IF YOU can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. As I see it, that has been the watchword in Canadian agriculture for at least three decades.
The philosophy was laid out rather clearly in the 1969 federal task force on agriculture report. The task force concluded that two-thirds of Canadian farms are essentially “non-viable” because their operators have not “kept up.”
According to the report, these unfit farmers can be distinguished from the “farming elite of large-scale business-oriented, technically experienced operators” by their lower levels of education and experience. They show evidence of “lack of ability, lack of initiative or an unco-operative spirit.” In other words, they are stupid, lazy or stubborn.
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It claims that overpopulation has divided the agricultural pie into too many slices and cautions that solutions to this “small farm problem” have been hampered by agricultural leaders who were “loathe to recognize the need for a widespread exodus from farming.”
The only real solution, it insists, is to develop “much more effective policies to take men out of farming.”
It seems Canada has been successful in this, now having about one-third the number of farm residents it had in 1969.
More recently federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief gave voice to that philosophy in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press in November 1999. Responding to criticism of the government’s refusal to reinstate historic supports for the grain sector, Vanclief said the government’s position was a form of “tough love.” Improving the safety net would send the wrong signal to profitable operations, he suggested.
In other words, the loss of support helps force people out of farming who really do not belong there because they can’t take the heat.
Interviewing rural families over the last decade, I hear more of the highly competitive “survival of the fittest” language that I used to associate with urban boardrooms.
The assumption is that the “weak,” usually defined as “poor managers,” or people who are economically unproductive, are chaff that must be winnowed out. Supposedly communities get stronger when the weak are removed.
Is that really true? Studies in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand show a strong correlation between increased farm size and decline in the quality of community life. They show that with larger farms comes a decreased interest in co-operative farming and an increase in competitive factions, retreat by men and women from community participation into farm work or private consumption, the loss of local leadership, the loss of educational, health and social services, and a decline in a community’s ability to determine its own future.
On the Prairies, a lot of the “weak ones” who are leaving are young farmers. They have difficulty sustaining payments on large capital loans required to get into the highly mechanized farming now associated with “successful” agribusiness. They have exited farming in large numbers, taking with them another group of unproductive weak ones – their children.
Are rural communities better off without them? Hardly. To raise children, communities have to build schools, form clubs and sports teams, and so on. Children catalyze the development of institutions and relationships that put people in touch with each other. Adults develop social and economic partnerships as they raise money together for band instruments and watch their kids play ball.
With the loss of young farmers and small farms has gone the population base needed to support community infrastructure.
Strong, healthy communities are those who have a variety of folks: old and young, strong and weak, productive and unproductive.
Survival of the fittest thinking ultimately ends with no community at all, just the one “fittest” cattle baron or wheat king reigning in undisturbed loneliness in an empty countryside.
That’s not my dream for rural Canada.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
