Old 99 Farm Week of Nov 18 2012

More cool nites, but hey it’s lovely in the greenhouse. Mist or frost most mornings.

Lots of greens, no new carrots yet, first cutting of claytonia this week.

I’m going to regale you with my speech to the Copetown Lions Club tonite, the live in-person ‘trailer’ for Nicole
Foss talk on Food, Farms and Family.

Here it is.
p(. News flash: the Lions Club voted in favour of being a co-sponsor of this event, along with DundasInTransition and Local 351 of the National Farmers Union in Ontario.)

Trailer for Nicole Foss: Food, Farms and Family, Building Resilience within Limits
Why would you come to a talk like this?
Do you sometimes feel fed-up, cynical, angry, discouraged with how the world is going? Do you doubt some of the positive spin from elected representatives and corporate execs in the news?

I’m going to suggest that A Great Disruption is upon us, and it goes by many names. We see it in many forms: real estate bubble, extreme weather events like Sandy and Katrina, price of fuel, ecological disasters like Deepwater Horizon, Exxon Valdez
Because you can’t have unlimited growth on a finite planet, it happens that we are the endgame generation, it’s happening in our lifetime.

Limits in food production are all around us: fisheries, topsoil, clean water, and minerals like phosphorus, and the big one: fossil fuels, limits on where we can safely dispose of our waste. We’re seeing superweeds and resistant insects and plant diseases, we’re seeing health epidemics like obesity, cancer heart disease to name just a few tangible signs of limits.

People seem to side with one of two extremes in facing this: we’ll be saved by technology, or are doomed by human greed and stupidity. Nicole proposes a middle way which gives more room for action: a ratcheting down of production and consumption, but not entirely by choice because of events beyond our immediate situation.
But if by choice it will be a lot more comfortable: as they say, it’s a lot more fun to jump that be pushed.

But if you do stay the course, stay in the mainstream cultural trance beamed by mass media, tv and the papers, you often end up feeling disempowered, helpless and by turns, like I asked at the outset: fed up, cynical, angry cheated. Why?
The lies and half truths from sources we want to trust, like our elected reps, disempower us.
The regulations that tie us in knots and keep us feeling like schoolkids, help some people and some of them a lot. Like corporate interests who can very easily afford to comply where small farmers, family businesses and proprietorships cannot

We are already in the post peak era, we are past the peak rate of extraction of conventional oil and natural gas and other minerals too; what remains to be seen is what the rate of decline is going to be. It can’t be a prediction though, not like predicting how long to fill a glass of water one drop per second.
It’s more like how to predict when a fish is going to find your bait and try it out for dinner. Too many factors at play to be a simple prediction, but we can forecast the likely scenarios.

When it comes to financial matters, Nicole says change can happen very quickly because of mass behaviour. We go with the crowd, on the way up and on the way down. Mass mood is very fickle and always seems to overshoot the target. We therefore often get a worse reaction that the facts really merit.

Also government action can change the picture, printing money, delaying consequences, making international trade deals, holding elections that avoid talking the real issues.

There is not direct causation in climate upset between burning oil and putting carbon in the air, and Superstorm Sandy. There is a multiplicity of intermediate steps, that’s systemic causation.
NO DOUBT burning fuels, putting carbon in the air leads eventually to catastrophic weather events.

Our local food and farm scene here in the Dundas Flamborough area is pretty good. For food security the farm infrastructure is good;

• good soil and plentiful water,
• 4 butchers, 4 feed mills, 4+ equipment dealers,
• 2 Agricultural Societies with excellent fall fairs,
• at least one really good men’s service club ,
• a bee club, poultry club and 4H
• and some world class farmers,including some organic dairy cashcroppers and market gardeners,

However we are not isolated from damaging events that happen elsewhere. We can’t duck the knock-on effects of an XL Meat Packers disaster, or a drought in Texas, and there will be more.

So along comes Nicole Foss to Copetown, a 50ish woman who lives with her husband on a farm near Ottawa, with a background in biology and environmental law and she says “I think we need to talk about all this”. She is one of those rare courageous people in my opinion, who see through the deception and false optimism in the mass media; she connects the dots for us and speaks out. She has given hundreds of speeches in 15 countries over the last three years. As a result you can make up your own mind and be more in control of your situation. That my friends, is what resilience within limits is all about.

Food comes from farms, better local farms than far away, Farms need paying customers they can rely on. Families need nutritious affordable food. In a time of disruption to the business as usual world we want to believe in, these are all in question. Nicole asks us to consider what we going to do about that for ourselves and gives us a head start.

Come out on Friday Nov 30th at 1pm to listen, learn and think for yourself. Nicole will speak from 1 to about 2:30 and we’ll have informal discussion from 3 to 5. There will be lots of times for questions.

thank you.