WHEN large forces shut us down, it helps to review our assumptions.
In Learning While Leading, Anita Farber-Robertson tells how the American forces bombed bridges during the war in Vietnam to prevent the Vietnamese from crossing rivers. However, they were baffled to find that even when the bridges had been destroyed, people continued crossing rivers by the thousands.
After the war they asked the Vietnamese how they did it. They replied, “we built the bridges six inches under the water.”
In northern England last fall I noticed that some basic assumptions about how one raises sheep had changed as a result of the foot-and-mouth crisis.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
Before the outbreak, most Scottish sheep producers assumed that raising sheep was a solitary business. Scotland has many different, small breeds of flocks trained over generations to tend themselves on particular tracts of land. There wasn’t much incentive for co-operative work.
But during the outbreak many flocks, even whole breeds, were slaughtered and burned. Afterward farmers realized they needed each other’s breeding stock and experience with raising and marketing unfamiliar breeds. They formed producer co-operatives that made their industry and communities stronger than before.
The bombing of their “old bridges” forced them to take a new look at how they organized their industry.
Here in Canada, the cattle industry has operated on a couple of assumptions. We’ve assumed that American packers will look after our mature, over 30-month cattle. And we’ve assumed that producers don’t need to market their own beef.
With the borders still closed, mature cattle are accumulating in large numbers. The old assumptions aren’t sustaining the industry.
Producers are beginning to doubt that the United States and big packers will solve their problems.
Now a number of western Canadian producers plan to create their own packing plants. They intend to process mature cattle for specialty markets overseas with profits going to producers.
It’s happening in grain farming too. We’ve assumed that high-input farming, including lots of machinery, is efficient. That’s true in terms of human energy. Not much labour is required to produce a bushel of wheat compared to 50 years ago.
But we’ve simply replaced that input with extraordinary amounts of gas, oil and electricity. The total energy required to produce that bushel has actually increased. As a result we are not capital efficient either. It takes more money to produce a $1 return on wheat than it used to, so profit margins have shrunk to almost invisible proportions.
Grain farmers are now more vulnerable to drought, depressed markets and so on. They are beginning to look for under-the-water forms of agriculture- co-operative and sustainable, for example.
It doesn’t hurt to ask ourselves regularly, “what assumptions am I making about my business, or my family, or community?”
Whose interests do those assumptions really serve?
Do bridges always have to be built above the water?
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
