BELLEVILLE—A group of desperate young farmers from the Beginning Farmers Group took its case and 15 piglets to MPP Leona Dombrowsky’s constituency office in Belleville. The group demanded that the minister of agriculture review the Ontario Cattle, Hog and Horticulture Program, but the minister wasn’t there.

"(Dombrowsky) is pushing us out of business," said Tina Vehof, a leader of the group. "The program is immoral."

The Beginning Farmers Group is objecting to a provincial survival program for hog, cattle and vegetable farmers that they say doesn’t help new farmers and leaves many of them facing bankruptcy.

Vehof says: "Dead farmers got cheques, retired farmers got cheques, bankrupt companies got cheques, but new, younger farmers are left out in the cold. The banks are calling in loans; we are literally losing our farms."

The problem is this. Eligible farms were those taken from the federal Cost of Production Agri-Invest Kickstart and the provincial Top-up program data base for the years 2000 to 2004. But the program was aimed at conditions in 2007. Moreover, many beginning hog farmers were under contract or had low inventories in the years 2000 to 2004. With contracts, the processor owns the pigs so there were no annual net sales, the criteria on which a government payout is based.

Vehof said her farm was doing some sharecropping and raised pigs under contract. Based on the eligible years, her farm received almost nothing. But if the year 2007 had been used it would have received $200,000. Some farms received over a half million dollars, she said. What’s more, information collected through access to information by Rene Boerkamp, of Eureka Farms in Oxford County, showed that 503 retired farmers were eligible for payment under the program.

The young farmers are asking for fairness and they haven’t seen a lot of that in the last five years. Vehof said when the prices turned down, companies tore up contracts or renegotiated the price downward. The beginning farmers need a debt relief program now to stay in the industry.

She is the mother of four children, the oldest being 10, and says she and the others are marching in sheer desperation. "We can’t get another loan," she says.

At the Pork Congress in Stratford, the young farmers recruited more than 200 new members, bringing the number to more than 300 farmers.

The protesters will try again to meet the minister. On the second Friday of July they head to Queen’s Park.

"Maybe the pigs can eat some of the garbage on Toronto streets during the strike," says Vehof.