The evolution of farming

From the late fifties till 1967 my family lived on a four acre “farm” beside the railroad tracks in Elora. Four acres isn’t much of a farm by today’s standards, but it allowed us to keep a couple cows, some pigs, ducks, geese, rabbits, and chickens, and the most expansive kitchen garden you’d ever want to see. It was a recreation of what my parent’s had grown up with in the old country.

The cows gave us milk, and when the time was right, steaks. The chickens provided eggs, and when the time was right, various tasty chicken parts. Probably three quarters of what was on the supper table back in the day came from those four acres.

But things were changing fast. As Ed Hutton, a farming lifer, explained to me, “we used to get everything from the farm and rarely spent money anywhere else. Now we grow one cash crop and buy everything at the grocery store.”

The farmhouse here at Falling Downs was put up in 1914. It replaced the log cabin that had stood here since pioneer days. In 1914 a hundred acres could throw off enough cash to put up a two story brick farmhouse.

That was the case till after the WW II, when farm economics changed to where Mr. Farmer could make way more money working in a factory than he could tending his hundred acres. If you loved the farming lifestyle you couldn’t maintain it on a hundred acres. Guys who kept farming were forced to get bigger. Today, anything under 500 acres is a hobby farm. Most serious full-time farmers count their acreage by thousands, at least if they’re into cash cropping or grazing cattle.

As farms got bigger and more expensive, most of those farmers who “feed cities” succumbed to the lure of “scientific” farming. That’s where all the inputs get more expensive and it becomes imperative to drench the soil in chemicals in order to get the crop yields required to pay your debts. On the livestock side, factory farming became the norm. When you’re buying pork or chicken today, odds are those animals spent their entire lives indoors and never saw a ray of sunshine.

But I believe the pendulum is swinging the other way now. That’s partly because more people realize that the way we’ve been doing things for the past 75 years or so is not sustainable. Drenching the land in chemicals eventually kills the soil. Factory farms are an exercise in animal cruelty.

There’s got to be a better way…

And there is. We made a stop today at DeJong Acres, not ten minutes away. They do sheep and pork and a variety of stuff the old-school way. Their flocks of sheep are outside in the fresh country air, herded and guarded by authentic old-fashioned sheep dogs. They’ve got a farm store going on in order to deal direct with the consumer and cut out, as much as possible, the middle-men.

That’s the future of farming.