Canadá: P.E.I. farmers face future without McCain Foods

The machine is planting peas, he explained, a first for his business, Greenfield Farms Ltd. of Bedeque.

A few fields over, Green has fava beans planted, another first.

He’s hoping the peas and beans, when rotated with his traditional potato crop, will help improve his overall yields and diversify his income options.

He’s shaking up his planting plans for various reasons, but one of the biggest is the loss of the McCain Foods Ltd. french fry plant in Albany, which closed in 2014.

He’s been supplying spuds to McCain Foods since 1989, he added, but that relationship will, in all likelihood, come to a close after this season and he needs to start planning for that.

“If I can find something other than potatoes to grow and be profitable doing it – potatoes are going to get smaller on this farm,” he said.

Like Green, potato farmers across P.E.I. are busy planting this year’s crop, but those who used to sell to McCain Foods have the added worry of wondering where next year’s crop will be heading.

When McCain Foods closed its only processing facility on P.E.I., it committed to keep buying potatoes from its contracted growers here for another two seasons. Farmers are responsible for trucking their product to processing facilities, but McCain Foods subsidized the transportation of the raw P.E.I. product to processing facilities in Florenceville and Grand Falls, N.B. for those two years.

The move was intended to help cushion the blow to farmers who had contracts to sell to the Albany plant and who were caught by surprise when it closed suddenly.

But that cushion ends when the 2016 crop that’s going into the ground now is harvested and sold.

McCain Foods is not making any commitment to continue buying P.E.I. potatoes in 2017 and beyond.

“All of our growers understand that going forward, P.E.I. needs to be competitive with locally-grown potatoes for us to continue to buy from there,” a company spokesperson told the Journal Pioneer.

It’s a situation that Green, and he suspects many other local McCain contract holders, do not find palatable.

“Unless things change in our favour, I’m not really in a position to be hauling to McCain Foods in New Brunswick. It’s not cost effective to do it,” he said.

There are about 20 producers on the Island who have contracts with McCain Foods for the 2016 season.

Greg Donald, general manager of the P.E.I. Potato Board, said that despite there being no official commitment from McCain, the board is hopeful the company will continue to deal with P.E.I. farmers.

“They’ve been great customers over the years, I can’t say enough about that,” said Donald.

“I know that all the efforts here and of the growers will be to maintain that (relationship) beyond this year; and from all accounts I think they’ve been happy with the way things have worked shipping from here – though we would have much preferred … to have (those potatoes) processed here.”

McCain could continue to buy P.E.I. potatoes for many years, but it’s not looking likely that Green will be selling his crop to them beyond this year. He’s hopeful his efforts to find a supplementary cash crop will bare fruit and he’s recently signed a contract with Cavendish Farms, so he still has a market for the spuds he’s going to continue to grow.

Still though, he’s sad to see his relationship with McCain come to an end.

“It’s like losing an old friend,” he said.

Colin.MacLean@Tc.tc

@JournalPMacLean