IROQUOIS, Ont. – Colleen Ross, national women’s president for the National Farmers Union, is in the middle of a description of her busy farm and political life when the telephone rings.
It is an NFU member from Ontario wondering how to create a local food market in his area.
She is impatient to end the call and yet uses it as another platform for her message about the need for more farmer control of local food.
“We are no longer considered an essential service. We used to have a community that wanted our food but now we are competing in a global market and with Loblaws,” she said. “I am fighting this fight on my farm, producing food that people within a 100 kilometre radius want and that they want to buy from me. If I do all this fight on Parliament Hill, I will lose my farm. I have to fight it here.”
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Then she returns to the interview.
“I get that all the time,” she said. “How can you save the world? I say, how can you save your farm?”
On her 200 acre farm southeast of Ottawa near the St. Lawrence Seaway, Ross and her husband, John Weatherhead, run an organic operation that includes chicken, beef, soybeans and vegetables.
The mortgage payer is the 60 to 70 acres of organic soybeans that are in demand for soy oil and tofu.
The vegetables are sold at a farmers’ market in Ottawa during the summer.
Other produce is sold through weekly food baskets to local customers who pay for fresh organic produce.
The lambs and a 30-head breeder herd produce some revenue but more importantly, natural fertilizer.
But revenue from the farm is not enough.
Ross is a full-time employee of Heifer International Canada, a private development organization dedicated to “eradicating poverty and hunger while preserving the earth.”
She works throughout Ontario with local food sovereignty groups and First Nations communities interested in returning to food self-sufficiency.
Ross said she would prefer to concentrate on the farm and her farm activism, but off-farm income is a necessity to pay the bills.
On top of that, she spends up to 20 hours each week on NFU business, sometimes more.
And she is an activist in the international peasants’ movement Via Campesina that took her to Spain and Mozambique last year to talk about supporting local independent production and fighting corporate control of agriculture and seeds.
“When I look at how much I do, it is unsustainable,” she said on a recent rainy winter day on her farm. “It is crazy. Something has to give.”
That something will be her leadership role in the NFU.
She believes in the union’s analysis that corporate power and globalization are eroding farmer power and driving farmers off the land.
But Ross says when her term as women’s president ends late this year, she will not run for office again, although she will remain an active NFU member.
She finds farm politics in general and the internal politics of the NFU “quite cannibalistic.” The fact that NFU does not offer much compensation for the many hours required means it is the part of her busy life that must be jettisoned.
“I worry about succession, though,” she said. “We are very thin on the ground and have few resources. But I need my off-farm income to keep this place going and this place is who I am.”
It has defined her for only the past 13 years.
Ross, 48, was raised in a Toronto suburb with a well-to-do accountant father who had a deep attachment to the land and food production from his Cape Breton history and family.
She studied agriculture at the University of Guelph and then moved to Australia where she worked on farms, met her future husband, farmed for almost 15 years, had three children and in 1995 sold everything to move back to Canada when a deal to buy a dairy farm fell through.
“It was a blessing in disguise,” she said. “The farm was in Victoria where the drought has settled in and dairy farming without irrigation there does not work.”
It also is the part of Australia devastated recently by wild fires.
“We left at a good time.”
She was attracted to the NFU for its analysis of corporate market failure and sees her work on her organic farm, in the NFU, in developing local markets and in advocating for small-scale peasant farming around the world as part of the same whole.
“I really don’t have to change my mind set when I move from one file to the other,” she said. “They are all part of the whole, part of who I am and what I believe.”
