I came across an article in the Huffington Post during my morning reading and I just had to share it with you. To quote the article, "Connecticut agriculture officials say the collapse of a farm building because of heavy snow has killed 85,000 egg-laying hens."

Think about that. One building, 85,000 birds. I know it's terrible, but I had to laugh when I read that. If our chicken "barn" collapsed we would lose 11 hens. 11. I can't even picture what 85,000 hens looks like. Sometimes industrial farming practices defy the imagination. 

Get this though, the farm is called the Kofkoff Egg Farm. 85,000 hens in one building? *cough* *cough* sounds about right don't you think?

Read the entire article here.

/cynicism off

The first big announcement was the unconditional approval of GM Alfalfa by the USDA. Once again Monsanto had applied to bring another of their genetically modified plants to the open market and the USDA was faced with the monumental decision of allowing the seeds to be planted by American farmers. The seeds are genetically engineered to be resistant to Monsanto's prolific herbicide Round Up. You know that stuff you spray on the weeds that grow in the cracks of your driveway? Well it is the most widely used herbicide going and industrial farmers already spray millions of gallons of the stuff on their patented Monsanto GM corn, canola, cotton, and soy. As of this latest decision, we can also add in alfalfa which is widely used as cattle feed (along with grain, but I won't get on that rant right now).

The opposition to this decision was very vocal and wide spread. Groups like the Center for Food Safety, and the Food and Water Watch lobbied long and hard to try and have some concessions made for those of us who don't want GM crops invading our fields. You see, here's the thing , if our neighbour decides to grow a GM crop, our fields are put at risk of being contaminated by their crop. It is a simple thing for that crop to spread its pollen into our field and the next thing you know, we are growing genetically altered crops without our knowledge. But it gets even crazier. If that were to happen, Monsanto has every right to sue us for copyright infringement. Yeah, that's right. Their crap spreads in to our fields and we are legally responsible for growing something they own. It started with Percy Schmeiser back in 2004 in Saskatchewan and it has been happening all over North America ever since.

The watchdog groups were lobbying to have certain protocols put in place that would protect organic agriculture and ensure that we don't loose any of our bio-diversity by making sure that all of the conventional crops would remain available. It even looked like Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was going to play ball when he issued a public letter recognizing the impact of GM crops on organic agriculture. There was real hope from the post-industrial crowd for awhile, until the announcement came that Secretary Vilsack had decided to abandon any sort of co-existence approach and fully deregulated the crop. Epic Fail.

The consequences of these decisions are pretty far reaching. Take sugar beets for example. There is, of course, a genetically modified sugar beet out there that is owned by Monsanto. It was introduced back in 2007/2008 and there has been a fight raging over the crop ever since. Sugar beets provide about half the sugar that the US consumes so it is naturally in Monsanto's interest to own that crop. Since the introduction of the GM sugar beet, conventional sugar beet seeds have nearly become extinct. It has gone so far that when the USDA imposed a moratorium on planting GM sugar beet back in August of 2010, farmers quickly found out that there simply wasn't enough conventional seed available to meet the demand for that staple of the American diet, refined white sugar. The USDA's answer? Cave in. Last week the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection (APHIS) department again decided to partially deregulate the use of GM sugar beets. Yet another link in our food chain patented and controlled by a corporation. Conventional seeds get run out of town and more and more of our food is controlled by giant multi-national corporations with the express purpose of making as much money as possible. 

So, what does this mean for us Canadians? Coincidentally enough, there is a Bill before the House as we speak that would put a hold on the sale of any new GM seeds while the impact of GM crops on our food exports is studied. There is even a 5 hour debate scheduled for tomorrow. So this is where you and I step in. CBAN has been working really hard to get the average joe and jane to contact their MP and make their voice heard in favor of not selling our agriculture out to corporate profits. They have made it dead simple to contact your MP. Just go here, enter your postal code and you are done. Don't take this one lying down. The last thing your farmers need is even more looming threats of law suits from Monsanto. Life shouldn't be owned, and Monsanto's GM crops don't belong in Canada.

/rant off

We had the privilege of attending the Incredible Picnic at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth this past Sunday, and we had a great time. It isn't often we get to experience first hand people eating our beef, so getting immediate reactions was a real blast. If you ever get the chance to attend an event like this, do yourself a favour and check it out. It is a great opportunity to meet a lot of local food figures that you may not otherwise meet, plus you get to eat... a lot. 

Special thanks to Local Source Market for pushing us to attend. We most likely would have spent the day hiding on the farm if not for their insistence that we attend with them. 

Back to the matter at hand, however. Organic. The big O. A lot of folks ask us why we don't certify when we could. It's a long story, and I will come back to it. I want you to read this quote from The Omnivore's Dilema first. I just came across it and it struck me as very relative to our province.

"...the organic label itself - like every other such label in the supermarket - is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away" pg. 136 - 137

In Nova Scotia, the average that your food travels is 4,000 km. That's pretty far. In fact, you could almost drive to Austin, Texas in that. The Ecology Action Centre recently released a report based on 2008 data that pegged the average food milage at that whopping high number. Now hopefully, since 2008 we as a province have been buying more local grub and have driven that number down, but that remains to be seen.

The point is, our farm is not 4,000 km away. I promise. Driving in to "the city" every Saturday morning would be far more painful if it involved multiple thousands of kilometres. It takes ninety minutes to drive from downtown Halifax to our driveway. Trust me, I do it a lot.

It is on that note that I want to challenge you. I don't want you to just buy in to my pitch at the Market and walk away satisfied that you are doing your part. You are, don't get me wrong. You are making a huge difference to both our farm and Nova Scotia agriculture as a whole. Every dollar you give to us and deny those grocery stores is a sort of vote. But, what I really want is for you to give up one hundred and eighty minutes and come see the farm that is growing your food. Come meet the people you never see (my infamous father-in-law) and look your food in the eye. See for a fact how it is raised, what it eats, what it doesn't eat, and how we treat them. I want you to come and ask to see their feed. Ask to see their water. Walk around with the cows and calves and experience it all for your self. 

This is where that organic thing comes in to play. I promised to tell you why we don't certify, but only on the condition that I get to tell you while we sit around my dinner table and I serve you coffee. And maybe a burger or steak. Maybe. The point is, please come see your food. Don't just buy into a label and walk away satisfied. Know your food. It doesn't come from 4,000 km away, it's just down the road.

What crosses your mind when you watch that video? Do you think of your own diet? Maybe you cook for a family and you think about your kids or your partner. Perhaps it made you think of the family you ought to be cooking for but unfortunately are not. Maybe you are a foodie and you think about the people that you love to cook for. As I watched that video I was brought close to tears thinking about all the Canadians, particularly us Nova Scotians, who are suffering ill health because of our eating habits. The latest numbers I could find from Stats Canada indicate that 30% of men in Nova Scotia are considered obese as opposed to the national average of 22.9%. That's almost a third of us who are risking serious health problems and those numbers do not include those of us who are simply considered overweight. It's safe to say that things here in Nova Scotia are not as they ought to be considering our access to such a diversity of local, healthy, unprocessed foods. If we made greater use of our local resources instead of depending on the industrial food chain we could greatly reduce the obesity epidemic in our home province.

I suppose I should probably start with who "I" and "we" actually are. My name is Chris and I am the son-in-law-student-farmer to Godfrey and Bev, the real farming minds behind what we do. You see these guys have been farming since Noah got off the Ark or sometime thereabouts. They have been dairy farmers, grain farmers, beef farmers and everything else in between. They started out in England and emigrated to Alberta back in '94. That's where I came on to the scene.

I met their smokin hot daughter Leonie, who would soon become my smokin hot wife, at school in Calgary in '98. We got married a scant year later and it was my new in-laws who began to expose me to what farm life entailed. I have to admit that my involvement with their farm over the next 10 years was fairly minimal. I used to hate getting dirty. Or wet. Or sweaty. Or anything else that involved going outside. I was one of those guys that loved techo-gadgets, books, ideas and clean things. Don't get me wrong though, I would help out here and there when they needed it but I always tried to swing it so that I was doing cooking or driving a truck or some other activity in a controlled environment. The long and short of it is I was very much a part of the system, just another cog in the consumer culture machine.

Then things began to change. Mom and Dad (yeah I call my in-laws Mom and Dad) took a beating in '04 with the BSE fiasco. They are very much farmers of principle and they had been trying to prove to those Alberta feedlot guys that you could feed beef cattle grass and still get good gains without having to stuff them full of food that they really shouldn't eat. Of course that means they were sitting on quite the sizable herd when the floor fell out on beef prices. They managed to keep going for another few years but by the spring of '08 they had run out of steam. They sold the farm and for the first time in their lives walked away from farming with no idea what to do with themselves.

In the meantime Leonie and I had added three children to the ranks of our family and by '08 I had been working in television for a few years. Things appeared to be normal but as we watched Mom and Dad leave farming and mourned the family's loss of the farming lifestyle we began to question the values of the culture we found ourselves mired in. What were we striving for? A bigger house? More cars? A cottage? A massive tv? Who were we trying to impress? We didn't even know our neighbors to be honest. Why would we care about what people thought of us if we didn't care enough about people to be in relationship with them? Something about that seemed backwards and over the next year we came to realize that the entire system seemed broken and we wanted out. Desperately.

I'll carry on with the rest of the story next time as this post has gone on far too long but this should give you a pretty good idea as to who we are and why on earth we are trying to farm in a day and age when agriculture is almost a guaranteed loosing bet. We may be nuts but it turns out being nuts is a lot of fun so why not?