When extreme weather events strike the farm, the small landholder always has a better chance of muddling through it than his agri-biz neighbour. This principle has been persuasively documented in a study by a University of British Columbia professor who looked at 2800 major droughts, heat waves, cold snaps and floods in 177 countries between 1964 and 2007.
Dr. Navin Ramankutty observed that severe weather events, especially droughts, typically reduce yields in Europe, North America and Australia by a much wider margin than they do in undeveloped countries like Africa and India. That is because large tracts of industrially farmed crops are extremely vulnerable to drought and yield drops can be massive. Small landholders are generally more diversified and their households better able to withstand the effects of weather shocks.
I saw this principle demonstrated right here on the sideroad this past summer as our Ontario township sweltered through the worst heat and drought since 1965. After a cold, dry spring we went into a hot, dry summer. By the first of July, the pond was arid enough for the sheep to walk across without leaving footprints. It reminded me of the old Australian joke: “It’s so dry we’ve been spraying the trout for ticks.”
In spite of the parching heat that went on and on through the season, we were able to maneuver our way through it without a dramatic difference in our living standards. Tree rings will someday reveal the effects of 2016’s drought, but our pantry and freezer will not.
We brought in the earliest and best hay crop ever, unhindered by a single day’s rain. We had to start feeding it right off the wagon because the pastures were done by that point. Pasture seasons can be short, but 30 days?
It took a lot of well water to keep the garden alive but the berry crops were abundant and the sheep for once were free of parasites and coccidiosis. The pigs were not allowed to hold the water nipple down to make their usual mud hole. I took to visiting every few hours in the heat of the day to give them a drink and shut the system down at night. Every frog born on the farm this year has had to come up to the stone fountain in front of the house to learn how to swim. A tough year, but it looks like we will get through it without any real change. The same number of pigs and lambs will go into the freezer, jars of jam onto the shelf and potatoes into the root cellar.
However, cash cropping for our neighbours has been a disaster. Soybean pods and corn cobs failed to fill and everyone has a claim in for crop insurance. The only crop that went into the bin without a yield hit was winter wheat. In the diner, the potato farmers are gloomily calculating the diesel fuel bill from days on end of pumping the river and, in the newspaper, the conservation authority is musing about water restrictions for agriculture. There is no joy in Mudville.
Back in the 1960s, one of my farming godfathers, Albert Foster, always said that your hands were there to help you. By that he meant that when times were tough you could stay in the barn longer, work harder, rig up some system that would help you cope with a drought, or a frost or a flood. But as he watched agriculture become more intensive and industrial he warned that there would come a day when your hands really couldn’t help you anymore.
I think about that when I’m looking at a 300-acre field of wilted soybeans. There is absolutely nothing that a human being can do with his hands at short notice to solve that kind of problem. A man would feel the same way a Republican must feel watching Donald Trump rampage around the country trampling on the sensitivities of one group after another. A person would have no choice but to sigh and prepare to sit out the next term and wait for another day and another chance.
Here at the Larkspur Supper Club we will sit down as usual to the fruits of our labours, granted to us perhaps more grudgingly by the land than usual, but once again, sufficient to our needs.
- Dan Needles