Council hoping to breathe new life into agriculture

The Next Generation Advisory Council is hoping to breathe new life into agriculture across the province.

The council's mandate was recently extended until November 2015 by the provincial government, allowing it some time to work on objectives it outlined in a report on how to expand the number of new people in agriculture across the province.

The report made a series of recommendations on how to expand new entrants to the industry, including enabling access to the industry and its resources, developing leadership among the new entrants and developing one voice for agriculture across the province.

Nathan Ryan, who owns and operates the Fallentimber Meadery with his family, is one of the 10 members of the council who helped identify the recommendations.

“We were a group comprised of a lot of diversity within the agricultural industry, and I think that is where the challenges were,” said Ryan.

The Fallentimber Meadery is located northwest of Cremona on Twp. Rd. 302.

The council's role was not to solve any of the issues they identified – at least not at this stage – but rather just identify some of the challenges facing newcomers to the industry, he said.

While the council identified ensuring that newcomers have leadership opportunities within the industry as one of the recommendations, the council didn't specify how that might be accomplished, he said.

“We identified that there was a developing need for more leaders in the industry and more learning opportunities for people coming into the industry, because the way that agriculture has been going for quite a long time is that it's kind of been consolidating into a lot of big businesses and there's less people in the industry than there ever has been. And as a result of that, there's less people to offer advice to new people coming in,” he said.

The council has talked a lot about how the future of agriculture involves an expansion of the number of smaller businesses and how to focus on niche and local markets, he said.

Ryan is hoping that over the next year the council will explore ways of implementing the recommendations.

For Ryan personally, he said working on the council has been a good way to expand his knowledge of different aspects of agriculture beyond the meadery business.

“During our conversations, there was a lot of commonality with some of the struggles that all of us (council) members had found in our time in the industry so far,” he said.

Access to industry resources, the perception of agriculture amongst the broader population, business capacity, and representing rural social values and culture are key discussion points for the council, he said.

“It didn't seem to matter what we were talking about. Those four things always seemed to play a role in the conversation,” he said.