Is the family farm disengaging socially and losing political clout?

by DON STONEMAN

Farmers in Ontario have long believed that there is a gap between farmers and even small town dwellers, and that the gap is growing. This concerns some individual producers as well as commodity groups, especially as the number of farmers decreases and the scale of agricultural operations increases. Farmers generally think that, as their numbers fall, they carry less political clout - a trend exacerbated as rural townships merged with small towns to make larger municipalities.

But is that gap between townspeople and farmers as wide as you think? Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, says John Smithers, associate professor, department of geography, University of Guelph.

Last month, Smithers released a study that he had supervised in Huron County, funded by the provincial government when rural affairs was still part of the agriculture and food ministry. The study suggests that perhaps too much is being made of the differences between townsfolk and farmers. However, Smithers is quick to point out that the jury is still out. While some questions have been answered, more need to be asked.

"It's easy to say that the family farm is disengaging from local communities, economically and socially," Smithers says. "You pick up the newspaper, there's been a manure spill and people are upset. A lot of relationships are defined by conflict, or at least by benign neglect."

Smithers' test area is the municipality of South Huron, about 45 minutes drive north of London. The seat of local politics is Exeter, which has a small manufacturing base, but it also sits at the centre of a predominantly agricultural area. Farmers in the old Usborne and Stephen Townships (now wards of South Huron) produce beef and pork, traditional cash crops and also higher value canning corn and peas. As well, a huge greenhouse complex has sprung up.

Smithers grew up on a farm not far away. "It's often been said to me, 'if you can't make a living farming in southern Huron County, you can't make a living farming,'" he says.

With a population of just under 5,000 and straddling a major highway, Exeter has grown while nearby communities, such as the village of Hensall (five miles away in the municipality of Bluewater), have faltered.

While the grocery store in downtown Exeter holds its own on a bustling main street across from a new library, a "big box" grocer is open at the north end, beside a new large-scale Canadian Tire store. There's a Tim Horton's coffee shop, a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a McDonald's. The construction of the McDonald's restaurant, in particular, was heralded as a sign that Exeter was growing.

Recently the town's farm co-op store closed, its premises now occupied by a Rona Cashway building-supply store, which some farmers complain, caters to an urban consumer. Meanwhile, the main street in nearby Hensall sits mostly empty. Two years after it closed, the grocery store is still boarded up.

Expanding farmers lack connections

On the latter point, the townsfolk again disagreed. They feel that agriculture is still very important in the local economy, that Exeter is still a farming town and that it is farmers who account for the town's prosperity, Smithers says. "The farmer tells you a different story. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle."

Upon closer examination, Smithers says it became clear that some farmers are not nearly as connected to their local community as before. The differences are subtle and have nothing to do with the commodities being produced, Smithers says. Rather it has to do with "people situations."

The South Huron study "cut the pie two ways," says Smithers, by looking at the different business aspects of farming, and then examining the families that ran the farms. It slotted the farmers surveyed into four distinct groups, depending on the "trajectory" or direction of their operations. One group is expanding their farms; another group's farm growth is static. A third group is phasing out or winding down its operations, and a fourth group has responded to income pressures by working off the farm. (Statistics Canada says the number of farmers in the municipality working off the farm has increased by 15 per cent in the last 10 years.)

Farmers in the static, phasing-out and working-off-farm categories were most likely to take part in community activities with townsfolk, such as service clubs and church groups. They also involve their children in sports. The expanding operators felt they didn't have the time for such things. Their operations were too demanding.

The expanding farmers are also least likely to do their farm-related business in town and were unaffected when the local co-op store shut down, Smithers says, whereas "the small guy was stung quite badly."

The operator of an intensive, factory-type operation "and a linkage to inputs from Cargill" may not have a major connection in town, he says. (This may be a concern to some commodity groups, in particular the pork industry, which has moved rapidly towards what some call an industrialized model. Big barns have detractors and building a big barn can draw a lot of heat.)

Smithers admits that the South Huron study "probably asks more questions than it answers about how change is happening." One of those questions is: what does it take to bring communities like this back together?

Smithers thinks he has an answer: social connections. The town used to exist to meet the business needs of farmers, a connection that may now be crumbling. Smithers thinks that the traditional institutions of churches, sports, schools and hospitals are now that much more important in connecting farmers and townsfolk. An example is the hospital in Clinton. When the province threatened to close it a few years ago the community got together to save it. Likewise a threatened school closure brings a community together.

Smithers says it could be misleading to look just at Exeter. He points to the nearby villages of Hensall and Zurich, which have not fared as well in recent years. In addition to the grocery store closing, Hensall's co-op store has also shut down with the result, some farmers say, that Exeter has benefited at the expense of Hensall.

"We've been studied to death," says Usborne pork, beef and cashcrop farmer Pat Down. She and her husband Bob produce pork, beef and cash crops on a farm that has been in the Down family since 1846. Despite her jaundiced attitude, Pat Down is surprised that the farmers Smithers interviewed for the study felt that Exeter wasn't a farm town anymore.

She points out that Exeter has a John Deere dealership at one end of town, a Case IH dealer at the other end and a feed store that caters at least partly to farmers. "What do they want?" she wonders. The business people in Exeter that she knows can tell when farmers are having a bad year -- it shows up on the hardware store's balance sheet.

She acknowledges that farmers feel they have less political voice. "Personally, I feel we are outnumbered," she says. "We are going to have to come up with coping strategies."

No longer core players

The first issue is already on the table, Down says. The Huron Health Unit proposes to make the pumping of all rural home septic systems mandatory every three years. It will be expensive, she says, and there is a limited place to put the effluent. Many sewage treatment plants can't take it because the nutrients are too concentrated for the plant to handle.

Smithers has also surveyed farmers in northern Huron County, where the centre of business is Goderich, which now has a Wal-Mart store. Farmers there feel that with the new development, Goderich is no longer a place for a farmer to do business. "If I had to rely on Goderich, I'd be in trouble," is one view, Smithers says. New development there is being aimed at tourism and manufacturing. Smithers says there is a psychology that farmers don't see themselves as core players any more. They conduct their farm business 20 km away from Goderich in Blyth, which boasts an extensive choice of farm machinery dealers and feed mills.

As for the concern that the farm rural vote has been lost, Smithers says "that's a knife that cuts both ways." He thinks farmers now have the opportunity to change the public agenda in towns. Agriculture used to provide the jobs for townsfolk. Now the farmers look to the town for jobs.

A study that the University of Guelph's geography department conducted in North Huron in 1999 points out that the average farm size is 240 acres and fully half of farmers surveyed had off-farm jobs. North Huron is the combined townships of Ashfield and Colborne. Ashfield is best known as a battleground between Acre-T Farms' swine operations and a local organization called PROTECT (Presenting Recommendations On Township Environmental Concerns Together). Colborne Township's claim to fame is that it fought off provincial efforts to amalgamate the rural township with the town and township of Goderich, citing the imminent loss of its rural nature.

"The evolving farm-town dynamics defy easy characterization," the study says. It concluded that generally farmers pursuing rapid expansion tend not to do business in the local community and don't take part in social activities. They but farm inputs more "strategically" and are less committed to local shopping. Some are even less committed to the local economy; they have formal linkages with agri-business. Meanwhile, farmers who aren't expanding have taken off-farm jobs and are even more closely linked to town through such things as sports and schooling.

In 2000, a similar study was conducted in Alfred-Plantagenet Township, southeast of Ottawa. Alfred-Plantagenet is different in some ways from North Huron but similar in others. Its population grew nearly 30 per cent between 1981 and 1996, compared to 12.4 per cent in Ashfield and Colborne townships.

The majority of farmers responding to the survey said that they shopped locally for both business and household needs, but here "local" had a different meaning. They considered the local area to be anywhere within the United Counties of Prescott and Russell, with some towns a 30-minute drive away. Shopping outside the area meant going to Ottawa.

In Huron County, the common farm practice is to shop for prices outside and give local vendors an opportunity to match them. In Plantagenet, farmers sought good prices and service, but shopped for them locally. In both Huron County and Alfred-Plantagenet, there are groups of "farm-focused" farmers who consider shopping locally as not necessarily a priority. It can be assumed that, given their scale and resources, these farmers are the most active consumers of farm inputs and services. That can be a concern for local businesses. BF

Pork producers' calendar puts a human face on pig production

The calendar is part of the Ontario Pork's "farm to fork" campaign, which is addressing the public's perceptions of environmental issues, says communications director Keith Robbins. In essence, the campaign is trying to bring some common sense to the subject. "Would it make much sense to pollute the water that you drink? Why would a farmer want to do that?"

When research focus groups about the pork industry are held with residents in places like Kincardine and Stratford, the environment is at the top of everyone's agenda, says Robbins. When pressed further, participants say the environmental concern comes down to worries about factory farms. But no one can really define a factory farm. "It's this faceless entity that they are all concerned about," Robbins says.

The statistics show that hog production is a major economic contributor to the community, but no one really sees the money being spent. "They don't know when a pig farmer goes into a store for groceries," says Robbins. For this reason, he says, the pork producer calendar, distributed to groups such as municipal politicians, has been invaluable. The pork board has had calls from people saying that they recognized someone in the calendar, often someone who goes to their church whom they didn't know was a pork producer, Robbins says.

"People suddenly recognized (producers) in their communities. Once you put a face to the image, there is a connection."

Not too many other producer groups are doing research as to what consumers think about producers. Bonnie Jean McDonald, head of the Beef Information Centre (BIC) office in Mississauga, says most consumer surveys aim to evaluate attitudes about products offered for sale. Only occasionally do they ask consumers how they feel about farmers themselves.

In 1996, the annual BIC tracking study asked consumers how they felt farmers did business. The result: 52 per cent of consumers said farms were largely family owned and operated, while 26 per cent said farms were largely corporately owned, factory operations and 15 per cent didn't know. Another six per cent said farms were both, likely the most accurate answer.

At the same time the tracking study asked if Canadian farmers treat their animals humanely. Sixty-five per cent said farmers do, eight per cent said they don't, another 24 per cent didn't know and two per cent said it depends upon the animals.

In 2001, the Ontario Farm Animal Council hired Ipsos-Reid AgriFood to study the attitudes of urban consumers towards farm issues. Interviews were conducted with 1,000 consumers in major centres across Canada. "On average, impressions of farmers and ranchers are more positive than for any other group," the study reported. "Groups who oppose the use of animals for meat and dairy have the least overall reputation, while groups who improve the treatment of animals on farms are viewed almost as positively as farmers."

That is cause for some optimism for farmers, who are otherwise often a pessimistic bunch. BF