Our daily bread

Did you know that if you live on a couple acres on Gilead, Royal or Doxsee Roads you can’t raise a chicken? Or a pig? Or a goat? You may not want to do any of these things—but does it make sense to bar folks from growing food in rural Prince Edward County?

Growing up in Harrison’s Corners in the far east corner of Ontario, everyone farmed on our road. We lived on three and a half acres that had been carved out of Angus Duncan McDonald’s large and impressive farm that now bounded us on three sides. Perched on a rise, our home served up a near storybook view of rolling fields that swept forward for nearly a mile to the river in the valley below. A windmill pushing water up to Angus Duncan’s barn was all that punctuated the rotating backdrop of amber coloured crops, charcoal furrowed fields and brilliant white quilts of snow before us.

We farmed. Though we never would have called it that. Compared with the other real farms around us, we were more pet owners than farmers. My dad figured it was necessary character formation that his sons learn to raise and care for animals—for food and profit. He purchased a small modular barn from a catalogue. When it arrived he had it erected on old foundation of an earlier generation’s stable.

We kept pigs: a handful of sows that produced piglets at regular intervals. Fresh into this world the not-yet hogs were subjected to practiced routine that involved yanking incisors and snipping bits of tails and ears (to guard against sunburn and infection) and, if they happened to be the unfortunate gender, the netherbits were excised as well. We raised the young pigs till they were about 200 pounds, give or take, and then a man everyone called White Satan (I never learned his real name) came by in his pickup truck distinguished by very high and dirty plywood walls. He gathered the pigs and drove away, headed to the butcher in St. Andrews or the market in Newington.

Most of our neighbours kept some animals and tended a garden. The garden was an expression of who you were. How we kept the weeds in check, the lushness of the greenery, were all measures of our worth—or so I was led to believe.

I suppose I was in my teens and looking to divert my buddy Gerry from his family’s after-dinner routine of weeding and tilling the McGillis’s magnificent garden. Gerry’s dad, like many of our neighbours, held an off-the-farm job to make ends meet. Hugh paused to chat for a moment, leaning on his hoe.

“See all this lettuce?” asked Hugh, pointing to a leafy row at least 25 yards long. “I can buy all this at the Dominion for about ten dollars. I make that in less than an hour at work.”

It might have been the first time I had heard farming spoken about in that way—as a matter of economics, input costs and return on effort and resources. Until then, farming was just something you did. You kept your head down, worked hard and responded as best as you could to the seasons and challenges that nature presented.

The tectonic shifts in farming were already well underway by then of course; the McGillises—who just a few years earlier had kept chickens, sheep, rabbits, pigs and beef— now just had beef. Instead of 50 calves a year— they needed to produce three or four hundred each spring. The little red McCormick Farmall tractor had been replaced by an enormous Case with a closed cab, radio and steps to climb into the behemoth. In time they bought many of the neighbours’ farms as each passed away or otherwise moved on.

There were regular meetings with banks, seed salesmen and bookkeepers. Once started down this path, the McGillis’s had to continue to get bigger just to feed the growing machine.

This new order on our road didn’t sit well with everyone. The McGillises’ expansionary ambitions came at the cost of others’ dreams, according to some of the grumbling. Meanwhile new folks began arriving, building homes on severances carved from the dwindling number of working farms.

As the tensions grew on our road and across the province, new rules were erected to keep the peace. Setbacks were established at the municipal level. More elaborate setbacks to prevent odour complaints as well as right-to-farm legislation were established by provincial authorities as a means to protect farm livelihoods. Though well-intentioned, the new rules served in some cases to draw harder lines between rural neighbours.

Perhaps we went too far.

Today we eat more produce grown in other countries than we do our own. This is true even in Ontario’s growing season. Ultimately it is consumers who pick and choose the food they wish to buy. But perhaps in communities like Harrison’s Corners and Prince Edward County, we can think about ways that might encourage, or at the very least not discourage, local food production—things like market gardens, farmer’s markets, small-scale processors and the back yard farmer.

Despite the dwindling return on his efforts, Hugh McGillis never put down his hoe. Though the economics had been twisted out of shape, Hugh understood it was his job to feed his family. That wasn’t something he was willing to hand over to the Dominion store—or anyone else.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca