Growing food was never supposed to be a complicated business and there’s no evidence ancient societies thought of it as much more than a part-time job. When Samuel de Champlain spent the winter on my farm 400 years ago as a guest of the Tobacco Nation, he wrote that the natives had ample supplies of corn, beans and dried fish stored up and they spent most of the winter asleep. He envied their way of life.
When I bought this farm in Southern Ontario near Georgian Bay in 1978, very few people farmed full-time. They all had jobs at the shipyards, or in the bush or ran lifts at the ski hills. I thought this was a recent development, but people assured me it had always been this way. Having a farm in these stingy hills meant you ate reasonably well but if you wanted spending money you had to get a job in town. I came to envy their way of life.
We still grow corn out here on this field. It’s twice as high and probably ten times more productive than Champlain’s day. The machines visit for a few hours in the spring and a few hours in the fall. But it’s still a break-even exercise. Field corn now costs about four dollars a bushel to grow and that’s exactly where the market price has been sitting for several years now.
“So why on earth do you bother with it?” I asked my neighbour, who has rented the field for 25 years as part of a vast cash crop operation that takes in several thousand acres.
“Part of the corn-bean rotation,” he shrugs. That is enough of an explanation for him but it puzzles the hell out of me. I’ve watched so many giant organizations sail serenely into icebergs over my career that I am always tensed up, bracing for the sound of rupturing steel. I have the ominous feeling that big changes loom on the horizon for corn/soy croppers.
Years ago, when I worked for Canada’s oldest life insurance company, Gordon, the long-retired chief actuary would drop by my office on his way up to the board of directors’ meeting. He was 90 years old then and had manned a field gun at Vimy Ridge in 1917. I once showed him a very stirring speech I had written for the president and he read it politely before setting it down.
“Dan,” he said. “This is not a complicated business. You break even on the insurance and you make money on the investments. And you do your best not to botch things up. Every time I came to work here I asked myself, is this the day, am I the person that will botch this up?” Old Gordon died a few years later and shortly after that, management botched things up. The company no longer exists.
We have done amazing things in modern food production. It’s never been more efficient, productive, safe or reliable, but we’ve also botched it up and the cost to our communities has been enormous. The pandemic has frightened enough people in the city about their helplessness that the real estate market for farms in our area has exploded over the last six months. An agent said to me that people are suddenly very interested in food security.
I know what food security is all about. I have fifty meat chicks out in a pasture hut that is wired up and electrified like Millhaven Penitentiary. If they survive the summer and return from the processing plant in a plastic bag they will have cost me ten dollars each. I can buy exactly the same bird in Loblaws, cooked, for nine. Same story for my sheep, cattle and pigs. But if there was an accounting technique for assigning value to a way of life this operation would show a handsome return.
So I welcome the newcomers. The virus that drove up real estate activity has also brought my kids home and given us new interests including a portable sawmill and a mushroom plot. We eat well, but if we want spending money we still have to find work in town, just like our predecessors.
As my neighbour Hughie used to say, “Stop trying to justify any of this with that calculator. Put that thing away before you hurt yourself! You keep chickens because you like them. That is the only reason you ever have to give me for anything you do.”