Yet they have continued to thrive, in part because of the anomalies, not the regularities — starting with Arthur passing on his farm to his son. The average age of a Canadian farmer is fifty-seven and climbing, and the thin profit margins make it difficult to cut up the equity and fade into retirement. Plus there are far fewer risks and much more money to be made in the city — or, around here, in the oil patch — than in farming.
But for whatever reason, Byron has known since his teens that he wanted to farm, and for all the headaches he loves the work — the diversity of it, the profound absence of monotony. One day, he was a tractor operator, the next a mechanic or an accountant. They sometimes sold their wheat while it was still in the ground — a relatively new approach brokered by the Canadian Wheat Board — and so some days Byron was a sort of day trader, too. And throughout, he was a highly skilled agronomist, tracking the weather and watching for invasive volunteer flax from last season among the new wheat shoots, selecting just the right mix of herbicides from a catalogue as thick as a phone book. “That’s one thing about farming,” he said. “It takes a tremendously wide scope of knowledge.”
Other anomalies: the Jaqueses have been more zealous than most about dodging debt — it represents less than 10 percent of their revenue, about half the national average — and they’ve shied away from buying up every adjacent quarter section (a quarter of a square mile, or about sixty-five hectares) they could get a mortgage on. They practise meticulous crop rotation, which helps reduce their dependence on nitrogen fertilizer and other petrochemical inputs. And the irrigation system leaves them much less vulnerable than the vast majority of farmers to variations in weather and climate.
For all of that, the Jaqueses have remained acutely aware of the tight margins, the escalating input costs, the sense of running at a dead sprint just to stay where they are. “That’s the trouble with agriculture: where it’s going to end,” said Arthur. “I kind of worry about where the hell people are going to come from to keep agriculture going.”
he weekend after my visit to Jaques Farm, I took my family to the Asparagus Festival at Edgar Farms outside of Innisfail, a town about an hour’s drive up Highway 2 from Calgary. The farm is a minor legend among area farmers’ markets and locavore restaurants, for its crisp, sweet asparagus spears, and the Edgars, another multi-generational Alberta farming family, have come to acknowledge their crop’s fame by throwing a spring party in the shadow of their silos each year.Farmers’ market stalls are the closest I come with any regularity to the origins of my food. I’m heartened by the foreshortened supply chain they represent, imagining them as the sole consumer arms of the farms themselves. I buy my bundles of Edgar’s superb produce in season, often straight from the hands that harvested it, and I flatter myself in the belief that, when it comes to asparagus at least, I’ve provided a complete answer to the question of how else to make and buy and eat food. The story down on the farm, of course, is much more complex.
As we turned off the range road into the Edgars’ farmyard, we were greeted heartily by Asparaguy — a young man, that is, in a mascot-like costume that extended several feet above his head, transforming him into a jovial, anthropomorphic asparagus spear. In the farmyard beyond, a tidy marketplace was set up, with vendors peddling homemade asparagus soup, grilled asparagus with three kinds of dip, and pottery and handicrafts, as well as a large market stall overflowing with tidy bundles of fresh Edgar Farms asparagus and other local produce. There was also a petting zoo, a face painting stall, and a straw bale maze. Every thirty minutes or so, a tractor pulling a long, low flatbed lined with straw bale benches returned from the fields to pick up another load of gawkers for a farm tour.
A neighbouring farmer drove the tractor while Elna Edgar delivered a tour guide’s spiel via a wireless headset. The Edgar family had been farming the land around us since 1907, but as Doug and Elna’s kids headed off to pursue university degrees and urban lives, the couple had come to think they might be the last to do so. Elna told us that when their daughter Kerri came back to the farm with a new husband, Randy, keen to work the land for another generation, “you could’ve knocked me over with a feather.” They had already been trying to diversify their business — they first planted asparagus on a single acre in 1986 — but with a much longer time horizon now in sight, they redoubled their efforts.
As we passed one of the farm’s warehouse-sized utility sheds, Elna directed our attention to the combine inside. “There are two problems with traditional farming,” she said. “The first is that a combine costs about as much as a house. The second is that someone else tells you what your product is worth.”
Asparaguy notwithstanding, Edgar Farms has long been and remains primarily a commercial grain and cattle farm. The asparagus fields cover about eleven hectares, and another small patch has been given over to market vegetables. But on the rest, just shy of 500 hectares, they grow wheat and canola and raise beef — globally traded market commodities, their prices set according to an elaborate calculus that might, at any given harvest time, include real demand and futures market speculation, grain shortages in Africa, wildfires in Russia, or dwindling water reserves in India. Grain grown in Innisfail is tethered inextricably to an agricultural economy that is never less than continental in size, part of a worldwide food system under such stress that by comparison the collapse of Canadian hog farming looks more like a prelude than an outlier.
n December 2010, the United Nations Food Price Index hit an all-time high; the very next month, it broke that record, and broke it yet again in February 2011. The reason is as simple as an introductory economics seminar: demand is intensifying at the same moment as supply has reached a plateau and begun to suffer frequent and intense contractions. The upward spike in price has been precipitated by a list of factors that reads like a shorthand description of globalization itself, including population growth, newly affluent consumer bases in populous developing nations like China and India, and a global boom in biofuels that has enticed farmers into the energy business.At the same time, supply has dwindled under the excesses of the same system. Diminishing returns on the fossil-fuelled, capital-intensive processes that expanded supply to global scale in the first place have begun to occur even as those processes push the system into the range of certain absolute ecological limits. Globally, wheat and rice production is growing more slowly than population for the first time since the 1950s, when agriculture’s green revolution introduced high-yield grain varieties, industrial equipment, and petrochemical inputs to the world’s poor. (By one recent estimate, nearly 50 percent of the world’s population now relies wholly on petrochemically derived nitrogen fertilizer for its daily bread.) And what viable farmland remains is now threatened the world over by encroaching urbanization, widespread speculation in commodity market derivatives, and a rapidly expanding wave of straight-up land grabs. In the developing world, more than 20 million hectares of farmland — an area three times the size of Ireland — has been gobbled up by foreign investors in the past five years.
The biosphere, meanwhile, may be unable to sustain much more growth in mouths to feed and arable land to feed them. One reason global demand for grain has soared is that increasing water scarcity is reducing food supply. This past February, the Chinese government provided more than $1 billion in emergency aid to its agricultural heartland, where two-thirds of the wheat harvest was lost to drought. In Punjab, India’s breadbasket, the water table is plummeting by more than half a metre per year, nitrogen fertilizer use has increased dramatically, and the Ministry of Environment and Forests has baldly declared its current agricultural model “unsustainable and non-profitable.” The wave of unrest that has redrawn the political map of the Middle East over the past year traces its origins in significant measure to soaring food prices and water scarcity. (Just months before Egyptians took to the streets to overthrow the government of Hosni Mubarak, the Associated Press reported that half the country was relying on government-subsidized bread.)
“Around the world,” the Economist declared in February, “the food system is in crisis.” Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, put it even more emphatically: “The world is now one poor harvest away from chaos in world grain markets.” France, which holds the G20 presidency this year, has made food security a top priority for meetings among the world’s most powerful economies.
