Grainswest - Winter 2026

Winter 2026 grainswest.com 31 “A part of agriculture seems to believe those programs essentially guarantee profitability, and that’s not what they’re meant to do.” —Mathieu Lipari O utdated. Reactive. Costly. This is how certain critics describe business risk management programs available to Canadian farmers. A Farm Management Canada (FMC) report prepared by the Canadian Agricultural Policy Institute (CAPI) notes the need to dramatically improve the suite. Dubbed Striking the Balance: Proactive Strategy versus Reactive Response , the September 2025 report lists five key takeaways: Current policies have created dependency and discouraged alternative solutions; Proactive risk management is needed; Declining investment inhibits proactive risk management; A new, modern framework is required; and, National farm data harmonization is vital. FMC program manager and national risk management lead Mathieu Lipari said there is good reason to revisit existing BRM programming. “We noticed there wasn’t a lot of focus on a comprehensive approach to managing risk. It was very much focused on BRM and the insurance side of things, which is still the case today, unfortunately.” The organization’s staff created its own online tool, AgriShield, to help farmers be proactive with risk management. Lipari believes the problem is not the programs, but how they are perceived. “A part of agriculture seems to believe those programs essentially guarantee profitability, and that’s not what they’re meant to do,” he said. “They’re meant to protect against disasters.” Certain farmers see it this way and adopt proactive risk management practices, added Lipari, while others who depend on BRM programming want the suite to do even more for them. He contends programs must do more than simply repair damage after the fact. A shift is needed toward proactive management that will prevent and reduce risks in the first place. Not all risks come from the skies, either. Poor marketing strategies, bad financial planning, informal or absent transition plans and labour shortages are real risks that deserve attention, said Lipari. “We need to adopt a more proactive and comprehensive approach to risk management in the ag sector. Part of the solution could be to divert some of the money currently devoted to our BRM suite towards programs that encourage farms to adopt a proactive risk management approach.” He added government could better explain how the programs work, citing the “really complicated” AgriStability as an example. To qualify for AgriStability, a farmer calculates margins based on allowable expenses and allowable revenue. This doesn’t include things like machinery amortization or rental costs—for the last five years, removing the highest and lowest year, and then averaging the remaining three years. Suppose that a farmer’s reference margin is $100,000; to qualify for a payment, there must be a 30 per cent drop, or $30,000, in their current year margin versus their reference margin. If a farmer earns $60,000 in a year, they qualify and their payment is $70,000 minus $60,000. At a 90 per cent payout rate, the farmer receives $9,000. Complications aside, it is one of the most affordable forms of risk management available to farmers at $3.15 per $1,000 of reference margin. AgriRecovery is classified as a relief framework intended to complement the broader BRM in times of natural disaster. It does not cover production loss or revenue lost to disaster. “There’s definitely education to be done about the programs,” said Lipari. Then there’s the cost factor. Lipari wants to see less overall dependence on the suite, which he said will become a danger in the long-term. “We have to figure out better ways of doing it.” He’s right. According to the federal government, 55.1 per cent, or $1.98 billion, of its Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada budget for 2024-25 was “sector risk,” or the BRM suite.