DVISING farmers that improving the efficiency, productivity and growth on their farms will make them poorer is a lot like telling kids that being extra good before Christmas will get them fewer toys from Santa.
It just runs counter to every story we’ve always been told.
Like the connection between behaving well and getting better stuff from Santa, being efficient and getting better economic returns on the farm seem to follow logically. Is there anyone left in the farming community who actually believes that improving efficiency and increasing productivity could result in a poorer bottom line on the farm?
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These are such obvious economic truths that it seems hard to even question them sensibly. But like the Santa stuff, it’s worth the trouble to examine just what’s actually true about the story.
What are the actual outcomes from various kinds of behaviour? Whose purposes does the whole “efficiency” belief itself serve?
In a recently released research paper from the National Farmers Union, The Farm Crisis, Bigger Farms, and the Myths of “Competition” and “Efficiency,” Darrin Qualman explores the actual outcomes of our drive to greater efficiency in farming. The results are startling.
The paper points out some things that anyone travelling across Western Canada can clearly see: farms have become larger and there are fewer of them. Abandoned farmyards and empty farmhouses tell this story.
While farmers made up 10 percent of the Canadian population in 1966, they had declined to less than three percent of the population by 1996. And the losses continue.
However, these fewer, larger farms produce more food than ever before. Output per farm has more than doubled over the last 30 years.
Bigger, more intensive farms are only possible thanks to new technologies. Farming on the Prairies has been transformed over the last 50 years with the arrival of tractor power, hybrid seeds, chemicals, fertilizers and the whole range of machinery and high-tech options used on the modern farm.
Farmers have adopted new technologies rapidly, always with the belief that by doing so they would become more efficient, more productive and hence, more prosperous.
The data shows that for the last 40 years, agriculture has indeed led all other industries in Canada in terms of productivity growth.
But all this has not delivered a better bottom line on the farm. In fact, the opposite has happened.
Net farm incomes continue to decline, with total net farm income now reaching its lowest level in more than 30 years. (Western Producer, Dec. 4, 2003, p. 67). The on-farm reward for increased efficiency is a deepening financial crisis.
Myths can shape behaviour.
By debunking the myths which drive the “efficiency” agenda, we are freed to consider a future for farming based on other values such as healthy communities, ecological balance, cultural diversity and quality food – and, of course, prosperous, small-scale farms.
Nettie Wiebe is a farmer in the Delisle, Sask., region and a professor of Church and Society at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Western Producer.
