By Suzanne Armstrong
Family farms are still the backbone of agriculture in Canada. Despite changes in other industries away from family enterprises, the Real Dirt on Farming notes that “97 percent of Canada’s farms are family owned.” However, with changing technology comes changes to family farms. The same farmer today can safely manage far more animals and much larger acreage of land than the previous generation could. This can dramatically change what a family farm looks like. But the question remains, at what point has a family owned farm business morphed away from the values of family farming?
I have often heard people, within and outside agriculture, divide farms into two categories.
However, the two categories change depending on who is speaking: efficient farms/inefficient farms; sustainable farms/unsustainable farms; organic farms/conventional farms; small farms/factory farms; all of them boil down to a judgement on good farm vs. bad farm.
In fact I have found that no two farms are alike, and that within any grouping of farms—be it conventional, organic, small, large—farms are very diverse. Having a diverse farm sector, consisting of farms of different sizes, using different methods, producing diverse commodities, I would argue, makes for a more sustainable and healthy agricultural sector overall. Family farms need to be big enough to provide a viable family income, and small enough that the farming family can still have a meaningful relationship of care for the land and animals on their farms.
Hearing members in our local districts describe their farms to me, I am reminded that family farms can look vastly different. Some farming families, for example, run farms that have a diversity of animals and crops. They may produce primarily for a local or niche market, and may have a small flock of chickens for eggs or for meat, some rabbits, a horse, goats, and of course the cats and dogs. Other farming families run larger operations, sometimes working together with parents, siblings or cousins. They may have very large barns of pigs, or broilers, barns that the kids can’t just walk into. They may have significant acreage planted in cash crops of corn or soy beans. However, big and small, these farms that are owned and operated by families are “family farms.”
Farmers are concerned that consumer perception is lagging behind reality. Marketing may be a large part of idealizing bucolic notions of farming. Some farmers, operating large farms still run within their family, see themselves as operating at an “industrial scale.” They see the family ownership and operation distinction as invisible or hard to explain to a consumer.
Recognizing that family farms are not all the same, and also recognizing that what a family farm looks like today is very different from what a family farm looked like 50 or even 10 years ago, means that we need to examine what does continue to make family farms different from other types of farms. More importantly, we need to convey to consumers why family scale farming is still beneficial for agriculture and society as a whole.
