Small Farm Canada » Editorial

July/August 2010 – Fractionalization! What fractionalization?

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:10:22 +0000

Several times in the last few months I have heard about fractionalization in the Canadian farm community. If I understand the issue correctly, fractionalization means there are too many competing interest groups, provincial boards and regional organizations to keep agriculture from presenting a unified front.
What nonsense.
I can assure you that Canadian farmers are united in their efforts to produce good food, steward the land, and make farms viable. From coast to coast, we work, speak and produce as one. The only exception I might make—and I emphasize it is the only exception—are the farmers represented by the marketing boards. Maybe I am just jealous of all the new tractors they can afford, but it seems to me a horribly unfair advantage over the rest of us to be able to focus on farming and not the wretched marketing. What’s worse, every time I buy milk or eggs or chicken I’m making a payment on their new equipment! No, the quota farmers stand apart from us regular farmers.
But, as I say, that’s the only exception. Otherwise, farmers across the country face the same issues, the same challenges.
Fractionalization: ha! . . .
Come to think of it, I could be persuaded to make another exception. Organic farmers bug me. They whine above their weight, make the rest of us want to hide our sprayers behind the barn, and seem to have the buying public on a string. They have everyone wanting organic. What’s next? Organic bullets? No, organic farmers are definitely different. With those two exceptions, however, Canadian farmers are unified.
. . .
Okay, truth be told, I don’t really feel kin to large-scale producers of any sort, either. I mean, big ag has increasingly come to mean looking for a big handout. A lot of people make fun of us little farmers, but I say we are the only non-subsidy farms in Canada. I don’t have much in common with a fellow in Saskatchewan who needs a 10 acre field just to turn his air seeder around. Have those farmers ever walked their fields, ever touched the earth?
And while we are at it, let’s call a spade a spade and say what horse farms are: tax evasions! Putting them in the same category as a productive farm is like saying a negligee and overalls are both forms of protective clothing. Yeah, right. I guess I’d have to say something similar about agri-tourism. What have U-pick ice cream and corn mazes got to do with real farming?
Real farmers drive strangers off with a pitchfork, not welcome them in a clown outfit. I don’t want to be in an organization that counts any of these people as members. I’m in solidarity with real, food-producing small farms from coast to coast—though I have to say that the kind of small producers who live close to Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary and cater to rich people with pastured Berkshire pork and holistically-massaged, lavenderinfused free range chickens and God knows what kind of bother me too. You have to take out a loan just to buy a pork chop. That’s just serving the fantasies of the rich.
I’m not so keen on fibre farms, goats or crazy niche products either. In all honesty I wouldn’t care to sit beside these folks at a farm meeting. Otherwise, I see eye to eye with farmers across the country.
Fractionalization: ha!

A co-operative endeavor

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:40:52 +0000

For the last couple of years we’ve partnered with John and Lorraine Buchanan, of nearby Parry Bay Sheep Farm, to share equipment, land, crops and marketing. It’s been successful in a number of ways: it has reduced the duplication of some equipment between the farms, made better use of other equipment, made better use of our time, given us a second set of good minds to bounce farm ideas off, been profitable and been fun too.
In short, co-operating with John and Lorraine is one of the best things we’ve done.
I thought I’d share a few details and observations on the how and why of this joint venture in case any of you are thinking of going down the same road.
Just to be clear: both farms are mixed operations, with crops (grain, hay), livestock (sheep, pigs, chickens). Both farms operate independently but we share some equipment, some land, and some crops.
To get the venture going required some sacrifice on the part of both farms, and to keep it going requires good communication and what I think is a cool way of tracking costs, time etc. (having beer and pizza together every now and then helps too). The genesis of the co-op was simple: to make the farms more viable.
John and Lorraine probably made the greater sacrifice because they had more land and more equipment and were more knowledgeable. Our contribution was to buy equipment that was compatible with theirs (hay tedder, rake) thus providing them with backup. Since growing grain (especially wheat for bakeries) was something both farms wanted to do more seriously, we bought a combine, auger and grain cleaner. You might say these were the investments both farms made in the shared enterprise.
To keep track of time and money spent on shared farm activities we set up a spreadsheet listing equipment and inputs on the left axis and the various fields we share along the top axis. Then, for each piece of equipment we established hourly costs, including depreciation. These range from $45/hr for a 50 hp tractor pulling a roller to $85/hr for a 105/hp tractor baling straw. The tractor costs include fuel and an operator wage of $15/hr. We wanted to be thorough so we even included an annual fee for smaller equipment like the grain auger ($300/yr). There are currently 31 pieces of equipment/inputs on the list of possible expenses.
If a process/piece of equipment seems over/under priced then we consult and adjust. We have been doing this since we started and I expect we’ll be doing it annually for years to come.
An added benefit of this system is that we can see how much we’ve invested in each field. We can also accurately track some revenues from each field (for straw and hay bales) and reasonably accurately track revenues from grain.
Of course the whole shared farm endeavor is contingent on both parties giving more than they take. John and Lorraine demonstrated this marvelously last year when, after I bent the door on their big Massey tractor, they insisted on paying for repairs because the mishap was the result of “a design fault”. That’s a big-hearted quality not even the most thorough spreadsheet can account for!

March/April 2010 – Reliability a precondition of farming

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:11:41 +0000

If you’ve attended a farm meeting or conference lately chances are you’ve seen an earnest young man or woman stand up and complain that the price of land is keeping them from farming. Their point is valid, but only if ownership of land is considered an essential prerequisite of farming. As Treena Hein points out in her article in this issue, there are other ways of getting into farming, including co-ops and leasing.
Our farm is composed largely of leased land. I’d also like to see these (usually) smart, strong young people become farmers. So I think it only fair to add several comments that Treena and her sources may have been too polite to mention.
There seems to be a sense of expectation, even entitlement, in young people that there should be a system for accessing land much like they access health care, or a passport. I find this worrisome because a.) it suggests an overreliance on governments/systems to provide for their needs/wants and b.) hints at a sort of unrural impatience: it is as if they are saying, “I want to farm and I want to farm now!”
Leasing land is complicated and, no matter how many details are written into a contract, still relies on a kitchen-table kind of trust. I lived in this community for a decade before I was able to lease land of any acreage. In retrospect, I think the landowners needed to see that I was reliable, and was going to stick around. The biggest impediment to young farmers accessing land in this area seems to be their desire to be both of the land and of the planet, to be local and international. You can be a sturdy Wendell Berry kind of farmer with a deep affinity for the land. Or you can be the kind of Worldly Person who digs wells for tribes-people in West Africa one month, and the next month is clashing with cops at a climate change conference.
You can not be both.

From the I-wish-I’d-said-that department
If you were looking for a one sentence summary of the strange world farmers are selling into, you could do worse than the remark by Ontario lavender farmer John Murrel that “People are buying our products because of what’s not in them.” (p 39, italics mine.) Gosh—there’s something profound in his comment; think of the marketing around what food is “free” of: trans-fats, gluten, genetic modification, pesticides. Meat is marketed as cruelty-free, chicken is hormone free. And, if a food isn’t free of something, it has less in it, like salt, or calories. Gosh again—marketers have us paying for what isn’t there!
A thousand years from now historians will look at this time—when we were so full that we paid to have less—and declare that it was at this point that we either finally started looking after ourselves, or began the long ascent back into the trees.

Jan/feb 2010 – Calling all inventors

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:57:35 +0000

Calling all inventors
Six ideas that could change the world of
farming (or at least keep farm couples happier).

Device: GPS traceable tool beacon.
How it works: electronic beacon magnetically attaches to crowbars,
large wrenches, etc., sends out locating signal to a GPS locator unit.
Purpose: easily locate lost tools, saving hundreds of dollars annually
on mower blades, baler shear pins etc. Possible utility in keeping track
of teenage daughter/step daughters.

Device: retractable treads on rubber boots.
How it works: in the same way aircraft landing gear retracts, the
treads would pull into the sole, leaving a smooth, cleanable surface.
Purpose: reduce livestock fecal matter in living room, kitchen,
refrigerator, cheese drawer, master bedroom etc. Ancillary benefit:
improved spousal harmony.

Device: egg-shaped truck tires.
How it works: elliptical-shape keeps vehicle from rolling.
Purpose: to keep farm trucks lacking in functional parking brakes
from rolling when you get out to open or shut a gate. Current system,
dependent on vehicles with approximately round tires, involves
chasing rolling truck or being chased by rolling truck.

Device: warm air duct for open station (cab-less) tractors.
How it works: a hose or pipe would deliver warm engine air up your
pant leg.
Purpose: increased operator happiness, less time wasted warming up
at the coffee shop, more productivity.

Device: solar-powered headlight hat.
How it works: fibrous solar panels charge batteries that power LED
lights.
Purpose: environmentally friendly lights help illuminate barn,
equipment at night. Ancillary benefit: good for walking home from
the neighbours’ after researching malting barley products.

Device: built-in vacuum cleaner for trucks.
How it works: um, like any other vacuum cleaner?
Purpose: removes dirt, dirt-like matter etc. before it gets ground
in to truck floorboards or tracked into the house (see fecal matter
points, spousal happiness, above).

Nov/Dec 2009 – The swine!

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:50:15 +0000

It is said that pigs are the cleanest of farm animals. This is true except
when it isn’t. Usually very steadfast about dunging in one area of a
field or pen, our pigs occasionally suffer an instinct breakdown and
poop in their feed dish. When one makes a mistake, they all follow.
Within hours there is an unholy mess.
It is also said that pigs are the smartest of barnyard animals, and
that they compare favorably in intelligence to dogs. Again, this is
true except when it isn’t. A pig has a curious mind, I’ll agree, but this
is also the same animal that will opt to drink filthy puddle water
when fresh water is a few feet away. Is this smart? Or am I mixing
preferences in taste with intelligence?
With pigs, the opposite of everything is true. They are clean and
filthy, engagingly curious and beast-of-burden dull, easy to work with
and the most irritatingly stubborn of farm animals.
I was thinking of our experiences with pigs while reading the
comment in Ray Ford’s column in this issue (page 18) about how,
when first given the opportunity to romp and forage in grass, his
son’s pigs. . . opted to snooze on the manure pile. How typically
piggish! How wonderfully swinish!
Pigs look happy because their face is configured in a smile, like a
dolphin’s, but I know our pigs have a sense of humour. They enjoy the
slapstick of chasing a rolling squash as well as the subtler comedy of
snoozing on a hot summer day while we toil.
Along with chickens, pigs possess an almost unbelievable
positivism. You can cut the testicles off a pig one day, and the next
day he is grunting and chatting with you like a best friend. It is as if
he is saying, “Let’s put yesterday’s unpleasant events behind us, shall
we? Today, we eat!”
Only a pig lover will understand this: a pig is truly gorgeous.
When working around them, I find my eye constantly attracted to
their haunches. The essayist G.K. Chesterton thought the same, and
concluded that there was a satisfying universal shape in pigs, writing
that, “The pig has the same great curves, swift yet heavy, which we
see in rushing water or in a rolling cloud.”
Okay, when I look at our 400+lb sows, the swift part seems a bit
of a stretch.
But there is something in the shape of a pig that a Modernist
might call “true”: a near mathematical elegance to the curves and
movement that must, at some level, satisfy our need for form and
symmetry.
Put a dozen pigs together and you have the best and worst
of human society—from the nasty debauch between consenting
adults in a modern mall bathroom, to the gregarious good cheer of
a medieval village on May Day, to professorial interest of a sow in
excavating, from an overburden of soil and rock, a single savory seed.
As someone else once remarked, “Man is more nearly like the pig
than the pig would like to admit.”

Sept/Oct 2009 – One potato, two potato

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:25:15 +0000

Scaling up production comes with its own issues.

Unless you are possessed of a sort of Confucian contentment about your farm, you’ll be familiar with the impulse to increase production. The scale does not matter. No sooner does the small farmer sell eggs from a half dozen hens than she is spread-sheeting costs and revenues of a dozen hens. The market gardener, noting that early spuds sell off the roadside stand by noon every day, wonders if two more rows wouldn’t be a good idea. And the farmer with a 40 hp tractor covets the 50 hp tractor.

As Treena Hein points out in an article in this issue (see p 22), scaling up production affects every aspect of the farm, including business and personal matters.

My wife and I, having expanded the farm in the last four years, know whereof we speak. Four years ago we ran 40 ewes, two sows and a boar, and grew a couple of acres of grain. Annual revenue was $15,000. We now have 60 ewes, 12 sows and two boars and this year are growing, along with another farm couple, over 40 acres of grain. Our gross revenue last year was $67,000.

It may be too soon to say whether the effort and costs of scaling up have been worth it, but here are my observations:

Negatives:

Increased risk: we now have thousands of dollars in crops and products at risk to weather, power failure (meat in freezers) or simply to market trends. In pre-expansion days, we could off load excess lamb with a couple of calls to friends. Now, we are faced with selling over 100 lambs, 130 feeder pigs, and tonnes of grain per year. A lot more is at stake.
Less. . . fun: harvesting an acre or two of barley with the old combine was kind of circus-like. Who really cares if you get the crop off before the fall rains set in? Although our grain production now is picayune compared to most Canadian farms, it has the potential to make (or lose) us thousands of dollars. I laugh less at screw ups.
Need for labour: whereas the wife and I could simply muscle our way through haying season and barn clean outs before, we now need regular part time help. We’ve lost some independence.
No holidays: Taking more than a few days away would require launching a military-scale preparation 10 days before. No fun.

Positives:

More opportunity to make money: The profit on a few sides of pork just didn’t amount to much. Sell several hundred sides a year at a small profit, as we do now, and you’ve got a decent amount of money.
More experiments: with a few acres in a crop, or just a few head of livestock, it is difficult to run comparable trials. We now can watch and learn from using different growing programs (no-till vs till with the grains; formulated livestock feed vs what we make on the farm for the livestock). We are learning more, faster.
Better farming: increased production has allowed us to have more and better breeding stock, yielding consistently superior market lambs and hogs.
On balance: the expanded farm is less fun but more satisfying. You have to be a farmer to understand.

July/August 2009 – Advice to Young Farmers

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:30:11 +0000

• Find a good chiropractor, treat him/her like a deity.
• If you need to borrow money, borrow from family, not the bank (banks charge interest and want regular payments).
• Grease is one of your best friends. Use it liberally.
• What may seem like a cockamamie farming practice to you may be someone else’s hard won experience.
• Men: accept that at least one part of the yard needs to look nice, help your wife/partner keep the dahlias weed-free.
• Women: accept that old machinery is, in fact, a sort of warehouse of possibly useful parts. Resist the urge to have it hauled for scrap.
• Be nice to your non-farming neighbours: they are more likely to have time to help in haying season than farming neighbours
• Eat at least some of what you raise.
• Get a gun, learn to use it.
• Avoid unnecessary expenses. As a Greek philosopher said, economy itself is a great source of revenue.
• Don’t move boars or bulls when you are tired.
• If raising livestock, understand that killing is part of farming.
• Have a professional designer make your business cards and website. (Just because your sister-in-law has a “flare” for art doesn’t mean she can create something attractive.)
• Don’t get hung up on owning land: security of tenure is really what you need.
• Do get hung up on soil fertility: constantly add manures and organic matter.
• Accept that you will need an off-farm income.
• Unforgiveable family tenses will arise if you transport a billy goat in your mother-in-law’s Volvo.
• Slow cookers are your other best friend.
• Bill promptly but pay slowly.
• Keep your fuel clean and your tractor seat dry.
• Develop/learn a unique skill: welding, shearing, castrating, artificial insemination. You can charge a high hourly rate for these skills and, more importantly, you’ll be a sort of essential service in your community.
• For every 4 hours you spend in the garden/field/barn, spend one hour in the office (work on the business, not in the business).
• Learn/develop hobbies or pastimes that have nothing to do with farming, like ping-pong or Brazilian folk dancing. Farming can be all-consuming. Best if you can get right away from it.
• Keep one vehicle free from grease and dirt.
• Livestock need a constant supply of water.
• Maintain records: varieties planted, when, and where; harvest dates and yields; breeding dates, birth & growth rates.
• Understand your costs so thoroughly that you know what your per lb, per unit costs are on any given day.
• Accept charity.
• The best fertilizer is the farmer’s boots: spent 15 minutes a day observing your livestock; fields.
• Don’t always bitch and gripe about farming. Be positive most of the time and euphoric at least once a week. You are growing things: hurray!
• Strive to keep greasy tractor parts, bits from recently eviscerated chickens etc off the freezers from which customers buy their beef.
• Be proud of what you accomplish and humble of what you have yet to learn.
• Learn to like yourself and your thoughts: you are going to be spending a lot of time working alone.
• Remember that deodorant isn’t just for city people.

May/June 2009 – What farmers can learn from publishers

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:38:39 +0000

In the curious bi-polar world that I live in—magazine editor by day, small farmer by evenings and weekends—the magazine tends to benefit from the farm more than the other way around. I’ll come across an idea while farming and, if it seems suitable for a national audience, find a way to work it into a successful feature in the publication.
For example, the story on soil testing that Ray Ford wrote in the March/April issue was the direct result of a need I felt, and that I shared with other local farmers, to better understand soil dynamics of their fields.
There are other examples of the magazine piggybacking on the farm.
However, in the last year I‘ve noticed that our farm is benefiting from the publishing side of my life.
In the magazine business there is an old saying that a company is only worth as much as its list of readers. The reader list—Small Farm Canada’s included—is made up mostly of individuals with shared traits. Our readers are small farmers, interested in food and food production, keen to learn. . . . That’s why advertisers are willing to pay good bucks to reach the likes of me and you: because the odds are high that we could be consumers of their products, like seeds, or tractors.
I recalled this several months ago when one of our farm’s biggest pork customers slashed his orders. The cancellation left us with several dozen unsold feeder hogs. What to do? The auction would yield less than the cost of raising them. Somewhat desperate, I pawed through old receipt books and bank deposit forms and assembled a list of about 70 customers that we had dealt with in the last three years. In many cases these were people who had bought lamb, or firewood, or hay, or grain. Then I got on the phone and started selling pork. An hour later and we had pre-sold every hog on the farm except the sows and boar.
There was no secret to this success: the list I was working off included people who: (a) knew us and our farm (and trusted us) and (b) were of a mind to buy local (and knew not to expect Costco pricing).
I encourage you to think of the same thing.
If you don’t already have a list of customers there are easy ways to begin. Start with people you’ve sold anything to. When you are talking to them, ask if they have family or friends that might be interested in your products. Ask people at work, or on sports teams or school groups. It may seem like you are tapping them for a favour but remember, too, that in these times of intense interest in local food you are doing them a favour.
Advertising helps build lists too (of course I’m going to say that—
I’m a publisher too!). Last fall our farm spent $280 on ads in several local newspapers. I calculated we got $1,600 in direct business from those ads. On a strict cost/benefit analysis advertising wasn’t worth it. But in the months since the last ad was published, we have had a number of repeat orders from the customers and several reference-related orders as well. The ad may have expired but it is effectively still at work. The concept of a long-payoff should be something all of us farmers are familiar with.
On a sort-of related matter, you may have noticed that the magazine has a different feel. Beginning with this issue, Small Farm Canada will be printed on an earthier, more environmentally friendly paper. Not only is the new stock more in keeping with our subject matter, but it allows us to keep advertising and subscription rates to reasonable levels during tough economic times. And—bonus!—we’ve upped the page count in this issue to 56 pages. That means even more articles and stories for you to enjoy.

March/April 2009 – Other Measures of Success

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:43:50 +0000

Among agricultural press writers there is an ominous joke that Canadian production agriculture will soon—in a matter of decades—be conducted on “one farm”. The term refers to the inexorable trend to bigger, and fewer, production farms. The farm writers jest about competing to get interviews with the lone Canadian farmer, and writing stories that will be read by an audience of one—the same farmer.

If Canadian production agriculture is to avoid the one farm scenario large-scale farmers are going to have to fold the interests of people—towns, schools, community centers—into their business plans.

It can be done.

David Rourke, the forward thinking farmer from Minto, Man., has made a priority of finding a way to keep people in rural areas. With 5,000 acres in grain, and producing (depending on the market) up to 14,000 hogs a year, Rourke isn’t anybody’s idea of a small farmer. Yet part of his focus is maintaining the population and vitality of rural communities. He is a supporter of the small farm conferences held in nearby Boissevain (where I met him several years ago), and his unique set-up, which sees feed wheat from his farm run through an on-farm ethanol plant. The ethanol is sold, the spent grains are fed to hogs, whose manure is spread on the fields to grow more wheat. The operation has a lovely circularity to it, of course, but it employs a half dozen people too.

More important than the production details, was Rourke’s ambition to make the operation a model for other farmers, so they could employ local workers as well. And, recognizing that a pay cheque isn’t enough, Rourke had also invested in Minto’s restaurant, so there was a place to go for coffee or dinner.

A long way to the east, that same year, I saw a fascinating scene played out on a Mennonite farm in Ontario that also proved community can come to the fore in farming. The farm was run by a sect of Mennonites that use modern machinery, but only under certain situations. A hay wagon, drawn by a team of workhorses, made its way around a field, collecting loose hay (by means of an ingenious horse-powered conveyor—and no, I can’t describe it). Atop the stack, two boys forked hay while a sturdy, bearded man minded the reins. When the wagon was loaded the team took it to a barn where the loose hay was muscled into a stationary baler powered by a tractor. The bales then made their way, via a noisy conveyor, to the upper floor of a barn where still more workers, young and old, stowed them. The litmus for the use of the old and new technologies, it was explained to me, was their benefit or harm not to production or the bottom line but to. . . community. Technology that kept people working together was good; that which sent a man off by himself (a tractor and baler, for example) was not good. Hence the stationary baler.

Different priorities, different measures. That’s what is needed if we are to arrest and perhaps counter the march of corporate economics to a depopulated rural landscape.

For more on David Rourke, see the February, 2009 issue of Canadian Farm Manager, available at farmcentre.com

Jan/Feb 2009 – Uncomfortable on the Pew, Uncomfortable off the Pew

admin — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:46:19 +0000

Oh, I was a smart little bastard when I quit church. It was 1975. I was 14. Church, even the humble, small-town, low-Anglican St. John’s that I attended, seemed more about the institution than it was about spirituality. Skirt-chasing ministers were making news for all the wrong reasons. Pews were hard, sermons stodgy, the breath of the old parishioners beyond toxic. No, church was irrelevant, often hypocritical. It was not for me.

I broke the news to my mother, a steadfast church-goer, over a usual Sunday lunch of home-made pea soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I told her I’d find my spirituality elsewhere and in more authentic circumstances—in walks in the forest, music, discussion with friends.

I am now 47. My views about the problems of churches have not substantially changed. But I am increasingly mindful of the shortfalls of what might generously be called self-directed spirituality.

As far as I can determine, self-directed spirituality too often leads to shopping for cheap tools on Sunday morning. Or driving the kids somewhere. Or catching up on office work. Or going about what many of us do the other six days of the week. The imperatives of modern daily life are such that, should we suddenly be blessed with an eight day week, we’d be just as busy taking the kids to another soccer match, pursuing yet another good buy.

Many of us ditched church but forgot to set aside time for an alternative, for real, hard exploration of non-material values—to study, read, think. (To those who claim to be able to explore spirituality and work or shop at the same time I have two comments: Good for you! Bullshit.)

I am also concerned about the message being sent to young people or, in the case of those of us who have abandoned church, the message that is not being sent. Whatever you think of the goings-on of a church, there is something meaningful in the fact that families gather to sing, pray, listen and discuss in formal, serious circumstances. To see, as I did in my youth, the mill worker sitting beside the nurse in church signals that prayer is a real activity, worthy of time, attention, respectful appearance.

Now, compare that to the image many of us telegraph on Sunday mornings. Dropping $50 at Canadian Tire, a coffee at Timmy’s . . .

I can see that I’m headed for trouble here—writing myself into a corner where I advocate either a return to church or, ludicrously, that we somehow have to outwardly show that we are spiritual individuals. I’m not pushing either. At this point all I know is that churches are both more and less than appears. Give me another 30 years and I may not even know that.