Showing posts with label Community Supported Agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Community Supported Agriculture. Show all posts

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Revisiting "Po' chic organic farmin'"

I was kinda flattered to be invited as guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Bruce County Organic Farmer's Co-op. That "modest honorarium in kind" remuneration didn't faze me one bit. I'm well known to talk hours for absolutely no compensation whatsoever, so walking away with a dozen free-range eggs or a jar of pickled organic beets was all bonus from my point of view.

Instead, three days later I'm still scraping tar off my butt-cheeks and picking feathers out of my ass-crack.

Boy, did it get ugly!

Seems the good folks at the Co-op somehow got hold of this blog-post and took it ENTIRELY the wrong way.

Instead of a warm welcome and a jar of pickled beets, they were waiting with a bucket of tar, a bag of feathers, and some really nasty looking root vegetables of indeterminate genus.

Somehow they had concluded that I was a shill for Satan; that I was dissing small-scale farming in favour of agri-business; that I was an agent for the Dark Side...

NONONO a thousand times NO!!!

What I did was point out a weakness in the Community Supported Agriculture model that I continue to believe is a weakness; that it too often depends on the free labour of idealistic young professionals in order to be viable.

That's a model that won't feed cities. It'll feed a limited number of CSA groups in cities, while the dominant model of 500 horsepower half-a-million dollar tractors towing 6,000 gallon vats of chemicals through the fields feeds everybody else. That ubiquitous bumper-sticker about farmers feeding cities is about the kind of farming that's feeding most city-dwellers today.

Monsanto and Cargill and all the rest of them love hiding behind the image of the wholesome farm family working the land.

The question is, how can we wean more farmers off their addictions to chemicals and genetically modified seeds?

I don't have the answer.

In the meantime, I applaud the efforts of everybody who is working so hard to make the CSA model work, especially those young professionals in their unpaid internships.

Friday, September 13, 2013

The future of farming

We all know the future of farming.

Ag hedge funds buy up all the viable farmland in the world and lease it back to "farmers."

Those "farmers" will be tied in to the big agro-chemical multi-nationals who will guarantee a steady profit stream so long as the lessees agree to use the latest genetically-modified agro-products from ADM and Monsanto and the rest.

These are the "farmers" who feed cities, as the bumper stickers never tire of reminding us.

But there are other farmers who feed families and neighbourhoods, and there is reason to be optimistic about their future.

I recently had a tour of Caitlin Hall's organic farm outside Harriston. No GMO shit on her property. She's part of the Community Supported Agriculture movement. She runs her farm entirely outside the Monsanto-ADM sphere of influence.

And here's why I feel good about the future.

I was there because my buddy Kipling's daughter is interning on Caitlin's organic farm for the growing season. Kipling's daughter is a P. Eng who generally books her time at around $100 an hour. She's at Caitlin's farm as an intern for a $50 per week honorarium.  That works out to about a dollar an hour.

She has a passion for organic farming. She would like to run her own CSA organic farm someday, and she is at Caitlin's place to learn.

So are three other interns who are working for Caitlin this season, all highly educated and very passionate young people.

They have nothing but contempt for the industrial farming promoted by the agricultural hedge funds and the agro-chem multinationals.

These dollar-an-hour interns are the future of farming. They are learning the trade and will soon enough be running their own CSA farming operations.