Only 30 Chances to Get it Right?

Last Saturday, I saw the film To Make a Farm. It follows five young small farmers through the 2010 growing season. The director, who was present for the screening, said he originally thought he was setting out to make a depressing film about the end of farming, but it ended up being very hopeful.

The film is definitely worth viewing, and I could say more about it, but one line in particular got me thinking. A young woman in the potato patch, dealing with late blight, commented,

"If I farm for 30 years, I'll only have grown potatoes 30 times."

Unlike musicians who can practice a piece hundreds of times, or even high school teachers who could teach the same course over a hundred times in a career, farmers get only a few chances to learn from their experiences and to fix mistakes. Especially if the farmers do not have a family farm background, as none of the young people in the film did.

My dad and grandpa, in the 80s, conferring over machinery repairs.

My grandpa lived to be seventy-five. He probably grew wheat 60 times, because he grew up on a farm. But that's not all. He also had his father's memories, and possibly his grandfather's memories, to tap into, and their memories of neighbour's growing seasons. That was an invaluable resource for my dad, and my brother.

Regardless of how plant varieties and equipment change throughout the years, the past offers lessons for everyone. The internet has a multitude of farming forums to participate in, but those other farmers don't know your land intimately. I admire those young urbanites who are succeeding at farming, but I wish it could be easier for them - and intergenerational transfer of knowledge would make it easier.

With the demise of the Canadian Wheat Board, some bright young guys are thinking of ways to cash in. Just the other day, an acquaintance came up with the concept of a Wheat Pool whereby farmers could come together to sell their wheat. Yes, the same voluntary pool that didn't work in 1931 and morphed into an elevator company. Our ancestors had to learn to appreciate trees during the Dirty Thirties, and we may have to come to the same realization with the wild swings in spring weather we've been experiencing in the past few years.

And the best way to learn - as with languages, values, and swimming - is through immersion as early as possible in life. We need intergenerational family farms.

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.

Farm Safety: The Real Story

U.S. Labor Department has just withdrawn a set of proposed safety regulations for young people working in agriculture. The regulations proposed to disallow children under 16 from operating machinery with power takeoffs, and from working in feed lots, grain silos and stockyards.

Under these regulations, my brother wouldn't have been able to pay for his university education by farming my grandmother's land. And my dad wouldn't have been able to tell the story about riding his bicycle down the road when he was ten, and seeing a driverless tractor coming toward him. As it approached, he realized it was being driven by his five-year-old cousin who couldn't be seen above the steering wheel. My brother and my dad's cousin survived, just as I survived using the rotary mower, as a subcontractor mowing besides the railway tracks, at age 13.

But the thing is, my dad didn't survive a farm accident, three years ago. Farming is dangerous. A Stats Canada Report shows that "Agriculture is one of the industries with the highest rates of fatal injury. From 1991 to 1995, that rate varied between 14.9 and 25.6 per 100,000 workers in Canada... Agricultural production thus ranks as the fourth most dangerous sector, behind mining, forestry and construction ...With regards to non-fatal injuries among agricultural producers, studies indicate that annual frequencies are generally in the range of 5% to 10% of the population." It's not just because the average age of farmers is really high: the injury death rate for young children who live on farms is almost twice that for all young children in Canada.

Maybe it is more effective to educate about farm safety than to disallow children from working on farms - this is the tack the American government is going to take. However, I think there are two essential pieces to this news that have not been emphasized. First, these labour laws would not have applied to children working on their parents' farms. How many children under the age of fifteen (need to) work on other peoples' farms? Yet, it wasn't only 4-H instructors complaining about these laws. News articles were full of emotional manipulation like this:

e here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/27/4447875/child-labor-groups-upset-farm.html#storylink=cpy

On the Sombke family farm four kids learned everything they know about the trade from their parents..."I wouldn't have worked out here, I would have taken a completely different, completely different path in life," Brett Sombke said.

The Republicans were all over this overblown rhetoric, for their own political gain. However, despite the wholly inaccurate portrayal of the proposed laws in this article, the closing paragraph holds the key to another very important piece of the puzzle:

Brett says it's hard enough to find people to work during the spring and fall. He says that without kids being able to perform certain tasks on family farms the traditional meaning of family farm could end.

None of the farm groups protesting this law have mentioned the bigger issue behind it - the need for cheap or free labour on family farms. How many bankers or plumbers do you know who need to take their kids to work just to keep food on the table? (Hint: none.) And it's not because they are so much better at their jobs than family farmers are at theirs. It's because small family farmers are getting screwed every which way by input sellers, by processors, by commodity speculators, by consumer expectations of cheap food.

And *that* is the real problem.

And, it might even have something to do with farm safety. Stats Canada also says that farm receipts are inversely proportional to farm accidents.

The State of Science Journalism Today

I can hear the voices of a hundred neglected tasks setting up a cheap, jangly tintinnabulation in my ears. My to-do list for this afternoon stretches to the horizon - and I live in a province where you can watch your dog run away from you for three days. So today will not be a feel-good post. I'm going to engage in some catharsis; in other words, I am going to irritably complain about the state of food reporting.

While I do have post-secondary education in the area of food, agriculture and social justice, it doesn't make me an expert on food issues; nor does my reading, my gardening practice, or what I like to think of as my common sense. But surely, some things are obvious to thinking people? I stumbled on this article, "Expert spills the beans on organic food: new article stews over the advertising myths of the corporate organics industry" by accident through an offhand Twitter link. It is absolutely appalling

Although it pained me to do so, because I taught English for several years, I overlooked the error in each of the first four sentences. I am more concerned with the lack of science knowledge demonstrated by the reporter - and, possibly, the cutbacks in media that allow a poor paraphrase of a press release to pass as journalism. Here are my quibbles with the article:

1) Claims to authority are unsubstantiated
The article, and its place of publication, are not listed. Google tells me that the author quoted works in a lab at the university mentioned; I could find no mention of a degree he may possess. I do not see how he can be called an expert. His publications, listed on his website, are primarily letters to newspaper editors.

2) Claims about organic food are misleading
While the article is not detailed enough to give specific examples of advertisements that make the claims that organic food is healthier, not grown with pesticides or antibiotics, and more natural, I can still argue against the author's oversimplistic refutation of these claims.
      a) He claims that "Every scientific organization that's in charge of food safety, that has looked for a health benefit in organic food, cannot find one." I wonder if he has looked at claims by organizations who are "in charge of" nutrition, rather than food safety. In truth, the evidence is inconclusive. It is clear, however, that organic food production is far healthier for growers, farmworkers, flora, and fauna. (Please note the credible sources I have linked to, as this is an essential part of science journalism.)

Organic insecticide used: thumb and forefinger.

     b) He claims "Organic foods do use antibiotics and toxic chemicals, they just aren't synthetically produced." This is true. However, there are strict regulations in place around the use of antibiotics: an organic dairy cow in the US, for example, can no longer be used for organic production when antibiotics are given. It is also true that organic growers can use some toxic chemicals, such as copper sulfate in orchards as a fungicide. The author does not say how widespread this use is, while implying that it is ubiquitous, and dangerous. But pesticides are not necessarily so. My brother set out dishes of beer for slugs - a potent and compostable insecticide. Many organic horticulturalists that I know use Bt, a biological insecticide that is non-toxic to humans and animals, biodegradable, kills only specific insects, and is non-toxic or only mildly toxic to beneficial insects.
     c) His last claim, that organic food is no more "natural" than say, genetically modified food because all agriculture is a human modification of the environment, is a simplification of the issue - I may post about it later. However, if he had said that the word "natural" as employed in advertising is meaningless because it has not been codified or standardized, I would have agreed.

Such is the state of science journalism today. I offer this complaint in the hopes that you, at least, will not let these facile arguments thwart your pursuit of the truth.

Yes, I sent a comment to the editor of this news source. No, I have not received a response.

I have in my hands an advance copy of the book "Food Sovereignty in Canada" put out by Fernwood Publishing.  I am very proud! I would tell you exactly what I did for this book, but then my thin veneer of anonymity would be blown. I will say that I did copy-edit half of it, and did substantive editing for three of the chapters. Please don't tell me about any typos I missed. That was probably the other copy-editor.

The rest of you will have to wait until November to get a copy, but I'm going to whet your appetite:

"The language of food sovereignty was initially introduced by La Via Campesina to express both the truth of power relations within the food domain and the hope for the democratic, widely dispersed, just distribution of those powers over food...In order to transform the dominant forces, including those related to politics, economics, gender, the environment and social organization, we need to be able to imagine and articulate new relationships to food, community and ultimately the earth."

"Instead of the current construct of farmers producing and individual consumers buying food, where both the access to and production of food are determined by the market, food sovereignty begins from the position of citizens engaged in decisions about providing life-sustaining good food."

From the publisher: "Achieving food sovereignty requires conceptual and practical changes, reshaping menus, farming, communities, relationships, values and policy, but, as the authors clearly demonstrate, the urgent work of building food sovereignty in Canada is well under way."

Inside:
"Advancing Agriculture by Destroying Farms? The State of Agriculture in Canada"
"Indigenous Food Sovereignty: A Model for Social Learning"
"Growing Community: Community Gardens as a Local Practice of Food Sovereignty"
"Community Nutrition Practice and Research: Integrating a Good Sovereignty Approach"
"Transforming Agriculture: Women Farmers Define a Food sovereignty Policy for Canada"
and more!

Tantalizing Quotes from "Decolonizing Food"

Briarpatch Magazine has just put out a food and agriculture issue, "Decolonizing Food". This covers a wide range of food and agriculture issues in Canada, with implications for beyond. Some excerpts:

"As a result of destroyed livelihoods in their countries of origin due to free-trade-facilitated corporate expansion (in which Canadian multinationals are often complicit), thousands of farmers come from Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere to work in Canada’s SAWP. Canada creates and perpetuates an unjust situation for these farm workers, who are usually poorly paid, given harsh accommodation and denied access to services...how do we make these spaces safe for the most marginalized among us while also building an effective resistance to the systems that create and perpetuate food injustice?" Maryam Adrangi and Laura Lepper, "Food for all! Food justice needs migrant justice"

"Farming, in my experience, is too rich, too complex, too full of pleasure and agony to be learned from a distance. You need to wade ankle deep into mud, gorge on warm berries, toss bales until your fingers bleed. Farming as an art is interconnected and complex and requires a method of instruction that reflects this essence." - Anna Kirkpatrick, "Learning to grow: The proliferation of hands-on educational opportunities for wannabe farmers"

"The need for commercial, artificial human milk has been manufactured through the same intentional degradation of community that has manufactured doubt in our ability to produce milk from our breasts or food for our tables. It is not at all surprising that the years that saw dramatic decreases in breastfeeding are the same years that we gave up more and more of our gardens, our chickens and our recipes in exchange for supermarket solutions. We have been told that the work required to feed ourselves and our infants is drudgery and that time spent washing bottles and standing in line at the till is freedom." - Erin Laing, "From apple pie and mother's milk to pop-tarts and formula: How will we feed the next generation?"

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.
          

Food Sovereignty In Motion

La Via Campesina in Movement... Food Sovereignty now! from La Via Campesina on Vimeo.

"According to the FAO, 800 million people suffered from hunger in 1976. Nowadays that figure exceeds 1000 million. Why? Because the system doesn't want to solve the issue of hunger." - Carlos Marentes, UTAF, USA

"A production model that has turned food into financial speculation and land into financial speculation. The Green Revolution and the transgenic revolution don't aim to eradicate the hunger of thousands of millions of human beings. They want profits for the few owners of those large companies. - Angel Strapazzone, MOCASE, Argentina

"This agriculture is an agriculture without people. It's an agriculture that doesn't accommodate nature and human beings."
- Itelvina Masioli, MST, Brazil


"It is essential to reclaim the importance of agricultural work in the world and the importance of people who dedicate themselves to agriculture and who feed humanity." - Luis Andrango, FENOCIN, Ecuador

"It's the strength of the organization that produces change into practice. Being in La Via Campesina and being organized gives me the hope I can change the world and create a new society."
- Dayana Mezzonato, MST, Brazil

Taking Control of the "Feed the World" Meme

One of the techniques I used a fair bit to prepare students for a lesson when I was teaching was brainstorming. There are more or less intricate ways of setting up a brainstorming exercise, but I'm not going to get all fancy here. I'm just going to pose a question to you, one that was posed to the general public on a website I stumbled across the other day. I think it was meant to be rhetorical, but I also think it shouldn't be.

"How can we feed a growing global population in an era of climate instability without genetically modified crops?"

Here's some answers I came up with, off the top of my head:

• curtail waste in the food system (40% of food is wasted at the household level in Canada; postharvest losses in developing nations range from 15-50% of production)
• stop producing food for inefficient biofuels (ie, almost all biofuels)
•  maintain and perpetuate biodiversity in order to respond contextually and locally to climate changes
• support and develop greenhouse gas-reducing farming methods
• put money back into public research in agriculture because even the USDA admits that Monsanto's 'drought-tolerant' corn has yields only equal to that of corn conventionally bred

I'm pretty sure the answer is not "giant plantations of monocultures from one seed source that require massive amounts of chemical and fossil fuel-based inputs to produce". That sounds like a textbook definition of a vulnerable food system to me.

What can you add to this list?

Progress?

I've been working on a couple of essays these past few weeks, and reading a lot, but haven't put together enough ideas for a meaty blog post. So, in lieu of theory or reflection, here are some statistics.* Let me know what you think of these trends.

The most recently published Statistics Canada census of agriculture, in 2006, saw a decrease of 5,196 farms in Saskatchewan from 2001 – or, 10.9%. The number of young farm operators in Canada (under the age of 40), including those working with older family members on farms, decreased 58% from 1991 to 2006: a decrease of 33% to 16% of all farm operators. In Saskatchewan, 10% of farms are operated by young farmers.

Farm size has increased correspondingly - from 2001-2006 alone, average farm size increased by a quarter section, from 1283 acres to 1450 acres. Changes in provincial land ownership laws in 2003, whereby land was opened up to non-resident, non-farmer ownership – residents of other provinces, numbered companies, investment companies - have opened the doors to investment in farmland by non-farmers, a growing trend. For example, One Earth Farms, controlled by investment firm Sprott Resource, leases 250,000 acres of First Nations land in Alberta and Saskatchewan to produce grains and livestock. Assiniboia Capital Corporation, based in Regina, owned roughly 100,000 acres of Saskatchewan farmland and had about $65-million in assets under management in 2010. Although foreign ownership of more than 10 acres is still prohibited, exemptions can be granted by the Farm Land Security Board, and foreign players can be minority partners in corporations that own land. 

Prices of farmland in Saskatchewan, while still on average less than those in the other prairie provinces, have also been steadily increasing since 2002 according to the Farm Credit Corporation, including an increase of 2.7% in the last six months of 2010. This adds up to a 44% increase over 2002 prices. 

*I have sources for all of these - Statistics Canada, FCC, various scholarly or news articles - but thought it would be a bit much to post them. Available on request.

Whose Side is Science On?

The kids and I went to the Saskatchewan Science Centre this morning. The soap bubbles were a big hit, as was the mirrored table where you could create kaleidoscopic images with coloured plastic shapes. Lest you think my kids are Luddites, I hasten to assure you that they were also enthralled by Richardson's Ag-Grow-Land, which "celebrates the science and cutting edge tools of modern day agriculture in Saskatchewan": the exhibits had buttons to push and levers to pull.

http://www.sasksciencecentre.com/here/exhibits/aggrowland.html

In one agricultural exhibit, you can climb inside a John Deere tractor cab and have the virtual experience of growing a crop - choosing tillage methods, when to apply chemicals and fertilizers and how much, that sort of skilled technical decision.

I have a friend who is a rural sociologist. Her father is an organic farmer. She decided to play the game and farm organically. Turns out she wasn't offered the chance to cover crop, use green or animal manure, intercrop, or any other organic or agroecological methods. She ended up with the worst score of anyone in the game.

Well, maybe that's scientifically valid. Surely the Science Centre would have vetted its sponsored exhibits for scientific veracity. Let's see, shall we?

Your farming performance, based primarily on yield, is rated against previous players at the end of the game. I have some problems with the equation of good farming with yield, but let's accept that assertion for now. How do the yields of organic agriculture compare with those of conventional agriculture?

The answer, of course, is "it varies", based on type of crop, region, how long the land has been in organic production, and specific weather events that might occur. But for many crops, organic yields are quite close to conventional yields. A twenty-one year European study found an average yield of 20% less for organic, but this ranged from 10% less for winter wheat, no difference for grassland yields, and 33% less for potato yields mainly due to a potassium deficiency. Another twenty-one year trial in Pennsylvania found similar yields for corn and soybeans in both methods. 

So if the entire world switched to organic agriculture, would that mean a reduction of 20% in food supply? Of course not. Much of the world's production, in developing countries, shows drastic yield increases with the adoption of agroecological methods. Drastic, like tripling yields of grain in Honduras just by cover cropping. Reviewing several studies, Altieri* found that "integrated farming systems in which the small-scale farmer produces grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder and animal products out-produce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms." Studies in Mexico found that it takes 1.73 ha of maize monoculture to produce as much food as 1 ha of mixed maize, squash and beans.

Another post will have to address all of the additional benefits of organic farming found in these studies and others, including 30% fewer fossil energy inputs, increase in biodiversity, more resilience to weather shocks, greater water retention and nitrogen and carbon levels in soil, and waste recycling.

The divide between conventional and organic methods isn't as clear-cut as Richardson et al might like you to think, of course. Conventional farmers increasingly use organic methods such as cover cropping, or planting a legume in rotation to increase nitrogen in the soil. What is clear is that agribusiness benefits from positing conventional, chem-dependent methods as not only normal, but examplars of scientific progress. Hey - you aren't anti-science, are you? Against progress?! 

Luckily, agroecology is cutting-edge science, both physical and social. And smart farmers, if they can find out about them, will adopt methods that work.

And, luckily, if you take your children to visit the Science Centre, you are armed with some data to help them critically think about what they're seeing.

*Altieri, Miguel A. and Victor Manuel Toledo. (2011). The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty, and empowering peasants. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:3.

Doomed to repeat history? I wish.

Elderly people in their 70s are my favourite interviewees in my masters' research so far. Born just after the Depression into frugal families, young and idealistic during the civil rights era, farming through decades of boom and bust, these men and women have a wide perspective of agriculture in Saskatchewan. I was mining my interviews today and ran across this quote from one of them:

What the hell's wrong with this whole set-up? You know, our fathers and grandfathers would have revolted against it. And now people just don't have a thought about, you know, there's something wrong with the system.

Last summer, I read a lot about early agrarian movements on the prairies.  My favourite read was Hopkins Moorhouse's Deep Furrows*, a creative nonfiction book from 1918 about the Grain Growers Grain Company's origins with lines like "industrious little mallets were knocking away on the Xylophone of Doubt" and an unabashed bias towards the farmer activists. I found his enthusiasm to be contagious.

Agriculture here has always been capitalist - we had no peasants - and geared towards export. So I don't know how deeply our grandfathers questioned capitalism (although the Communist Party had several thousands of members here in the 1920s).**  However, there's no arguing that they effected large-scale change of a more radical nature than many in the food movement contemplate today.

In the early 1900s, when the wheat boom began and Saskatchewan saw the beginning of an immigration rush, farmers faced daunting array of organizations eager to bleed them dry. There were only two major railways, and they serviced different parts of the province. Elevator companies often owned all the elevators on a line and sometimes colluded on prices. The Winnipeg Grain Exchange was dominated by Eastern dealers and millers that farmers perceived as milking them. Federal tariffs made their agricultural products cheap for Eastern consumers and the Eastern industrial goods expensive for the farmers.

So the farmers organized. They formed the Territorial Grain Growers Association in 1901 and took legal action against a Sintaluta station agent the next year (and won). They formed the Grain Growers Grain Company in 1906 and managed, despite opposition by all the other dealers, to get a seat on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and sell grain on a commission basis, returning profits to its farmer-investors. They formed the Wheat Pools in the 1920s, farmer-owned cooperatives that at first traded and marketed grain but became cooperative elevator companies after the 20s. Local retail co-operatives joined together in 1928 to form Federated Co-operatives Limited, which still administers over 160 co-ops in Saskatchewan today. And when farmers' lobbying pressure on politicians didn't result in desired results, they formed their own political parties. They were the nucleus of the Progressive Party which formed in 1920 and got 65 seats in the 1921 election. The United Farmers of Canada were instrumental in the the formation of the CCF in Saskatchewan (now the NDP).


All of these were collective, community-minded solutions because, as another 70 year old told me, "just like the working man, a farmer needs an organization to speak for him. By yourself you're nobody." Hopkins Moorhouse tells us that the directors of the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Company in the early 1900s warned farmers that if the goal was only to produce dividends, they would “reproduce in another form the evil it was intended to destroy” and that the idea of service must be foremost in mind: their goal was to organize, educate, agitate, and socially and economically uplift farming. Their alternative system did not have generation of profit as its highest goal, social considerations be damned.

The corporate dominance of the food system in Canada today is not much different from how it was then. What is our response? We compete with each other to increase production, which drives down prices. We blame the faults of the system on individual failings - for example, if speculation wreaks havoc on prices, we say the answer is that farmers must learn to hedge. We accept the status quo as natural, even common sense. We think that we are taking action by buying something - "voting with our dollar"- without recognizing how the limited choices have been set out for us. Only 61% of us vote and those who don't likely aren't engaging in action to either change or make obselete the political system that they deem irrelevant or unimportant. We are kept in constant fear of national and personal financial insecurity and told that circling the wagons, excluding others, and getting what we can for ourselves is the way to stave off doom.

Well, I've worked myself into a funk. I'll post something more positive in a few days, but for right now, does anyone have any examples of some positive movement?

* Subtitled: Which Tells of Pioneer Trails Along Which the Farmers of Western Canada Fought Their Way to Great Achievements in Co-Operation

** I am compelled to write this geeky footnote: They were likely more Narodist than Lenin would have liked (although he would have expected no different).

Conservatives snub democracy, farmers with move to dismantle Wheat Board

I couldn't be silent on the issue of the Canadian Wheat Board. It's in my blood. This is an article I wrote that will be appearing in a provincial NDP newsletter in June (so bear in mind the audience, when reading). For another angle that brings in the labour movement, see Simon Enoch's article.

On May 17, Conservative Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz terminated a longstanding debate in Western Canada by announcing his government's intention to end the Canadian Wheat Board's monopoly on marketing wheat and barley.

On one level, the debate is economic – do farmers do better with a monopoly seller representing them in the global marketplace by pooling their grain and sharing the average proceeds? This question has been conclusively answered 'yes' by many academic studies and trade inquiries.

However, the real issue at stake is an ideological one. The anti-CWB side argues private entrepreneurs should have the economic right to market their own grain and barley and compete with each other for the best price. The pro-CWB side argues in favour of economic cooperation and food sovereignty - values that have historically typified the Canadian farm movement and were crucial in the CWB’s formation.

The Canadian Wheat Board evolved in response to western farmers' lack of market power in the early part of the twentieth century when federal government policy set up the West as cheap providers of raw materials for Eastern industry. These farmers felt powerless against duopolistic railways, elevator companies, and the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. In the face of this, farmers' natural inclination was to take matters into their own hands, acting collectively for the good of the farm community: the Grain Growers Grain Company, the Wheat Pools, and finally the Wheat Board – made mandatory in 1943 – resulted.

Through its three guiding principles - single desk selling, price pooling, and government guarantees - the Wheat Board provides stability and market power to farmers. Unlike a private grain company, whose shareholders demand ever-increasing profits, the Board returns more than 95 per cent of its sales proceeds to farmers.

Of course, this is only part of what the CWB does. The Wheat Board also uses its considerable influence to advocate for farmers with Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, taking these railways to court when they have provided substandard service to farmers. The CWB also invests heavily in wheat and barley research, funding 60 per cent of the Canadian International Grains Institute. The Wheat Board has spent decades building markets that promote the superior reputation of Canadian wheat. These are services that the private sector either will not currently perform or will only do for a profit.

The Wheat Board is one of the last major institutions created by our ancestors to support prairie farmers. Farmers have lost other farmer-controlled institutions such as the Pools and supportive government programs such as the Crow Rate. In a situation that hearkens back to the 1900s, western farmers today are at the whims of a duopolistic rail transport system and the four companies who control more than 80 per cent of the global grain trade. More than an economic loss, though, the destruction of the Wheat Board seems to indicate the destruction of the cooperative values of our Saskatchewan farming ancestors.

Perhaps the most relevant lesson from the Wheat Board's impending demise for both rural and urban folk involves the federal government's conception of democracy. CWB opponents claim the recent election of a federal Conservative majority government, regardless of the tiny percentage of those voters who are farmers, means that the government has a clear mandate to kill the CWB.

CWB supporters point out that there already is a democratic mechanism to change the Board’s mandate. Since 1998, farmers who sell wheat and barley have the democratic right to elect directors to the CWB to carry out their wishes. And, since these elections began, 70 per cent of farmers have consistently voted in pro-CWB directors.

It's hard not to see Ritz's termination of the Wheat Board debate as a continuation of Conservative attempts to erode democracy by bypassing democratic processes, ignoring stakeholder desires, and ruling autocratically. For our food system, it means that we have lost control of a major staple and a major counterforce to multinational agribusiness giants.

Homespun Wisdom

In December, I was very fortunate to interview an amazing 69-year-old farmer from Manitoba with an incredible knack for turning a phrase. Fred is erudite and down-to-earth, humourous and sober, gentle and passionate. You can hear an interview with him on Shaking the Tree Radio, but these quotes are from my interview with him. We talked about the demise of the family farm, the loss of rural communities, the future of agriculture, and public consciousness. Fred explained how the logic of the capitalist marketplace means that wealth and knowledge are transferred out of rural areas into the hands of monopolistic corporations as citizens' democratic control over the economy weakens.

"I remember when my dad first sprayed a field for yellow mustard. This was such a novelty I rode on the tractor with him to watch him apply 24D to a field, which now is total lunacy. But all of a sudden it changed the way we farm.It created a dependency where the benefit of the technology was all captured by the price of the technology. And then because prior to that the knowledge was passed from generation to generation when I was probably at maybe preschool I can remember my grandfather taking me by the hand and showing me things. You see, that was that intergenerational transfer of agricultural knowledge that goes back right to the Euphrates valley 10000 years ago. All that linkage and all of a sudden, when my dad hooked on that sprayer, that knowledge was not important anymore...The transfer of knowledge from community to a place where community rents and buys knowledge from a knowledge supplier is not a sustainable system."

Fred contrasted our situation on the Prairies to the situation he saw in the Philippines a decade ago, where politicians were eager to embrace - and to force people to adapt to - the industrial farming that we model, with all the losses that would entail.

"There's another thing that I didn't realize we'd lost until I'd done that trip to the Philippines. In the evening, because of their poverty to a degree, the community there functioned as a community. They got together, and adults sat around talking about the problems of agriculture. Which never ends, it's universal. And on the outside of the circle, the children were sitting listening in. I thought, “I've been there.” But it's a long time ago, and we don't have that anymore. We come in off the long day and we turn on the idiot box or we pick up the paper and the nodding heads and the golden hands direct the conversation. Because you know, it's got to a degree that a lot of people in social circles think that it's impolite to initiate a conversation about the social and economic problems of our community. They just want you to go away, don't bother me with that. I want to turn on something like Dancing With the Stars. And there I get to participate 'cause I can vote! That's democracy!"

And finally, on community:

"I always look towards the collective way to do things, because I desire my neighbour more than his land. Because without my neighbour, the land isn't much good to me, because an agricultural desert is not the place I want to live."