The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), Ontario’s leading farm lobby group, has launched province-wide meetings to overhaul the organization. People have been griping about the OFA and sniping at the programs but this is no time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As vice-president Geri Kamenz told a stormy crowd at the Finch hockey arena last year: "Don’t trash the organizations you have because in the absence of that you’ve got nothing."

There is plenty that is working well in the OFA. It has an excellent research arm handling property tax evaluation, hydro prices and energy costs. But these don’t generate big headlines and so often don’t get the publicity they deserve. Yet they are essential services.

Numerous suggestions for change have come in from the grass roots. Here are twelve from one meeting (You’ll notice many have been around for years.):

1. All commodities need to have active representation;

2. Be grassroots based;

3. Need to be more focused on core issues – farm income is everything;

4. Be smaller, more responsive;

5. Need to work with commodity representatives present at meetings;

6. Meet more often;

7. Need longer terms for stability;

8. President and vice president should be elected by delegates and directors at convention;

9. Identify commodity issues and contact commodities;

10. Need training at board level for professional representation;

11. Let the executive do the day to day;

12. Grassroots need to understand they are critical but should support the board in the end.

Some of this is window dressing and none of it really gets to the heart of one of the questions that burns among the grassroots: Who’s looking out for my interests? Hard to answer when interests are so diverse. Look at one example. When the corn producers went before the Canadian International Trade Tribunal last winter they were opposed by hog producers and beef producers. The beef and hog boards got their lawyers together and helped defeat corn producers at a tribunal, and Ontario agriculture subsequently lost one of its brightest farm leaders, the corn producers’ Brian Doidge, who initiated the countervail on U.S. corn.

The OFA has the unenviable task of representing farmers with opposing interests. It follows, therefore, that governments have difficulty deciding what kind of farming they want.