Down on the Farm

What is the real value of a farm?

We live in a cult of measurement. As the world’s population expands and raw materials and fossil fuels dwindle, there is an increasing need to justify how we use our limited resources. Governments responsible for resource allocation have come to rely on the use of measurements of efficiency in their decision making, giving those with more readily measurable results a head start in the struggle for funding. Business and commerce produce the most measurable outcomes of all—goods, services and employment valued in monetary terms—and substantial resources are devoted to generating more and more of these. However, our leaders must also determine how value should be assigned to other human endeavours that we know are intrinsically worthwhile, but that cannot be easily quantified in monetary terms.

One way to do this is through stories that appeal to core human values. Collectively, we acknowledge that education, health care, community service, basic science, stewardship of nature, entertainment and the arts offer important outcomes. These pursuits appeal to traits we are taught to value from childhood: compassion, exploration, discovery, learning, creativity, cooperation, rationality. Traditionally, these sectors have communicated their value through stories that speak directly to core human desires and thereby move society— and voters—toward consensus on their merit. Yet, in the ongoing competition for limited resources, there is increasing pressure for such sectors (farming, for example) to quantify their positive impact. Not an easy task.

Under consideration here are two books that use compelling anecdotal evidence to make the case for supporting small farms and traditional aspects of rural life. Small mixed (livestock and crops) farms were once the mainstay of agricultural production across Canada and supported local businesses and communities, but no longer. The “death of the family farm” has been blamed on changes in farming methods and in the business of agriculture, as well as on changes in consumer demand and marketing.

These factors and more are explored in Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life and Thomas Pawlick’s The War in the Country: How the Fight to Save Rural Life Will Shape Our Future, which highlight the human and environmental consequences of the intensity and economies of scale underlying commercial efficiency in modern farming. Both authors argue that there is greater value in the more traditional aspects of rural life than can be found in accounting balance sheets. They provide compelling stories to enlist support from urbanites, suggesting that policy makers will only pay serious attention if the 80 percent of the Canadian population that lives in cities ascribes real value to the health of the rural hinterlands.

In Trauma Farm, Brett, using the structure of a typical farmer’s day, takes the reader through the “natural history” of his ten-acre mixed farm on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, over its 18-year history. The rebel aspect of this history refers to Brett’s nonconformity in pursuing farming for pure enjoyment, not profit, and his preference for trusting traditional knowledge over modern scientific authority. His stories of life on the farm target our longing for a greater connection with the world, a void many city dwellers try unsuccessfully to fill through consumerism. These farm tales read like a hero’s myth, detailing a personal odyssey, an epic battle for the greater good.

According to Brett, running a small mixed farm is the pursuit of his passion, and an art unto itself. Trauma Farm (so named because “beauty … demands a little terror and laughter”) is the realization of his childhood dreams. He describes the pleasure he takes in eating food he has grown and in learning lessons from the people, animals and plants around him. Like Thoreau, with keen senses, Brett describes an awe-inspiring world where the mundane become players in a larger folklore: the ability to discern different shades of black, the key to the perfect egg (a corn diet produces pale yolks while an insect diet yields a richer colour), the joys of garlic and the awesome complexity of beehives. His stories range from comfort to horror. On one page, he and his wife watch a ewe lambing and gradually become aware that all the barnyard animals are moving in to bear witness as well, a nativity scene “painted by a naive artist.” In a shocking contrast, a few pages later, another ewe’s lamb becomes stuck halfway out of the birth canal and an eagle devours its head.

Brett describes small farming not as an activity or a business, but as a way of life. Survival as a farmer demands trust in oneself and one’s community, and enjoyment in life comes from closeness to nature and to the food that nourishes us: “Life is about relationships, and the closer the relationships between the land and our belly, the better the food.” He calls Trauma Farm his rebellion against consumerism, profiteering, government and, occasionally, progress, because “modern economics and simplistic thinking have made farming even more cruel and dangerous than it has been historically.” His small farm is a money-losing endeavour, supported by the family’s off-farm income. Like a starving artist, he accepts debt and the nobility of the struggle, and he seasons his personal experience with wider truths from Aldous Huxley and Native and eastern teachings. He pointedly weighs and rejects lessons given in workshops by what he perceives to be well-intentioned but myopic government regulators (“three blind mice” as he calls them). Brett conveys a very human love-hate relationship with globalization and progress. Worldly and well travelled, he appreciates and enjoys food and cultures from across the globe (e.g., his boiled millet Beijing breakfast). Yet he is skeptical of some other aspects of progress, and refers to Ronald Wright’s “progress traps,” the notion that a good idea can sometimes backfire because of unforeseen consequences, most notably in reference to genetically engineered crops and introduced species that become invasive. He generally expresses himself with thoughtful introspection, and includes many humorous insights and descriptions, particularly as a witness to warfare between the animals on the farm: a peafowl attacks an eagle, a gander wrangles horses and a heroic battle between a spider and a mouse.

Honest and humble, prescriptive without venturing into preachy, Brett’s evocative writing stirs the urban reader to recollect dormant values. His playful digs at the stereotypical mindset of the city dweller are forgiving and for the most part indulgent. Some of his science will raise a quizzical eyebrow with a few academic readers, such as his definition of “ecological entropy” as “the natural process that creates diversity” (is this a poetic way of saying evolution?). Despite this, the book’s intention seems honest and the style is approachable and intensely human. All readers will find episodes within this book that inspire, and Brett’s stories and observations are likely to recruit many to the cause of reassessing the values implicit in rural life.

Whereas Brett is something of a farming philosopher, Thomas Pawlick is a journalist and a provocateur. In The War in the Country, he assumes the role of an embedded war correspondent detailing individual battles and skirmishes in a vastly unequal contest. In this conflict, an array of rural champions is portrayed as a David pitted against the collective Goliath of corporate agribusiness, exploitative mining companies and an indifferent government. The book’s professed aim is to inform and rally the urban troops in support of the beleaguered and vastly outgunned rural foot soldiers.

The former Harrowsmith editor begins with a dire global view of a rural world under attack and in spiralling decline. Against this backdrop Pawlick moves to more familiar geography, history and events closer to home. In the chapter titled “How It Used to Be,” he describes a nostalgic view of rural life in the early half of the 20th century, including the Depression years. Stories are woven to depict the period as a halcyon time when there was honest toil and just recompense for rural folks, in a thriving community. A friend relating his childhood years tells of his family farm with its twelve cows. Mother made butter and father drove the milk to the cheese factory in Marlbank. When their grandfather died he willed some money for his two sisters. Father got some money for them by felling 100 cord of basswood, which he had cut at a local mill, before selling it to the factory for cheese boxes.

The rural idyll of old is then contrasted sharply with illustrative episodes from the front lines of the “war” in eastern Ontario and Quebec. For example, Pawlick uses the story of Shawn Carmichael to support some of his assertions about the stifling of rural enterprises by “over-zealous” regulators and his own ambivalence toward quota systems. Carmichael had expanded his free-range egg business to 15,000 birds and was told that he had to purchase quota for them costing $2 million. The incredulous farmer is quoted as saying, “If I had $2 million I wouldn’t be getting up seven days a week to farm!” He refused to pay, precipitating a troubling skirmish between the law and rural “vigilantes”: when the Rural and Agricultural Crime Team, a division of the Ontario Provincial Police, was sent to confiscate the flock, they were confronted by the activist landowners association. Pawlick uses this and other examples to support his view that while quotas were implemented to protect farmers, he feels the current systems discourage the next generation from going into farming.

Pawlick has taken an approach that recognizes that it is hard to move middle-of-the road attitudes and publicize a cause effectively by standing on the centre line in gentle discussion. With war declared, he effectively questions who among the urban recruits would side with the Goliath: the intensive livestock operator, agri-business monopolies and mining prospectors granted sweeping rights over landowners to pursue radioactive mineral riches? There is no doubt that this book will serve a useful purpose in helping raise the profile of many vital issues confronting those who feed our cities, and has already brought the debate to the attention of the national media. Readers engaged by the topics raised in the book will, one hopes, seek to explore the issues further, from all sides.

Like Brett, Pawlick describes farming as a way of life, not as a business and a competitive endeavour, and therein lies the intractable conflict. Agricultural companies and supermarkets have pursued logical business strategies to maximize their profit margins and please their shareholders, and the values they offer the urbanite consumer are relatively low prices and convenience. Pawlick’s goal is to win over city dwellers and encourage them to vote and press for policy changes that shift the balance directly toward rewarding other values, such as nutrition and sustainability. In the meantime, it is up to those who support these values to vote with their wallets. This is an important message conveyed in Pawlick’s previous bestseller, The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply—And What You Can Do About It, and reflected in the growing economic impact of farmers’ markets, local food availability in grocery stores and community-supported agriculture.

Overall, it is fair to say that Brett and Pawlick put forward compelling stories that appeal at very fundamental levels, arguing for a reappraisal of our evaluation of rural life, and in doing so have made a significant contribution to their “side’s” efforts in the battle. Their books and associated publicity are a step on the road to winning over the urban electorate by appealing directly to our collective core values. Pawlick in particular has also begun reinforcing these assertions with reviews of quantitative information. However, for policy makers to appreciate fully the worth of more traditional rural living, and to devote more resources toward it, the ability to measure value in terms of the true and complete costs and benefits of rural life and small farms is necessary. Standing on their own, arguments such as Brett’s and Pawlick’s are vulnerable to accusations of sentimentality and nostalgia.

Measuring these costs and benefits will be one of the challenges of our time. A true and rigorous assessment of the impact of traditional rural practices, such as small mixed farming, is now drawing upon innovation in the emerging fields of social, environmental and ecological economics. These new approaches must also be integrated with conventional farm business accounting and agricultural economics. Researchers the world over, including Nobel Prize–winning Amartya Sen, are tackling the question of farm sustainability value, attempting to measure social costs such as the loss of businesses and schools in rural communities and inequality in food and income distribution among farmers. It also involves assessing environmental costs such as the opportunity costs of not having the stewardship provided by small farms and the impact of fertilizers and pesticides used, as well as traditional financial measures such as crop yield and farm productivity. While methods for the quantitative evaluation of mixed farming are being developed, policy analysts must also consider reward systems to drive real change in business and farming practice. Rewards could take a variety of forms, such as a carbon credit system or tax incentives.

One of the major assets the small farm movement has going for it these days is the fact that the environment is now firmly at the forefront of the political agenda nationwide and worldwide. Globally, legislators are considering the merits of paying Native peoples for stewardship of the remaining crucial swathes of tropical rainforest. European burger chains are claiming carbon credits for sponsoring rainforest tribes in Central Africa. In Canada, a major objective of agricultural policy is to promote a sustainable and efficient farming sector, applying environmentally friendly production methods that combine profitability with a sustainable use of natural resources. Recognizing rural farms, businesses and indigenous peoples that practise good stewardship of the environment, as measured through sustainability indices, is consistent with this objective.

Reassuringly, assessing the full value of rural life and small farms appears to be established on our governments’ agenda, and initiatives that recognize and reward the role of small farms and rural life in fulfilling the goal of food and environmental sustainability are under way. These initiatives will be vital to our ability to meet the enormous challenges ahead, posed by climate change and dwindling fuel, raw materials and food. The success of future generations depends upon successfully integrating food and raw material production with environmental sustainability and social stability. It is farmers and the rural world that will lead this struggle, telling the stories that must be told, and providing for our needs and those of our children.