Po' chic organic farmin'

I know a little bit about farming. Worked on a farm summers and school-season evenings. Done it all; plow, disc, harrow,cultivate, seed, bale,  and so forth.

I didn't know much but I knew it was a tough gig. The vast majority of the old school farmers, guys with one or two hundred acres, now make their main income working off the farm. While the small beef herd may still make you $20,000 in a good year, just like it has for the past 50 years, you can't raise a family on that any more.

That's one of the reasons the organic farm I toured last year made such an impact. It was a hundred acres tied in to one of those "community supported agriculture" outfits.

Ya gotta be careful here, because after all, the words "community" and "communism" are fruits of the same roots...

Anyway, Missy with her hundred acres gets over 60 thousands up front from her band of organic food acolytes. You can actually have a life on that!

And she's doing that with intensive cultivation of approximately five acres of her hundred acres farm. The rest is hosting free-range grass-fed beef.

But guess what? Even five acres of kitchen/market garden takes intensive cultivation to cultivate. A five acre plot is essentially full time work for five people.

$60,000 can't pay five workers a living wage. And even if it did, there'd be nothing left over to pay the owner's mortgage.

So Miss Organic Farmer get's around that conundrum by hiring five "interns."

And the thing is, she can't really pay them, so she ends up with a bunch of middle-class idealist young professionals who aspire to be organic farmers, and who have the luxury of having a "real" career to subsidize their idealism and their organic farming aspirations.

Is this a viable model for our food supply?

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.