05) IS THIS THE END OF FAMILY FARMING?
By Graham L. Wilson, Albertan family rancher
For much of my life I have felt like the last of a dying breed, rather than simply one of the next generation. So often I have seen my fellow ranchers, white haired old men in jeans and caps, relics of an age when Alberta's provincial product was raised from the ground and not extracted from underneath it.
Many were either the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves, such as my late grandfather. The world they describe is unrecognizable from the Alberta of today, long before we became so "prosperous". They remember when being a farmer was not only sustainable, but sometimes quite lucrative. Sadly, this is no longer true. That time has come and gone.
What is even more striking is that at my tender young age of eighteen I too can remember better times. At no point in my life has our family ranch been more than a "hobby" operation, demanding the external employment of my father and older brothers to stay afloat - something which speaks volumes in itself.
However, I can recall some happier childhood memories of "calf cheques" and the spells of financial freedom they provided us. The bunk‑bed of my twin brother and I, for example, was financed through exactly these annual windfalls. A less pleasant memory, several years later, was that after expenses, all the calf money could purchase was a new toilet seat. What changed a profitable side interest into what it is now?
When the mad cow scandal broke out in May 2003, I was nine years old. I was not able to fully comprehend how it would affect my life, and pave the path for all the strife to come. All I can recall was the panic, and the sudden deprivation of those yearly calf cheques. I also recall the varied responses to the panic, such as Premier Ralph Klein's infamous "shoot, shovel and shut‑up", and the disloyalty of American ranchers' organizations like R‑CALF. Believing that by closing off their Canadian compatriots they would win out, they broke solidarity with the rest of us and unwittingly fell into the interests of the large agricultural companies.
Even so, we did emerge out of the crisis, battered and bruised, but still standing. Although now hardly profitable, we continued to break even: the price fetched for our calves paid for the cost of feeding the herd over the winter. This security proved vital to our continued operations when the other link in the chain broke. My father lost his embedded technology job after the fall of that great capitalist boondoggle, the Dot‑Com Boom, leaving him underemployed for the best part of a decade. It was a difficult balance, but we continued to work it out such that both bovine and human continued to be fed, sheltered and healthy.
Still, the industry continued to stagnate, as the large agricultural corporations continued their efforts to push out small farmers. The margin to pay for our feed became smaller and smaller, until finally a few years ago we started coming in at a loss. The enterprise of three generations of my family had finally become a liability. It was now financially poisonous to maintain our lifestyle and to retain our family traditions. This is particularly alarming given the relatively low inputs required: winter feed and the occasional salt block or fence repair. Conceivably, our operations should be sustainable and self‑sustaining. We thought that this was going to be pretty much the lowest it could get.
This year has proved us wrong. We are now facing the choice between selling our calves at rock‑bottom prices, or retaining them over the winter and hope for better in the spring. Since we were fortunately able to get a decent deal on hay last summer, it appears that the latter is our best option. But the hay purchase left a stoppage in our cash flow, driving us to the local food bank. For the first time since my father got his new job in June, we had to choose their feed above our own.
This is not just a one off in our case, but a larger issue affecting ranchers across the Prairies and beyond, all over the developed world in fact. The reasons for the current crisis are emblematic of the decline in Canadian family agriculture as a whole. The E.coli scandal and the atrocious policies of XL Foods are taking most of the spotlight, and rightly so, but ranchers had been nervous for months before that new revelation came to light.
The United States has spent most of the past year in an extreme drought, devastating the production of hay and corn, which has caused a feed crisis and a mass sell‑off of livestock. This influx of supply has naturally cratered demand in international markets.
Of course, the innate link between the drought and climate change has been largely ignored and under‑reported, along with how this has specifically targeted the most vulnerable. In the face of lower production of their preferred corn‑meal, the large feed‑lots have simply diversified their choices, making sugary swill out of things such as surplus Oreo cookies and gummy worms. This is not an option for those of us who feed our cattle grass and hay, as they are biologically suited to do. With lower hay crops, many farmers across the United States have had no option but to sell their stock or watch them slowly starve.
Thus calamities on both sides of the border have created the perfect storm, and like all such storms produced by the contradictory system of capitalism, the smaller and the poorer operations suffer far more. In the end, it is not the large monopolies like Cargill, Monsanto or XL Foods who foot the bill for our lost livelihoods. No, they will profit from the influx of cheap meat, with no added benefit to consumers or their employees. If it wipes out what little parts of the sector remain independent, all the better. A world where there are no family farmers, and no healthy, happy pasture-raised cattle with room to roam, has been the one they have been working towards for decades. Their crusade, with explicit government backing, has been widely successful.
Unless a drastic fightback takes place in support of family farming, the rural diaspora shall continue until the countryside is filled by nothing more than factory farms, animals treated as industrial materials, and a few tenant farmers on the payroll of their rich masters. In the context of a brewing food crisis across all agricultural sectors and in all parts in the world, due to years of mismanagement, unsustainable policies and the ravaging of climate change, this trend should worry everyone. If new blood such as myself and my brothers are the last of our kind, who will retain the skills needed to pick up the pieces when it all comes tumbling down? How can we ever come back to way we once were? Is this the end of sustainable, healthy, and humane ranching as we know it?