It’s going to cost producers $2.30 per hectolitre for one month to pay compensation to farmers who had to dump milk because transporters couldn’t get through.
It’s a far different story from when Ontario Farmer publications asked immediately after the storm about the impact on producers and processors. Its answer then was that things were back to normal and consumers would not be impacted.
The Milk Transporters Association said then that most of it’s trucks were pulled off the road.
Mark Hamel, board director for Grey-Bruce, told farmers attending Dairy Day at Grey Bruce Farmer’s Week, said the board was caught unprepared.
“We didn’t have a good crisis emergency plan in place,” Hamel is quoted in the Owen Sound newspaper. “I will take ownership of that – not all of it, but my share of it. We didn’t have a strategy in place.”
Hamel said that close to 45 per cent of the province’s more than 3,300 producers were affected by the storm.
DFO chair Murray Sherk has sent a letter to producers outlining plans to pool the financial losses of missed pick-ups among all producers, not just those who were forced to dump milk when trucks couldn’t get through.
Hamel said the direction from DFO this time was not a policy change, but a one-time directive in a unique situation. Hamel added the DFO’s current policy for dumping milk is still in place, and has worked well in Grey-Bruce in the past.
