Food Security, Cultural Landscapes, Communities and Sustainable Farming

(photo of agricultural land in Scotland south of Stonehaven)
Another dimension to the whole business of food sovereignty and local food self-sufficiency is of course land, and support for farming economy, and farming communities as well as agroecology. Today at Athabasca University, where I teach, my colleague Ella Haley talked about issues of ethical investment and "land grabs". Her talk title was "Pension funds, farmland grab, human rights violations and divestment campaigns - how are your pension funds being invested?" This struck home with many of our colleagues, as ethical investment is a goal, but difficult to realize. Even our Canada Pension Plan funds are apparently implicated in conversion of vast tracts of farmland in the prairie provinces to investment income generating commodity.....
I think of my late Mother in law, from a marginal north Saskatchewan farm, with five generations on the land. I also think of the now deserted small farming communities between Shell Lake and Saskatoon, emblematic of the great depopulation of the Saskatchewan landscape. About a century since the fields were proved up, and families settled on the land to make their livings and grow food for the country and the world. My partner's uncle was an organic farmer, growing wheat a bit north of the optimal zone for number one red wheat; fall rains in the northern fringe of agricultural production spoil the perfect colour. The value added of organic farming helped make up the difference. He's retired now, though some of his younger relatives still farm or grow specialty fruit crops (saskatoons and the like).
The realization that, as global population grows, and some other forms of investment have become unstable, farmland makes an attractive investment for income generation was new to me. Similarly, the realization that international investors take diverse agroecologies and convert them to depauperate monocultures was familiar to me, but I had never linked the consequences of human ecologies, communities and economies with global investments and commodity production for global trade so explicitly. Similarly, Ella discussed the leap-frogging of pressure to sell out farms for potential development, or as investment property over the Toronto region green belt. Having grown up (in part) in suburban southern California, I was familiar with the leveling of lemon groves for subdivisions, the division of ranch lands and crop lands to accommodate urban sprawl. These days the pressures to give "options" on farms, to convert large swaths of formerly diverse family farms to depopulated properties for income purposes seems to have shifted in scale and quality. The greenbelts of southern Ontario were intended to preserve ecological and environmental diversity, and peri-urban rural amenities around cities like Toronto and Hamilton. This has succeeded, but the geographic scale of economic pressure has simply lept over the protected lands. Certain large scale developers apparently are buying up land in Alberta, in rural Ontario, and in diverse other parts of the globe, like Africa, where diverse swidden agricultural areas and managed diverse forest are converted to vast sterile monocultures of crops like oil palm. The more I learn about that crop, the more I try to stay away from purchasing anything with palm oil in it– but it is virtually impossible to avoid.
On the local scale, the rich Saskatchewan River valley farmlands of northeast Edmonton are also at risk from large investors. The Greater Edmonton Alliance has called attention to the risks of urban sprawl eliminating our local food production capacity. Some of the vendors I patronize at the Farmers Market have thriving market gardens and farms within the city limits.

When my daughter was small, we had a tape recording of Woody Guthrie singing this song:

When the farmer comes to town
With his wagon broken down,
Oh the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you'll only look and see,
I'm sure you will agree,
That the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall;
Then they take him by the hand
And they lead him from the land,
And the middleman's the man who gets it all.

Oh the lawyer hangs around
While the butcher cuts a pound,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all;
And the preacher and the cook
Go a-strolling by the brook,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall;
With the interest rate so high,
It's a wonder he don't die,
For the mortgage man's the man who gets it all.

When the banker says he broke
And the merchant's up in smoke,
They forget that it's the farmer feeds them all.
It would put them to the test
If the farmer took a rest,
Then they'd know that it's the farmer feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall;
His pants are wearing thin,
His condition, it's a sin,
He's forgot that he's the man who feeds them all.

I think it summarizes many of the issues of the conversion of farming and farmland into corporate investment opportunities with no concerns for the integrity of either communities nor land. It interests me, as I've commented earlier in this blog, that the traits of the cultural landscape of the Salt Steppe (Hortobágy) in Hungary could not be maintained without maintaining the cultural practices of land management realized by traditional herders. Similarly, the health of the agricultural landscape, and its human communities I would argue is necessary for food sovereignty and a healthy social-ecological system here in Canada, let alone where foreign corporate interests dispossess subsistence farming communities in many regions of the global south.

Reflections on local food self sufficiency-

Processing local apples today for apple butter and applesauce. I prefer to use the fruit of local trees…besides being pesticide free, they often represent old varieties, or the unique qualities of fruit trees grown from seed. The flavours are distinct, more interesting, less bland, than applesauce made from commercial fruit. When I lived on the Skeena, I used to harvest the fruit of a motley assortment of apple trees, each one distinct, that had been planted 50 years or more before by an early homesteader, and apple trees from seed “planted” by birds sitting on the fence post, or by the scat of a passing bear. I used to pick the fruit green to try to get it before the bears broke the trees down, harvesting the fruit the same way they would the berries of a tall saskatoon bush. The flavours were unsurpassed, and the fruit was tangy, sour, bitter. My daughter and I would sit on a low stool and run the cooked pulp through a hand cranked Foley foodmill in the kitchen of our cabin cum new-old-farmhouse. The pectin from the green apples made the sauce thick before it was reheated with sugar to can.
Today I am processing the fruit from three old Edmonton apple trees. Apple trees planted by homeowners decades before are often neglected by contemporary supermarket-oriented residents, the fruit a nuisance rotting on the ground. Fruit trees are an investment that take decades to reach their prime, and stability over decades is a rare thing in today’s urban areas. The mentality to put food by, the skills and equipment to can or make jelly, are no longer universal, especially in urban areas where even home cooking from “scratch” is increasingly rare. I went to the market to buy apple juice needed for the cooking liquid to make apple butter…the closest source I could find was organic apple juice processed in Chilliwack near Vancouver. The sugar I will add is organic fair-trade demerara- hopefully ethically produced and both socially and environmentally “OK”….but certainly not within my 100 mile radius for “local”. I would have to search out a local honey producer for that, and I would find, in our climate, that the overwintering bees must be fed on sugar syrup, most likely tropical cane sugar, and neither environmentally nor ethically produced…so the honey I eat is local, but the bees are sustained by the global food system. We cannot escape the connections.
In urban North America our social system no longer supports food self-sufficiency either; we have jobs and time commitments. There is neither time to harvest food nor time to process it around our work obligations and our family and other social relationships. Today is a work day, and I have a nagging sense of guilt as I process the apples rather than marking papers, reading student web posts, working on my new course. We don’t get time off for harvest…but the apples need to be processed now. They have their own seasonal imperative.
Yesterday I also nibbled some high-bush cranberries on a walk and collected some mushrooms in the ravine by my house, an urban greenspace used mostly for urban dog-walkers, joggers, and mountain bike enthusiasts along with occasional pram-pushing parents taking babies out for a walk. The mushrooms are a gourmet treat- wild relatives of portobellos. The trick is to find them before they are too old, riddled with the larval excavations of mycetophylid flies. And of course to wash them well. I manage to find enough for a couple of skillets full that are still good, and now have a couple of freezer packs of “wildcrafted” mushrooms in the freezer. Mushroom harvest requires experience, local knowledge, and detailed ethnobiological knowledge of how to recognize edible kinds and distinguish them from unknowns or poisonous varieties. Some of my fellow harvesters come from mycophllic cultures like Italy or Poland. Most of my Euro-Canadian neighbours lack the skills necessary (and the inclination) to add local edible fungi to their diets.
I found it poignant when we were in Regina a couple of weeks ago after my partner’s mother’s death to go out into her tiny backyard to pick some things for my sister in law to add to the family lunch and find a neatly tended and highly productive vegetable garden, with chard, carrots, potatoes and onions ready for harvest. Few yards in my Edmonton neighbourhood have a ready source of fresh vegetables outside the back door, though it was common a generation ago. Jean came from a farm family, and valued growing her own.