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Island Farmer Columns and Opinions

No, contrary to expert opinion, our biggest farm problem isn’t too many farmers

"In the larger accounting then, industrial agriculture is a failure on its way to being a catastrophe." Those words weren’t written just recently by a farmer or consumer who was beginning to see just how seriously conventional agriculture has been misguided, but rather by Wendell Berry back in an essay in 1978. According to him and some other experienced observers, the misguidance has been economic, agronomic and cultural, as well as educational.

A couple of weeks to forget

The two weeks that went into the production of this issue will definitely go down as a time to forget in Island agriculture.
It seemed as if each day brought another frontal assault on the Island’s number one industry. First there was the announcement by Larsen’s they would not be purchasing any more animals for their plant in Berwick. This announcement had been expected for some time.
After the closure of the Natural and Organic Food Group plant in Charlottetown, many of the producers that opted to carry on wondered whether Berwick would be far behind. That’s why about half of them decided instead to ship to duBreton in Quebec.

Some late summer musings

* Late blight continues to be a major problem and Mother Nature seems to hold the cure. The rainy and humid weather that has been a thorn in the side of tourists and beachgoers has also produced little joy for growers. For the second summer in a row, it’s just too darn wet. We can only hope two years doesn’t constitute a trend. Despite the best efforts of the late blight committee, we now have more cases than we did this time last year. As Marleen Clark of the Department of Agriculture explains it, any morning the grass is wet is a bad day for late blight. I haven’t counted how many mornings my grass has been dry this summer, but, if I had, I’m guessing I would still have fingers left over.

What progress? What development?

E.F. Schumacher is best remembered for his 1973 book Small is Beautiful which is subtitled A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Not as well remembered, or even known are his other books. A Guide for the Perplexed, which is without a subtitle, was published in 1977. Twenty years after that, he wrote This I Believe, which has a title extension, "and other essays." Somewhere in between he wrote and published a book titled Good Work. In 1981 he wrote in the Foreword of his friend and colleague’s book Small is Possible: A factual account about who is doing what, where, to put into practice the ideas expressed in E.F. Shumacher’s Small is Beautiful, "Many years of work on these matters have completely convinced me not only that small is beautiful but also that small is possible and has the future on its side." Time will tell whether that prediction is right or wrong.

Some interesting numbers in report

There are some interesting facts in the statistical review compiled by the province that came across my desk recently.
For one thing, it puts some hard data to the trend of more non-farmers in rural areas. Although some of the data is based on the 2006 census, there is little reason to believe much had changed in the last three years. The majority of the province’s population still lives in rural areas (defined by Statistics Canada as communities of less than 1,000 people) although the gap is narrowing.
In the last census, there were 76, 906 Islanders living in what might be called “the country” while 61,721 lived in areas with a population of 1,000 or greater. Of that rural total, only 5,295 were farmers. The province now has a bigger Francophone population than it does farmers, although farmers who speak French would be included in both groups. The province’s francophone population is 5,665.