How young people are being driven off the farm

How young people are being driven off the farm TheStar.com - News - How young people are being driven off the farm
TANNIS TOOHEY / TORONTO STAR
When the older folks retire, will there be anyone left to till the soil and grow our crops?
September 23, 2007
Catherine Porter
Environment Reporter

When Kurtis Andrews walks into his family's barn, he can't just ask one of the employees where his dad is. He has to ask for "Mr. Andrews." That's because few of the market staff know Kurtis anymore. They think he's another customer.

Andrews spent 20 years working on the farm. When he was seven, he bought a bicycle with the money he'd saved weeding the fields by hand for $1 an hour.

He's climbed the trees, built a swimming raft for the irrigation pond, and rumbled across the fields on a tractor.

But now, he's a stranger here.

"It feels odd," says Andrews, 34, examining a 20-year-old family portrait that hangs in the barn. In it, he, his two sisters and their folks pose in a raspberry field, each of them dressed in red-and-white checkered shirts and holding a basket of berries. It's full of joy and optimism – hardly the picture of farming today.

"I do feel nostalgia about the farm," he says.

Andrews is no longer a country boy. He lives six hours away, in Ottawa, where he's in his second year of law school. And he has no plans to return to the fields.

Neither do most of his peers. The statistics are distressingly clear – young people are leaving farming in droves. In Ontario, the number of farm operators aged 35 and under plunged by 35 per cent between 1996 and 2001. Since then, it's dropped another 21 per cent. Only 8.6 per cent of farmers are in that age group today.

Enrolment in agricultural colleges is plummeting. And the average age of the Ontario farmer keeps creeping up. Around Toronto, it's now 53.

Which raises the question: when they retire, will there be anyone left tilling the land?

It's what Wally Seccombe calls a "generation impasse." He is the founder and chair of Everdale, an organic farm near Orangeville that trains young farmers.

"If we want to be farming in Ontario in 20 years," he says, "we have to find a new generation who are not the sons and daughters of farmers and get them recruited on the land and farming in a very different way than we have before."

You don't have to dig deep to get to the roots of the problem. At its base are simple economics: for the most part, farming isn't a lucrative business anymore.

Around Toronto, most farms make less than a junior child-care worker – under $25,000 a year.

To survive, almost half of Ontario farmers work second jobs. With increased competition from places such as China and South Africa, it's harder to make a living wage.

"There's no money now," says Greg Downey, a 33-year-old who started working full-time on the family farm near Brampton 13 years ago, when the business was "more profitable." It's a decision he still questions, watching his bricklaying and banking brothers padding their bank accounts.

"If I was going back to college now, I wouldn't be coming home," he says. "I'd get into a trade."

The lifestyle doesn't help either. There are few days off and fewer vacations, due to monetary reasons and sheer logistics. Dairy cattle have to be milked twice a day, regardless of your baseball tickets or dinner date.

When Cecelia McMorrow was a child, members of her family used to take turns racing back to the farm every day while on vacation at a nearby cottage. "Every day of my life, every social function, I had to leave at 4 p.m.," says McMorrow, 26, who, despite being president of the Junior Farmers Association of Ontario, has no intentions of farming herself. "That's not a commitment I want to make."

She works for the Lindsay Agricultural Society but dreams of working in international development. Her parents, like many in the industry, encouraged her to go to university and study something other than agriculture. Farmers, like factory workers and taxi drivers, have bigger dreams for their children.

"The idea of farming as an exciting, viable, respectable profession doesn't exist now," says Christie Young, director of FarmStart, a Guelph non-profit organization bent on reversing the trend.

Even the few who do go into agriculture studies at university rarely return to the land. The majority land more secure agribusiness jobs, like working as a lab technician for a pesticide company or selling tractors for John Deere.

"The education system is not pushing people into farming," says Dave Lewington, 30, past youth president of the National Farmers Union. "It's grooming young people for jobs in agribusiness."

In high school, his guidance counsellor dismissed his plans to farm as "a waste of good marks," he says. He did it anyway, buying a spread near Sudbury, where land is still affordable, in 2004.

Which brings us to the overwhelming roadblock for the aspiring farmers who don't inherit an operation: land prices. Buying a farm around Toronto is like to buying a mansion in Forest Hill. Around the Andrews' farm near Milton, farmland is being scooped up by developers at $50,000 an acre. A 100-acre farm will sell for $5 million – and that's not including the tractors (a new one can cost as much as $250,000), irrigation pipes, seed and other necessities.

Few people under 35 have saved up $125,000 for a down payment, especially if they've been working, and getting experience, on a farm.

"Really, you'd have to win the lottery to get into farming (near Toronto)," says McMorrow. "For most people, that's not how they want to spend their winnings."

Renting land from a developer can be cheap. But it's risky. Andrews was growing winter wheat and corn on a nearby field and was kicked off without notice so the developer could build a driving range.

Without any security, it's hard to build up a business. Plus, it's not easy to find farmland to rent that comes with a barn and a house.

"There needs to be some perks to farming," says one young farmer. "You should at least have the joy of waking up on the farm."

There is a minority of young farmers swimming against the current. Many of those who don't inherit the business are drawn to farming for environmental reasons. They're what Seccombe dubs the "modern-day back-to-the-landers." Most are working on small-scale operations, growing organic food directly for specific customers. They're part of a new type of farming, called "relationship-farming," that's at the heart of the local food movement.

A just-released survey of alumni of a local organic farming program called Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) revealed that most were young females who grew up in the city. They're people like Tarrah Young, who sees farming as environmental activism. She just bought 50 acres near Ayton, an hour northwest of Guelph, where she plans to raise organic pigs and turkeys.

"I feel I can make a change, even if it's only on 50 acres," says Young, 30. "I'm helping create a better model for food production and help people create better health."

She could only afford the farm with help from her parents. And, she expects to depend on her partner's earnings as a graphic designer to pay the mortgage. She reckons that in due time, she will be able to pay herself around $25,000 a year.

That makes her the exception. In the CRAFT survey of intern alumni, only 36 per cent were still farming – most tilling small plots (five acres and less) and not making a living off it. It raises the question: as a society, are we going to rely on idealism to feed us, along with the sacrifices of a few Thoreau-types willing to live on peanuts? It seems hardly a model food policy.

The Russian sunflowers tower over Kurtis Andrews' head as he walks around his father Bert's farm. Despite having left seven years ago, he's still a farmer at heart. You can take the man off the land, but you can't take the land out of the man ... Sunflowers, he explains, are planted in rows over weeks, to extend their season.

He bends down to examine a vine with orange flowers that, in a short time, will transform into pumpkins. And he points out the tracks made by raccoons that have devastated his father's corn crop.

Throughout the hour-long walk, his father keeps appearing on an ATV bearing pamphlets on berry growing or a handful of raspberries.

"Is my dad coming again?" Andrews exclaims. "I'm having flashbacks from when I was a kid."

He always planned to take over the family farm. After his family bought the land in 1980, he worked here every summer through school and university.

In 1998, he moved back full-time to start working with his father. But he found it difficult taking orders. And his father found it hard, after so long, to share control, he says.

It's typical not only of farming but of any family enterprise.

Father and son hired a consultant, who told Kurtis it would be best for him to leave. It was the most heart-wrenching decision of his life.

"The thing that's different about farming than a lot of other professions," he says, "is that it's your home, it's your job, it's your community and your social circle. It's everything in your life. To leave all that, it's really difficult."