Funny Farms

As James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency, has put it: “The age of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad is coming to an end.” Between January and July of this year Canada imported $12.2 billion of its fresh and processed food; an oil shortage would make shipping fruit and vegetables from California or Chile or China in the winter months prohibitively expensive. As the fuel that spawned suburbanization and competitive factory farming becomes scarce, we’ll look closer to home for sustenance.

This will mean not only a major shift in resources, but a shift in the way we think about everything from land use to labour. Instead of about 2.6 percent of the population engaged in farming, 16 percent of whom are right on the doorstep of suburbia, Kunstler envisages the revival of a native-born farm-labouring class in a distinctly rural setting.

He also imagines a return to small farms that feed ten people using traditional methods of agriculture in place of the agribusinesses, which currently feed about 125 on average. “The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational,” he writes. “Food production will necessarily be much more labour-intensive than it has been for decades.”

What natural resources will be available for all this is another question. Statscan reports that only 5 percent of the country’s soil is free from severe constraints to crop production. Moreover, by 2001 half of Canada’s urbanized land had been developed on dependable agricultural land. That land can’t be reverted for farming. As Gregory Greene, director of the documentary The End of Suburbia, says, “There’s no Plan B for agriculture. Once you’ve lost the soil, it doesn’t help to go organic.”

Meanwhile, Tom Chudleigh’s business continues to boom. On a typical Sunday in October, there are so many cars at the entrance that Chudleigh has to hire a traffic cop to direct visitors into the parking lot. Since he started charging admission in 1996, he has tried to be present to greet his guests as they make their way to his orchards. There, from row upon row of manicured trees, tourists pick a souvenir of farm life, a memento mori.