Do family farms matter? It feels like they should, and there is a sentiment among the Canadian public that the family farm is a good thing. Most policy-makers too profess support for the family farm. But still, the family farm has been travelling a rocky road for decades and a glance at the trends in farm debt, demographics, and production concentration suggest that the window for an active decision on the fate of the family farm will soon close.
If Canadians want to have food produced and foodland tended by family farms well into the future, then something has to change.
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If we re going to engage the support of the broader society in bringing about this change, we should be clear among ourselves on a critical question. Does the family farm matter?
Before we can tackle that though, we need to first tighten up our definitions. What is a family farm? Is the answer as simple as farms owned by families? That definition today would include a vast range of operational scales. Two problems follow. If renewal of the family farm is going to be policy led, such a range of scales makes it difficult to implement support programs without making matters worse in the long run.
If the renewal of the family farm is going to be consumer led, then we can tell from what opinion-leading consumers are reading (i. e. The Omnivore s Dilemma), watching (i. e. Food Inc.) and buying (i. e. source-identified groceries), that these opinion leaders will reject any definition that overlaps with their notion of factory farming.
So, for now, let s adopt a working definition of the family farm based on three conditions: (a) the majority of the farm labour is provided by members of the family; (b) the operation is not financed by value-chain partners and (c) the farm is free to make its own decisions on where it buys inputs and sells its production.
Now to the question of why this particular kind of farm matters or more specifically, which argument for the family farm matters most today to the people who are most in a position to help.
One argument could be based on preserving the health of our farmland for the future good of all. It s easy to believe that a family, tending land with an eye to keeping it in the family for future generations, would be inclined to protect, preserve and renew it with care, whereas a corporation may be inclined to treat declining soil productivity or groundwater degradation as externalities that have less bearing on current business decisions.
Another argument could be based on maximizing choice for consumers. An industry comprised of a diverse group of relatively small independent producers, following their own compasses encourages creativity. The result (as the European example perhaps shows) should be a range of consumer choices that exceeds the range available from a more industrialized, commodity-driven, and ownership-concentrated food production system.
If family farms united behind either one of these arguments, and then turned it into a common game plan pursued with authenticity and focus, it s no stretch to imagine Canadian society putting its support behind such an idea.
But this begs a question. While there is truth to both of the arguments above, is there enough consistency among family farms and enough contrast with other production systems? If we are confident that in comparison with a food system based on larger-scale producers, family farms can consistently deliver on the promise of either better environmental stewardship or better consumer choice great. But if there are any doubts here, what are the prospects of rounding up such a famously independent group to pursue a common strategy in the future?
This challenge points us to another possible argument for the family farm, and one that may prove more immediately valid than the previous choices. Call it the Internet argument.
As most people know, the creation of the Internet was inspired by the desire to produce a communications system that could survive almost any future hazard. The essence of this ruggedness was decentralization.
Canadian society recently invested tens of billions in response to the near collapse of the global financial industry a system that, just like the food industry had vertically integrated, centralized and concentrated enormously over the past 30 years. If the collapse of a financial system is scary, imagine the collapse of a food system. Hard to imagine? Yes. Inconceivable? Well, it wouldn t be a collapse if it didn t catch people by surprise. And history offers precedents of wild gyrations in the supply and cost of food gyrations that had far more to do with politics and ownership than weather or blight.
Society is poorly equipped to calculate risks of this nature. Still, it seems clear that a decentralized system of food production grounded upon many independent family farm operations offers a security of supply, price, quality and variety that creates value for society in a way that is simply not accounted for in our present system of commodity prices.
Perhaps it is ultimately on this basis that the rest of Canadian society can be engaged in pausing the further centralization of agricultural production. Imagine, if governments and consumers stopped paying family farms to take on more risk through debt and expansion, and instead, began rewarding family farmers for protecting food sovereignty and security by simply being themselves. CG
Photo credit: Melanie moore
