Farmers talk sustainable farming as Farmers' Week comes to close

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Farmers shared their views on how to make the food production system sustainable during an online Grey Bruce Farmers’ Week panel discussion Monday.

It was Ecology Day, one of eight themed days that were part of the all-virtual 55^thannual event which ended Tuesday with Crops Day.

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Organizer Lorie Smith said by email the technical production quality was great and doing the entire event online in light of COVID-19 restrictions on in-person gathering was a success, especially given the huge task for her small team.

“This week has been incredible: we have been sending feeds all across Canada, and the U.S.; and bringing speakers in across Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and New Zealand.”

Tuesday’s sustainability discussion kicked off with moderator Rob Campbell looking at sustainability in terms of environmental and social considerations as well as profit.

People should care about sustainability because fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be due to soil depletion and a preference for fast-growing and pest-resistant varieties, he said.

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Further, the average farmer was aged 55 in 2016, farm net incomes have declined for 20 years while farm debt has grown. He said farmers are subsidizing poor market returns by taking on more debt and asked who will take over for them?

Climate change adds urgency to the problem, particularly given that atmospheric carbon concentrations have reached a global tipping point, he said. And the pandemic showed centralized, export-oriented food chains are problematic, he noted.

Panellist Thorsten Arnold, whose 1.5-acre Persephone Market Garden in Grey County strives for sustainability, nonetheless said farmers’ ability to fix the food system “is really very limited” because farmers are just one component.

“It takes a village to heal a food system,” he said. “Farms are being asked to do a lot of things. We shall end poverty by creating food that everybody can afford, so we have to be super cheap.

“We are asked to save the world by producing with ecologically sound practices at a super cheap price and we are supposed to do that on land that is so expensive that actually no one can buy land with the money that you earn from farming.”

It will take more engagement with communities to solve the problem and farmers should “stop pretending that we as farmers have the power to change the food system.”

Arnold is an environmental science, agriculture economics and watershed expert and consultant. He co-owns his farm with his wife and children. He initiated Eat Local Grey Bruce, an online farmers’ market.

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Brett Israel’s 3Gen Organics family farm in Wellington County includes 1,150 acres of cropland and a 180 sow farrow-to-finish hog operation. The farm began a transition to organic production in 2015.

He said most producers want to hear concerns from the public and do the right thing. “We’re always thinking about the decisions that we make today, what impact they’ll have for generations to come and how does it pay respect to those that came before us and build our operation,” he said.

He said for him, sustainability starts with direct marketing through customers who visit the farm where the food is grown. Without that, “it’s very difficult to have that level of appreciation and respect needed to value the work of the farmer and hear and listen to what the concerns of the broader public are.”

He said farmers have been told to “produce more for less and that it’s okay to compromise on environmental aspects if we can just maximize our bushels per acre.” Instead, farmers need to focus more on the quality rather than quantity of food produced, Israel said.

“I think a lot of producers are just going to feel hopeless against the enormous array of challenges we’re facing in health, environmental health, the long-term sustainability of farms from a financial perspective,” he said.

But farmers can be more profitable, have more environmentally sound, ecologically regenerating farms, while improving food quality and better serving the community, he said.

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Owen Goltz operates Riverdale Farm and Forest, a 60-acre farm in Inglewood, Ont., southeast of Orangeville. He farms a dozen 12-metre by 91-metre strips containing vegetables, dry beans and grain crops sold via custom online ordering for a 40-customer membership.

There are too many local grocery stores and farmers’ markets and online grocery delivery services to compete as a traditional CSA or community-supported agriculture operation, he said. For one, it’s hard to beat their convenience, he said.

A discussion six years ago about unhealthy people led him to focus his farm on raising the nutritional value of his crops, through soil and plant health and seed selection. He does regular plant nutritional value testing.

“In the system, the need for food of high nutritional quality has yet to be widely recognized,” Goltz said. Just being a certified-organic farmer “doesn’t mean anything.”

It’s less about the soil than “finding the right plants that are going to work in our farm system.”

For example, he wasn’t able to raise the nutritional value of leaf lettuce but he could for head lettuce, testing showed. “And so the question became `Why would we sell leaf lettuce?’”

He said seed breeding has mainly been done to increase yields, for insect and disease management, size or colour. But “usually” this comes at the cost of nutrition.

He also developed a more natural farming system called zero budget natural farming. He said his farm pays because people with health issues will buy more of his nutritious food — $1,000 to $1,800 per season.

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“That kind of need is what I see that is very sustainable for us in a very high-populated area.”

In another part of the discussion, Goltz suggested Ontario should create a farm apprenticeship program to expose kids who didn’t grow up on farms to the work.

The eight-day agricultural conference has been recorded, with each session to be available within 48 hours of its live broadcast. All of the content will be available online for 30 days following the event.

See greybrucefarmersweek.ca for the broadcasts, information about the speakers and the event itself.

Grey Bruce Farmers’ Week was presented by Grey County Agricultural Services.