Hello all! 

 First off, please allow us to apologize for how long it’s taken to get the first newsletter together – we have a new system being implemented that we are hoping will make us more cold, heat and drought resistant.  It has been very labor-intensive getting things set-up, and not much time for being on computer!

The year of course is late, by perhaps three weeks or so.  We are anticipating starting deliveries in July, and fulfilling the full 16 weeks by extending things into the fall.  Our new system of extensive covered-beds, to be augmented by more hoop-houses, should allow for production later than would normally be possible in this climate. We have started plenty of produce in the field at this stage, including beets, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, salad greens, onions, corn, potatoes, peas and cauliflower.  Pretty soon here the heat loving stuff started indoors will be going out – beans, squash, melons, tomatoes, etc.

The big challenge right now is water – there has been no significant rainfall yet this spring at the farm.  Thankfully we had plenty of snowmelt, and lots of water in the ground so far.  The animals have just gone out on grass, but the grazing is patchy – good grass is limited to those areas where snow drifted and melted, and on the native grass uplands the land is cracked open and the grass is scorched and crunchy.  We will likely be bringing in more hay, something we have never had to do before winter in previous years.  Things may turn around, however. We have seen many springs start very dry here on the plains with rains coming in June nonetheless.  In the meantime, we have purchased a gas-powered pump to augment our hand-pumps, and it is seeing daily duty getting water to the new transplants.  We are not of course “hydrocarbon-free” on the farm as some have dubbed us in good faith – no one is in our culture.  We are working towards sustainable alternatives with animal and human power wherever possible, however.  We have no tractor, choosing the horse instead.  We think ultimately the Amish may have the best attitude towards technology – accept that which enhances daily life short of running the risk of building dependency and/or causing fundamentally damaging cultural change.  We can do this on our little place.  Off-farm, however, we have less leeway than they do!  

We have a new pond dug, so now we have two.  The runoff here was tremendous this year – a river!  It partially destroyed the spillway on the new pond, but a “lip” remained and held back an appreciable amount of water, and there are springs in the bottom.  Ducks and geese are fond of it already, and muskrats have taken up residence.  We have stocked it with local lake chub, blunt-nosed minnow, white sucker and brook stickleback for mosquito control, and broadcast cattail seeds in the hopes of establishing this very useful plant – a veritable grocery store in and of itself and a purifier of water.  The spillway will be repaired this summer, ready for next year.  Our existing pond is well patronized by a number of duck species, swallows, eastern and western kingbirds, muskrats, tiger salamanders, chorus and wood frogs, and many other species.  Where there is water, there is life!

The horses are well, and Gwyn and Emma (Clydesdales) hitched three-abreast with Raven (Clydesdale/Percheron) did a lot of work on plow, disc harrow and spring-tooth harrow this spring, muscling up noticeably!  Sarah (Emma’s filly) watched from the sidelines – she will be ready for some work next season at three.

We have had one new yak born so far this year, a bull-calf.  He is now being bottle-fed, as his mother, Lillith, died due to complications despite treatments – something rare for yaks, which are usually fool-proof calvers.  We think she may have had genetic issues – last year she miscarried.  We will miss her.  At any rate, her calf – “Wild Bill” – is doing very well, a cute little devil full of life, and we may make him into a steer and use him for packing and winter work. 

We are looking forward to a good season, and hope to get you all involved here to the degree of your interest.  We see this enterprise as a community venture, and hope to find more ways to celebrate this fact this season.  We are open to suggestions and ideas, and look forward to meeting you all.   

Thank you!

–          Andrea and Jon

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living

on a small piece of land…”   

 – Abraham Lincoln

~ Thompson Small Farm ~ 

Newsletter #6 – September 2008

Hello all! 

We simply can’t believe how quickly the summer has gone.  Thank-you everyone so much again for your support.  We very much enjoyed being involved with you in this venture, and getting to know a little so many wonderful folks.  The summer was a great learning experience for us, not just in terms of CSA farming but in terms of giving us real perspective on how the CSA model fits, or might fit, into our culture and into Calgary specifically.

Here’s a summary of our thoughts based on the CSA experience in retrospect, a sort of “year end report” and then some.

Our Goal – Did We Achieve It?

Our primary goal this summer was to provide our members with a market share of fresh produce grown locally in a manner representing an alternative to industrial agriculture.  We had no illusions of sustaining ourselves solely on the proceeds, but we did hope to gain insight into whether this would be feasible in the future.

Certainly, we provided fresh produce to our customers, grown in a fashion that even the vast majority of organic farms don’t attempt[1], and that is largely without industrial machinery as a power source.  We believe we came up short, largely due to conditions this summer, in providing members with the volumes they’d have been getting from the market for the same money.  Does that mean our produce was therefore over-priced? 

The Real Value of Food

In the CSA model, the customer of course shares risk with the farmer.  One of the things this means is that in a year like this one, it is not really pertinent to say one was overcharged.  If you get less food in a given year, it simply means the price of local food from your supplier was higher that year.  You got less for more.  This may seem like a handy excuse for the farmer, but many times we reflected that we would rather, in a “bad” growing year, have brought what we did manage to a farmer’s market and simply get recompense for what we brought.  Fair market value for what we provided and no more.

Or is it?

CSA Farming and Calgary

We believe in the CSA model and believe it offers value for money for Calgarians, and is important culturally.  The value in our minds lies goes beyond the alternative produce provided.  We believe that CSA’s serving Calgary – especially ones using alternative power sources to hydrocarbons and electricity – would still be of great value to that community in keeping alive and running – not to mention relearning – the models we will need in the future when the realization is forced upon us by dwindling resources that we don’t really have the luxury of unsustainable living for more than the few generations it takes us to exhaust our natural endowments – this luxury is an illusion, or perhaps better a de-lusion.  Recognition of this need is why we would be CSA members were we not CSA farmers. 

Farming Must Sustain the Farmer As Well to be Truly “Sustainable”

For sustainable farming to work then it must also sustain the farm, it must pay the family unit to be there full-time, farming, no outside job. This may seem intuitive, and certainly was how things more often worked before consumerism, fueled by industrial money, kicked into high gear following WWII.  In fact, farming more often than not does not sustain the farm family today.  The fact that farming no longer sustains farmers (and fewer all the time, even, of the new breed of “agribusiness” industrialists) is a global crisis.  Ideally, deeded landowners immediately surrounding a city are the ones to be running CSA’s.  The problem is that these areas are viewed as future housing developments or acreage potential for industrial elites, not as land that could potentially sustain us, and it’s way too expensive for farmers to make “a go of it”. Nowhere is this more true right now than around Calgary.  This is why our little place was located a full hour from town[2].  “Nevermind, the interest is not there amongst these landowners anyway”, you could argue, but even if it was, it is doubtful they could support a place of such land-values running a sustainable, biodynamic CSA.  We certainly couldn’t, and believe me we’d have loved to have been close enough to have delivered to drop-off points under Clydesdale-power!

What Should be the Real Cost of Locally Grown Food in Calgary?

What then would a biodynamic CSA, horse or ox powered and with a mix of animals and crops, on the outskirts of Calgary need to charge to sustain itself?  Members would likely need to paythousands of dollars for their seasonal membership, in order to support the farm that feeds them.  This sounds outrageous, but it would actually then represent the true, unadulterated fair market-value of local food in Calgary.  But is this so outrageous taken in objective context?  Many Calgarians have few qualms, for instance, about paying a half million dollars and even far, far more than this for that other basic requirement – shelter.  Food, of course, should not and cannot cost that much.  But neither then should any basic need perhaps, and if we are willing to afford so much for one, perhaps we should be paying a commensurate amount for the other.  Perhaps the price of a CSA membership should be on a scale with the cost of living in general in the location in which it is based. We doubt that anyone in Calgary would be willing to pay so much for their food, today.  

So here we may gain some insight into how unrealistic our food (and housing) prices are now, how unrealistic our current living model is for the future of human beings, and why farms have mostly all failed or are failing.  It is also why running a CSA serving Calgary devoid of the large-scale industrial inputs and cheap (exploited) farm labor – the very things CSA customers are trying to avoid supporting – will, until things change entirely, be on a significant level an act of self-sacrifice for the farmer.

An Unfortunate Situation

This situation is unfortunate – there is nothing Alberta needs more than alternative models.  At the time we were doing our CSA this summer, there was one other such initiative in the entire province that we knew of.  

 
If unsustainable living is a delusion, so then, really, is the city of Calgary[3], and others like it or that aspire to being like it.  And of course, the influence of Calgary is not limited to the city “limits”.  The same issues we became so clearly aware of this summer are now rearing their heads throughout the entire landbase of Canada where conditions are best for farming – and well beyond.  “Calgary” now includes to a significant degree almost all of southern B.C., and increasingly Saskatchewan.  We have a very serious crisis here (or more aptly a symptom of an even larger one) that few seem to acknowledge as such.  As a result of this situation, and for as long as we can continue to string this current goal of bigger-is-better and more-is-more out, one of the tasks of sustainable farming will be to learn how to grow food on the marginal areas that farmers (as opposed to industrial agri-producers) can actually afford to purchase, live on, and farm. 

Epilogue

Our twenty acres is an oasis of native grass, bottom swale and the virgin garden plots where we grew your food in a vast landscape of inert planting medium that was once rich prairie soil.  Right now it is harvest time for the agri-industrialists.  Living right next to our normally very quiet road, this is an awful time of the year for us.  Battalions of combines whine all day and well into the night as we try to sleep.  Convoys of eighteen-wheelers pass our place at intervals of about every half-hour, sometimes until almost midnight.  Everything is dust – our house, our pasture, our animals, our sky even.  The atmosphere looks as though we are experiencing a south-eastern level of humidity, but it is not moisture, it is dust, as far as the eye can see, and that’s a long, long way out here.  Dust kicked up day and night by this army of machines waging war on the land, huge piglets on the petroleum sow roaring “let’s see how much diesel we can burn this year!!!”

There is nothing about this situation that resembles “farming” as we understand it.  This is because it is not.  It is agribusiness.  Whenever the agribusiness has business in our neighborhood, quality of life plummets.  The onslaught is relentless while it lasts, the pace frantic, panicked even, the environment dangerous.  I daren’t let the dogs out, and I worry our horses will get the heaves from breathing so much of the pulverized earth into their lungs.  I occasionally prevail upon the owner of this particular empire – “Would you please water the road down?”…  “Would you mind not running your convoys for all of our long weekend?”…  “Would you please not spread your strychnine along my fenceline where my animals are liable to get at it and die a hideous death”… “Tell your men to slow down before I hurt them!” …  After speaking to me briefly in the tone of a used car salesman trying to give me the business, this ‘farmer’, one of the largest operators in an area of large operators, always has the same answer – “We’ll see what we can do, Jon.”  And we see that what he can do never amounts to much, although his drivers have become more respectful, insofar as respect can have anything to do with the operation of eighteen-wheeler convoys on a quiet rural road.  What he has proven he can do repeatedly, if not intentionally, is step all over our toes in a fashion I would never dream of doing to him nor anyone else.  But this is the problem not just with today’s agribusiness, it is the problem inherent in being “BIG”.  Show me a “big man”, show me a big concern, show me a big business, show me a big city and I will show you people and environments being disrespected.  It cannot be helped.  It’s the law of critical mass beyond which everything goes downhill.

For all of this frenzy, I have heard that Mr. Big’s concern is not doing well these days.  The cows that stand around in their own ordure for weeks on end as they’re “finished” for slaughter are not paying the bills.  This was inevitable, of course.  Unsustainable is unsustainable, and as scores of American business concerns are finding out, being BIG – nay – being GI-BLOODY-GANTIC doesn’t change this natural law.  I wish my neighbors well, of course, and sincerely hope their operation goes straight down the toilet.  Good riddance, as this would be best for all humanity.  When all the massive agribusiness concerns of the world finally hit the wall of their own disgusting reality, perhaps then, and perhaps only then, we can move on to a better way.

Thanks again everyone, we very much appreciated your support and are buoyed by knowing there are concerned, kindred people out here with us in these interesting times.

“Farmers Jon and Andrea”