In my explorations, I have been looking at the many ways to farm. Here in North America, we seem to have only 2 ways to farm: ‘them’ and ‘us’, such as organic vs. conventional, or big farm vs. small farm, or industrial/conventional vs. traditional/subsistence farming. There are many choices to developing a farm business model that suits each farm family’s lifestyle and values. It is these options that I seek to explore globally, so that I can offer a vision for more choice in Canadian Agriculture.
We are caught in dichotomies, and it does not have to be this way. What could the future of agriculture be in Canada, that offers farmers more choice? We need choice, not more regulations. And right now, farming is prohibitive to serving the common good – healthy food for all. As I proposed in my Nuffield application:
We got to where we are in only a couple of decades. What would the pathway forward look like if we were to introduce a new food culture and a new vision for agriculture in Canada?
Here is one example of a different way to farm: forage farming. Forage farming is the idea of living lightly in landscape and farmed ‘wild’ harvesting. I share a blog from Milkwood: permaculture farming and living. Kirsten has written a blog very much in line with what I call self-reliant farming. I am sharing it here in the link below.
I have always liked the idea of maximizing production per acre. With intensive farming I am told that one can gross from 30-100 thousand an acre. This is great news for employment, rural depopulation, and reducing the carbon footprint that comes from transporting food for long distances. Developing markets is crucial in this. Perhaps this is easier now than it was 40 years ago, or perhaps today s young agriculturalists have a greater ability or determination to stick to it than I did. And for me, I slipped into “conventional” agriculture, for a variety of reasons, one of which was opportunity.