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February 28, 2006

Christian Farmers

Elbert van Donkersgoed is the Strategic Policy Advisor to the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario. This edition of his radio column, “Corner Post,” makes interesting reading, particularly the gap he describes between the bio-technology centred approach many government policy advisors in both the U.S. and Canada seem to be working with, and the grassroots "good food equals good health" approach of many small-scale producers. I have posted the column here in its entirety with his permission.

“Closer to the Heart: A CFFO Vision for Farming” is also worth reading. You can find it in a pdf document on the Christian Farmers website.


Corner Post #421

Farm & Countryside Commentary by Elbert van Donkersgoed

February 21, 2006

“Working Towards a New Direction for the Agri-Food Sector” was the theme for last week’s national conference sponsored by CAPI, the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. CAPI was created two years ago to be an independent think tank with a mandate to step back from the issues of the day and maintain a long-term view of the agri-food sector.

Much of what I heard was stimulating and enlightening. And then there were the ideas that make you shake your head. Take for example the notion that the agri-food system should become a solution provider for health — make Canadians the healthiest citizens in the world. Now, I’m not about to take issue with the reality that health costs are rocketing upwards unsustainably for our federal and provincial governments. And I’m on side with the voices that argue for more emphasis on prevention rather than fix-it medicine. I take issue with the voices that look for a road to health in bio-engineering our natural resources into an intensive bio-food economy.

First, the real front line workers who deal with food as health every day were not at the CAPI conference. I’m thinking of the folks I met last fall at the 3rd National Food Security Assembly in Waterloo. That conference resulted in the establishment of Food Secure Canada. Many of its founding members are the front line workers in our health agencies — municipal, provincial or federal, from across Canada. Much of that conference’s talk linked zero hunger, healthy food and sustainable farming. Many of the participants were women between the ages of 25 and 50, a very different crowd from those the CAPI event attracted.

Second, when food — the vegetables, the lean beef or the raw milk — leaves the farm gate it is “food for health.” On the way to the consumer table there is a lot of change: mixing and mashing, pasteurization and sterilization, packaging and presentation. Consider just one change, the addition of salt — where the average daily intake of sodium far exceeds the daily recommended amount. The main health effect of too much sodium is high blood pressure. Food for health is not more bio-science, more bio-technology and a more intensive bio-economy. It is about a food chain, from the farm to the consumer table, which is short — it is about eating close to the source.

Third, we eat our environment. Food is the result of a complex system that involves feedback loops, where unintended consequences and unpredictable developments are commonplace. Think drought or grasshoppers or mealybugs or mad cow disease. We eat embedded in our environment. The future is knowing the environment we eat and keeping that environment healthy, not bio-engineering it.

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Elbert van Donkersgoed P. Ag. (Hon.) is the Strategic Policy Advisor of the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario, Canada. Corner Post is heard weekly on CFCO Chatham, CKNX Wingham and CHOK Sarnia, Ontario. Corner Post has a complimentary email subscriber list of more than 3,750 and is archived on the CFFO website: www.christianfarmers.org/index.html. CFFO is supported by 4,300 family farmers across Ontario.

To be added to the electronic distribution list of Corner Post send email to evd@christianfarmers.org with SUBSCRIBE as the message. To remove your name, send email with UNSUBSCRIBE as the message.

Posted by Henry Bakker at 11:22 PM | | Comments (2)

February 24, 2006

February

We have a book here called "Nature's Year in the Kawarthas." It describes February as "the gateway to spring." That may be true, but we have been having our first real stretch of unbroken winter weather the last few weeks. Yesterday afternoon I fed the cows on the upper pasture, then while I was spreading straw in their shelter the wind kicked up and soon the snow was blowing so hard they were only dim shapes feeding at the far side of the field, and at times I couldn't see them at all. We are having a lot of sunny days too, fortunately, and with the wind generator often spinning all night long, our system is producing plenty of energy for our needs without having to run the generator. Winter is usually the low-point for production in a solar-energy system.

Still, the signs of spring's approach are beginning to be felt. We're past winter's mid-point and the days are getting noticeably longer. This past week Sylvia heard the clear, ringing call of a Prairie Horned Lark, one of the first migrants to return to the area. Our resident birds have also begun singing more as they reaffirm or establish pair bonds and their breeding season begins. We have started a few plants in the kitchen, and the first sprouts are beginning to emerge from the soil. Our greenhouse needs to be replaced, but that is a project that will have to wait until next year.

I've also been reading Edwin Way Teale's book "North with the Spring." It is the chronicle of a 17,000 mile journey he and his wife made in the late 1940s. They began in the Florida Everglades in mid-February and traveled gradually north, following the progress of the season in the eastern United States through March to June. It will be fun to read and think about spring advancing towards us while we enjoy the last weeks of snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, and snow-laden cedars, counting the signs that will mark spring's arrival. Crows and Canada Geese should be here soon.

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances
up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends
mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood
of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of
us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see
only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances towards us
out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away into the north. We see all
phases of a single phase, all variations of this one chapter in the Odyssey of Spring.
My wife and I dreamed of knowing something of all phases, of seeing, firsthand, the
long northward flow of the season.

- Edwin Way Teale, "North with the Spring"

Posted by Henry Bakker at 10:18 AM |

February 20, 2006

Russet House Farm

This is the name we adopted for the farm after much discussion during a meeting yesterday. There is a beautiful old Russet apple tree near the corner of the barnyard. It is quite possibly a hundred years old, and for many years the original log house was referred to by its owners and people in the community as "the russet house."

Sun Run Farm/Centre was also a good name, but we were looking for a name that was tied in a little more fully with the history of the farm. Renewable energy is obviously essential in any consideration of a sustainable lifestyle, but we didn't see the photo-voltaic (solar energy) system that provides us with much of our electricity as central to our mission or vision, as important as it is.

We feel the new name captures something of the continuity of community and identity in place that a sustainable culture should strive for. Our neighbour, Denton, is in his eighties, and his mother's family settled our farm in the eighteen-fifties. He is a living link to the beginning of the European presence on this land, and knows the entire history of the farm (as a farm) because it is partly also his history. In one of our first conversations he asked me how the Russet tree was doing because he remembered it from his childhood, when the farm was still owned by members of his extended family.

This morning I was walking up to the house from the woods as the sun was coming up. I paused by the northwest corner of the barn to admire the russet tree. It is certainly old, part of its trunk is dead and hollow, but there is life in its branches still, and it gives us good fruit. The wine we made from its apples last fall should almost be ready. In the dim morning light its dark shape was beautifully silhouetted against the rising reddish glow on the eastern horizon.

The American poet Gary Snyder has said that you need to live in a place for four hundred years before you can begin to live there respectfully. A lot of things come into perspective when you begin to think that way. My hope and my goal is that in four hundred years (maybe even less) people will be living a respectful creational relationship on Russet House Farm.

Posted by Henry Bakker at 7:46 AM |