A month or so ago, I signed up to be a part of the second annual Blog Action Day.  I can’t even remember where I first read about it.  But, having clicked on a badge somewhere, it was clear that this was something I’d like to do.

How could I not.  There were so many benefits to joining in.

For one, I would be forced to sit down and write something new on this sadly neglected blog.  (Yes, I will, eventually, finish my ‘How to Start a Farm’ series.  And, I will follow that up with an e-book.  Tease.)

Secondly, if writing one blog post about poverty on a specific day could have some impact; could add my energy to a larger energy, why not?

Well, I never realized just how difficult it would be.  Poverty.  This is a huge issue.  It’s a lot of issues.  It’s hunger in third world countries.  It’s disease from poor quality water.  It’s lack of social resources here in North America.  It’s homelessness, mental illness, obesity.  On a less drastic but extremely widespread level, it’s not being able to afford quality food.

Having realized how little I really know about poverty around the world, I thought I’d do some research and share with you glimpses of what I found.  I invite you to look into any of the statistics or facts that you find here in an effort to raise your awareness about some aspect of poverty.  Let’s all put some good energy to this!

First tidbit:  Terminator Seed Technology and how it is threatening livelyhoods

Let’s start with this beautiful picture of a woman who seems to be cleaning seed.  This is only slightly less technologically advanced than our homemade seed cleaner that uses a drill, some screening and a bucket to sort out the chaff and weed seed.  Small tech-y difference.  HUGE quality of life difference.

This picture comes from an article about Terminator technology in seeds.  Be on the look out for a rant about this in the near future.  Gives me the warm fuzzies thinking of how big agribusiness has figured out how to get more of this woman’s money.

The Lambi Fund of Haiti

Below is an excerpt from The Lambi Fund of Haiti‘s website talking about one of the projects this organization undertook to improve the lives of Haitian women.

“The task of milling grains, such as corn and millet, falls to women. Once milled, the grain can be fed to

their families or sold in the marketplace to raise money for household expenses. Women in rural areas of central and

northwestern Haiti faced daunting challenges in accomplishing this task. Because there were no mills in their small villages, they had to transport the grain, on foot or by pack animal, to mills that were often many hours’ journey away. Once they arrived, they were often pushed aside, and merchants with larger amounts of grain were served ahead of them. The women developed proposals for motorized mills or multiple small manual mills which their organizations would operate. With Lambi’s assistance, the women now collectively own and run the mills; they have access to the service they need close to home, and no longer have to endure the rudeness of the male mill owners.”

Kudos to organizations with humanity!

Another organization with humanity: Kiva.org.

• This is Abduzoir Shokulov.  He is a small farmer in Tajikistan wishing to become a viable farm business.  Sounds familiar.  (Yet so different.  I think my gratitude journal will be well used tonight!)

He is one of the people looking for micro loans through Kiva.org.  People (like you and I) can donate as little as $25 to these entrepreneurs.

What we consider a micro loan, these folks can start a business on.  Hmm… sounds like the people at Kiva.org are putting a lot of good energy towards poverty in the world.

So, no, I didn’t look deeply into any aspect of poverty.  I simply couldn’t wrap my head around just one.  And coming up with something that related to what we do here at the farm?  Well, I didn’t want this to turn into a rant.  (That will be for another day!)

What I chose to do, instead, was touch on three different topics for interested readers to look into.  That’s what Blog Action Day is all about, right?  Bringing awareness.

Please look into something poverty related whether it be something I mentioned or not.  And, do tell me about it.  I’m interested.

There is some confusing language used around farming.  Even the word farming doesn’t really convey what the job entails.  (A lot of jobs have this problem, though.  When we say police officer, we don’t think paperwork, but I understand that they do a lot of it.)

I think the business of farming suffers more acutely from this confusion, though, because of the romanticism that it stirs up in people.  When people – even farmers – think of farming, they’re imagining sunny afternoons planting crops, late night barn checks watching and listening to their peaceful animals and all of the outdoor, in-touch with nature tasks that farmers do.  Even the less desirable tasks that come to mind are of the outdoor, hands on variety.

How many people picture paperwork, computer time and a long list of phone calls when they think of farming?  Not many.

And what on earth could farmers need to spend that much office time for, you ask?  Why, marketing of course.  Let me elaborate.

Marketing wasn’t always a task that the small family farm had to engage in, for sure.  In fact, at least since the Barley Days (1860 to 1890) here in Prince Edward County, marketing has been done by out side bodies.  Export to other countries and continents has been going on for generations.

My own Great Grandfather was a grain buyer for Pioneer Seed in Alberta around 1900.  He would travel from farm to farm buying up all the grain to export and ship to cities.  Similarly, nowadays, farmers can simply haul all their grain to the elevator or all their animals to the auction hall and wait for a cheque to arrive in their mailbox.

So why, you ask, do farmers need to do marketing if the systems for it are already so well established?  Why, if you can simply transport it to the right place and wait for a cheque, should farmers do anything else?  The long answer to that could be another post altogether to discuss the ethics of certain production models, start-up costs and more.

The short answer is this ‘Mailbox’ business model sees the farmer getting about 9¢ per retail dollar.  So bread, for example, you’d make about 14¢ for the wheat it took to make one loaf.  The ‘Do your Marketing’ model of small farm businesses can see you making 60, 70, 80, 90 cents on the dollar.

Hmm… a lot less work to get the same money.  Or a lot more money for the same work. Marketing looks pretty good, all of a sudden.

For those who have read the previous posts in this series, you already know that keeping your pencil sharp is essential.  The difference is that, on John’s Opa’s farm, the main use of the pencil was the math required to spend less than you make.  Your pencil will have more varied work.  It still has to do those expense calculations, but it also has to plan how best to market what your farm is producing.

For anyone seriously looking at farming for a living, I give you yet another set of questions to ask yourself:  Do you like dealing with people?  Are you a planner?  Are you self motivated?  Basically, do you want to do the marketing?

Because, farming really is more than half marketing.  Said another way, the success of your farm is based at least 50% on the quality – and possibly the quantity – of the marketing you do.

You might want to get a second pencil.  It’s going to be busy.

Is the organic and sustainable food movement complacent about pricing?

Over breakfast, John and I were discussing organic milk. How we got onto that topic, I don’t know. Maybe it was the carton in front of us. However it came about, our conversation hasn’t yet left me. What has caught my attention was something that John read in a newspaper he found at the bottom of our firewood box. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that we’re still lighting morning fires in May.

This article, possibly a year or more old, left John with a sense that there was soon going to be an oversupply of organic milk in Ontario. (Having looked into it a bit, there doesn’t seem to be consensus on this.) From this jumping off point, we started to speculate what would happen to the price premium and allowance for organic dairy farms to ship more milk than other producers.

(A basic overview of the Milk Quota system: Farmers purchase units of quota that allows them to ship milk from one cow per unit of quota and be guaranteed a steady price for the milk. Quota currently costs around $30,000.00 CDN per unit. Organic farmers get to ship more milk per unit of quota than conventional, giving them more return on investment.)

Presumably, if there were no supply shortage for organic milk, the price would go down for the consumer and the premiums that the dairy farmers are getting would disappear. In theory, organic milk would cost the same as conventional milk. As someone who buys organic milk, this would seem strange in a ‘Yeah! The Grocery Bill Fairy has been here!’ kind of way. I’m not sure the organic milk producers, who spent the time and energy to struggle through a long and expensive learning curve, would feel the same.

While I don’t know if this will happen anytime soon, it did bring up the idea that organic producers in general seem to be complacent about price. If they are concerned about the future of pricing, I’ve never heard tell. I have heard some not-certified, sustainable, ethical farmers getting vocal about the true cost of food, but rarely.

And why should they worry? Organic farmers are getting a premium over conventional farmers for everything from soup to nuts. Sustainable farmers generally are, as well. And, while part of the premium they get goes into more costly production in many cases, at least some of the extra cost is a result of an unbalanced supply and demand. There isn’t enough to go around, so the price goes up.

This is precisely why we should be concerned.

To think that once supply of ‘alternative food’ (I’m lumping certified organic with sustainable ethical production under that label) catches up with demand, the prices are going to level out somewhere near to conventional produce should strike fear into the hearts of anyone affected. Sure, in the entire food industry, it doesn’t seem likely to balance out in the near (or possibly distant) future. That’s not the issue. The problem is that the current price for conventionally produced food doesn’t represent the cost of production that the farmer bears. This is why so many farmers work full time off the farm. Their full time on-farm job doesn’t make enough to pay even minimum wage.

So, if producing food alternative food is often more expensive for the farmer, you’d think there would be widespread panic at the thought of prices going down to a level that can’t sustain those who are there now. As a producer of non-certified, more organic every year, ethical food, I’m forever putting energy into educating people about the true cost of food. I’m frequently telling people that a wheat farmer makes $0.14 per loaf of bread.

Sure, alternative producers are getting a premium price compared to conventional food prices but try comparing the cost of alternative food against the cost of producing it. Suddenly, what looked like a tidy income for the farmer looks pretty meager.

And look further to the bargain basement food in our grocery stores. Somebody want to speculate on what kind of corners have to be cut to get prices that low? Anyone want to consider the health and animal welfare results of drastically cutting corners on food production? (Think about what has to happen in to production phase of cheap clothes and the level of quality that results and you’ll have a fair parallel, I’d say.)

So, yes, I’d say the alternative food producers are somewhat complacent. To be happy with prices inflated by a supply and demand discrepancy is like driving in the dark with your lights off. You might be cruising along now but you won’t see the ‘Bridge Out’ sign until you’re in the drink.

At some point, supply of good clean food will match demand. Ideally, by then, consumers will be aware that, though they thought they were paying premium will realize that what they were really doing was meeting cost of production. Including a wage for the farmer. Sounds reasonable to me.

My, how I was mistaken. The Lada of my youth was never a car in the way a BMW M3 is a car, for example. Similarly (and yet very differently), the Lada’s I have known were not cars the way, say, a ’68 Camero with gold pin striping is a car.

Why, you ask, am I bringing up painful vehicular memories from my family’s sordid car history? It may seem unrelated but to my mind these cars are relevant to the struggle of pricing what we produce here at the farm.

Lost yet? Bear with me.

Very simply put, trying to determine a selling price for our meat gives me a head ache. Any way we do the math, the delicious, healthy SOLE food we produce is a BMW. And high end vehicles cost more to produce. So does high end food. Working a living wage into the equation is the challenge.

We’re working at whittling the cost down as we progress and, not insignificantly, we don’t have to buy grain at the exorbitant prices of late because we produce our own. But, at the end of the day, J. & C. Nyman Farms lamb, for example, is still a BMW of lamb. And that’s where the head aches start.

See, people go car shopping and expect to get what they pay for. If you pay for a Lada, you know what you’re getting yourself into. Something that will be cheap to buy, easy on fuel but cost a lot to maintain and have a short road-life.

If you choose a BMW, you’re expecting – and getting – something that delivers performance, pleasure, fuel efficiency, low emissions and a long driving life ahead.

Unfortunately, when it comes to food it doesn’t matter that the produce cost a top quality dollar to produce and is truly quality food. The average consumer is conditioned to be able to pay a Lada price and believes they’re getting the BMW product. (The fact that they’re not actually getting the quality of the BMW is one of the great crimes of the big food machine, but that’s another story altogether.)

Where does that leave me with my calculator in one hand and my head in the other? It leaves me trying to explain (to people who are open to the idea) that they’re not actually getting the BMW for the Lada price. It leaves me needing to be informed and sincere enough to be able to show them that they’re eating Ladas. Yummy.

Realistically, I’m not going to be able to convince very many people to stop buying their bargain food and pay a lot more for our top of the line variety.

So I’m using my calculator to cut out a large part of that living wage I mentioned. And I’m selling what we produce to the customers who are willing to pay a little bit more for quality food.

And, most importantly, I’m sleeping well (possibly not as well protected as my husband John here, but well) and I’m reveling in my days.

I get to do something that is good for the Earth, my community and my family. And, I love to do it. Living wage? Who needs it!