Connect the Dots: Wetlands and Agriculture

My extended family gets together on all the big holidays. Lately, my relatives on a farm southeast of where I live have been hosting. My cousins are thoughtful folks and I enjoy talking with them about farming - and I was gifted with some homegrown lentils, homeground flour, and some borage seed.

My one cousin is sitting on his RM's advisory board for a pilot project focusing on environmental stewardship. It's an area pocked with sloughs, and he was telling me about the benefits of leaving and/or aggregating the wetland areas in fields: increased biodiversity including pollinators and predatory insects, and less water erosion immediately spring to mind. He and his family also like to have cook-outs near one picturesque slough on their land. But lots of farmers like to drain wetlands and seed them, because driving around them takes more time and they want every bit of their land to yield a crop. My cousin figures this is a bit silly - often, the drained bits are still too wet to seed when the rest of the field is ready, then they get all weedy, and you have to spray more. Despite the benefits of maintaining the wetlands, my cousin estimated that maybe ten to twenty percent of farmers in his area would take up the practice.

Flooding in Yellowgrass in 2011, picture courtesy of CBC Sask.

The spring of 2011 saw unprecedented torrential rains and flooding in a vast area of southern Saskatchewan. I don't think I'm crazy for suggesting that wetlands could have helped mitigate the damage, but apparently dams, dikes, and disaster assistance are the Saskatchewan answers. Manitobans probably don't think I'm crazy, either. Many of them have connected the dots and realized the importance of wetlands What will it take before Saskatchewan does too? 

Turns there's something else that provides the service of water retention and can reduce flood risk. Unfortunately, it also gets in the way of being able to drive a tractor in a straight line for miles. That's right - shelterbelts - which are going to become even more of an endangered species since the federal government cut funding to the PFRA shelterbelt program.

Community helps prepare for natural disasters

With farmers becoming as scarce as hen's teeth, where you used to be able to get advice at the local coffee shop, feed mill, or elevator, you have to sometimes go further afield. New communities of shared interest rather than shared geographical proximity are filling in some of the gaps. One such, for computer-savvy farm folk, is the #agchat community on Twitter. Although a subset of avid internet and social media users, it's a fairly diverse crowd of vegetable, grain, livestock and dairy farmers, big and small. In the wake of Hurricane Irene, last night during the weekly chat on Twitter, people offered tips on dealing with natural disasters.

I live in a pretty disaster-free area. Landlocked and far inland, we aren't affected by hurricanes or tsunamis. The last earthquake my mom remembers, in the 80's, knocked a picture off the wall. Land flat as a dinner plate means no volcanoes. We've had some spring flooding lately, but the main disasters that threaten agriculture here are drought, hail, high winds, and the odd tornado.

I posed a question about limiting hail damage (besides using insurance) and got some good replies. Bonus: only 140 characters each, max. 

- ensure proper shelter for livestock, machinery
- For fruit growers and produce ... there is hail netting
- depending on the crop (mkt/csa veggies) & where located, putting on layer of row cover for some protection
- Diversify! Some crops recover from hail better than others. Squash & lettuce get wrecked, but onions and tubers have reserves 2 recover
- a big tarp? For silage bags, we keep a lot of duct tape around to repair holes
- with 150 year old hardwood trees for cover -- hail is just a way to fill the cooler before the game.
- another consideration 4 crops wld be where to plant...w/in natural borders & protection via trees, tall grasses (permaculture)     

The question on dealing with high winds or tornadoes also got good replies.

- You know all those century old Midwest barns built into a side of a hill? Pretty smart huh?
- Our Coverall buildings bend in the wind. They have held up pretty well to tornado and high winds 
- Our farmhouse is concrete up to the rafters. It can withstand tornadoes. No other buildings have ever gone down in high winds
- Tough to fortify against tornado, but for high winds, we did plant a windbreak many years ago around our grain storage facility
- get rid of items sitting around that become missles n windstorms. Put equip n bldgs. Clear clutter.
- hoop bldgs fared better w less damage 2 bldg contents than pole bldgs n r area n July 11 windstorm
- Future farm infrastructure development should consider geodesic domes for rock solid structures, tornado resistant
- ''portable'' hoophouses & similar structures can be taken down in prep if ahead of storms..transporting delicate crops elsewhere
- keep trees trimmed away from power lines, bldgs. Put in underground power lines where possible 2 minimize damage. 

The drought question did not garner any replies that I found useful, living in a region where climate change is predicted to create multi-year droughts. "Pray" and "Irrigate" were the two answers given. I would suggest that diversification and drought-tolerant plants would mitigate some damage. Ultimately, I think the more links we have with different communities, the more resilient we will be.
          

Detective Work: Following the Money in the Consumer Food Dollar

In 1911, a bushel of wheat cost $1.
Today, that $1 is worth $23.82.
Today, a bushel of wheat costs $9.28.

Is there a problem? Yield has gone up, so farmers get more bushels per acre than in 1911. And farmers own more acres than in 1911 - average farm size grew from 297 acres to 1450 acres.

So how is it that Canadian farm net income from the market was near zero, and often negative over the past couple of decades?

Here's a clue: only 5 % of the consumer dollar goes back to the grain farmer. "Using his farm in East Selkirk, Man., as an example, [KAP president] Chorney said he would receive $90,000 if he grew 300 acres of wheat that yielded 50 bushels per acre. However, the bread, cereals and other products from his wheat would generate $1.8 million in sales for grocery stores."

Where does that 95% go? Transportation, packaging, advertising, retail and storage costs like rent and business taxes, fuels and electricity, and labour.

Oh, and profit for global agribusinesses. Remember the food crisis in 2008 that saw food riots in many countries? The Wall Street Journal reported that in the midst of the crisis, "grain-processing giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. said its fiscal third-quarter profits jumped 42%...Monsanto saw its profit in the latest quarter more than double...Cargill Inc.'s profits jumped 86% to $1 billion in the latest quarter...Bunge Ltd.'s earnings rose about 20-fold to $289 million."

(Inter)dependence

Oh no! Scientists brought dinosaurs back to life and they're in my house!

Sometimes, I like to indulge my paranoid side, especially as it links up with my imaginative side. I love making lists and thinking of possible contingencies. I know exactly how I should prepare to have enough food and water in my house to survive a months-long disaster of unspecified cause. I know various methods of food preservation requiring no electricity or other fuel. I know methods of gardening for dealing with drought and methods for extending the season. I know how to build a solar powered water distiller.

Unfortunately, all of this is in my mind. I'm a planner - not necessarily an executor of said plans. Other than freezing two gallons of water to take up freezer space (a full freezer is more efficient), I've done nothing to prepare for an emergency. (I don't like to think about what happens to my freezer half-full of locally pastured beef if the electricity cuts out for more than 24 hours. Since I only have the vaguest notion of how to smoke things, a block party, maybe? Hmm, that bears thinking about...)

I don't think I'm unique in not being prepared for a major disaster, or even a minor one. I'm sure more than a few of you have heard that, if supply lines are cut, grocery stores have about three days of food - perhaps less if people go crazy stockpiling in the first day. I have enough food around the house to survive for a couple of weeks without shopping, although I would probably be missing some key nutrients by the end of our reliance on rice, dried beans, and the aforementioned beef, and I'd have to find a toilet paper substitute. More than a few weeks? That's where it get sticky.

My friend Tracy told me that if a disaster happened, the first thing she would do is gather her extended family together. She's lucky enough to have them close to her. I would probably take my family, my seed supply, and head out to a relative's farm. But what about people who don't have those connections?

I read a quote the other day that in our society "the interdependency of individuals [is] not mediated through political, social, or religious institutions but via the market and contract". When that market contract fails - when the stores have no food, when the city's water treatment plant is malfunctioning, and we can't purchase what we need to live - do we have connections, institutions, that will help us and wherein we can help others?  Who's going to save you? Your church? They don't have the resources. Your family/friend network? Not if they are likewise dependent on purchasing the essentials of life.

This is not a hypothetical situation in many parts of the world, where the water supply is unreliable or too expensive, where food prices may rocket out of reach and droughts annihilate subsistence crops. However, in some of those places, people do have something we lack here, in our "independence" of one another: interdependence. And this interdependence can cushion catastrophe.