“It’s a savings on inputs, because of overlap; and a savings on time, I think, more than yields,” he replied. “It’s a huge gain in efficiency.”
We were planting seeds at the rate of 100,000 per acre. We were wasting as few as possible, maximizing each one’s chances of becoming a mature, commercially viable plant through the application of multiple chemical treatments, and automatic steering, and surgically precise GPS guidance. Byron had an app on his iPhone that delivered up-to-the-minute weather data from a station less than two kilometres away, and by using a probe he knew the soil temperature was on the happy side of 15°C preferred by Great Northern bean seeds. The planting machine rode a three-point hitch with a digitally controlled hydraulic system to keep the planting line smooth, level, and straight. I knew even less than I thought about farming in Canada today.
Byron hit the brakes, and we climbed down to inspect the tractor’s handiwork. The field was a tight corduroy of slightly raised beds, and he dug into one with his finger. A couple of centimetres down, he unearthed a pink-speckled seed. A half-dozen ruler-straight centimetres in front of it, he dug up another. “Everything with a row crop works better when it’s in straight rows and equally spaced apart,” he said.
y first lesson in modern Canadian agriculture: On farms today, everything has to work better than ever. Faster and more efficient, bigger and smarter, more precise and timely. The system is optimized to deliver the maximum yield per hectare, at the lowest possible cost per unit of production, guided by a largely undeclared continental food regime sometimes called “the cheap food policy.” In the history of agriculture, no one has ever paid less for their calories than contemporary North Americans do — in labour or in dollars — and a substantial portion of the techno-industrial genius and applied skill that enables us to eat so cheaply is found in places like Jaques Farm.For all its prowess, Canada’s cheap food policy has produced an agribusiness sector that broadcasts the mixed signals of a system under severe stress. Nationwide cash receipts have climbed from $37 billion in 2006 to more than $44 billion last year, with a record take of $46 billion during a price spike in 2008. But over the same period, net farm income — the figure that matters most to the 300,000 Canadians who work the farms — has fluctuated wildly, climbing from $283.5 million in 2006 to above $6.8 billion in 2008 (a twenty-four-fold increase) before declining 62 percent, to just over $2.5 billion, in 2009 and 2010. Between these figures lies a gap pried steadily wider by the need for more land, bigger and smarter equipment, patented seed, and ever-precious supplies of fossil fuel inputs — from the gas in the combines to the petrochemical herbicides and nitrogen fertilizers that enable increasingly larger yields. Roger Epp, former dean of the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus, in the heart of eastern Alberta farm country, put it to me this way: “That growing middle piece of the graph between net farm income and gross farm income is the money that flows through farmers’ hands but doesn’t stick around long.”
These have been boom times for canola growers and harvesters of pulses (such as the Jaqueses’ Great Northern beans), but Canada’s global market share in its traditional agricultural mainstay, wheat, has declined from 23.5 percent to 14.5 percent over the past twenty-five years. Canada has fallen from third to seventh in overall food exports worldwide; grain imports have spiked by 100 percent since 2000; and profit margins have steadily shrunk, even as mounting market pressures to expand and invest in new technology have inspired an unprecedented stockpiling of debt, like so much winter hay, across the Canadian countryside. (The average Canadian farmer’s debt-to-income ratio is thought to be two and a half to five times the average American’s.)
A recent report by the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute called for a new direction in farming, with hard talk of “falling profitability, lost opportunity, and declining relevance.” Epp, writing in Alberta Views in 2007, described Canadian farmers as “an endangered species.”
On too many Canadian farms, the endangered species has taken to a sort of forced self-immolation. Farmers by the tens of thousands have quit the profession. The profitability crisis has hit livestock producers particularly hard, and hog farmers hardest of all. Since 2005, the cost of producing pork on the Canadian prairie has remained around $1.40 per kilogram. As huge American slaughterhouses and international meat-packing conglomerates have grown even bigger, they’ve squeezed that tiny margin past profitability. As of late 2010, the wholesale price of pork had fallen to $1.25 per kilogram, and many hog farmers in Alberta and beyond have given up. There were about 11,000 hog farms across Canada in April 2007; by April 2011, there were around 7,000, a contraction of more than 35 percent.
“It’s been significant in the past decade and a half, the number of farmers who are being washed out of the system,” Epp told me. “For me, that raises food security alarm bells, because every farmer washed out of the system represents farm knowledge and farm skill washed out of the system.”
For those who remain on the land, the key to survival is the same as it has been for more than a generation. “Get big or get out” was how Epp summarized it. “The answer to the farm income question — ‘How do we make this sustainable in every way?’ — is always ‘Produce more. Find a way to produce more.’”
The big picture historical data for Alberta tells an emphatic story. Never in the history of the province has more land been under crops — more than 9.5 million hectares over the past decade — and the last time there were so few farms, the province was not yet a province. In 1911, the year before the first Calgary Stampede, 60,559 farms covered nearly 1.4 million hectares of crops, and each farm was about 116 hectares; in 2006, there were 49,431 farms in operation, and they averaged 427 hectares, just a little smaller than Jaques Farm’s 550.
uch about Jaques Farm makes it an exemplar of the broader trend in Canadian farming, a model of how to play the game, as it’s currently configured, in peak form. It is a far larger property than Arthur Jaques’s father would have attempted to tend, for starters, and it has stayed profitable by moving into some of the most profitable niches in prairie agriculture — in particular, canola grown for sale not as edible oil but as seed for future harvests, sold under exclusive contract to agribusiness multinationals like HyTech Production and Viterra.Jaques Farm is a hugely capital-intensive operation. The day after they finished bean planting, I surveyed the equipment parked around the main yard: Three John Deere tractors — a 280 and a 4450, as well as the 8120 I had ridden in the night before. A RoGator 1064 sprayer. A Brandt GrainBelt 1545. Two John Deere combines — a nearly new one for most of the crops, and a refurbished thirty-year-old one for the beans (which are uncommonly hard on combines). A Westward swather. A John Deere CT322 forklift. Three pickup trucks of assorted vintages, a pair of ATVs, a little Kubota four-by-four mini-truck. A full-size transport truck parked next to the Quonsets, for hauling commodities to market. A backhoe left out by the irrigation channel it had dug. It went on and on.
“It’s a huge capital cost to grow crops,” Byron told me. “And there’s a major amount of infrastructure, and it takes enough acres to earn enough income to make a living.” He paused to swat a couple of mosquitoes, which were relentless on this prairie evening at the end of an uncommonly wet spring. We were seated around a table on his father’s patio, overlooking the irrigation pond — father, son, and I. “You basically keep investing back into the farm is what ends up happening.”
