is concerned and dr. Henry McKenna of the national National Council of Churches and Louis Newman with a Southern Baptist Church there's a number of them and we we work together on many different phases and certainly appreciate this work in I think in trying to bring this about to get people to understand that there are moral obligations imply that they have to work with the other people living around them and work together make a better world then as part of the other church groups are concerned they basically I guess you might say they're all actively working towards improving the social and economic situation on the farm and certainly in doing this it's going to improve the toast and economic situation all the country mr. Evans you mentioned earlier in the program that you moved away from LA I believe because of the I mean because of that word mean smog smog is that it has a problem and that is sort of another problem we're going to have to face is involve air pollution and in doing this of course as far as the city problem is concerned if you if we improve the farm problem they're certainly going to help the city problem as far as the ghettos and so on that we have that's very true because I moved out because I wanted some space around me so that left more or less a deserted study fortunately I could move out there those that cap move out and I think because of that we are getting our urban problem that he felt them our time is drawing to a close today and on today's program we've had Monsignor Weber with the hoods executive secretary of the National Catholic rural life conference we appreciate you being with us today Monsignor Weber and mr. Evans with the avocados growers bargain council a Fallbrook California which is in Southern California incidentally and also Walter Miller who is president of the Ontario Farmers Union we appreciate you three people actually from across the country and in almost different walks of life but yet we but yet we appreciate you people being on today's u.s. farm report to help us in this area to understand better some of the problems of the North American continent thank you us farm report has presented a look at agriculture with special guests Walter Miller president of Ontario Farmers Union and O.L. Evans of the avocado growers bargaining Council of Tobruk California and Monsignor Webber of the National Catholic rural life comforts members of the National Farmers Organization invite you to tune in again next week at the same time for more facts on agriculture and rural America which is a gear wheel in our economy that produces the majority of our nation's new wealth the farm income pattern since the nation's prosperity and the national farmers organization represents new thinking for a new generation of agricultural producers a brighter day for American agriculture