Do big farmers and small farmers have to despise each other?
Is large-scale, intensive, industrial farming incompatible with small-scale, holistic, mixed farming?
Often people act like the two approaches can’t work in the same economy. You talk to some large-scale, technologically-sophisticated farmers and you get a sense that they think small farmers are dinosaurs that need to go extinct in order for the full birth of the new epoch of modern farming. And if you speak with some promoters and practitioners of small scale, mixed holistic farming, you get the sense that they see big farmers that use cutting edge technology as THE DEVIL.
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General moods of intolerance afflict both communities in this matter, and the attitudes get entrenched as one approach sees itself condemned by the other side, and the other side feels it’s being treated with contempt and derision by the other.
I think 80 percent of farmers just simply think getting bigger, using more technology and employing sophisticated management is necessary in order to survive as a grain farmer (or a hog farmer) and there isn’t much debate to be had. You either adapt to the times or you’re going to be out of business. And generally I think they’re right. If you’re going to produce a bulk commodity, you need to have the lowest possible cost of production, and that is created through scale, technology and management – none of which work well on a small scale in grain or hog farming.
But there’s no reason non-commodity ag can’t prosper alongside big bulk commodity ag. Especially if each sells into different markets.
It’s obviously a loser proposition for a small farmer to try to compete at the same per-bushel or per-pound price with a big farmer because margins will always be razor-thin in commodity production. But there are totally different markets for some farm goods, and if small farmers can find those markets and produce those products, there’s no reason they can’t thrive.
I’m obviously not having new thoughts here, having said this sort of stuff many times before and having heard lots of people say the same things, but it popped up in my mind again yesterday as a I visited an urban farmers market and talked to a farm couple that sells meat there. The people buying food weren’t the kind you see at Costco. (That’s where I usually shop.) They seemed very concerned about the localness of the food, about how it is produced, about what approach the farmer takes to producing food. That’s what sells here: a close connection between the food, the farmer and the consumer. Since the food can be sold for a little bit more than the price at the grocery store, there’s enough margin to cover both higher operating costs and lower amounts of production.
So it’s a totally different kind of market and one that can give a place to smaller, mixed, holistic (and high labour) farmers that are willing to go through all the extra steps to serve it. You might think there’s little room for this market to grow, because farmers’ markets are small (in terms of tonnage) and there are only a few of them.
But that’s where you’d be wrong. Farmers markets are popping up everywhere. This one was only about a mile from my house, and its held twice a week, but there’s also one often held just a few blocks from my house in the heart of my own neighborhood, and I know of half a dozen other farmers markets in various parts of Winnipeg. The St. Norbert farmers market is the famous one, but I’ll bet more product gets moved through the other ones.
And the trend towards local food is profound and likely to intensify. Lots of people aren’t going to become fanatical locavores, but the trend towards everyone of a certain class becoming a self-described “foodie” means more and more urban consumers will be trying to one-up each other on the “quality” and wholesomeness of their food ingredients, and in their minds local and simple is always better than big and industrial.
This thought cheers me because I find the caustic crabbing between big and small, left and right, industrial and traditional in both farming and society in general to be dreary and pointless, so I hope everyone can move forward, build their own markets, and forget about bad-talking the other forms of farming. There’s room for everybody.
