Farmer Ryan's Rant

Here's a good rant from Ryan Hayhurst, operator of Niagara Escarpment Organics at Duncan. Enjoy and please comment. Lots of effort went into this one.

It has been some time since Farmer Ryan has had time to rant, and somehow, someway that time has again come. For those who have not been around since the beginning, this is a disclaimer that what you are about to read, if you choose to read it, will probably touch socio-political nerves that may require you to subsequently visit you philosophical chiropractor (psychologist?!)

Remember, just because your food was grown within a hundred miles or so doesn’t mean we can stick our head in the sand beside our plastic Made in China Walmart-purchased lawn chair. There are many ways to reduce your personal environmental impact other than just supporting the local meat guy. How about not eating meat at all for starters – you can more healthily and efficiently obtain the calories your body needs without killing another being anyway – imagine that?!

Furthermore, we have to be demanding of our producers and ask them face to face to make their farming techniques more environmentally friendly and their food more nutritious with less toxins (note: when you do so and if you happen to be driving a luxury automobile, get out of the car first and make it look like you to have just been working in the garden).

We have to suggest to our large corporations and their provincial/national government groupies that we want smaller producers making better products from local materials with local skills – and then we have to support them when they open for business. Talk is cheap remember, but honest local businesses are priceless.

Why? Because everywhere you look these days (well, maybe not everywhere), every channel you turn too (again, probably not all) the talking heads are talking about environmental degradation that is taking place in this country as we all stand all too idly by and in fact participate in this unsustainability because we are not self-less enough, not compassionate enough to make the changes that we need to affect the changes that we want, bringing hope and justice to those that are in harms way.

My incomplete list of current crisis, not including global warming, and with a Canadian emphasis, includes:

- The Mountain pine beetle devastating forests, eating its way east from BC. But fear not, the Olympics is coming to Vancouver and with it perhaps social and environmental justice for all creatures…?!

- Syncrude & company and their polluted oil sands settling ponds, are killing flocks of birds, fish and everything else in Northern Alberta. They did manage to save two of the 5000 bird flock that recently landed though, which is a start, right?! Oh, has anyone mentioned that we are burning our clean natural gas to produce this dirty oil that almost in it’s entirety gets piped down to the States? Good deal, eh.

- Across the north, Caribou herds are threatened by oil & gas development, pipelines and mineral resource extraction. Obesity follows among other things as the native population turns to fast food and office jobs as opposed to traditional pursuits. High suicide rates are reported to be higher of late among a population that was forced to relive their residential school days in the courts to qualify for compensation payments. Hundreds of yet still unresolved land disputes continue to smolder nation wide.

- Saskatchewan, home of Monsanto and the discouraging fields of genetic engineering, chemical cropping and monocultures. Bring back the native prairie I say and let the buffaloes roam! Alas, the oil companies are moving in – there goes the neighbourhood.

- Manitoba…beautiful lakes, but mad mosquitoes. So bad that they blanket the city in insecticides each spring – how’s that for a solution! Humans are now officially ‘integrated’ into the town’s pest management.

- Onterible & Quebec, the industrial heartland and chief consumers of all things. Leafs on one side, Nordiques on the other (oops, they got sold to Americans…) and a whole bunch of agro-industrial economies in between taking more from the environment than they are returning in kind – except for nitrogen fertilizer and agro-chemicals that is, which farmers along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence still allow to leach into the hydrological cycle causing algae blooms from Sarnia to Sept Ilses and high cancer rates from Pelee Island to Penatanguishine .

- Big News in the Maritimes is Fredricton’s big flood, which accidentally washed almost as many chemicals out the watershed that day as conventional potato farmers will apply and release in maybe, a season?! Respect going out here though to farmers in general, just not the ones who aren’t willing to put health over profits.

- Newfoundland – not only late coming into confederation, but finally looking at joining the ‘Have’ Club of provinces ‘pulling their weight’ in the Canadian Commonwealth, thanks largely to offshore oil projects which would not in a million years ever harm oceanic ecosystems, no, no, no. St. John’s municipal waste continues to go directly into the harbour meanwhile and the seal hunt, in all it brutality, gets worse press because of how cute the seals are despite the fact that Ontario’s veal industry is likely responsible for more deaths of cute little fellas than the Newfs have clubbed since Confederation.

- Overseas there’s genocide in Darfur, probably in Tibet and likely many other minority areas in CCP controlled China – “I interrupt this regularly scheduled programming to bring you the VXIIX Olympiad from human-rightless Beijing”. And guess who is providing weapons to extremist militias carrying out the killings and displacement back in Darfur?! Meanwhile, much of the rest of Africa continues to starve or die of AIDS because leaders are not courageous enough to lead their people away from the ‘World Bank modernization project’ that has failed to bring them much health or happiness. Of course the poor people of Zimbabwe are suffering an unbelievably cruel and unusual fate. What can you say about the Middle East?! Will greedy men ever stop fighting over its oil wealth?

Where am I going with this?

Why does it matter? Why should anyone care?!

Long story short, if all we’re concerned about is the fact that our inflation adjusted net average income hasn’t changed in the last 25 years – (See Globe & Mail Cover) – and continue to measure wealth in terms of dollars earned then our society will continue to be aiming at the wrong target. That said in not aiming at wealth are we to say aim at poverty – in fact the two cannot exist without the other. Why do you think the average income hasn’t changed in the last 25 years? Because the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer, but on average…it all evens out, right?

Think about what you have become fond of over the years, what actually means something to you and you wouldn’t want to give up. To me, the words family, friends and food come to find right away. Is this not how wealth should truly be measured?

So what do you want from friends, family and food? You want for their health and that from your food as well. This community in fact forms the basis for human health and well-being and if we are a little more mindful of the way we do it, we can achieve symbiosis with our surrounding environment by nurturing the life systems that nurture us.

So with Ontario faced with the prospect of becoming a have not Province and all us proud Ontarians walking cap in hand to the West Coast welfare line, what say you we show the rest of the country what it means to be good global citizens in an environmentally advanced (more egalitarian) economy.

So our manufacturing is heading south and overseas. The companies that are leaving are probably not the ones that we as Ontarians are necessarily proud of nor the ones that ever would have been committed to taking our economy to the next evolutionary level.

Quite frankly there are some pretty inspiring examples out there of regions and nations taking advantage of their natural abilities and geographies and turning that combination of skill and materials into high value, high quality export goods. Germany comes to mind immediately because they are far further ahead that we North Americans in most of the fields that we’ll need to be strong and sustainable in the future, including

- Transportation (high speed trains, urban tramways, hybrid-electric & hydrogen cars (not sure if they’ve bought into the bio-fuel b.s., but there is no doubt a handful of folks into the mindful minimization of reused veggie oil in the old VW option…;)

- Energy (leading the way in both solar and wind, production and consumption I think? Moratorium on nuclear as I understand it…

- Agriculture (organic agro-stewardship and Steiner’s biodynamic philosophies are well ingrained in the rural culture as is a renewed emphasis on tree planting, which has helped to re-establish an appropriate balance of green space to managed agro-urban space;

- Compact mixed use urban design, green architecture and natural building are all ahead of their time in Germany, in this case partially a result of a progressive mindset & innovation – perhaps also because of their historically human scale urban-rural landscape that was ‘invented’ long before the car distorted time and space as the internet has exponentially in the age of globalization.

- Water – Not sure if they are much better than the rest of Europe, but with the Alpine Glaciers drying up and Germany’s continental climate, I wouldn’t be surprised if water became an issue for them if it’s not already.

- Social Progression – A tough area to judge because like Ontario they are very progressive on some issues (access to healthcare, education, skills training), but less so on others (acceptance/integration of immigrant communities; income inequality; holiday time!)

My feeling is that compact villages and bio-regional economies that produce quality niche goods for export (say solar panels, electric cars, wine & cheese), while still measuring actual wealth not by the number of cars that they sell or panels that they make but rather by how much free time they get celebrating family, friends and food from hamlet to homestead would be the most successful direction for Ontario to turn now in the post-manufacturing, post cheap oil, wish I could say post nuclear era.

We’re fortunate, because like Germany many part of Ontario were founded and shaped pre first time/space distortion, pre-automobile. Therefore, and for example up in The Town of The Blue Mountains where I live, networks of small towns and hamlets still do exist. We are fortunate to have natural comparative advantages in such things as agriculture, recreation and lifestyle and are currently exporting these goods/services to neighbouring regions. We’re not yet self-sufficient in our consumption, certainly not in anything but meat and apples perhaps, but we could be and we should be and we will be if we all get onside and start producing the quality of goods that we need and enjoy. People need to take their money out of large corporate stock programs and putting them into Made in Ontario companies that employ Ontarians to produce goods for local consumption and, in high value niche sectors, produce surplus to share and trade with our neighbours for that which we are not yet producing. It might not produce as much paper wealth as a good run up in technology stocks, but investing in small to medium sized Ontario enterprises will do a lot of good for our triple bottom line, regardless of whether the economists are calling us a have not.

The dollars and cents will generally take care of themselves and greater health and happiness (i.e. real wealth) will be produced if we can shift towards creating a better balance between economies based on resource extraction and an obsession with wealth creation to a society self-sufficient in our consumption of goods, but more than willing to share the quality of our lives with cultures around the world, beginning with the ones right next door. A re-orientation towards the well-being of our own neighbourhood, towns, cities and bioregions (and away from what is happening in London, Los Angeles or Japan) will also serve to alert us to the plights of our own people and our environment.

Think global, eat, drink, build, & buy from as local as possible; celebrate your region, your friends and your family and get going on getting your town ready for the future. Speaking of which, thanks to Peter Mitchell and the University of Guelph students that came by last week to engage in a dialogue with their local farmer and help us move some of our growing tomato plant collection out to the potting shed and get them potted up.

Farmer Ryan