Land use Regulations in Alberta

[Deb]

Just out of curiosity, what would be wrong with having more farmers on the land and each one with a "self-sustaining slightly more than hobby farm" with a little extra to sell at the local market? No exporting food, but so what. We'd all eat and eat healthier and our communities would become more healthy as well.

[Deb]

having more families on the land is just what most of us would like to see Deb.......

The unfortunate thing about all of this is that with the increases that we have seen in our generation alone, we can't afford to send our kids to college, or buy a decent vehicle, or buy a modest piece of equipment farming the same size of farm, or raising the same number of animals that our fathers did. The margins that we get now for livestock and grains just don't cover a lot of the bills that are made just to put the crop in. The bankers and lawyers in their foresighted nearsightedness says that we have to produce more, on less margin to keep up with the JONES/Other countries in this annoying new world we call the Global Village.

As a result the number of acres, or the number of hogs or the number of cattle that a single farmer has to look after just keeps increasing. We don't have the luxery of a raise increase (or paid vacations) like some of the the new generation Anti-farm groups do that are preaching how we should be farming. Unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, when these groups come to some communities to fight the nasty corporate barns and ILO factories, they are also alienating many of the farmers that are still trying to farm on a smaller scale. Rules being imposed in some RM's are making it necessary for even the family with 40 sows, or 50 cows, etc to make some expensive upgrades to their farms.

One of the latest Stats Canada reports says that on many farms, the off farm income is contributing most of the income that is keeping the farm running. Why not let us keep another couple of hundred hogs, or add another couple of pens to our feed lot? These outside groups are just making it harder for many of us to do what we are trying to do.

I'm not frustrtated by any of these groups on a personal basis by the way, but with the media attention that they are getting, it won't be long before their vision of the agriculture scene could make Canada a net importer of food

[dalek]

Deb it's one of those cutesy-pie acronyms somebody spent a week dreaming up but I can't think of it right now so maybe it didn't work as well as they hoped.
As for your other question, I guess it depends on what your definition of self-sustaining is. A lot of the people in these groups that I see seem to think self-sustaining for a farmer is something that will give that farm family roughly the same lifestyle as their grandparents or great-grandparents had, yet few of them would accept that same lifestyle now for their own families.
Life changes. Most of these people in this area think I should be farming the same size farm as my grandfather when he was my age, but you can't turn back the clock on technology. When he was my age, he was milking 15-

20 cows by hand, shipping to the cheese factory half a mile a way, pumping all the water for them by hand. The farm was still 20 years away from hydro and 15 years from their first tractor, they hadn't heard of even a square baler yet, and all the manure was taken out in a wheelbarrow to a horse-drawn spreader and spread as close to the barn as possible year round.
If I was to work the same ground and animals today that he did, even with some minimal technology (round baler, front-end loader, pipeline) it would take me about an hour and a half a day. Why should I expect to make a full-time living working much less than part-time?
The group here is now advocating farming on the scale of the late 40s or early 50s, yet Dr. Surgeoner from the University of Guelph did a study in the early 90s comparing 1951 practices to 1991 practices and found that in 1951 it took anywhere from 2 to about 3.5 times as much feed to produce a kg of meat (higher for chicken, lowest for beef), more than twice as much manure was produced for each kg of meat produced, and that if the Ontario hog industry of today used the same practices as in 1951 it would take nearly twice as much farmland to produce the same amount of food, roughly 9 times the area of the city of Greater Toronto extra for pork alone. The land just isn't there.