Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Farm Crisis - Read my Lips - If you sell to the system you are F****d

The CBC talk today about the paradox of a rapidly expanding market for Organic Food and falling prices for producers.

The organic market is growing 15 to 20 per cent a year, and is worth about $1 billion in Canada, not including exports, farmers at an educational seminar in Charlottetown by the Agri-Food Canada Organic Network and the Canadian consulate in Boston heard Wednesday.

They also heard more of what they already knew.

"Everybody else is making their margin, but the farmer's got to be the one that takes the bite, that's my concern," said Alan Hicken, an organic fruit and berry grower.

Matthew Holmes, managing director of Canadian operations for the Organic Trade Association, came to the meeting to encourage farmers to join the organic market, despite narrowing profits. Eighty five per cent of the Canadian market is filled by American farmers.

"We need you. There's an immense demand; we can't meet all of the demand globally, as well as within Canada or the North American market," said Holmes.

But much of the new demand for organic food is coming from mainstream supermarkets, and those supermarkets have made it clear they are not interested in paying premium prices for organic foods. A recent television ad featuring Galen Weston, chair of Loblaws, and touting organic baby food at the same price as regular baby food was a focus of conversation at the meeting.

How can we all be so stupid? No matter what you do, if you sell into the "System" they will squeeze you.

All around me I hear farmers in distress hoping for maybe higher prices some time in the future. YOU WONT GET THEM.

It's simple. Coffee in Kenya to the grower 20 cents a pound. Coffee in the Supermarket $26 a pound. Why? It's all about power. 2 buyers thousands of producers.

The ONLY WAY farmers will get paid what they deserve is when they build a system where they can sell direct to consumers and where they own this system. Hard to do but the web will help as it is in all other areas where the middlemen own the show.

Thinking about any other direction is a waste of your time and will condemn you to failure.

Sorry about the rant - it is so hard to sit by and have spoken to the industry here on PEI for nearly 15 years and still see everyone so lost.

Farm Crisis - Local Local Local

The pips are roaring!

More than half of P.E.I.'s livestock industry could disappear by the spring, says federal Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter.

There is an attempt this weekend to showcase PEI meat locally. This is a great start - BUT surely we need to ensure that local meat and other local food gets preference in the mainstream outlets. For the major supermarkets will not carry it - they want more volume.

Our local beef and pork producers produce I hear about 15% of our local consumption.

The key to a healthy farm sector is not support at the farm gate but support to get the product onto the local shelf at a price that the farmer can live with. The key is distribution!

The systemic problem is simple. The major buyer - the distribution chains and the processors - buy globally. They have no incentive to do otherwise. So each producer whether pork, potatoes or apples - whether conventional or organic - has to compete globally.

So the local producer on PEI and in the Atlantic region is effectively shut out.

Oh but the consumer wants lower prices many will say. But the price of having no farmers is too high. What kind of society has no way of producing its own food? At some point soon, the price of oil will prohibit the global market. What then? What will we do when we have no one with the will, the money and the expertise to grow food locally?

The risk is much greater than losing an important sector it is that we risk not being able to feed ourselves.

So what to do?

Make the local market a priority - make a major investment in making it easy for us to buy locally - it is all but impossible other than at the Farmer's market to find local product.

Expand the Farmer's Markets all over the Island to a 5 day operation

Have an Atlantic Alliance with the other Provinces and add a punitive tax to the supermarkets that do not mainly source locally and at a fair price for the grower

Use a facilitating agency - such as the Food Trust - to act on behalf of all our farmers in the market place.

I have been doing my best to show that we would arrive in this place for more than 10 years. My fist work on PEI was to offer an insight into the forces that would take us here. It saddens me that we have indeed arrived here and that all my work has been fruitless.

Beef Plant on PEI - Hope is not a method

Everyone in the beef business on PEI is probably breathing a sigh of relief this week as ther plant has been given a reprieve.

But as I listened to the CBC interview some folks involved my heart sank. Costas asked them what had gone wrong and the two spokesmen fumbled around "Market conditions, BSE, too new etc."

It's simple, if you are small, you must lose money if all you sell is a commodity. So long as a small plant on PEI tries to sell the same routine beef as the major packers, we are doomed.

There is a way out. If on PEI we developed a very high end product. Niche pork and grass fed beef - we could have a go.

If PEI and the other Atlantic provinces made the purchase of local food a cornerstone of the ag support strategy - we could have a go.

If PEI and the other Atlantic provinces made the supply of local food to schools and universities mandatory - we could have a go.

But simply taking the 12 million and hoping means that nothing has changed and that all of this new money will be lost.

Why is it that we cannot speak the truth about agriculture? Why is it that most of what we hear at crisis meetings, is that we all have to try harder, or that we have been unlucky.

It's the system!!!!!

The core of the farm crisis is simple - thousands of framers in a commodity business selling to 2 buyers. That's it. It does not matter how you grow it. It does not matter if it is organic or industrial. If you participate in a commodity and you sell into the food system as it exists, you have to lose.

Only a new system will offer relief.

Grow things that are special and not a commodity.
Create a local system that largely cuts out the middle man

This is not dreamy stuff - local farmers markets are the fastest growing sector in North America. Many countries are now really worried about the crap that we feed kids. Ontario will ban transfats, there are attempts to ban junk food in US Schools. In the UK huge progress is being made to feed kids better.

Why can't we even start to get behind these trends? Where is the thinking in both industry and in government?

Don't you too get depressed?

Pet Food Crisis - some lessons

It was announced today that Royal Canin, a premium dog food, is recalling its dry food. So far 16 pets have been recorded as having died and 14,000 have been ill.

Couple of big issues for me:

• It seems that the actual manufacture of animal food is even more centrally focused than human. So why would I pay a premium for Royal Canin when Old Roy ( a cheap WalMart brand) is made by the same people in the same way?
• Most dog food is made out of corn - wonder why your dog is fat? Would you feed it Corn Pops? Isn't it weird, we feed cows meat and we feed dogs corn

There is going to be a huge push back as owners who care understand that they have been cheated by the premium brands. There is going to be a huge opportunity to expand the small segment of Real Food animal food.

Many of us will reject all forms of processed food for our pets. After all we are rejecting it for ourselves. Many will go back to our 100,000 pratice of sharing our food with our best friends.

For the biggest joke of all is the advice that we get that dogs should eat differently from us. Dogs stopped being wolves when they joined our pack. Dogs have evolved to share all of our lives - especially our food. There was not pet food industry 75 years ago - so ask your self what did dogs eat before this? They ate our scraps. They have evolved to do that. So long as our food was healthy, so were they. It is only now that we have messed up our own diet and become reliant on our food coming from a few processors that we think that our dogs should have their own processed food

I think that it is starting to be clear that the reason why we have become ill and obese in the last 40 years as we have adopted corn as the core of our diet. We are not adapted to having such a high sugar diet.

Let's move away from corn based processed food for us and our friends.

Will our Titanic get home safe?

Imagine that you are a passenger on the Titanic. Could you possibly imagine that it could sink? It was so big, so comfortable, so well run. It felt like home.

When the lookouts saw the berg they rang the bell to alert the bridge. The officer of the watch tried to miss it by reversing the engines. But the inertia of the ship was too great and she continued on a path that ripped open about 300 feet of her plates.  It was 11.40 pm on April 14 1912.  Hardly a shudder was felt by the passengers. It seemed that nothing had happened.

But at that moment the ship was doomed. No one felt any urgency at first. The first distress call on the radio was not sent until 35 minutes later. 150 minutes later, the bow submerged.

Even then, it still seemed unbelievable to many that the great ship would founder. Many of the men gave up their seats in the boats thinking that there was not much risk really. How could a ship of this size really sink. Many also reasonably thought that on that busy North Atlantic route that rescue would be close at hand.

They were right. Everyone could have been saved if the right message had got out in time and the right action had been taken by those who could have helped.

15 miles away the Rappannhock sailed by but had no radio. The Californian was in sight of the Titanic but her radio operator Cyril Evans had turned off his radio. Before the Titanic had struck, she had asked him to "Shut up!" because his signal was interrupting Titanic's efforts to send routine traffic.  So Evans heard nothing of the Titanic's crisis.

The watch officer of the Californian saw the distress rockets but thought they were signs of a party. After all, who would expect the Titanic could be in trouble?

The Carpathia did get the message. Captain Rostron did his best. Carpathia was only designed for a flank speed of 14.5 kts, but Captain Rostron diverted all steam to the ship’s engines, locking down all auxiliary power, and achieved 17.5 kts for the run-in to Titanic’s reported position, 58 miles distant. When she arrived at 4.15 there were only 705 passengers still alive. 1,500 had died.

So why the History lesson? Because this story feels so much like what is happening to us on PEI.

On PEI it all looks so safe and lovely.

How could our agriculture sink? It all looks so safe. It is well run by hard working people who know what they are doing. Sure we have had a few tough years but good markets will come back. Won't they?

I think that Agriculture is to PEI as the Titanic was the the White Star Line. It is our jewel and it is the face of the Island. It defines us.

Like the Titanic, we have been steaming fast though dangerous waters. All aboard feel that we must in the end be safe - what could sink us?

There have been some warning messages about danger but we still feel that we can find better markets in time.

I think that we may already have struck our own ice berg. Like Titanic, we hardly felt it. The band is still playing and there is no sign of the inevitable sinking that will take us all down, not only farmers but our entire society.

Here is what the first impact of our "Berg" looks like.

The risk is our momentum. We may be moving so fast in the commodity agriculture system that we risk doing so much damage to our soil vitality, to our water quality and to our biosphere that it will be very hard to recover. Once we lose these essential aspects, there is no coming back. The ship has to founder and all on her too.

Only if we slow down and then change course can we save our farmers and save ourselves.

What does this mean? Am I blaming the farmers?

No!

Our farmers are trapped. At the moment, they have no choice. They have to continue to serve their masters - the few big players that control the inputs, the credit, the distribution and the prices in "Big Ag". If they don't, they die. Big Ag sets up the system that drives them into the Ice Field. Who makes all the money in Agriculture? It is not the farmers.

If we change how and where they get their money, they can do this. If we can make farming profitable in a new way, they can do this. If we can make farming essential for society and pay for this, then they can do this.

Join me this weekend in Trusted Space Food as I talk with John MacQuarrie about an important new way of how a community can connect with its farmers that can free them from bondage and align their needs with the needs of their society. Find out how others are becoming free from the trap of Big Ag. Find out how we might miss hitting the berg and all get home safely to port.

Join us as we explore the world of ALUS

Chapter 1 - Can we Change - It's all about Incentives

confused about Food and Health?

Last years poison is now touted as this years fad. We have been told to reduce fat, but new research tells us that fat makes no difference. We are told to eat more carbs in the food pyramid but now we have to reduce them. We are told to reduce meat but then new research tells us that meat is good.

Most of us are now confused.

Get unconfused with Michael Pollan author of the Omnivore's Dilemma - Unhappy Meals - one of the best articles I have yet read on food.

War on Junk Food Begins

The reaction to the proposed ban on ads for Junk food (High sugar - high fat) in the UK began this week.

It is just a matter of time before it becomes generally accepted that:

• Most processed food is very bad for us
• That the food industry have known about this for a long time

It is tobacco all over again - the commercial media, the ad industry and the food industry will fight, lie and obstruct BUT the truth cannot be swept away and in a few years we will see that Bad Fod designed to be addictive for Kids will be seen as we see tobacco now.

Businesses that support good food will thrive. Local food systems will grow.

More on Smoked Salmon

Thank God it's Friday - tomorrow I can go to the market and get my Smoked salmon Fix from Kim

My particular fix is Atlantic Salmon - I really don't think much of the pallid less fatty West Coast type of Salmon- even though I have good friends out west - even family.

The debate rages over at Medallion - Atlantic or Cat Food?

Eggs - My Choice - Yours?

I never really thought about how animals were raised and what that might mean to me ethically and also for my health until recently.

I have now made a vow that whenever I had the choice I would buy eggs and meat only from people that allow the animal a real life. The challenge is that when you go to the store - you seldom have that choice. Organic as a label does not mean that an animal has been kept as an animal should. As Organic has spread - factory organic is a new reality.

So here is my choice for eggs - I buy them from friends. This is what the choice means

This is how many egg layers live now

(Photo and text credit - Farm Santuary)

There are approximately 300 million egg laying hens in the U.S. confined in battery cages — small wire cages stacked in tiers and lined up in rows inside huge warehouses. In accordance                     with the U( SDA's recommendation to give each hen four inches of 'feeder space,' hens are commonly packed four to a cage measuring just 16 inches wide. In this tiny space, the birds cannot stretch their wings or legs, and they cannot fulfill normal behavioral patterns or social needs. Constantly rubbing  against the wire cages, they suffer from severe feather loss, and their bodies are covered with bruises and abrasions.

In order to reduce injuries resulting from excessive pecking — an aberrant behavior that occurs when the confined hens are bored and frustrated — practically all laying hens have part of their beaks cut off. Debeaking is a painful procedure that involves cutting through bone, cartilage, and                   soft tissue.                   

Laying more than 250 eggs per year each, laying hens' bodies are severely taxed. They suffer from "fatty liver syndrome" when their liver cells, which work overtime to produce the fat and protein for egg yolks, accumulate extra fat. They also suffer from what the industry calls 'cage layer fatigue,'       and many become 'egg bound' and die when their bodies are too weak to pass another egg.

I can't read this and buy another regg that comes from a system like this - no matter that the poor hens are filled with antibiotics etc and that hens kept like this may the real breeding ground for bird flue. It is not just my safety - it is how can I support this?

Is there another way?

What if there were many people like my friends who refined a way to have 200 hens living a real chicken life? What if there were hundreds of such operations? What if there was a kind of network eBay that linked them to buyers? What if this spread idea from eggs to poultry? What if we then added real pigs? What about small milk production? What about cheese?

What if scale was not a factory but a network of thousands of small mixed operations? Hey what if this could bring back the real family farm as a viable way of life?

What would this do for our health? What would this do for our souls? What would this do to our landscape and our ecology?

I am going to explore this in the next few months. What if I started on PEI with a poll to find out who would like to buy real eggs from real chickens? After all it was the egg and the cheese coops here on PEI that 100 years ago brought cash into the family farm for the first time.

Living in a big city in 5 years time?

Imagine it is 2010 - you live in the suburbs of a big city. You teach at York University. Gas prices are about $8.00 a litre (The China factor) and are just going up to $12 as the coup in Saudi Arabia has taken Saudi oil off the market. You wonder how you are going to cope.

Your heating bill (you are on natural gas) is already $2,500 a month in the Jan-March period. You keep the thermostat down to 15c and you wear a lot more clothes. You still have a car. It costs you $400 a month in gas and you keep the mileage way down. You sold the SUV years ago and drive an Echo now. Ford and GM closed their doors in 2007. Daimler Chrysler is in Chapter 11 and is not expected to survive. Your new Echo gets 1,000 k per fill up. You don't see many big cars anymore. People who drive them look stupid. All of the family have bikes and there is a nice new store that has opened up in the neighborhood. It has most of the basics and sells wine and beer. The wine is from Ontario though. It is too expensive to buy imported wine.

You still have to drive to the supermarket once a month. Food has doubled in price and you no longer get those nice California lettuces or fruit from Israel. You are thinking of putting in a vegetable garden in your yard. Your neighbor has chickens. You objected when she did that at first now you are thinking of doing the same. You have just bought this cool book about how the Cubans adjusted to the end of cheap oil and the end of sugar sales in the 1980's. You have the time now - too expensive to travel anymore. You haven't seen your mother in 18 months. She had to take the train. Train travel is way up. Air travel has collapsed. It's not even a cost issue. There just are not many seats for most of the major airlines have gone bankrupt and only a basic intercity service using small planes is available for regular folk like you. Driving long distance is for emergencies only. There is talk of ferries coming back on the Great Lakes and up and down the St Lawrence.

You and some friends have set up a local school. The regular schools have shifted the year to the summer. They can't afford to heat in the Jan- April period. You have to pay a bus diesel supplement or take your own kid to school. You and many have opted to take your kids out and school them in the neighborhood. You have the time to do this now as you spend most of the week at home.

Some of you still have jobs but few go into town to work much anymore - you have to telecommute. Nearly all your courses are now taught online. Students found that their costs of attending class were higher than the fees and they demanded an online alternative. Thank goodness because you had the same cost issue. It was costing you more to go to work than it was worth. The York campus is like a ghost town. Enrollment is dropping like a stone though. Kids are going to trade schools more than University. You are part of a task force looking at how to offer a radically cheaper and better online alternative that students can take part time.

The economic and employment fall out has been widespread. The stock market crash of 2007 has taken the bloom of investment banking. The Saudi coup has only depressed investment even further. Thousands of well paid people in the sector are unemployed and are mainly unemployable. Who needs their skills? Worse, the housing crash has locked everyone into their houses and has made moving very difficult. The one good thing is that the Housing Protection Act brought in by the new NDP government makes it all but impossible for banks to evict defaulted owners provided they pay something every month. The banks agreed because it gave them the fiction that the housing assets need not be written off completely. This act has been pivotal in preventing a complete collapse and has helped bring back life to neighborhoods and has taken the worst of all worries off the minds of most people who feared being made homeless.

In this context property taxes were way out of line. The great strike of 2009 when activists mobilized a 4 month witholding of tax has forced the cities hands. Of course this has lead to major layoffs in city staffs and services. Garbage and road maintenance were the first services to get cut. you are coping with the garbage better than you thought you could. First of all you are not buying a lot and secondly everyone is composting at home now. The roads are a concern. At some point they will start to degrade and then what will happen?

Most middle class people have had to cash in their RRSP's . As many were unemployed the tax hit was not too bad but this also contributed to the sorry state of the markets. Many now wonder how they will make it though their senior years. Pensions have been adversely affected by the crash and most are under water and many have sponsors that are no longer in business.

The good news is that many of the 20 plus year old kids have been forced home and somehow with more hands on deck and more to do at home that keeps life going maybe the family as a valuable social unit is coming back?

You used to shop alot. But now all that you have goes into energy and food. Anyway there is not much to buy. Retail is shrinking rapidly. Most of the independent truckers who were the arteries of the just in time world went to the wall in 2007 now and the Saudi move will be the last straw. Moving goods around is no longer feasible. The economy is flat on its back. The banks are in effect all bust and are kept alive, as they were in Japan in the 1990's, by the government. Most of the assets they hold, houses, trucks factories, planes etc are worth only a fraction of what they were when they became collateral. There are of course only two Canadian banks left - the TD/RBC and the Scotia/BMO. CIBC was bought by HSBC. More than 50,000 lost their jobs in the process.

Of course demand for goods from China has collapsed and you wonder if Wal*Mart will survive. At least demand for oil in China has collapsed too but with Saudi offline prices for oil are moving up again. There is a lot of worry about how China will react to the ending of its own dream. Japan is rearming as the anti Japanese rhetoric builds in Beijing.

Tensions between Canada and the US continue to rise. After being effectively locked out of US markets in 2008 all Canadians know that NAFTA is now a joke. No joke is the growing envy in the US over Canada's water and oil supplies. The US military need the oil sands and they don't care that it costs more to produce that it has in energy value. The water shortages in the South, in the mid west and in California have put water at the top of the agenda. It is easier for US politicians to look for more in Canada than to deal with the shortage at home. Water became a major issue in the election. Will Canada be a target? We certainly cannot defend our selves and somehow we are not the terrorist types.

The Iraqisation plan of course failed as the Vietnamisation plan failed in Vietnam but it was the only face saving way out. Now Iraq is made up of three warring factions. It was bad enough when the fundamentalist took over in Egypt but now they have killed the King in Saudi Arabia the Middle East looks worse than it ever has. Israel is under siege. Extreme Zionists are talking up a Masada last stand and those who can leave, the able and the fit, are slipping away as it is clear that Armageddon is inevitable.

You used to think that your cousin who moved to PEI in the 1990' was mad now you are not so sure anymore ....
To be continued