So, You Want to Be a Farmer?
Podcast: Who will help raise Canada's food? Why not you?
When taking a closer look at the demographics of the Canadian workforce and dividing it up among trades, farmers represent the oldest demographic in the country at a median age of 52 years. Within agriculturally dense provinces such as Saskatchewan, in 2007, the average farmer was 56 years of age and only 12.3 per cent of all farmers there were under the age of 35.
As skills and knowledge are replaced by fossil-fuel-dependent systems and technologies, this aging demographic represents a significant threat to the future of Canada's food supply.
Where are Canada's future farmers, and how does anyone interested in farming get involved?
In March 2008, host Jon Steinman travelled to Sidney, B.C. to attend the annual conference of the Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia (COABC). On this broadcast, we listen in on one workshop titled, "Starting Your Organic Farm."
Write to a farmer who inspires you
As the age demographic among farmers continues to change, so too is the population distribution between Canada's urban and rural communities. As the population increasingly becomes concentrated within cities, Canada's urban populations have become far more removed from the source of their food than ever before. One symptom of this change in population distribution has been a seeming loss of appreciation for the all-important grower and producer of food: the farmer. This didn't sit well with Nelson, B.C. resident Paul Edney who launched an event in collaboration with Nelson's Kootenay Country Store Co-operative. The event was titled, "Write to a Farmer Who Inspires You."
Guests/voices
Robin Tunnicliffe, farmer/co-owner, Feisty Field Organic Farm/Saanich Organics (Victoria, B.C.) -- Saanich Organics is a community of farmers from small, certified organic farms who work together: Three Oaks Farm, Northbrook Farm and Robin's Feisty Field Organic Farm. Feisty Field grows a variety of fruits and vegetables near Prospect Lake within the city limits of Victoria. Robin is currently completing a master's degree at the University of Victoria on the value of local agriculture.
Paul Edney, author/director, We Are What We Do (Nelson, B.C.) -- Paul is the Canadian director of the international We Are What We Do movement. He authored the Canadian version of Change the World for Ten Bucks, which outlines 50 simple, everyday actions that everyone can do to make a difference, such as take public transport, decline plastic bags where possible, plant a tree and write to someone who inspires you. Change the World for Ten Bucks aims to create a global community of people who are what they do. It started in the U.K., and has launched in Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Canada. Worldwide, over 400,000 copies are in print!
Related Tyee stories:
- My Back to the Land Fantasy
And why it feels more real every day. - The Dirt on Organic Wines
Are they vegetarian or vegan? And more fine distinctions. - Tyee Podcasts
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Fiat lux
3 years ago
As non-certified organic
As non-certified organic farmers, watching the planned destruction of the family farm system for many years,I had the following letter in the Feb.26 issue of the Williams Lake Tribune, enclosed in 2 parts:
The Editor, Williams Lake Tribune. February 18, 2008.
Dear Mr. Editor,
The destruction of the family farm, and of real private enterprise, started after WW2 with the Austrian School theories of Friedrich von Hayek, taken by Milton Friedman to the Chicago School of Economics as the “neoclassical market economic theory”, to become the biggest crime wave, colonizing and collectivizing the whole word under the dictatorial oligopoly of a few multinational corporations.
In the fifties, US Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, declared to farmers: “Get big, or get out”. In 1970, US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, declared: “Control oil and you control nations, control food and you control people”, and “tame” politicians have been selling their farmers off ever since.
The large majority of independent farms have now been ruined, and the world's diminishing food supply is now under the control of a few corporations, who depress prices to the remaining producers, while raising them to consumers. There's a growing, global shortage of beef, yet prices paid to our ranchers are half of what they were ten years ago, while prices in the stores are going up every week.
The feedlots, controlled by mega corporations, are their main weapon of collectivization, setting the prices at both ends, while pumping the animals up with stinking tallow, falsely called, “marble”, the North American public became, incomprehensibly, addicted to.
The feedlots are environmental disaster areas, with tens of thousands of animals up to their knees in muck, poisoning the land and water tables for large areas, while wasting incredible amounts of water for the infrastructure for small weight gains.
Continued..........
Fiat lux
3 years ago
Continued... The animals
Continued...
The animals are shot full of antibiotics, hormones, steroids, etc, fed with grains, and then, as an article in the Western Producer pointed it out some years ago, this whole racket is repeated every time they're moved to other lots, in some cases 5-6 times, before their adulterated meat is sold to the public, while governments shed crocodile tears over people getting fat and down with an epidemic of diabetes.
The best weapon against exploitation and dictatorship is self sufficiency, a concept abhorred by economists and politicians on the take. Unless producers take matters into their hands they'll all be wiped out and the control of food will be collectivized into the hands of the multinationals on agribiz kolkhozes, using imported Mexican labour, the mining industry is also dreaming about.. The public must be shown what junk they're forced to eat and then supplied through a producer controlled marketing system, bypassing the feedlots and middlemen, as it is already done to a great extent in the Maritimes and many parts of the world, with the selling of clean, wholesome, healthy, grassfed meats.
Contrary to propaganda, it is easy to prove that many organic products, especially meats, can be produced and sold at much lower, sometimes for half the price of the feedlot junk, when the control of billionaire middlemen is removed from the system.
With this letter I'm also delivering several packages of beef to the Tribune staff, from a calf that has never had any shots and never ate anything else but milk and grass, with the question to be answered in the paper: Have they ever had more tender and better tasting meat ?
Ed Deak, Box 9, Big Lake Ranch PO, BC, V0L 1G0. Ph:243-2263, email: thinker @ this1.ca
PS. From the Editor: "The newsroom staff did sample the meat Mr.Deak delivered, and found it to be extremely tender and very,very tasty.
"It's as goo as it gets ": one staffer said.
Thanks for the treat"
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
Ed's Beef
Ed's beef with the economists and with the industrialization of farming is noble and sincere. His unadulterated beef is good too - first class! My family and I had a bit of it and it was wonderful. When we found we had no more of Ed's beef, we purchased some from our local butcher. It was awful! We have been spoilt and we can find no one in our area who sells beef before it has been run through a feedlot. Luckily we can purchase locally raised bison that has not been run through a feedlot to "finish" them. It is lower in fat than beef.
Rhea
3 years ago
farming
This whole issue drives me crazy....it's a vicious circle. In BC, especially in the lower mainland's Fraser Valley, which is prime farmland, land prices are so ridiculously high that farmers (who should be getting paid more than useless CEOs) can't afford to lease or buy or improve their land unless they've inherited or stolen ridiculous amounts of cash, or unless they're bankrolled by a corporation. If they can buy the land, they'll go broke paying taxes or trying to make basic improvements. My family was seriously investigating starting a small farm, and basically figured that unless we had at least half a million to invest in the land and startup, we'd be broke and homeless. This is why people don't go into farming...it's unsupported and undervalued, to our everlasting peril.
Fiat lux
3 years ago
Rhea......The biggest
Rhea......The biggest problem is worthless foreign money and US dollars looking for resource control.
In Vancouver house prices started jumping with the influx of Hong Kong money. We sold our new house in Vancouver for $65,000 in 1979, a year later it went for $138,000.
Here in the Cariboo 160 acres went for about $40-45,000 in the late 80s. Then the area was discovered by German and Swiss money, scared of devaluation in the EU. (I know Switz. isn't in the EU, but their governments are pushing for it)
Virtually, overnight the prices jumped to over $200,000. Then they were going down for a while, but now in the over $400,000 mark, with "investors" trying to get rid of their worthless US dollars while they still can and for the wrecking of the ALR, so they can subdivide.
Just last year one of our neighbours sold 160 acres for $460,000 to some Koreans who have no intention to live on it. Laundering? Who knows ?
In short, it is the "free movement of capital " racket, colonizing the world with the power of imaginary money created from the air, converted into realities.
So, keep on voting in "business" and "free trade" friendly governments and kiss our asses goodbye. Wait when the SPP and the NAU will kick in, bringing "wealth and prosperity".
Ed Deak, Big Lake.
anne cameron
3 years ago
Good on you!
Ed Deak,I always enjoy reading your posts, probably because I agree with you.
I farmed. I enjoyed farming, enjoyed the farmers I met, even enjoyed the hard work, the mud, the muck, and , at times, the blood.
On paper I guess we "broke even". You can break even as a farmer if you don't count the hour after hour of unremitting toil. If you suffer from the delusion your time is worth money, well, you don't break even at all, you're in the hole so far you can't see the top.
I frapped my back farming. I tell people I left my back on the fence line. I was on the business end of a "come along", tightening fence wire and...
When I was at the point the only way I could move was with the help of two canes, I had to face reality and sell the farm.
Farming taught me something about people. Folks who didn't hesitate to go into the LCB and spend sixty dollars on a bottle of booze whined, minged, squealed and complained at the cost of grass fed beef to feed their kids. People who spend ten to twelve bucks a day on cigarettes grizzled, bitched, and complained about the price of free range eggs. People who think nothing at all of spending fifty dollars on a restaurant meal pitched unholy fits when they found out how much it cost to raise chickens without chemical additives.
And I'm not a good sales person. I got so sick and tired of the whining and arguing that I'd just shrug and say "So don't buy it. Go away.". Every now and again I said more than that but this isn't the place for that kind of language.
People don't seem able to figure out that processed poison costs far more per pound than wholesome organic food. They'll pay ten bucks for a package of glup and feed harmful chemicals to their kids before they'll buy vegetables grown without pesticides.
People are funny. And not ha ha funny.
Why one nice lady showed up with a car full of kids who poured out shrieking and then started running after the hens. A couple wanted to climb the fence to get into the field to "see" the calves. She was most hurt and even insulted when I told her to round up the entire troop and put them back in the damn car, that I wasn't running a zoo.
She had come to buy a bale of hay to mulch her garden and was horrified to find out I wasn't going to sell it to her for two dollars. Why, the last time she'd bought hay it was only two dollars, why was I charging more than....
I invited her to leave and to take that pack of kids with her.
It took three days for the hens to get over their fright. Three days of reduced egg production.
That's money out of the farmers' pocket. And no, we aren't babysitters!
Ed Deak, you are a hero. And a dam good farmer.