Finding the real situation of farm families in unlikely places

Grant Robertson
National Farmers Union
At this time of year the routine for a lot of farm families goes a bit like this.  Get up early, start to work and keep going until dusk and often beyond, eat your meals at odd hours and sometimes in odd places, try not to get too cranky with each other because everyone is hot and tired, go to bed and then get up the next day to start it all over again. 

When haying season hits, everything else takes a back seat, particularly this year as many regions were so delayed by wet weather that haying did not get started until almost the time when some people are usually almost finished. With the weather unpredictable and the hay more mature and less able to stand rain the race to get the best hay possible takes control.

Trying to keep up with reading on public policy issues is a near impossibility for a lot of farmers who are basically working, eating and sleeping with little else going on. There is one place though that a lot of people find a few moments to read and it was there that it became apparent that the many media stories about the increase in food prices being a boon for farmers was shown to be wrong, absolutely wrong.

With our paper comes a weekly Real Estate supplement. It is meant for anyone looking or dreaming of buying property from all kinds of backgrounds, not just the farm community. It is filled with big glossy ads for all kinds of properties with listings for waterfronts, condos, starter homes, the old fixer uppers, retirement homes and farms. It is a habit of mine to look through this Real Estate supplement and it is always fascinating to see what some properties, like cottages, will list for when farmers are often told that they are over bidding for access to farmland.

I noticed these types of ads before, but somehow the significance of them had passed me by. Here is a farm ad chosen more or less at random. See if you can figure out what is so fascinating about it. I will leave out the name of towns and identifying information as it is not important.
“99 acre farm. Well maintained 4 bdrm. Country kitchen. Barn.  Productive Land. Hardwood bush.  Commute to (a city) & (large local employer). $379,500.

Did you catch the selling point? Real estate agents are hardworking people who have to know what is happening in the marketplace intimately in order to prosper in their business. They have to know what people are looking for and what it is that they need and will motivate them.

This is a working farm with, according to the ad, productive farmland. It could be what might be considered a starter farm for a young farmer or a place to expand a growing operation. 

Yet right in the ad one of the top eye catchers is proximity to commuting to an off-farm job. In other words, someone looking to buy a farm, or maybe upgrade or expand has the necessary concern about commuting time. 

This is the bare earth of the real situation in today’s Ontario for farm families. Real estate agents are seeing, through the financial wherewithal of buyers, that farming, for many potential buyers means an off-farm job. It is common enough to take up valuable space in an ad.

If we are ever going to confront issues like who will be producing food in Ontario in 20 years, what will be the health of rural and small town communities and other pressing issues that include our environment, water protection and others, then we better figure out a way to make sure potential farmers are able to look at the quality of the farm only and not how close it might be to an off-farm job. 

In the end the best way to preserve our valuable farmland and to ensure there are multi-generational farm families with an interest in acting as stewards for the soil and water is to make sure that it’s the farmers who are making a good living from farming, not others in the system.

(Grant Robertson is a senior elected official with the National Farmers Union-Ontario and a National Board Member of the NFU. He and his family farm near Paisley. The author can be contacted at grant@bmts.com.)