farmers are old

I can no longer think of my self as an exception: the young farmer! I am now part of the depressing statistic - farmers are old
See also The Greying of Farmers


I'm 50 tomorrow; Its neither old nor young but it is a half century.

My get cold quick feet may be the harbinger of a slow accumulation of creaks and complaints. I see the suffering of others I know and love and wonder when and if it will change. Can I slog on until....its sustainable bodily, socially.

Irony is, these pockets of fertility and bounty dotted everywhere in rural Canada seem to be ever more hitting the button of "safe haven" for local communities come some immanent disaster, market collapse, corporate crop failures, etc.
Its the wisdom of the land's perspective that keep these ancients hugged close, hanging on for dear life to these small farms knowing it will inevitably, tragically have to change.

The Choice to Farm

"The Choice to Farm: Of Five Farmers, and the Movement They've Joined is a small research paper devoted to the stories of farmers whom the author identified as college graduates with former non-agricultural careers or ambitions. This criteria was chosen to narrow the demographic of the farmers consulted to those individuals who had every opportunity to do something else but who decided to start farming. The Choice to Farm tells the stories of five farmers who have recently made this choice. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of new farmers as part of a national community working towards agricultural and food policy change, and the force of this community's momentum as a social movement." Anne Myers's The Choice to Farm

The life behind the symbols

I've been thinking about the symbols of Christmas and how we imbue certain days of the year with our values and expectation, even long past the days when we were rooted in the earth and celebrations were about the produce and the work that arose from them. The importance now is in the celebrity and symbolism of the day.
It reminds me of how we create and empower celebrities or leaders give them significance or infamy from a deep sense of human want or genetic memory. They are like our hedge funds or stand in for our values and our expectations. We create them and can live through them but they disappoint as quickly as they resound, because their symbolism shatters in the surfacing of their humanness. A deeper longings for belonging or wholeness has us entrust power to people as readily as we attach a symbol to a day. Leaders and celebrities come crashing down and pile up like christmas wrappers and heaps of dry tinseled trees.
I've known many food activists who have come to symbolize the voice of farming. They are in every city and have done honourable work in bringing forward the issues of food security. These are predominantly urban people whose detachment from the reality of farm culture is also evident in many of the projects: co-ops turned to businesses, endless grants without actual projects of the soil, policy change in favour of the next opportunity, food conferences and committees that farmers had no voice in. We have created this reality by giving over farm voices to a few, predominantly urban, cultural celebrities. We need these voices. But we need more farm voices. There are a few: Bove, Percy Schmeizer, Wendell Berry. The list is short, because the message is often one of desperation and urgency. Real issues pertaining to farming livelihoods like price and import controls, legal representation for right to farm or coexistence issue are virtually champion less. For a really dynamic local sustainable agriculture it is time to unravel the substance from the symbol. "Our culture today is mainly embarrassed about country things. we need to ask What is the nature of this place? And then: What will nature permit me to do here? Consideration of these questions might have led us to recognize the inherent economic connections between country and city, between what is grown and what we eat, between what natural resources are available and how they are consumed—and to accept and act on the responsibilities that those connections imply." source. The voices of those that struggle are often unruly, uncomfortable and of a different cultural milieu. Class plays a part.
It is a fabulous time for the celebrities of the organic/ sustainable farming movement to bring forward the voice and needs of the farmer they so often symbolize, to honour the dependency of urban existence to the primary producers out on the land. Not to speak for them, but to work for them. The opportunity of a special holiday is to stand back and reflect upon what our symbols mean. To connect that turkey with the goal of not just good healthy food, but with good healthy farmers on good healthy land. Every person, rural and urban, needs to come to the table to empower our food future and it is something well worth celebration. It is a connection of great magnitude and tremendous possibility.

Saturday morning thoughts

There is an unusual stillness in the air this morning: not a stir of wind. It is not raining, nor snowing, no blzzard or squall: I've seen nothing like this for weeks. The weather has been swinging from -15 c to +15, from drifts of foot deep snow to torrential sheets of rain that melt it as promptly as it came leaving a splatter of red mud and squelchy softness. This morning it is still, perfectly still. I wonder what can be next as a the birds are high in the innocent sky.
All these categories of weather thrown at us this past couple of weeks have given me a good idea about the vulnerabilities and needs of the old house I've moved into recently: the spots where the roof leaks, the windows that rattle like dry old bones, the eves that the vermin have pulled insulation from, the electrical outlets tht breath icy cold air. I respond to her as she groans and drips and pull my chair closer to the fire.
I live alone in this grand old house that has room for a dozen, on a farm that used to encompass what are now 10 other holdings. I am a long way from what I still think of as home, the west coast of Canada, and I am rooted here now by the presence of the cows and my new field turned, covered cropped and ammended for the garden to come. But I am lonely today without the distraction of extreme weather and the emergency repairs it requires. An unavoidable opportunity to reflect upon the state of loneliness that the choice between freedom and obligation has imparted and the vulnerabilities and needs that the reality of my new world brings. I am a woman of the soil who cannot live without a garden of her own but who could not afford that where her deep and meaningful relationships lived. For now it's the sweet grainy breath of cows and outrageous phone bills that fill that need. But I am part of a legion of farmers with land and space for others, who struggle alone and dream of attracting the rare breed of idealist with common sense and ethic who can work as passionately as they think. I'll list my farm in SOIL or LLAF, perhaps the Intentional Communities, perhaps WWOOF. Perhaps I'll write away for a mail order bride or fill the house with Haitian children. What I do know today, in this stillness, is that I will not groan and drip in old age with just cows, earthworms and virtual farmers for comrads. That as basic as land without debt obligation is to me, so too is community that resides on the land.

My personal farmprints three

I've been a jill of many trades but took to farming with passion in my late 30s. The old farm I'm currently honoured with is the third in a sequence of patches I could call my own. I came into farming by way of partnership with an extraordinary woman who taught me a host of practical things and who shared a fierce passion for an ethically intuitive approach to working with the soil. A 100 plus acre organic farm, it still produces some of the best food available in BC and is a dynamo attracting eager people from all over the world. Like most working farms, the people who sustain it struggle to balance books, time and social sustainability. I miss that place and always will, this first farm, that first love. But I had to leave. It had, like all 3 of the places I've settled, layers of history of the people who eked out an existence there before and if you go to my page of poetry, you'll find a song about old farm.
After various travels in and through the world and myself: Sri Lanka to the tops of mountains and Theravada monasteries, India on foot and train, Cuba on a bicycle, and other interesting things I may or may not tell you about, I landed on the middle farm pictured above. Also in BC, this was an old Doukabour homestead in very rough condtion and a fishbowl to the traffic driving by. I froze in the log shack, erected a massively necessary deer fence around a 2 acre field and cultivated vegetables that were gratefully received in the city near by. I worked with hoes and a BCS and missed the farmall super C with the basketweeder and all the other great equipment we had. But I came to enjoy the smaller scale and beds where no tractor traversed.I suffered in debt though to have the privilege to farm and so after 4 years I moved on to Nova Scotia where land is relatively cheap and history is deeper in the soil. I've arrived at this new old place this spring and have plowed and planted 2 crops of buckwheat on 2 acres and finished it with fall rye. (A double crop of buckwheat plowed under at knee high in flower has been my technique for preparing old sod for new gardens the following year). I have a massive mountain of my neighbour's 3 year old horse manure (13 hand-bombed loads)composting further which I'll spread in the spring with an ancient manure wagon I was given by another kind neighbour. The seed catalogues await scouring. And for now its just me and the 2 cows, their pasture covered in deep snow. One day, perhaps this old house will sound and these old fields will hum with a human community, adding to all the other living things here. I so wish for that. Perhaps the community of farmers who find comradeship on the net may help lead to that. This would help complete the circle in my personal farmprints.