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Island Farmer Columns and Opinions

Regarding wholistic development

 

Plenty of reason for optimism

 

While the crowd may have been small on a hot August night, there was no shortage of optimism at a recent meeting of tablestock growers.

However there is a "but"—as there usually is in farming. As every producer knows, a lot can happen before harvest time. Even if conditions remain in place for a high yield, Huffaker noted demand for potatoes and potato products has been dropping for approximately ten years. While the decline has slowed down, he still calls that the "big picture" for the industry.

Helping to look what one is looking for

One nifty feature with a word processor program is that one is able to find the words or phrases easily and quickly, even if it is a very long document. Pressing down at the same time both the Control key and the F key using Wordperfect accomplishes very quickly what could take quite a while "by hand." By hand, meaning of course running one’s eyes across every line searching for a word or phrase and hoping one doesn’t miss it. It’s one thing, for example to look for the word "agriculture" or any other word in a one or two page document, it’s quite another to find every use of that word in a many-page document.

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.