What "farming" was... and what it will be again

Check out this 200 acres of farm heaven on PEI.

That house once had aspirations, if not pretensions. When that place was built in 1917 those two hundred acres provided a livelihood for the family who lived there, and coughed up enough surplus cash to pay for this house.

That doesn’t happen anymore on a two hundred acre farm… unless you’re into market gardening or some kind of niche ag.

Market gardening is extremely labour intensive, even more so in this day and age when the consumer wants everything “organic.”

To make it in the modern economy most farmers buy into the industrial agri-chem model of farming. These are the guys who will pay $20,000/acre for cropland and still expect to turn a profit. Which they will… at least until soybean prices go down or interest rates go up. These are the guys who feed those cities you read about on the bumper stickers. These are the guys who depend on the latest Monsanto innovations to square the circle.

That’s what “modern agriculture” has become.

I’ve been around farmers all my life. I remember Ed Hutton telling me how in the old days practically everything you ate came off your own farm. You only left the farm to buy clothes and workboots.

“But gradually it all changed. Now a farmer does one crop and gets everything else off the farm.”

Ya, I guess you would. Don’t know how many different recipes you can cook up if you’re farming 2000 acres of GMO soybeans.

In Ed’s case, he didn’t go into soy; he went into gravel.

Ed told me the first ten years he farmed out at Vimy Ridge Farm they barely scraped by. Sometime in the early sixties he told his wife, “this is our last year on the farm if things don’t turn around.”

That was the year he, or maybe it was Ed Cox, discovered gravel under them thar fields. All those Cox gravel pits around the south-west corner of Guelph were at one time where Ed grew corn and hay and grazed cattle.

We’re coming to a turning point.

The gravel farmers have become miners rather than farmers.

The Monsanto “drench your acreage in chemicals” model of farming is falling out of favour.

What’s left?

The future belongs to small-scale organic farming.

But, that’s very labour intensive…

So I guess we’ll have to get used to paying more for healthy food!