Whether you plant thousands of acres of grain, vegetables and fruit to sell at the farmers market or a roadside stand or a backyard garden, a tiny greenhouse in your basement or a few veggies in big flower pots on your balcony, you will be making your final decisions about what to plant this spring.
Last fall, my wife looked high and low in grocery stores and farmers markets for summer savory to add to the stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey. Her neighbour came up with a little jar of savory that could have been used to stuff several turkeys.
A garnish that is used to top a decadent dessert in some fancy restaurants is ground cherries which grows in our climate but very few grow them.
Most of the vegetables grown today are bred to grow very fast, look perfect, and are suitable to be fed lots of fertilizer, irrigated, resistant to some herbicides, and machine picked. But they have much less nutritional value, minerals, vitamins and taste than older less productive varieties. Home gardeners can select these older varieties that are fine in their garden where weed control is done by hand and quality is more important.
If it is a large farm with thousands of acres, you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to plant crops and not know what the prices will be when they are harvested next fall.
These large farms will study trends in markets both domestic and international. Most of these large farms will forward contract part of their crop at a fixed price before they even plant it. This will cover most of their costs to plant even if prices drop. Some grain buyers have restrictions on varieties and cropping methods for the grains that they will buy.
I once attended a Canadian Federation of Agriculture annual meeting in British Columbia when in an opening address the president of the Ontario Federation said, “We have to grow less of what people need and more of what they want.” His reason was that people expect everyday food that they eat to be dirt cheap while they will pay a premium price for what they want.
There are thousands of restaurants in Canada that serve a variety of foods of varying quality. Two of the finest that quickly come to mind are in Quebec City. One has been operating in the same location for over a century, the other is the Restaurant Parlementaire situated inside the walls of the Quebec Parliament Building. You can order anything on the menu and never leave looking for any kind of antacid to settle your tummy. There are dignitaries from all over the world who eat there and Quebec does not want them to leave with any bad feelings about our food.
Some changes can take a lifetime while others can come quickly and unexpectedly. In only 70 years America has moved from no hybrids to GMO hybrids bred to be resistant to some herbicides and sprays that eliminate most unwanted weeds and grass.
Recently, consumers are demanding to know how their food was produced. If we cannot or refuse to tell them producers from other countries can and will inform them and take away some of our market.
A couple huge financial settlements following court cases and a declaration made by a health organization has resulted in many states and countries now having restrictions or total bans on some grains and products made from these grains.
Two old sayings come to mind, “You are what you eat” and “You reap what you sow.”
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
