General Managers Report

Supporting Our Farmers and Advocating for Our Industry

In March, we had to adapt quickly to the restrictions that were implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19. In some ways, the adaptations that were made fed into our we do different philosophy and has allowed us to explore new, creative ways of supporting our farmers and advocating for our industry.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began, the OSF had discussions about how the pandemic might impact our industry and what could we do to mitigate the risks. One key risk that was identified was the lack of communication and data sharing along the supply chain. As a way of mitigating this risk the OSF asked the Farm Products Marketing Commission to re-start the Sheep Industry Advisory Committee meetings. We also worked with Meat and Poultry Ontario on pandemic planning and are an active member of the Minister of Agriculture’s Working Group on livestock processing capacity. Additionally, we collaborated with other national livestock commodity organizations and expressed our concern to the federal government about the impacts of reductions in plant capacity or plant closures.

Even though some days it felt like the pandemic was all consuming, we were able to work on some of our longterm lobbying efforts which include the provincial Risk Management Program. And, after years of lobbying for increased provincial investment into the program, I am pleased to report that the government did add an additional $50 million to the program.

Nationally we continue to work with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the AgGrowth Coalition requesting changes to the national business risk management suite of programs, notably the AgriStability program. We also provided comments on the National Sheep Codes of Practice review, participated in the national transportation working group and the Animal Health Canada working group.

The production insurance feasibility project wrapped up this year. It determined that it is possible to develop both a rate of gain insurance product, and a mortality insurance project, but only if we have enough data. The lack of data across the industry continues to be a real stumbling block when it comes to being able to develop programs for, and provide resources (i.e., animal health products) to, our farmers.

While many of our plans, such as GenOvis, Maedi Visna and On-Farm Euthanasia workshops had to be canceled, we have been able to increase the number of webinars we offered. Recordings of these can be found on our Ontario Sheep website. OSF has also created an educational platform on Thinkific which allows us to upload content and provide educational webinars for producers to use at their own pace. The first course that has been uploaded is the Introduction to Small Ruminant Production course.

Heading into the fall, we had three Provincial Directors up for election and meeting restrictions enabled us to expedite the work we were doing to investigate electronic voting. OSF hired Simply Voting to conduct the voting for the Provincial Directors in District 3, 6 and 9. This did require staff to spend considerable time calling people and mailing out letters to update the membership lists for these districts. And yet, the lists remain inaccurate. Please if you received a letter or a

phone call from our office, call us back. OSN