Everyone has a farmer in their background

The seed arrives at school in an envelope, or a twist of paper, or loose in a coat pocket with lint stuck to it. It came off a tomato grown on a balcony, or in a backyard, or on a strip of ground behind a garage, by somebody's mother or grandmother, who saved it the way you save something you cannot buy here. The child carrying it does not call this agriculture. It is just what the family does with tomatoes. By June there is a shoebox of these envelopes in a greenhouse on the second floor of a school in the middle of Toronto, and a teacher trying to keep up with what the children keep bringing him.

His name is Dan Kunanec. He teaches technological design at Don Mills Collegiate Institute in Toronto, where he also leads the Green Industries program, and he has been in the building for twenty-six years. He did not set out to be a teacher. He dropped out of school, worked in the design and build trades, and by the mid-nineteen-nineties his options had come down to what he lists without much affection: police officer, firefighter, or a reluctant teacher. Today he runs the campus farm attached to the school. There is a pond in the courtyard, a greenhouse, an aquaponics system, an orchard of forty trees, and a kitchen that took eight years to finish. He teaches in what he describes as "the most multicultural school, I think, in the city."

The claim this chapter is built on arrives while he is explaining where the food comes from, which turns out to be the students. "So the favourite foods, the ways of doing, everyone has a farmer in their background, or multiple, or builders or growers or cooks or chefs."

Everyone. That is the claim of an emerging culture, and it is also the reason the claim is easy to make and hard to prove. Anyone can say that farming is being taken up by people who do not look like farmers. The question worth a chapter is whether it can be shown.

The part of the farm population that is growing

It can, and the way to show it is the census.

Between 2016 and 2021 the number of people in Canada's farm population who identify as Indigenous rose 6.0 per cent, to 16,705. Over the same decades the farm population as a whole kept falling, down 62.2 per cent since 1971. Set those two movements beside each other and something unusual appears: a part of farming that grew while everything around it shrank. The 2016 portrait adds a detail that runs against the sector's standard story about age. The average age of Métis and First Nations agricultural operators was 52.3 years, against 55.0 for everyone else.

Younger, and arriving. Which is exactly where the numbers get dangerous, because a growing population inside a shrinking one can be read as a gift to a sector short of bodies, and that is the reading the people doing the growing are most wary of. Charles Levkoe holds the Canada Research Chair in Equitable and Sustainable Food Systems at Lakehead University, and he names the mistake from the inside. "It's easy to look up and say, Hey, there's so much land, and why aren't people farming?"

The land is there. The reason the people are not is a history, and the history earns its place here for the one thing it explains about the present. Camden Lawrence works with First Nations Agriculture and Finance Ontario, an organization that has been lending to First Nations farm and agribusiness owners since 1984. He describes where the communities ended up: "a lot of our First Nation communities are in, have been moved to, are now are in the worst spots for agriculture, right?" Ground that is not prime, in places far from the market, and often off reserve entirely, because "most of the agricultural startups that we have are off the reserve due to the kind of the restraint of land in a community."

Then there is the gate that was closed on purpose, and whose effect is present tense. "They weren't eligible for quota because they were First Nation." The producers who were shut out of supply management in the years it was created are the ones with nothing to pass on now.

Those two movements join where the farms change hands. The farm population is shrinking while it ages, and the one part of it that is growing is also the youngest part. Camden Lawrence puts the two facts together as a question he asks of the whole arrangement: "How come our first nations aren't being the ones in line to buy these farms?"

The question is reconciliation being done for real, and it is material rather than ceremonial. Land and quota and a place in the market returned to the people the gate was closed against, on the ground they choose and at commercial size. What the exclusion interrupted was larger than eligibility. "We've gotten out of kind of the, I dunno, the kind of the small scale helping each other working together." What stopped was a way of farming that ran on neighbours helping each other, so getting it back is a change in culture as much as a change in title.

These two strands keep turning out to be one story, because the lender and the teacher are trying to reach the same person: the next one to farm. Camden Lawrence asks, "how do we create that love for agriculture", and a teacher in Toronto answers with a greenhouse on the second floor of a school.

Participation, not self-sufficiency

What Indigenous agriculture is for, in Camden Lawrence's account, runs against what a sympathetic reader might expect.

He is describing his organization's strategy, and the words that carry it are a question addressed to the whole province. "Why aren't first Nations also try feeding the whole province, right?" That is not self-sufficiency as a goal. It is a claim on the market, at commercial size, with the leverage every other producer wants. He knows precisely what he is asking for, because "the problem with agriculture is it's a, it's a game of scale".

The North Shore does not want to be Southern Ontario

Here is the turn that makes this a chapter about culture rather than a chapter about market share. He describes a community in Southern Ontario running two thousand acres of cash crop. He describes communities on the North Shore, whose ground is nothing like it. Nobody takes the southern operation north and hands it over. They go looking for what the northern ground is actually good for.

"So then the North Shore guys, it's like, well, you're prime for maple syrup, right?"

Then the question that decides everything after it, and it is not a question about margins. "It's what does the community want to do?"

One organization, several ways of farming, and each answer given by the people who live where the answer has to work. Levkoe's own field arrived at the same recognition from the other direction. He has watched organic standards turn from a movement's convictions into a list of things you cannot do, and he notes the thing that pushed them there: "different, different, different places required different kinds of farming practises."

Thirty kilometres

Raj Thandhi makes the point on a scale smaller than a province and larger than a farm. She is an independent chef and recipe developer who publishes Punjabi recipes as Pink Chai Living, and she grew up in a Punjabi household in Canada, watching her own food get filed under one word by everyone outside it. "Indian food is generally sort of homogenised under one bucket", she says, and then the words that end the argument: "you can cross 30 kilometres in India and you're in a new language, a new culture, a new food identity."

Thirty kilometres. Not a border or a continent. A morning's drive. If plurality is that fine grained inside one region of one country, then an emerging culture of Canadian farming cannot be one thing either. Kunanec uses the negative version of the same thought when he describes what his school's growing spaces are not: "It's not one farmer's monoculture corn crop, GMO across a dirt road beside another farmer's."

Kunanec states the positive half too, and it names what he is actually teaching: "there is, there is a difference and there is an appreciation, about those differences and there's a respect about those differences." A classroom of children whose families came from somewhere else is not a problem the farm program works around. It is the farm program.

What the missing grain costs is easiest to see in what nobody planted. Thandhi tells a story about a blueberry grower in British Columbia with an herb growing wild on his land, a plant the operation treated as a weed and his grandmother treated as food. "His grandma was like, do you know in India we used to cook with this?" Thandhi's summary of the situation is the chapter's thesis in miniature: "there's a demand for this thing, which is growing like a weed in bc."

The plate carries the same information without a farm attached. She describes what Canadian household food actually looks like, against the picture on the package: "the plates in home kitchens in Canada, they do not always look like meat and potatoes." Her own working method is to keep the local name, then find the words that let a stranger follow it: "my focus really is documenting, preserving heritage, Punjabi recipes, and also making them accessible to North American cooks".

Inheritance

Kunanec's classroom is where all of this arrives as vegetables. He starts with his mother, and the thing she made, and where she was from: "I'll tell a story about this is how my mom, you know, makes, uh, sauerkraut or kaputo, I'm Ukrainian." Then the children answer with theirs, and what accumulates in a Toronto greenhouse is a chain of grandmothers. What followed surprised him. They began to prize the food that had been the least fashionable and the most necessary: "start to appreciate like peasant foods, the foods that were the most necessary to survive are the favourites." And then the seeds started coming in, in pockets and envelopes, "and so we'll create, you know, a, a place to grow that stuff."

What is being remembered there is a food culture, in a building that had no farm, in a neighbourhood where nobody was a farmer, by children whose families came from somewhere else. It did not arrive with a policy or a program. It arrived in pockets.

A farm in the middle of the city

The classroom that received those pockets is an argument of its own about where farming is going. The campus farm at Don Mills Collegiate is a working operation inside city limits: a greenhouse, a pond, an orchard of forty trees, an aquaponics system, a kitchen. It is educational, and it is not a lesson in the abstract, because the students plant and tend and cook. Kunanec is blunt about what the city can do that the open country cannot. "Some of this stuff can be done in the city better than in a, in a rural area because of these microclimates."

That reverses the usual assumption, and the reversal matters. Urban agriculture is usually treated as the poor cousin, a school project set against the real acres. The greenhouse and courtyard are somewhere food actually grows, and at certain times of year Kunanec can grow what a big flat field cannot, because the city holds heat, breaks the wind, and makes a thousand small climates. The same advantage is being taken up commercially, by rooftop greens and market gardens inside city limits, by growers selling to a restaurant two streets over. Farming is no longer something a person has to leave the city to reach.

What leaves when a person leaves

The counterweight to all of that growth is what this kind of culture loses, and how quietly. Jordyn Domio is the president of the Junior Farmers Association of Ontario, which is where a lot of young rural people learn the institutional half of farming: how a board works, how a policy gets written, how to be the youngest person in the room and still be heard. She is describing what happens when a volunteer's time ends, and she is describing something larger than a volunteer. "You either you age out, you move on, you go to something different and then you lose that knowledge set."

She is talking about an organization's memory, and the same loss is at work across the industry. It sets the limit on every claim in this chapter about emergence. A culture is not only what it grows. It is what it can carry forward, and some of it leaves with the people who learned it, because nobody wrote it down anywhere the next person could find it.

Domio is also the other direction, and her own words are the ones to keep in view. "No matter how hard I tried to get away from agriculture in my schooling years, I always found myself back into it". The culture holds people who try to leave it. It just does not hold everything they knew.

Who gets to speak

There is a rule that governs how a book handles material like this, and it comes from someone well placed to notice the alternative. Levkoe, a settler academic who works with First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario on food systems research, says where his own work stops: "I never would want to speak for an indigenous community." And then what he does instead: "I don't have that experience, but I can learn from them."

That is the position this chapter takes as well, and it explains what is on the page and what is not. Camden Lawrence's account of lending, land and quota appears because he said it, about work he does every day. The knowledge that communities hold about their own land, their own seeds, their own ways of harvesting is not summarized here, because it is not the book's to carry, and a book that paraphrased it would be doing the flattening it claims to argue against. The people are not raw material. They are standing in the field, and they can speak for themselves.

Plurality is a method, not a courtesy

The reason this matters beyond manners is that plurality is where the useful knowledge comes from. Levkoe's field, agroecology, is where that claim is most explicit. It resists definition because it is not a set of inputs; it is, in the words he borrows from peasant gatherings around the world, "the kind of how to of food sovereignty", the practice half of the argument that the people who produce and harvest food should control the food system.

What it corrects is a habit of instruction. He describes the food literacy he sees most often as "quite narrow and quite limited, and often just supporting the status quo", a set of rules passed to people who are assumed to be doing it wrong. His alternative is not a longer list. It is "bringing all these different ways of knowing together and not believing there's one right way or there's one wrong way", on the grounds that "multiple things can be true at the same time."

He takes that position to its uncomfortable end. "We always talk about how broken the food system is, and I would say, I don't think the food system's broken at all." Something broken is waiting to be repaired back into the shape it had. Something working as designed is waiting on a decision about what it is for. Those are different jobs, and the second one is the one this book is arguing about.

Cabral in the greenhouse

The thinker who belongs in this chapter was an agronomist before he was anything else. Amílcar Cabral led the independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and before that he ran the agricultural survey that established what the country's farmers were actually doing, which became the ground his politics stood on rather than the decoration attached to it. He began from the ground, which is the agronomist's habit. His argument, in Return to the Source and across his writing, is that culture is not an ornament on a people's life. It is the ground of their freedom, and it grows out of practice rather than being declared in advance. The way to know a people is to watch what they do with their hands and listen to what they say about it, and the theory comes afterwards, to name what is already being done.

This chapter has been running that method the whole time, which is the argument for putting the classroom at its centre. The census heard the population, and found the one part of it that grew. Camden Lawrence and Levkoe and Thandhi and Kunanec each describe the practice of it in their own words, and the culture shows up as the ground they all stand on. Nobody designed a Punjabi-Canadian food culture, or an Indigenous agricultural strategy for northern Ontario, or a Ukrainian sauerkraut lesson in a Green Industries program. Each one grew out of what people were already doing with what they had. The culture is downstream of the work. Which is why a book about the future of farming cannot be assembled from a theory about the future of farming. It has to be built out of what growers are doing, and it has to use their words.

Cabral's survey is the method. He went and asked, kept the answers, and let the theory come after. That is the Situation.

The Situation: the interview you keep

Find one person who grows food. A neighbour with three tomato plants on a balcony, somebody with hens behind a garage, a grandparent with a garden, a vendor at the market who also farms, or the farmer whose field you drive past on the way to somewhere else. Any of them.

Ask three questions and stop when they have been answered. What do you grow? Why that? Who taught you?

If they agree, record it on a phone, and then write down what they said word for word. The word for word is the whole thing. Keep the false start, the name they use for the plant, the detour about an aunt, the sentence that trails off. The part you are tempted to tidy is the part carrying the culture.

Read it back when you are finished. What you have is a page of somebody's agriculture in their own words, which is more than most of the documents written about the sector contain. Keep it. It will be worth more in ten years than it is today.

Moves you can make

Nothing in this chapter waits on a policy or a cheque. The barrier to getting into farming is cultural more often than it is financial, and so is the fast track.

Ask the person who taught you to grow or cook one thing, what they grew and who taught them, and write the answer down where it will survive. In a city that is the neighbour with tomato plants on a balcony; on a farm it is the person across the fence. Somebody near you has a farmer in their background. The fast track runs through them.

Look at the ground you have been calling wasted. The strip behind a garage, the corner nobody uses, the plant you have been treating as a weed. Ask what it is actually good for, and who in the room already knows. A blueberry grower called a herb a weed until his grandmother asked why he was not cooking with it.

If you are in a position to hand somebody ground, or run a program or a fund or a classroom, the question that decides everything is not what the land should do but what the community wants to do. Camden Lawrence runs an entire organization on that one question, and it works as well pointed at a vacant lot as at a northern sugarbush.

Open questions

Whether an emerging culture is best served by being documented at all, given that the writing down is also a way of fixing something that was alive.

Whether the newest arrivals in this culture, the ones teaching themselves to build the small tools their farms need, are a new chapter or the next form of what the last three chapters have described.

And whether the child with the envelope of seeds, whose family already knows how to grow things, is better described as a new farmer or as a farmer the sector had not been counting.

The culture here is doing something with its hands, and it has never needed to wait for permission. The gate it faces was closed by people, which means it can be opened by people too, and the fast track was always a teacher, a grandmother, a neighbour who grows, a lender who asks what the community wants. That is the hopeful thing about a culture of farming running under the surface of the industry: it does not wait on a policy or a program, and it is being walked right now. The next question is what happens when those hands need a tool that nobody has built yet, and that is the next chapter.