The case for small farming just got a whole lot stronger this year and many voices have been raised in support of rethinking our notions about the best way to supply the country with reliable, safe and sustainable sources of food.
Small farms already feed more than 70 per cent of the world’s population. That comes as a big surprise to a lot of people because we have been assured for decades that industrial farms ‘feed the world’ and are therefore essential. In fact, industrial farming feeds western urban populations using 12 plants and five animal species. Most of the planet’s small farms are less than five acres and take up only 12 per cent of the world’s arable land. Farms larger than 100 acres make up a mere 1 per cent of all farms but account for 65 per cent of the land in production. If for some reason this one per cent and its food processing capacity were paralyzed by natural calamity those urban populations would quickly starve but rural populations around the globe would probably carry on much as before.
So, in any discussion of the economies of scale in food production the first question the farm leaders always ask is, “How do you feed New York City?”
The small farm activist Joel Salatin has famously retorted, “Who cares about New York City?”
Well, I do for one. New York City is a wonderful place and a constant reminder than no matter how nutty American politics becomes, there is still hope for the American way of life. New York City must be nourished. Thus, we have a very complicated problem in front of us, suddenly made much more urgent because a single pathogen came close to toppling one of the pillars of the industrial food system on this continent. During the early days of the pandemic two Alberta beef processors were forced to shut down and beef almost instantly disappeared from supermarket meat counters because those two plants account for 80 per cent of national processing capacity.
The beef shortage, brief as it was, should have been a wake-up call to producers and farm leaders, But there was a mad scramble to put the plants back in operation (pretty much ignoring the risks to the immigrant work force in the building) and beef returned to supermarket meat counters. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and food security has dropped out of the news once again. Everyone, that is, except consumers who suddenly got interested in food security. I couldn’t find a weaner pig or a box of meat chicks anywhere last spring. Garden seeds, planter kits, seed potatoes and lots of other gardening supplies sold out. If anyone is keeping track of zucchini production in Canada this season they will have noticed a spike of historic proportions.
Canadians inhabit a one per cent world, too. In Ontario there are 60,000 ‘farms’ according to Statistics Canada. Intensive barns for hogs, broilers and eggs account for 2600 of them. Another 3,000 are dairy farms. That leaves more than 50,000 farms that do something else. The average net income for all of them hovers around $5,000 and off-farm income has tracked total farm receipts quite closely for a generation. So most farmers in this province support their farming habit with jobs in town. Then there is the mystery food-producing economy, made up of people who would never call themselves farmers but still have a henhouse and raise a few dozen meat birds every summer. Some say that number alone might be as high as 20,000. I made this point at a farm conference a few years ago prompting a snort of contempt from the lobbyist for the Chicken Farmers of Ontario at our table. “Those 20,000 people account for less than one per cent of chicken production!” he cried. My answer was: “How safe is that?”
The first rule of economics is that free markets inevitably drive profit margins down to zero. This is where farmers have been for the better part of the last century and it explains why so many of them seek some sort of biological lock, a hybrid chicken or a herbicide tolerant corn plant, so they can ramp up production and take over the world. It’s an exhausting cycle for everyone involved, including the land itself. For safety’s sake we need leaders who will encourage diversity, resilience and a saner balance between ‘eyes and acres.’ That means we need more farmers and more farms, more processing plants and delivery systems and it all needs to be much closer to where we live.
For safety’s sake.