It seems like shades of Nick Parsons, a Peace River farmer who drove his combine from Alberta to Ottawa in 2000 to raise awareness of farm income issues.
He ended up drinking scotch and cola with then-prime minister Jean Chrétien and becoming something of a media celebrity.
This summer, Hamilton, Ont., agriculture professor John Varty has been driving a tractor pulling a hay wagon with a cabin on top from Prince Edward Island to Ontario.
He says the goal is to raise awareness among Canadians of the importance of farmers and food production.
“Only three percent of Canadians farm, but 100 percent of Canadians eat so it’s really an important story,” he told a CBC interviewer as he prepared to leave P.E.I. in June.
He says part of the motivation for the tractor trek is to broaden knowledge of food from the consumer level and what food is available.
“I want to give farmers a voice, not just a passing one, not just a trite one.”
Varty is accompanied on the trip by his partner, Molly Daly, and cameraman, Michael Liew. A documentary of the trip will be produced.
By late August, the tractor had rolled into eastern and central Ontario where Varty was visiting farms and farmers’ markets.
On Aug. 28, the farm promotion trip took a side road as Varty took the tractor to a rally northwest of Toronto to protest the building of a stone quarry that will swallow up prime agricultural land.
The graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and Yale University in Connecticut teaches at McMaster University’s L.R. Wilson Institute, which examines the impact of globalization on Canadian sectors and institutions.
His specialty is agriculture, concentrating on historic aid to India and the history of cattle diseases and trade embargoes in the context of globalization trends.
