Photo Credit: Ian McCormick, Meat of the Matter

Ian McCormick is one of the new generation of Canadian farmers.  Thanks to programs like FarmStart and CRAFT (Canadian Regional Alliance for Farmer Training), new farmers — young people and folks who often didn’t grow up farming — are trying their hand at small-scale production.  FarmStart helps develop a new generation of farmers by leasing small parcels of land and facilitating training.  CRAFT is a well-developed network of Ontario organic farms that offer comprehensive internships to aspiring farmers.

McCormick has been raising grass-fed beef cattle for just three seasons in southern Ontario, and is now looking after a small herd of 18 cattle that he keeps on host farms.  He’s also finishing a Masters of Science at the University of Guelph, having completed a BSc in Environmental Biology at Queen’s.  He’s 26.

So why did he start farming?  “Environmental studies can be a bit of a downer at times,” he explains.  “A lot of the jobs I was looking at after school were in the consulting world and involved telling people what they could not do.”

I asked McCormick if he could weigh in on the Alberta beef recall from his perspective as a newbie beef producer.  “The recall is obviously big and sad news for beef farmers.  I expect there will be some herd liquidations going on as people try and get out of cattle. Beef cattle make little money in a good year, in a bad year you lose quite a bit.”

When asked whether small beef farmers are immune to the XL-type disasters, McCormick replied:  “E. coli 157 and other pathogens don’t discriminate between big processors and small processors. No food is 100 percent safe from contamination, whether it be carrots, lettuce, pork or beef.  That being said, small-scale farming and processing significantly lowers the risks.”

So what’s the difference?  “When you have a plant like XL that’s processing thousands [4,000] of cattle a day all it takes is for one animal to be sick or infected and you can contaminate all the beef processed with the same knives and other tools.”  At a small abattoir, though, the smaller volume of meat allows inspectors to be so thorough they can examine each side of beef, McCormick explains.  Furthermore, small abattoirs are usually family run, says McCormick, so “maintaining quality is crucial and failing to do so could ruin the family business.”

Even with his own small herd, McCormick has had a tough year.  “My experience with the drought this year has been painful. The pasture’s produced half as much grass as last year so I had to feed more hay (dried grass). As you can imagine everyone was doing this so the hay price more than doubled. Just when everything looked like it was going to calm down we get the news from XL.”

Would he like to be a full-time farmer?  Well, yes, but he explains “that’s a hard reality to achieve in your twenties unless you are born into it or win the lottery.”  In the meantime, McCormick is going to finish up his masters in soil science and keep working as the start-up farm coordinator at FarmStart until he can meet his 10-year goal of working as a full-time, self-sustaining farmer.

Recent news suggests that the XL plant is set to reopen Monday, under the new management of Brazilian-based JBS USA and under the watchful eye of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.  Fully  2,000 employees were laid off in September and it is unclear how many will be rehired. Tragically,  in one load 500 to 600 tonnes of beef — wasted animal lives — were sent to a local landfill as a result of the recall, with more to come.

For more on beef, check out my last post, “A rare treat: The perks of local beef.”

Community Shared Agriculture is a system of buying vegetables where people buy shares in the farm and pay for the harvest at the beginning of the season.  Members pick up a box of their veggies every week, and farmers benefit because they were given the capital they needed up front to buy seed and equipment before the season began. At our CSA, our farmers get between $475 and $725 per family at the beginning of the season, when they need it most (people are paying about $25 in veggies per week).  The other benefit to farmers is that while the whole CSA membership shares in, say, a bumper crop of strawberries, they also stand with you in case of a hard season – like this one.  Members take their share of the harvest, and that means if the cucumber crop was smaller than usual because of the heat then everyone takes home one cuke instead of two.

As Wente unceremoniously points out, being a “locavore” or eating only organic has its limits.  Food can be both organic and have a huge carbon footprint.   Food can also be local but represent large-scale cash crops, as with PEI potatoes, which are sold in part to McCain Foods.  McCain wouldn’t be the poster child for local food in the minds of Whole Foods-types and community market shoppers, but if you lived in Charlottetown, it’d be local.

Part of the attractiveness of “local food” is that being close enough to our farms and food sources allows us to think about them as part of a larger system.  For example, if we eat local fish we might be more concerned with mercury poisoning in a local river.  Whereas if we are getting fish from abroad, through a large-scale distributor like Captain High Liner (Haddock caught in the Arctic Ocean, for example) we’re not as aware or concerned about how that fish harvest is integrated into local ecosystems, for better or for worse.  In the same way, if we eat “organic” or wild fish from far away, it’s easier not to think about why we aren’t eating fish from the river that runs through our city, the same one the kids can’t actually swim in.

The answer isn’t just eating local and/or organic, but being accountable.  Eating local and/or organic can in some cases become an expensive badge of honor for those trying to follow the trends—I think that’s what Wente is talking about here.  There is no pat answer to how to make food part of a sustainable future (although some would say being vegetarian would make the biggest difference), and likewise its probably not going to be an answer that makes a good bumper sticker.  But I’m still going to opt for getting to know my soil better, my farmers better, and this water better, in the interest of being accountable for what I consume.  This means I’m turning down the proud label of “vegan” or “locavore” in favor of weighing my impact and what I can afford on a case-by-case basis, and being open to change.  What about you?

Photos by Ian Willms

Robert Beynon’s dairy farm sits just north of the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill, on one of the southernmost edges of Ontario’s greenbelt. It’s a small operation (40 cows, 350 acres) set back off of busy Bathurst Street. Behind his 150-year-old brick farmhouse and squat green dairy barn stretches a patchwork of bare fields, still muddy in mid-April. It’s the kind of pastoral scene city dwellers naturally think farms look like.

What those urbanites likely wouldn’t picture is what surrounds Beynon’s piece of rural paradise. Across the road, on the east side of Bathurst, sprawls MacLeod’s Landing, a 1,400-unit subdivision of looping streets and oversized homes. Houses bleed north onto former agricultural land—much of which Beynon’s family used to farm. He’d like to expand his property, but it’s boxed in on one side by the development, and on another by land slated to become a cemetery. Besides, he says, “The land’s too expensive, and you wouldn’t want to set up a bigger dairy operation next to a subdivision. Everyone loves the idea of living in the country, but they don’t really want to live beside somebody milking a couple hundred head of cows.” Later he wonders aloud, “And who wants to farm in the city when it comes down to it?”

Beynon is 33 years old; he’s no grizzled old-timer ready to retire. When he was still in school at the University of Guelph, taking a farm operations program, he and his father made plans to move outside of the GTA, away from the already encroaching houses, to buy more land and milk more cows. But in 2001, the Oak Ridges Moraine Act became law. (The moraine area’s 470,000 acres run from Brampton to past Cobourg.) The result was strict land-use regulations dictating how farmers could alter or expand their operations. There was also a moratorium on intensive development, but that didn’t stop construction on MacLeod’s Landing; the development was grandfathered because it had been approved before the moraine policy was created. There was no such provision for Beynon, whose family has owned its land for 150 years.

Then in 2005, the provincial government created the 1.8-million-acre greenbelt, which wraps itself around the Golden Horseshoe—running north of Toronto, Hamilton and their suburbs. (The greenbelt also includes the Niagara Escarpment, which bends down from the Georgian Bay to Niagara Falls, and encompasses the environmentally fragile Oak Ridges Moraine, the expanding Rouge Park, and the Holland Marsh.) Beynon claims his property value dropped about 70 percent. Now he and his wife Trina are stuck. “We don’t plan. We can’t justify putting an addition on our farm. And there isn’t more land to rent,” says Beynon, exasperated. “I’m not happy.”

Not that you would know that from his demeanour. Giving me a tour of his farm one April evening last year, he talks constantly, filling up silence and filling in detail. He opens the creaky wooden door to his dairy barn and calls to his big black lab, Jake, to follow him. Inside, his Guernseys chew their cud under the old barn’s low ceilings—the building, constructed around the same time as the farmhouse, has hardly changed in 40 years. “This barn’s dated,” says Beynon, more serious now. “Through the ’90s we were not improving our farm because what’s the point when you’re supposed to move? So we got behind on that and now we’re trying to play catch-up,” he says, explaining that he’s trying to modernize his barn—to make milking and cleaning more efficient— without spending too much money on facilities he still hopes to leave. “But it’s hard to make a business plan when you’re in our situation.” So for now he waits, hoping he finds an opportunity to sell his farm and move his operation out of the GTA.

Other farmers, fed up with the costs, the traffic, and the bureaucracy are doing exactly that, setting out for more open, less regulated, less occupied spaces to the south, east, and north. Some believe a mass exodus is inevitable, and that as agricultural land empties, it will be bought up by wealthy urbanites and made into 100-acre hobby farms. “Little by little, down in the greenbelt, some of those [farms] are going to become big estates. What happens then, to good, quality land?” asks retired veterinarian and dairy farmer Terry O’Connor. The promise of a sustainable, local food source for millions of Ontarians may be thwarted by the very policies designed to foster it.

How did this happen? Despite good intentions, the government made a false assumption about agriculture: just because you save the land doesn’t mean you save the farms. Without a well thought-out provincial agricultural policy implemented along with the greenbelt, those good intentions will remain wishful thinking, or even worse, the death knell for small-scale agriculture in the GTA. If things keep going this way, farmers warn, the future of the greenbelt will be one of large-scale industrial farms and barely productive hobby farms—the worst of both worlds.

“Ontarians will never have to fear that our access to food runs out. Unless we experience a nuclear holocaust, we will always have access to farm-fresh foods.” That’s Burkhard Mausberg, president of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, paraphrased last summer by urban affairs magazine Spacing. “We have our own food basket in our backyard,” he said.

That’s the dream. In 2006, one year after the greenbelt was created, The Globe and Mail reported [PDF] that Municipal Affairs Minster John Gerretsen was happy with the result: the scheme was “strutting its stuff in that it’s curbing urban sprawl, protecting water supplies and ensuring land for food protection.” Four years later, the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume chimed in: “There was much shouting and screaming at the time—most notably from certain developers whose fury knew no bounds—but half a decade later, the wisdom of the move has been widely acknowledged.”

The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, a nonprofit whose purpose is to promote the protected area, boasts on its website that “possibility grows in the Greenbelt,” and claims the area is the most diverse of its kind in the world, both ecologically and agriculturally. It’s certainly one of the largest. At 1.8 million acres, it beats out London U.K.’s 1.2-million-acre swath, B.C.’s 716,000 acres, and the Netherlands’ 395,368.

There’s also no doubt Ontario’s greenbelt has saved land from developers. Conservationists and the public cheered the promise of land staying pristine, frozen in time. In fact, supporters cheered so loudly, they barely heard the grumbling from farmers out in their fields. Farmers weren’t consulted until after the McGuinty government announced the policy, and even then, they claim, no one listened. Agriculture, farmers groused, came second to environmentalism.

While she makes clear that she’s a staunch greenbelt supporter, food journalist Margaret Webb says, “When the local food movement gained momentum a few years ago, my perspective was that no one was really talking about the farmers… I think there was a misunderstanding of how farmers need to make a living.”

“We’re lashing out at the greenbelt because it’s the last insult,” says Niagara-area grape grower Howard Staff. “They should have talked about viability and programs that should have kept farmers in business.”

On the phone from his mid-town Toronto office, Mausberg—a former University of Toronto environmental studies professor and Ivey Foundation environmental director—says need for land protection was dire. “There was enormous growth eating up the land. Every year [in the GTA] we lost the equivalent of 1,200 soccer fields”—about 2,400 acres.

According to University of Toronto researchers Felix Fung and Tenley Conway, Toronto is “one of the fastest growing regions in North America, with the annual population increase exceeding 1.5 percent between 1996 and 2001. It is estimated that an additional 3.7 million people will make the region their home by 2031.” It’s no coincidence the greenbelt was created around the same time as the Places to Grow Act, a province-wide planning program to better manage municipal growth.

The Greenbelt Act itself states that the policy was created “to sustain the countryside, rural and small towns and contribute to the economic viabilities of farming communities;” “to preserve agricultural land as a continuing commercial source of food and employment;” and “to recognize the critical importance of the agricultural sector to the regional economy.”

But nowhere in the act’s 5,000 words does it lay out policies that support agriculture in any concrete way. Farming near an urban area, with its traffic, lack of agricultural infrastructure, and high land prices is difficult and frustrating. Those problems weren’t caused by the greenbelt, but they should be ameliorated by it.

In August 2009, University of Guelph rural-planning professor Harry Cummings and two grad students released a detailed analysis of agriculture in the region. Using census data, they looked at agricultural change from 2001 to 2006 in the greenbelt, and compared it to the rest of Ontario. What they found was that, in those years, the greenbelt area lost 490 farms and 86,000 acres of farmland, and every livestock operation in the region was either experiencing more rapid decline or slower growth than those in the rest of the province. The number of pigs had decreased by 31 percent in the greenbelt versus 14 percent elsewhere in Ontario, and the number of greenbelt beef cattle dropped by 24 percent versus 13 percent. The number of dairy cattle in the greenbelt fell by 13 percent versus 9 percent. (London, England’s greenbelt, created in 1939, faced a similar problem in the mid-1980s. High land prices forced farmers to rent land rather than own, and according to three University College London researchers, the percentage of family-run farms dropped from 45 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1985.)

Mausberg isn’t convinced by Cummings’ research. He says the numbers present a cause and effect relationship between the greenbelt and the flight of farmers that doesn’t actually exist. He calls Cummings’ research shoddy (something he’s even told the researcher himself), explaining that Cummings’ team studied census data from 2006, even though the greenbelt was only implemented the year before. “When you look at animal agriculture, it’s the first to leave when urbanization comes close because the infrastructure for that kind of farming is too far,” he says. “Urbanization is the single largest reason why farmers move, not land-use regulations. If you want to keep livestock agriculture, then you need to grow the greenbelt.”

Cummings, however, believes his conclusions will be borne out when he redoes the study after the 2011 census. “The one thing I want to make clear is I never claim the 2006 data shows the impact of the greenbelt; I’m just showing what happened between 2001 and 2006,” he says. “I hope that in 2011 we’ll see some new agriculture being created in the greenbelt, but that’s not what I hear. In fact, what I hear is the province hasn’t chosen to have any special near-urban agricultural policy.”

While Toronto Regional Conservation Authority planner David Burnett says farmers are exempt from some regulations if there is no alterative (they could, for example, build that shed within 30 metres of the buffer zone for a waterway if there was nowhere else to build it), Cummings says it’s still a burden farmers aren’t able to carry. “Many of the people who are stronger environmentalists than they are agriculturalists haven’t thought of the implications of how we grow our food in a responsible manner and have a green countryside,” he says. “It’s a lack of comprehension about the total picture.”

On a stretch of secluded rural road about a 10-minute drive east of Kitchener lives dairy farmer Ken McNabb, his wife, Marie, and their three boys. I visit one morning in late spring, and McNabb takes me for a tour around his property, showing me the grove of giant, sheltering trees, a backyard swimming hole, and tidy, black-metal-clad barns. This is the alternative Toronto-area farmers are seeking. Marie is baking a batch of muffins when I arrive, and as we all sit at the kitchen table, McNabb, a lean 52-year-old with a kindly, matter-of-fact demeanour, tells me what it was like to move 40 cows, his farm machinery, and all of his family’s household belongings from Georgetown, about 15 kilometres west of Brampton, to New Hamburg: easy. Okay, maybe not easy. The process of packing up and hauling away their entire livelihood was stressful, but McNabb regrets nothing. They don’t have to deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic backed-up in front of their house (“You try to teach a 16-year old to get across four lanes of traffic with a tractor and a wagon”); they don’t have to worry about encroaching suburbs. And they can see the stars at night.

Though McNabb’s former property wasn’t inside the greenbelt, he faced many of the same problems farmers there do. He was too far from a lot of farm services like tractor mechanics, stable cleaners, and machinery repair services. And they owned only 88 of the nearly 300 acres they farmed, so he couldn’t expand. But unlike Beynon, McNabb was handed an easy way out. Farmers on either side of the greenbelt say that when the legislation was enacted, it was almost like someone drew an arbitrary line in the soil. It was hard to say why some were encompassed in the protected swath and why some were left out.

The McNabb farm ended up on the south side of the line, in the so-called white belt—land on the Toronto side of the greenbelt left ripe for development—and between April 2004, when he and Marie started thinking about moving, and February 2005, when they sold, the value of his farm nearly tripled, from $1,800 per acre to $5,200 per acre.

McNabb sold his land to a speculator. It’s still being farmed, but will inevitably be developed. While he seems sanguine about his own situation, he’s fatalistic about farming around the Golden Horseshoe. “Eventually everybody has to go. Everybody leaves at a different time for a different reason, but eventually they all have to leave,” he says. “Some tolerate it longer than others. It depends on where they are, who their neighbours are, and what traffic is on the road. But it’s not as easy to pursue agriculture in the greenbelt as it is out where we are.”

About 100 farmers, planners and environmentalists gathered at the Four Points Sheraton in Thorold, Ontario, near St. Catharines, on a Wednesday in March 2010, to talk about the greenbelt. The summit was a makeshift review of the policy, hosted by the Region of Niagara. Local MPPs Tim Hudak and James Bradley were invited, but didn’t show.

The Greenbelt Act won’t be up for official review until 2015, 10 years after it was passed, but farmers here have decided they want to be prepared. “Just because the province can’t review it doesn’t mean we can’t,” says Len Troup, chair of the tender fruit marketing board and one of the summit’s five panelists.

Some, like TRCA planner David Burnett, believe a lot of farmers are mad the greenbelt took away their retirement funds. “They thought that their retirement would be based on selling their farmland to a developer…they feel certain rights were taken away.” But that isn’t the main reason for farmers’ anger. On the contrary, they’re upset by the “browning” of the greenbelt as land slips out of agricultural production. Ultimately, they want the same things as the food activists: viable local agriculture, more access to local markets, and support from their communities and government.

Mausberg was also at the summit in March, and while he believes more conversation is needed among farmers, citizens, and the government, he doesn’t share all of farmers’ sentiments: he thinks they’re focused on the wrong problems. “If we start the conversation with why the greenbelt was terrible and how the government forced it on you, we’re not going to have a dialogue,” he says. “You can sit there and whine about the fact that this happened five years ago, or you can talk about it.”

Even if opposing groups do find common ground on the issue, fixing the greenbelt is going to take more than a simple review. Suggestions of ways to revamp the act read like a long wish list. Foodies like Webb and Toronto-based food writer Sarah Elton, author of the book Locavore, want a food policy; farmers want an agricultural policy—it’s something they’ve been asking for since the beginning. “It’s about time the government came out with a statement to the effect that agriculture is a needed industry in Ontario,” says GTA Agricultural Action Committee chair Peter Lambrick.

“Farmers have to get the sense that they’re actually wanted here and that they can make a living,” says Lambrick. “I think it will come, but whether it will be this generation that does it or the next is what we’re asking now.”

Not Far From the Tree volunteers picking serviceberries in the city. Illustration by Lindsay Campbell.

When it comes to eating locally, it’s tough to beat food that’s growing literally in your own backyard. Since 2008, Not Far From the Tree, a volunteer group in Toronto, has been helping people do just that. Founded by New Brunswicker-turned-Torontonian Laura Reinsborough, the group picked more than 19,000 pounds of fruit from some 200 trees last summer. The bounty was split between the volunteers, the trees’ owners, and local food banks and shelters.

Reinsborough began picking fruit almost by accident in 2007, when she was asked by her local farmers’ market to help harvest the apple trees growing at Spadina Museum, a historic house in downtown Toronto. “I had never been to Spadina Museum, I hadn’t even picked apples before. It was something I had to Google the night before,” she says.

While selling the apples she helped pick, Reinsborough realized that many Torontonians were eager to find help picking fruit growing on their own properties. Fast-forward a year and Not Far From The Tree was born. In the last three years the group has picked everything from apples and pears to gingko nuts and grapes.

This last winter, the group also kicked off Syrup in the City, a program that demonstrates the quintessentially rural tradition of making maple syrup using trees in the city. “People are so excited that this is happening in Toronto,” she says. “It brings attention to an urban ecology, a richness to the city that I don’t think we think about.”

Gillian Flies of The New Farm. Photo courtesy The New Farm.

The first time I visited The New Farm, Brent Preston and Gillian Flies’ bucolic 100-acre spread near Creemore, Ontario, the barn was kitted up with twinkle lights. Bundles of hay provided seating for a play and, later, for listening to the foot-stomping tunes of the Sunparlour Players. Professional chefs cooked up a delicious dinner with veggies fresh from the fields, and we hung around a campfire as the stars popped out of the big sky. It was every urbanite’s fantasy of rural life.

Of course, after five years working the land, former city dwellers Preston, Flies, and their two young children don’t have many illusions left about the tough daily reality of organic farming.

“It’s gotten easier as we’ve gotten smarter, but it’s taken longer, been harder work, and cost a lot more than we ever expected,” says Preston with a laugh.

Still, the couple, who met in Malawi and spent nearly a decade working to strengthen democracy movements in Africa, South America, and Indonesia, aren’t going anywhere. In fact, despite the challenges, The New Farm has become a leader in Ontario’s food movement. The family sells over 75 varieties of its heirloom organic veggies at farmers’ markets and to top restaurants—all while advocating for small producers, their rural community (where Preston was recently elected councillor), and engaging young people through farmer training internships.

But the most innovative partnership they’ve forged is with the least likely place: a Toronto food bank and community food centre called The Stop. Still, the fit seemed natural. “We love our customers, but we didn’t get into this to only offer our food to the wealthy,” explains Preston. “And The Stop does more than just hand out food. Like us, they look at the whole food system.”

In fact, The Stop has become The New Farm’s single biggest customer. Farm fundraisers like the one I attended (proceeds go to The Stop, which buys New Farm produce for its many food programs) are the biggest money generator for the partnership. But an entrepreneurial venture called Grow for The Stop—New Farm veggies are sold at independent grocers with 10 percent of proceeds going back to The Stop, which spends the money on more fresh produce—is gaining ground.

It’s a win-win situation. The Stop gets healthy organic veggies for its low-income neighbourhood—where diet-related health problems are rampant—and the New Farm has a ready market for its produce, and its values.

“The potential for collaborations like this is huge,” says Preston. “In fact, we think this holistic approach is the only way to change the food system.”

Off the Hook uses the community-supported agriculture model to keep fisheries healthy and bring fresher fish to market. Photo by Sadie Beaton.

It’s hard to find fresh fish to buy in Canada. Even in Halifax, in view of the ocean, it takes at least six days for local fillets to make it from the fishing boats to the supermarket. Now, a group of five fishers are changing the way fish are caught and sold. They’ve founded Off the Hook, an organization they call a community supported fishery, inspired by the local food movement’s community supported agriculture (CSA) plans. As with a CSA, members pay the fishers at the beginning of the season in return for a weekly share of the catch.

This close connection between consumer and fisher is new to Nova Scotia. Ever since colonial times, the Maritime fishing industry has fed the long-distance market. The fisherman relied on the fishing lord, the middle-man, to buy the entire catch. By creating the cooperative and selling directly to the consumer in nearby cities, fishers are reinventing the supply chain. They can also make more money. Whereas the price at the dock for haddock is between 80 cents and a dollar per pound, members of the group buy the fish for $3 a pound, which means they’re helping to keep the fishers on the water.

And because they have a guaranteed market, fishers are able to fish with a bottom hook and line, a method that doesn’t damage ocean habitat—unlike the commercial fishery’s trawlers that drag a large net along the ocean floor, sweeping everything up with it—a technique that contributed substantially to the collapse of the cod fishery.

The fish is good too. As people picked up their fish on one of the final days of the season last fall, they planned dinners of fish tacos and baked fish with herbs. Selling fish that’s just hours out of the water, rather than days, Off the Hook is giving “fast food” a whole new meaning for its members.

It may be anticlimactic for those who picture transgenic animals as products of zany laboratory cut ’n pastes, but Canada’s first genetically engineered animal to be raised for food looks just like the ordinary farm pig that shares its DNA.

Dubbed “Enviropig,” its creators at the University of Guelph say it’s a boon to the environment because it excretes 30–70 percent less phosphorous than a regular pig.

But critics are skeptical of its practicality and concerned about its potential place on your dinner plate. The pig is currently undergoing reviews by Health Canada and the FDA for approval to be commercially bred and marketed in Canada and the U.S.

We spoke with Steven Liss, University of Guelph professor and Enviropig spokesperson, and Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network about a few of the issues raised by this complicated animal.

Regulatory/Access to information

U of Guelph says: The world of transgenic animals and their approval for human consumption is relatively new. Enviropig puts Canada at the forefront of this technology.

Flipside: How Health Canada determines if a GM animal is safe is not yet public knowledge. And so far, Guelph has not publicly released its Enviropig application to Health Canada.

Biosafety

U of Guelph says: Enviropig is a genetically enhanced Yorkshire pig. Liss says that scientific testing supports that both types of pigs are equally safe to breed, raise, and eat.

Flipside: As previous food safety scandals have shown us, when it comes to what we eat there’s no room for error. Genetically modified pigs have not yet been approved for human consumption and there has been no independent testing of Enviropig or the impact it could have on both food safety and the environment. Sharratt notes that genetically engineered foods don’t have labels, and there’s been little public oversight and little public debate over such items in our food supply. “The advent of Enviropig raises all of this at once.”

Livestock management and the environment

U of Guelph says: “The primary benefit is to the environment,” says Liss. Enviropig’s special digestive system allows it to better digest the phosphorous in its plant-based diet. This results in less phosphorus in the pig’s manure—and that means less phosphorus leaching into nearby waterways. Result: less algae growth and fewer poisoned fish.

Flipside: By reducing phosphorous output, farmers could theoretically raise more hogs while still meeting environmental regulations, so Enviropig may not actually lessen the stress on the environment. Enviropig also does nothing to address other issues associated with large-scale meat production like air quality problems or the spread of disease. And the phosphorus in a pig’s manure can already be reduced by up to 50 percent by simply adding common supplements to its diet.

Economics

U of Guelph says: Enviropig could save hog farmers money by reducing the costs associated with the phosphorousreducing supplements they already feed their animals and by cutting back land costs for spreading hog manure. Commercializing and licensing the pig could also mean big money for the groups—including the University of Guelph, Ontario Pork, and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs—that have invested at least $1.4 million in its creation.

Flipside: As a trademarked technology, the cost of Enviropig is likely to outweigh the cost of buying competitively priced, phosphorous-reducing supplements for regular pigs, argues Sharratt. She also believes the Enviropig could shatter consumer confidence in pork, an industry already in financial crisis. Meanwhile, taxpayers have shouldered the cost of developing the Enviropig through the use of public funds.

Vanessa Rodrigues serves up musical food activism. Photo by Tom Inoue.

When she isn’t playing jazz organ in Rio de Janeiro or running her own jam session during the Montreal International Jazz Festival, musician Vanessa Rodrigues can usually be found making her own pickles. The Montreal-based musician has her plate full with music projects, but high on her list of priorities is food—the growing of, the eating of, and the educating about. She recently released her album Soul Food for Thought, a dancey, funky album all about food and the politics surrounding it.

“I am not a hard-core activist,” she says. “Nor am I going to play the part of a preachy vegetarian. I support local, organic markets and am pro small business. I grow my own food whenever I can.”

With mostly instrumental tracks, including tunes like “What’s in This?” and “Eater’s Manifesto,” Soul Food for Thought gets listeners thinking about what they are eating. The song “Ode to Monsanto” might not have any lyrics, but the creepy, uncomfortable feeling Rodrigues gets from the agricultural biotech company is vividly conveyed. Accused of trying to take over the world’s food supply by patenting genetically modified seeds, and making farmers desperately dependent on their particular pesticide, the chemical firm is—with good reason—under constant scrutiny.

Rodrigues has done her homework on Monsanto and advises everyone to do the same. “People … need to know who Monsanto is, what it has done and what it is doing. These people made Agent Orange. You trust them with your food? Really?” Rodrigues recently started tending her own garden and now happily grows her own kale, beets, cucumbers, peppers, and carrots. But does she use pesticide?

“No thanks!” she says. “Sheep manure, that’s it.”

Fleming College students constructing a green building.

“No one would think it’s possible to have students with no construction experience making an entire selfsustainable building from scratch,” says David Elfstrom, a graduate of Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario. But that’s what he and 25 of his classmates in the sustainable building design and construction program did in 2006, erecting an eco-friendly outdoor-living centre in five months.

Since the program began in 2005, Fleming’s students have raised three structures around eastern Ontario, including a food bank and a performing arts centre. Its goal is to produce graduates who have the skills and knowledge to create truly green buildings, and some of the program’s grads have already formed their own sustainable-building companies.

While green construction is gaining momentum throughout the country, most sustainable construction focuses on individual parts, such as solar-energy collection or water conservation. In this unique-in-Canada program, students and two instructors design, build and decorate a sustainable building—using earthen plasters, earth-bag foundations, straw-bale walls and natural paints.

Chris Magwood pitched the program to Fleming College in 2004 after close to 100 people applied for an unpaid, unadvertised apprentice position at his green construction company. “It struck me that if this many people wanted to work with my company for a season, there were a lot of people who wanted to push sustainable building into the mainstream,” he says.

The school signed on. Within months, Magwood was developing an intensive 20-week, hands-on program. The students, many with no construction experience, spent nine-hour days, five days a week, on-site, their nights filled with theoretical readings. “No one said it would be easy,” Magwood says.

The program’s first project was in Haliburton, Ontario, where the local food bank and thrift shop resided in a dilapidated storage garage. The municipality provided a construction site and money for building materials, and the class set to work. Five months and $120,000 later, the 4Cs food bank and thrift store had a new home.

Thanks in large part to solar panels adorning the building’s roof, the annual operating cost for the new building is less than what the old space cost in a month. On sunny days, the panels suck in enough energy to both power the structure and send surplus energy to the grid, to be used by the neighbourhood. While the building uses some conventional power for heating and electricity, energy bills have been dramatically reduced because of the store’s solar panels and radiant-floor heating. Like all of Magwood’s projects, the 4Cs site uses at least 50 percent less energy than a conventional building.

Still, the project is special for more than its environmental benefit and cost savings. “The community takes a fair bit of pride in it,” says Ted Scholtes, who sits on the food bank’s board. “We point it out to people because we have something unique.”

This year, 92 candidates applied for 26 spots in the Fleming program, and the college received several proposals from business and homeowners looking to get a sustainable building. Despite the program’s popularity, Magwood doesn’t expect similar ones to start appearing across the country. “I go to conferences and people are interested, but the field is still so new,” he says. “We’re a little ahead of the curve, and I think it will be a few years before the others catch up.”

Program graduate Elfstrom is more hopeful. “The success [at Fleming] is making other colleges think twice about their own programs,” he says. “There should really be more of this.”

[Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in the July-August 2008 issue of This. There have since been two more buildings built by Fleming students—a summer camp environment centre and a Habitat for Humanity residence.]

MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy's solar-energy-producing textiles. Courtesy Sheila Kennedy.

Rick Mercer’s quip during the Copenhagen climate conference last December summed it up best: “So [Stephen] Harper flew to Copenhagen to have a club sandwich and hide in his room?”

The post-Copenhagen doldrums were still bringing us down when Thomas Auer, managing director of Transsolar, the German climate-engineering firm assigned to the Manitoba Hydro Place, stepped onto a stage at Toronto’s Interior Design Show in January to explain his vision on designing a world without oil. The future in sustainable architecture is about harnessing daylight and fresh air, he declared.

The theme that came up again and again in presentations from renowned engineers, architects, designers and futurists at IDS was if we are to kick our oil addiction, guilt-tripping us won’t work. But seduction through innovative design just might. As design guru Bruce Mau said, “I don’t believe we can succeed in sustainability without making it more sexy and beautiful.”

So imagine, for example, a beach house with billowing curtains that harvest sunlight and convert it to energy— enough to juice up your laptop or illuminate your bedroom at night. Sheila Kennedy, architect, inventor and MIT prof, has done just that. Her sensuous textiles (including lace) are implanted with ultra-thin photovoltaic strips that produce electricity when exposed to light.

For Fritz Haeg, desirable objects took a backseat to the human condition. A geodesic-dome-dwelling architect based in California, Haeg says the story of oil is one of disconnection. There was a time when we used the resources immediately within our reach and dealt with our waste locally as well, Haeg says, but oil took this away and unintentionally led to our present ignorance about the environment.

One of Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates. Courtesy Fritz Haeg.

Edible Estates, Haeg’s ongoing gardening project, is trying to change that. By turning eight suburban front lawns from spaces you cut and “keep off” into productive gardens, Haeg wants to bring back a reality rendered invisible by oil. He’s not a Slow Food idealist; instead, Haeg says that questioning the front lawn is just the easiest first wedge into unraveling the old structure of our cities. But he acknowledges the idea will face resistance in suburbia. “How far have we come from the core of our humanity that the act of growing our own food might be considered impolite, unseemly, threatening, radical or even hostile?” he asks.

Yello Strom energy metre in use. Courtesy Yello Strom.

Like Haeg, Ted Howes of global consultancy IDEO believes that we have to turn energy from an invisible commodity into a tangible experience. And social media can help. The Yello Strom energy meter, which Howes helped develop for the German market, is a small wall-mounted box with a curvy bright yellow shell and a simple-to-read meter that could easily have been plucked from an Apple store window. It sends out tweets about your energy consumption and gives consumers direct access to Google’s energy management tool, PowerMeter. A phone app is sure to follow.

The attitude that we can wean ourselves off oil by finding more attractive alternatives may have ironically been best summed up by the man who was Saudi Arabia’s oil minister during the 1973 oil embargo. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani said recently, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

“We know that the greatest obstacles to technological progress are organizational, cultural, sociological,” says Anita McGahan, a professor who teaches “The End of Oil” [PDF] at the University of Toronto. “They’re not technical. We have the technology.”

Now we need the political leadership.