Yes, you're right, Pete. When I was a kid in Saskatchewan, many people were
needed to operate farms. Horses were needed to pull farm equipment and
threshing gangs came around to separate the wheat from the chaff. Farms
were very busy places and the prairies were known as "the breadbasket of the
world". Now, with mechanization, far fewer people are needed to operate
farms. Farms can no longer support the number of people they once did. The
kids who were so badly needed at one time have long since been sent off to
become lawyers, doctors, loggers or, as in some cases I know of, bums in the
city. Farm income has fallen, and farmers or their wives now often take
part time jobs in the nearest town to supplement their farm income. It's
not really a good situation.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "pete" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:49 PM
Subject: [Futurework] The farmers aren't jolly!
On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Someone once wrote:
Three jolly Farmers
Once bet a pound
Each dance the other would
Off the ground.
And Murray McLuaghlin wrote a song about a dusty old farmer with a face
like a shoe, or something like that.
The farmers I saw in downtown Ottawa next to Parliament Hill yesterday
were not jolly and most were too young to have faces like shoes. They
weren't angry either. They were serious, making a statement. The point
they were trying to get across was that we needed them. "Farmers feed
cities" their yellow T-shirts read.
But they were also making the point that they were being treated
unfairly. They argued that, while they were protected from the
importation of American milk, butter and eggs, products derived from
these commodities could be imported freely. Thus it was not necessarily
Canadian derivative products that went into our ice cream. It could as
easily be products from the US. As in Mexico, competition from heavily
subsidized American corn was also at issue.
I don't know how valid their arguments are, but there is no question that
many of them are hurting. I heard a woman who operates a large farm in
the Ottawa Valley interviewed yesterday morning. She suggested that her
expenses exceeded her income by about 50%, which is not a sustainable
situation.
But there is also something else involved, the possibility that an
honored and traditional way of life, already close to oblivion, will
completely disappear. People will not be able to pass their farms on to
their children. Consider the following from Statistics Canada's Census of
Agriculture:
The "other 20%" of Canadians make up the rural population. The rural
population has two distinct parts: those who farm and those who live in
the country, but commute to city jobs or have jobs as teachers, police
officers, firefighters, servers or cashiers in the businesses that serve
the rural community. Of the two groups, the non-farm group is by far the
largest: 9 in 10 people living in rural Canada don't farm.
(http://www.statcan.ca/english/agcensus2001/first/socio/immigration.htm#3)
Data provided by Statistics Canada shows that the farm population
declined from over 7% of the population in 1971 to about 2.5% of the
population in 2001. Given such facts, it would seem that the procession
of heavy machinery past Parliament Hill yesterday was as much a
procession of mourning as a show of strength.
Ed
P.S.: There are a few pictures at
http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/newblog.htm , last item.
What's missing in your numbers, of course, is the current level of
production. Are we supplying the same percentage of total food
consumption from domestic production as 35 years ago - ie does
the drop in farmers reflect a move to farm automation, or food
import, or a combination of the two? Also, the rural population
includes another component beyond farmers, besides commuters and
support workers: the other resource workers - miners, loggers,
fishers, etc. In most of BC, I think, they are the main portion of
the rural population, don't know how it goes in the rest of the
country.
-Pete
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