Farmgate produce: You may need to live here to get it

Prince Edward County residents are blessed with one of the most pastoral landscapes in Eastern Ontario. Closer to paradise, I sense as I travel several times a week between Wellington and Picton along the Loyalist Parkway with Lake Ontario and West Lake just off to my west. Old red and green barns adjacent to freshly-seeded pasture on both sides of the road. Cows and lambs meandering and milling about. Blue skies and sunshine with a south breeze at 18 km/h blows in off the water today giving us a comfortable 22 C while it is 31 C up the lake farther in Toronto this afternoon. Does it get anymore perfect than this?

Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.

The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.

None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.

Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.

Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.

But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.

The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”

Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”

Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.

The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”