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The Citizen, 1988-06-01, Page 5THE CITIZEN. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1. 1988. PAGE 5. BY KEITH ROULSTON The farms of Huron county have grown more than corn and cattle over the years as the list of farm leaders who came from Huron show. Names like Gordon Hill, Bob Allan, the late Malcolm Davidson, Delores Shapton and Ruth Osborn, for instance, were all among the winners of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture’s Centennial awards for contribution to agriculture last month. So was the name of another former Huron resident who holds a unique place in Ontario rural life. Sinceheleftthefamilyfarm in Howick township Elbert van Donkersgoed has become, notonly one of the busiest farm leaders in Canada, but one of the few voices that looks beyond the short-term economic issues of farming to the real problems and strengths of rural life. He and the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario (CFFO), of which he is Research and Policy Director, have become a sort of conscience of farming. The vision of the CFFO, he says in his crowded Guelph office last week, is to find the balance between economic aspects of life and the non-economic, intrinsic values of life. Public life is dominated by economic motivation but the really important things on a personal level are not economic; things like family, our environment, and beautiful sunsets. “We (the CFFO) in some respects playa unique role,’’ he says. “We don’t want to ignore economics but we want to balance it’’ with the non-economic things that matter in personal lives, the things that add to the quality of people’s lives. This tendency of the CFFO that tends to look beyond the simple economic aspects of farming as other farm groups has given it an influence far beyond its relatively small No victory yet on land stewardship fight membership of 600 farm families. Recently, for instance, land stewardship, something the CFFO has been talking about for years, has become part of Ontario government policy with the Land Stewardship Program. While it is legitimate for the CFFO to be pleased with the government’s recognition of the issue the group has championed Mr. van Donkersgoed says, he would not declare it a victory. Society hasn’t begun to accept the whole problem. The CFFO has “flagg­ ed” land stewardship as an issue but the real pattern of development still tends to be economic. It still seems natural to cities to roll out onto the next acre of farmland or to see agriculture concentrate on getting that extra bushel off each acre no matter what the long-term cost. “Land is more than commodity’ ’ he says. ‘ * Land makes people bigger than they are. ’ ’ His thinking goes beyond farming to philosophy when he says that for democracy to work there must be economic democracy before there can be political democracy. One of the best ways to have economic democracy is for people to own land, not just for the economic reasons but for the instrinsic values. When people cherish land because their great-grandparents cleared it, it guarantees people will take more interest in it, he said. “If the only reason to own land is economic, it will inevitably move into very few hands, ” he says, and democracy will be at risk. The mixture of a sense of morality with a realistic economic base goes back to the founding of the CFFO in 1954 with the amalgamation of four groups in southwes­ tern Ontario that had sprung up among immigrant farmers from Holland. There was a practical need for the groups because most of the members didn’t know the English language well and many also didn’t know the specifics of farming under Ontario condi­ tions. The groups helped them share their experience and find companionship at the same time as they developed into better farmers. But there was also the confessional or religious side of the organizations. Holland’s three major farm organizations were organized on religious lines with a joint committee to pull them together. And sowhen the organizational meetings of the CFFO took place in Woodstock and Strathroy the basis for future policies, combining the economic with the “intrinsic values’’ part of farming was laid down. Today although the members of the CFFO are Canadian though often of Dutch background (Mr. van Donkersgoed says he probably knows less of Holland than Canadian veterans who served there during World War II) the same philosophy holds true. Mr. van Donkersgoed, so linked in the public mind with the organization today, joined the CFFO as a fieldman in 1971. He had been born in Holland but grew up in The CFFO outgrew his Drayton house Howick on the family farm. He studied at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and earned a degree in philosophy. For many years the CFFO virtually operated out of the house he and wife Nellie lived in in Drayton. Today CFFO has its own quarters on the second floor of a house-turned-office-build- ing in downtown Guelph. Today the office is manned by several workers, not just himself. His initial vision, he says, was to build an alternative farm organization. Democracy must be fundamentally based on a question of values, he says. If there are no values then democracy becomes nothing more than vote buying, giving the voters what they want whether it is right or not. The role as the conscience of agriculture hasn’t always been comfortable. When the troubles of the early 1980’s broke on the farm community, Mr. van Donkersgoed broke with the prevailing feeling that if only the good old days of the 1970’s expansion period, days of high prices for land and high prices for farm products could be returned, all would be well. He says now that he was uncomfortable with the way things were going in the boom years but he wasn ’t able to put his finger on what bothered him: “I couldn’t pin the tail on the donkey. I couldn’t articulate what was wrong. I was caught in the rhetoric of the day,” he recalls. But when the high interest rates sent the whole system of capital intensive farming crashing down his ideas became more focussed and he started saying that the 1970’s were part of the problem and a return to the glory days was notasolution. Itwas, he recalls, hard for many farmers to swallow. He remembers a two-day conference in 1983 in London organized by seven different farm groups. He delivered a paper that I focussed on the importance of the moderate­ sized family farm and he said the 1970 ’ s type farm growth should not come back. His views have not always been popular Afterward, although there were three people on the panel for the question and answer period, about 95 per cent of the questions (most were really statements, he says) took issue with his view and they were greeted by applause by about a third of the audience. In some respects it was difficult to give some of the talks he did during that period, he says. He remembers speaking to a CFFO meeting in Kent county and one of the members after his talk questioned him saying the CFFO members were a people of hope “and you’re giving us no hope”. “He was right,” Mr. van Donkersgoed says now. Looking at the short-term reality of the farm crisis of the 1980’s, it was easy to get a very bleak outlook. That’s why after the 1 1 1 a\Q ■■■- 1 j j 9 Wk 11 1 3*WL k t I F 1 Jubilee Foundation for Agricultural Re­ search was set up by the CFFO (he is research director for the Foundation) its first project was to publish the book ‘ ‘ Economics and the Family Farm”. The Jubilee Foundation represents a change in direction for Mr. van Donkersgoed andfor the CFFO. One of his aims within the Federation, he says, was to help develop an alternativeleadership. Partof his philo­ sophy of how society develops is that not only must there be new ideas but there must be “legs under the ideas,” people who will carry those ideas forward. Part of his work has been to function as a resource person for the leaders of the Federation, to help them develop as a different kind of farm leadership than that of other farm organiza­ tions. Nowthatthere is enough leadership in the Federation he can start changing his own focus. “It’s a very clear intention for me to spend more time with the Jubilee Founda­ tion,” he says. He sees it as a natural progression as he devoted more of his time and energy at long-term problems of agriculture. “It’snot enough for 600 families (the CFFO membership) to worry about land stewardship.” More people must become involved, even those who may not be comfortable being members of the Federa­ tion. Setting up the Family Farm Stewardship Library by the Jubilee Foundation is one of those ways of getting more people outside the federation interested. Much of the reading material has been collected by Mr. van Donkersgoed over the years but he was the only person who knew howto use it. Now, he says, he wants to make it comfortable for anyone doing research of such things as the impact of the value of quotas on the family farm, for instance, to use the libraries resources. He doesn’t expect the CFFO membership to pick up the whole tab for keeping library going. There are already 400 others who help support the Foundation’s work and he hopes it may grow to thousands in the future. There was a time when he felt a less philosophical approach to solving farm problems was needed. In the 1981 provincial election he ran for the Liberals. Although he says it was a good experience in personal growth, he’sgladnowhedidn’t win the seat. “I would be a very uncomfortable, and probably very obnoxious, backbencher” he says. He has “great difficulty” with the direction the government is going in in areas of that delicate balance between economics and other values. The present government is certainly no improvement over previous Progressive Conservative administrations, he says. Although not ruling out the possibility of trying politics in the future, he says that for now he’sglad to be on the outside. There are Somebody must speak against unrestricted growth so many people who will speak for the destruction of farmland to build 3000- square-foot homes but not enough to speak against it, he says. Much of the promotion of alternatives can be done by non-government agencies, he says and he can see how non-government agencies can do much more in solving problems. He praises, for instance, the Ontariogovernment’suseofthe Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association to administer the Land Stewardship Program, ietting people themselves solve problems. Getting people involved in the solution of problems is one way to strengthen demo­ cracy, and for Elbert van Donkersgoed, farm philosopher, strengthening democracy is a goal worth spending a life promoting.