On the surface, the food landscape of Canada looks pretty good. There is an abundance of food in our grocery stores. We now have more selection and year round availability. And for that food we’re now paying the smallest percentage of our household expenditure (just under 10%) that we’ve ever spent and North Americans spend one of the smallest percentages of our income on food in the world. The current food system seems to generally be working for the retailers and even sometimes for consumers, but what about farmers?
They are a community that obviously plays a major role in feeding us, but the way the food system is currently set up farmers have been marginalized and may even been teetering on extinction. There are a lot of professionals out there where we get to make personal connections with like doctors, teachers, accountants and even Potentiality correspondents. But do you have someone that you can put a face to that grows your food? And that you can trust is providing you with food that is safe, healthy, nutritious and delicious? The rest of this post is going to help you get to know Canadian farmers and a few of the challenges that they are up against (and then my next post will be a more positive one on farming innovation and what you can eat to help).
First off, there aren’t that many farmers in Canada anymore. Only 2.4 percent of us are farmers and this is the fewest farmers we’ve ever had (we peaked at 32 percent in the 1930s). And the farmers that we do have overwhelmingly fit into a very specific demographic profile: aging (the average age is over 50 now), caucasian and male. Almost half of farm operators are reporting non-farm income (basically they need to have a second job). In terms of farms, there are fewer of them and they are bigger. 98 percent of the farms are still family businesses but they are under fairly serious threat, whether it is from land being bought up, farmer debt or corporate financing of farm inputs. Farmers are increasingly moving toward corporate control and as a result farmers are losing the ability to do even basic things like save seed from year to year.
The food system has also been changing in a way that is making it harder for a lot of farmers to distribute or process their goods. There are a lot of examples out there. The last fruit cannery closed in Niagara a couple of years ago and a lot of farmers had nowhere to sell their fruit. The result was perfectly productive fruit orchards being uprooted and farmers having to scramble to move to new crops. There is also an abattoir crisis in Ontario. 15 years ago there were 900 businesses to process meat and poultry and now there are about 130. The main cause of the closers has been a dramatic change in the standards, where small and medium sized abattoirs need to meet the same standards as the large scale ones (even if the small and medium ones don’t have the same safety issues as the large ones). Even the standardization 
of grocery store produce is a roadblock for farmers to get their goods into grocery stores. A farmer now needs to grow and package their lettuce in the same way that California does or many grocery stores and restaurants won’t buy it. Most farmers don’t have the resources to set up on site processing and when they do they struggle to navigate local land use planning to get it set up and if they are lucky enought to get that far they have their taxes go through the roof because they now have a commercial property (at least inOntario this is the case).
Canada’s farming community is facing significant pressures from a number of directions. But despite these challenges, I’ve met a lot of farmers, who want to continue farming and their kids, who want to stay in the family business. And with the raising awareness about local food, there already are opportunities for the farming community to move into new niches, new farmers to get their start and for innovative new businesses to bridge the gaps that exist in the middle of the food system between producers and consumers. Part 2 of “Who’s Your Farmer?” (to be posted 2 weeks) will have ideas on how you can get to better know your farmers and help farming in Canada become viable once again.