About 35 years ago, I was sitting at a farmers’ meeting listening to an Ag Canada specialist tell a room full of Quebec farm representatives how much more income Canadian farmers had made that year compared to the previous year. After about an hour of “being informed” by this economist, one of my colleagues asked, “Do those numbers include off-farm income?” The ag economist seemed a bit taken aback, but after a brief hesitation he said, “Yes, a little”. When we asked him how much, he didn’t know (or maybe didn’t want to say).
Every farmer in the room thought “If I couldn’t make enough money to put food on our family’s table, I would get a part-time job so our family could eat.” Some farmers, or spouses could take a little time to drive a school bus or do a mail run to supplement the income. Most dairy farmers couldn’t take the time to drive a school bus because morning milking starts about 5 a.m. and again at about 5 p.m., but maybe their partner could.
After the meeting with that ag economist, the farmers asked one of our farm union employees if he could find out how much true on-farm income had changed during the previous year. At the next meeting, he answered that the income had changed very little, but that farm expenses had increased, so the actual farm profit had gone down. That was not what the federal ag economist had told us the month before. We instructed our farmers’ union to tell our fed ag department to quit blending true on-farm income with the off-farm income just to make it look like farm profit had risen. About 15 years after that, I was late going to an annual meeting of our local UPA (Union of Agricultural Producers) and sat at the back of the hall. As I looked at every farmer in attendance, I made a mental note that of the 50 farmers that were there, only three didn’t have a part time job. Yes, a few farm wives were teachers or nurses, and one wife worked at a bank, but many non-farmers had more than one wage earner at their house too.
Seventy-five years ago, grandpa and grandma processed the farm milk and delivered it in town with the horse-drawn milk wagon, and dad snow plowed the sidewalks in town with a horse-drawn snowplow. That was just between milkings, feeding the animals, cleaning out the barns by hand, and bedding them with fresh clean straw.
A lot of farms have changed hands during the past 75 years. So, who is buying farms today? Many of the farmers who have remained on the land expanded their operations by buying the farm next door when the neighbour retired. Many remained because the next generation wanted to farm, and with better machinery and technology, the family farms expanded.
A few years ago, foreign investors were investing in farmland because land prices were increasing faster than stocks were. In Quebec, one bank was investing heavily in farmland because it was a better investment than lending money.
Today in Pontiac County, there are more small farms (many just recently) than large farms. People who lived in cities are looking for a way to escape the rat race and move out to the country to a more relaxed life. Those new farmers tend to be even more concerned about maintaining our environment and soil quality than some farmers who have lived in the country their entire lives. These new farmers also want to become active in their community and enjoy producing clean produce with as little chemicals and hormones as possible. Often one of the family members has a full-time off-farm job or maybe works with a computer from home.
Although the number of large farmers has diminished, these new farmers have greatly helped keep our schools and hospital alive and added to our community to keep stores open and some gas stations close by. Although 10 per cent of Canada’s farms produce over two-thirds of our food, our small farms contribute most to our farmers’ markets with locally-produced farm-fresh goods. Many farmers enjoy producing their own food, milk, meat, veggies, and fruits.
Grandma always canned and froze any abundance not needed today, so next winter we cold still eat “like a king.” Our Amish friends have been doing this for generations, and selling what they don’t need.
As farming becomes more computerized and less manual, we see many more farms managed by women, who can be some of the best people to work with animals because they care – it’s a motherly thing.
I hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner. I sure did, and I know the women in our lives had a lot to do with that too. We have so much to be thankful for here in the Pontiac: no floods, no wildfires, no hurricanes, no wars, just great crops and so many great friends that we can’t count them.
