As an agricultural journalist, it’s always hard to get out and actually meet farmers on the farm. Unlike city reporters, you can’t just drive 15-30 minutes to get to interviews. Farms can be hours away. City reporters can visit urbanites’ homes any day quite easily. Getting to a farm involves a lot more logistics.
And farmers have challenging schedules. It’s not a nine-to-five job and during seeding, spraying or harvesting a lot work 18 hour days. That’s the most interesting time to get out there, but also the most difficult one to arrange.
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Dairy farmers have brutal schedules too, often up at four or five a.m. and having various chores and milkings to do throughout the day until late at night. They have a more predictable life, so it’s often easier to arrange visits to dairy farms than to grain farms during the growing season. That’s one reason I visited a dairy farm to write a profile a couple of weeks ago. I knew they were more likely to be available than somebody busily seeding thousands of acres.
But the main, driving reason for the visit was that I’d been writing stories about the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and the increasing pressure being brought to bear on Canada to weaken the supply management system. I covered this issue in April during a visit to Washington, D.C., where congressional agriculture committee leaders demanded changes to Canada’s system, then wrote a couple of stories with Canadian dairy industry reaction and the views of an independent Canadian analyst.
As I covered this issue I noticed how the polarization around supply management (SM), setting SM farmers (poultry and dairy producers, mainly) against proponents of the free market farm commodities (crops, cattle, pigs), seemed to be eliciting a lot of nasty aspersions against SM farmers, such as dairy people. That seemed unfortunate to me, because whether you love or hate SM, I don’t think you should attack the motivations, ethics or worthiness of the farmers who live and farm within the system. Most SM farmers are passionate advocates of SM, but they have to be, after mortgaging their lives and futures to invest deeply in the industry. Once you’ve borrowed a bunch of eggs to put in that basket, you probably don’t want somebody to flip it over.
Sometimes SM farmers get portrayed as fat-cat farmers reaping the benefits of a rigged market (this perception is encouraged by usually urban organizations and think tanks that describe SM farmers as coddled and protected.) I understand the economic arguments against SM and don’t necessarily disagree with them. I am most comfortable with free market commodities like crops, pigs and beef cattle and am wary of too much regulatory meddling with markets to fix prices. But I also understand the arguments for supply management as a tool that provides stability and a chance for young people to enter the business.
None of that matters here or to this story. With this feature on the Plett family of Blumenort, Manitoba, I wanted to give myself and our newspaper’s readers a portrait – a true picture – of a contemporary dairy farming family, living in the present but having to plan for the future while the fate of their industry and their farm is being batted around in world trade talks, with no way of knowing how it will all work out.
It’s hard to imagine a more decent or admirable family than the Pletts, and that’s what I like most about farm visits, as hard as they are to arrange. I get to see the type of people I write for. These people had a dream of dairy farming and through hard work, modest living, and dogged commitment to doing what it takes to become a dairy farmer, they have succeeded. They have a tough and demanding life, with little downtime, but that is part of being a dairy farmer and they knew that getting into it.
So for whatever people think of supply management, whatever they think of the industry or the system, they should remember that at the base of it all are a few thousand family farmers that have thrown their lives into what they do, and regardless of anyone’s views on the political and economic elements of the industry, the farm families should be treated with respect and even admiration. Whatever kind of system exists five or ten years from now, these are the sorts of people we should all hope are still forming the basis of it.
