• Thanks for stopping by. Logging in to a registered account will remove all generic ads. Please reach out with any questions or concerns.

2022 CPC Leadership Discussion: Et tu Redeux

I was buying a 1/4 of a bison from my cousin until recently. The herd broke through a fence and ate water hemlock, so he lost a chunk of his herd.
That sucks.
I generally do two beef quarters a year direct, sprinkle the rest between 3 locally owned, operated, and sourced, butcher shops/ abattoirs. Might cut out the quarters, source is close to retirement and freezer is close to EOL
 
There is a shortage of abattoirs in BC from what I have heard. We do need to encourage the small scale niche businesses to have a robust system, both in the food and lumber market. Government trend to support large corporation as they are easier to police than a whole group of small independents. The large corporations lobby politicians to encourage this.
 
Average of just under $3B/year from government programs for the past 10 years if one believes deep-state statisticians @ Stats Can - spreadsheet here for those inclined.

Zackly where the $ goes? Good question ...
Now are these direct subsidies that go into someone's hands or are they a laundry list of insurance (crop insurance for instance) low interest loans, and check offs. Also is that 3billion just for beef cattle or is that all livestock put together?
 
Pete, I come from a long line of cattle farmers/beef producers. Could you explain how the meat industry is ”subsidized with billions each year”, because we certainly never saw any of that money….

It's definitely a touchy one, and don't think the bulk of it goes to family farms. Some economists also include things like tax breaks etc as subsidies. I don't have an issue with any of that, and generally prefer to buy from the farmers if I can. It's a tough life and can get wiped out by one or two bad years.

I think food stability is potentially a genuine national security issue, so have no problem at all in Canada doing all kinds of things to make sure Canada is self sufficient and can feed ourselves, and if we can produce an excess and export, then great. We are fortunate to have a lot of land that is a lot more productive for raising livestock than growing crops.

I do think we should really put a hard stop on converting farm land into housing; going around Niagara there is a massive amount of prime farmland that has been lost forever to McMansions, but given how hard scrabble farming can be for so little return, don't blame the farmers at all for selling it off.

In general, I think it would make sense if we can do more to help make the actual farmers make more money, with reasonable profits along the chain, but really don't know enough about any of that to have a suggestion to do it. So makes sense for the governent (at whatever level) to do things like give grants/loans to farmers, as well as to the processing/distribution side of the house so we stay self sufficient. With changing climate and population densities though, doesn't hurt to diversify things either, so investing in things like the vertical aquaculture etc that isn't weather dependent builds in a lot of resiliency into the supply chain.
 
^^
Canola Oil, Canada usually ships every kernel of access canola seed to China for processing. But after the latest skullduggery from China, there has been a big push to do more processing in Canada. There are currently two large processing plants in the Regina area being built. Once completed their addition will ensure that pretty much all canola production will be processed in Canada.

Agree with your assessment that urban sprawl needs to stop and like right now.

There is no way a kid can get into large scale grain farming unless they have a Saudi Prince as a backer.

Cattle ranching is almost as tough. Land, equipment and cattle are massive costs.
 
Corporations allow people to specialize, and allow people to concentrate investment capital without unlimited risk.

Weigh those two things against the factors cited as difficulties forming a "family farm".
 
Corporations allow people to specialize, and allow people to concentrate investment capital without unlimited risk.

Weigh those two things against the factors cited as difficulties forming a "family farm".
Honestly most corporate farms are family operations that incorporated to allow succession planning. Basically (and being a bit sexist here) Dad is the CEO of Maple Valley Land and Cattle Company Inc., Mom is the CAO. Child #1 wants to become CEO but wants to make sure Mom and Dad have a comfortable retirement. The process is a lifelong journey.
 
Interesting series of op-eds over on the left leaning Guardian, but this one seems topical. There is a running thread on holistic farming practices I think which is similar to this. I guess like anything, healthy mix of things in moderation, and raises lots of good points about what could potentially happen if we start relying on patented lab grown food products.

Unfortunately this kind of detail is usually absent in policy debates on the politics side, but I think there are lots of benefits to balanced agriculture, so government investment and support to all the streams can help encourage things from getting stuck on just a single way of doing things or focus on a single crop. I think it was bananas that almost got wiped out because a single variety is used and a disease popped up, and coffee is another one.

Eating meat isn’t a crime against the planet – if it’s done right | Thomasina Miers

Eating meat isn’t a crime against the planet – if it’s done right​

Thomasina Miers


George Monbiot criticised ‘chefs and foodies’ like me for focusing on regenerative grazing. But alternative, lab-grown foods, could have terrible consequences
Grazing cows belonging to the Knepp Estate's regenerative farming project.

‘To lump all grazing livestock into one bucket feels unhelpful and misleading.’ Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Thu 1 Sep 2022 07.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 1 Sep 2022 08.37 BST




I have huge admiration for George Monbiot, a columnist of this newspaper. His work has highlighted the urgent need to reduce our CO2 emissions and switch to greener energy. He has also shown intensive farming’s role in the dramatic levels of species decline and biodiversity loss. Much of what he writes I wholeheartedly agree with – but when it comes to the solutions we need to change our farming and food systems, we have radically different takes.
It is indisputable that the farming “revolution” of the 1950s, with its widespread use of ammonia fertilisers and herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, has waged war on nature. These intensive, monocultural ways of producing food are not only contaminating our land and waterways, but are heating up our planet and contributing to a crisis in human health (more people die of diet-related disease globally than smoking, according to a study published in the Lancet). The animals in factory farms don’t have a great time either. The decline of insect life is incredibly worrying: without the earthworm, beetle and bee, life as we know it could cease. Topsoils, which we use to grow 95% of the world’s food, are depleting at an astonishing rate. We need to change the way we eat and produce food, and we need to do it quickly.


The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb

Read more


Thus far Monbiot and I agree. But in a recent article, he wrote that organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb are the “world’s most damaging farm products”. He criticises “chefs and foodies” like me for focusing on regenerative grazing, which he calls “rebranded ranching”. His alternative vision includes a revolution in creating food through precision fermentation: growing food in labs from microbes and water. “Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life,” he wrote in this paper in 2020.

Although not averse to the idea of lab-grown food, I am much more for small-scale, community-driven farming because I believe in the potential of food to be a force for good, for human and environmental health. The methods that regenerative farmers such as the writer Gabe Brown propose have shown how non-intensive livestock, when managed well, can increase topsoil more than previously thought, which can then accumulate biomass (carbon) and retain precious rainwater. The argument put forward by Monbiot that it is not possible to produce enough food this way is often used to decry better food systems, yet according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, small-scale farmers currently produce about a third of our food.


Monbiot’s enthusiasm for precision fermentation worries me greatly. “Just about all of this new food technology is heavily funded by tech oligarchs, venture capitalists or the occasional celebrity,” writes the retail podcaster Errol Schweizer in Forbes. Precision fermentation claims to get us off our destructive addiction to cheap meat, but not without potential downsides. These inventions are heavily patented, pushing the future of our food supply further into the hands of an increasingly small and powerful collection of multinational food players..

There is very little transparency about the amount of energy and materials needed to build the system of factories that would be needed to adopt these foods to the degree that their proponents would like. How fossil-fuel dependent are they? How many other chemicals and compounds are needed to make them, and where will we get them from and how? In our race to look for better systems of food production it is tempting to look for magic bullets, but we cannot afford to ignore the risks.

Ultra-processed foods make up half of the UK’s calories, and their health impact gets very little attention from the government or in medical schools. We know that other ultra-processed foods – even some plant-based meat alternatives – are high in protein but can also be very high in salt and fat.

Companies that practise regenerative farming, such as Hodmedod’s in the UK, are producing affordable pulses and grains that are rich in protein and fibre, through a cooperative of small-scale farms that almost all use some grazing animals in their systems to aid the nutrient cycle in their soil. In these types of farms, small herds of cattle or sheep graze diverse cover crops, boosting the biodiversity on their land, not reducing it (as Monbiot claimed in his article). The cover crops build back goodness in the soil and remove the need to use pesticides. The presence of livestock adds nutrients through their muck and saliva. They also add the nutrients to our diets: animal fats from grass-fed animals are hard to replace in human diets. Plus, the livestock adds an extra revenue stream for the farmers, making them more resilient.

Through the work we do at the charity Chefs in Schools, I have seen first-hand how it is possible to feed people food that is high in fibre and in flavour, and that costs less than the ultra-processed food children were being fed before. With the right political will (60% of secondary schools are currently failing school food standards and food plays no role in actual Ofsted ratings), we can feed people on all incomes a better diet, not just through schools but also in hospitals, prisons and social canteens. If we continue to go down the ultra-processed route then food may well continue to make people sick, which, according to Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Plan, costs the economy an estimated £74bn.

Advertisement

I love doughnuts and crisps, but we can’t live on these alone. I am open to plant-based foods if we can move away from making them with the mono-crops that are so destructive to animal life and soils. And I am all for technology, but as long as it works with nature, not against it. We need better funding for soil science and for feeding proper food to people on lower incomes.

We need to change our diets. We do have to eat significantly less meat. But the evidence of the past 70 years suggests that when we replace nature’s complex biology with a tunnel-visioned look at certain aspects of chemistry and ignore others, it has profoundly negative and often unforeseen consequences. In nature the animal and vegetable worlds are never separate – we should learn something from that.

  • Thomasina Miers is a cook, writer and restaurateur
 
This is a US site but an interesting comparison of what the farmer getd for products we see everyday:

 
This is a US site but an interesting comparison of what the farmer getd for products we see everyday:



The short form of that table is that the more shelf stable a product is the more the farmer makes - see carrots vs lettuce. Carrots store easily. Lettuce wilts within hours. The cost of transporting lettuce, and the wastage in transport is high.

The other point is the amount of processing. Chickens generate more saleable product than beef. You can buy a whole roaster. Few people buy a whole steer. The slicing and dicing costs money and generates waste.

The final point is the amount of water. I am not sure just how much a farmer contributes to a bottle of club soda. In my experience that would be virtually nil. For something that is 100% water I cant see why the farmer would get anything. On the other hand if you are talking about something that is 10% sugar and 90% water ... the sugar farmer seems to be getting a fair return.

Making food available costs money. A lot of it.

Retail margins in the food industry are typically in the sub 5% range.
 
So back to the leadership race.


Will be interesting to see how that works…
TBS has actually had that policy in place for a long time. They are actually one of the worst for jargon and bureaucratese.

I'm a huge fan of keeping things free from unnecessary jargon, but that can be a real problem when you get into writing laws and regulation on very specific topics, where the terms have a very specific meaning.

This would be great but I think it has to be done carefully so you get rid of BS but don't simplify things to the point where people can drive a truck through it.

On the flip side trying to do plain language contracting is an exercise in futility if you can't get lawyers on board, but that costs the taxpayer a lot of money as the terms and conditions can be totally unenforceable because no one understands what it means.
 
Sure, but will be interesting to see if he can write a law without legalese…
 
I'm sure the Attorney General, the SCC, and many other legal bodies that would need to oversee/enforce that law might feel....well...differently about it.
 
I think a much cleaner way would be to have plain language guides to complement things, and generally the websites do a pretty good job of that.

A lot of his ideas seem similar; they seem like great ideas if you aren't familiar with the subject or don't think about it too much, but won't work in practical terms.

So sure, get rid of BS like 'maximizing efficiencies with stakeholders', but you will need to keep the accurate technical language for precision and clarity for the majority of laws, acts and regulations. They aren't necessarily supposed to be clear for everyone, just the intended users. Sometimes those intended users are SMEs.

If he wants laws drafted to the same level of simple language used to brief politicians, it will be down to 4th grade level, and frequently wrong.
 
Back
Top