| MPP
Arnott’s First Statement in New Session Offers Appreciation
to Farm Families
The
following is Waterloo-Wellington MPP Ted Arnott’s first
Member’s Statement in the Third Session of the 37th
Parliament of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. He
made this presentation to the House on May 15, 2002:
Mr
Ted Arnott (Waterloo-Wellington): In my first member’s
statement in this new session of the Legislature, I
want to offer my appreciation to our farm families,
who do so much to enhance our standard of living, quality
of life and way of life in the province of Ontario.
The dairy farmers of Waterloo-Wellington are an excellent
example of this.
According
to the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, there are about 709
dairy farms in Waterloo region and Wellington county
that ship about 254 million litres to processors, worth
almost $142 million. Close to 1,000 families work on
our dairy farms, which provide a total of nearly 2,800
jobs. To illustrate the positive local economic impact
of our dairy farms, we would need about 4,700 jobs paying
$30,000 a year to replace Waterloo’s and Wellington’s
milk income.
In
February this year, I attended the Waterloo-Wellington
dairy day in Drayton, where producers talked about a
quality assurance program that detects and solves quality
control problems literally before they happen. I thank
all the organizers and presenters for their contributions
to the dairy day.
I
also want to thank the Wellington county dairy farmers
for organizing a tour for me in April of Arnold Vervoort’s
farm near Fergus and Keith Burns’s Burnside Farms in
the township of West Garafraxa to provide me with an
on-site look at the work they do.
Based
on these consultations, it’s easy to conclude that dairy
farmers in Waterloo-Wellington are seeing that best
practices are shared, are implemented and that they
get better all the time, supported by the supply management
marketing system that I know is very strongly supported
by our new Minister of Agriculture and Food, who is
present in the House today.
All
members should be grateful for the efforts of our farm
families who labour to feed us all.
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