The Rural Voice, 1985-11, Page 72HAVE SAW, WILL TRAVEL
• Custom Sawmilling
• Cants • Ties • Timbers
• Dimension Lumber
Any diameter log up to 33 feet long. All work done
on your site.
KOOPMAN WOOD SALES, Box 671,
Harriston, Ont. NOG 1ZO, 519-338-2527.
ATTENTION
Commercial Pork
Producers:
In March of 1984. we began the purchase of
purebred Landrace gilts from Tony Vandendool.
Clinton and purebred York boars from Bodmin Ltd..
Brussels. both of which are rated "Excellent" under
the Ontario Herd Health Policy. We are using the
facilities of Bev Brown. Bluevale, plus our own barn
at Wingham. Our health status Is presently rated
"Good" under the Ontario Herd Health Policy. Our
average carcass index is 107. A select number of
these F-1 Landrace/York ailts are available. Em
quiries are welcome. Please call 357-2096 (home) or
335.3182 (barn) anytime
SANDY & SUSAN FAIR
FAIR FAMILY FARM
R.R. 4, Wingham
519-357-2096
TOP QUALITY
BRED GILTS
YORK X LANDRACE
Sound legs &
Excellent Mother Ability.
Open Gilts
READY FOR SERVICE
References Available
UNIQUE PRICING FORMULA '
LAURENCE
VANDEN HEUVEL
R.R. #2, Goderich
519-524-4350
54 THE RURAL VOICE
KEITH ROULSTON
Farm policy designed
to deplete farm population
The general trend to the "right" in
politics is welcome to most people in
rural areas. Most rural people were
never enthralled with the growing
movement toward the welfare state.
We've always looked after our own
in rural communities. The welfare
state is designed to meet the problems
of an impersonal society where peo-
ple are numbers in the counterparts
of huge industrial corporations or
lost tenants in apartment buildings
where people are crowded in like hens
in a cage -laying barn.
A greater percentage of people in
rural areas than in large communities
are self-employed whether on the
farm or as tradesmen. Most other
rural people are employed by small
firms where they work fairly closely
with the boss.
We also have a tradition of doing
things for ourselves rather than sit-
ting back and waiting for the govern-
ment to do it for us. This tradition is
being whittled away by subsidies and
transfers from senior governments to
our local townships or towns and
villages, but still we've retained many
of the go -it -alone attitudes of our
parents and grandparents. So the
message of a Ronald Reagan, a Brian
Mulroney, or a Michael Wilson has
been welcomed readily in rural
Canada.
We are ready to agree with the idea
that we must be more self-sufficient,
that we can't rely on the government
because the government is really only
borrowing money from us to pay for
services. It can't go on forever.
There's just one problem with the
self-sufficiency angle when it comes
to rural Canada. At the same time as
the government is asking us to take
more responsibility for ourselves, it is
perpetuating policies which will en-
sure that there will be fewer of us to
solve our own problems. In the past
few years, the depletion of the rural
population, particularly the farm
population, has actually accelerated
the post-war trend that has cut the
farming population to a fraction of
what it once was.
Farmers on rural concessions once
practised the ultimate in in-
dependence from government. Each
farmer was expected to work on his
portion of the concession road each
year and keep the road in front of his
property in passable condition. The
system didn't work and was ultimate-
ly abandoned because some farmers
were more skilled or more conscien-
tious than others, but it graphically il-
lustrated the individual's contribu-
tion to the good of all. Later we paid
taxes so that professionals could
maintain uniformly good roads in the
townships, but the situation remained
the same: we each paid our share of
keeping up the road, either by work
or by tax money.
But think what it would be like if
the system were in place today. As
families are driven off the land, the
chunk of road a farmer would have to
look after gets longer and longer. In
some parts there are a couple of miles
between one occupied farm house
and the next.
We don't have to do it, of course,
but we do have to pay somebody else
to do it. If the farmer who occupies,
say, five farms today earned five
times as much as five individual
farmers of the old days, then this
kind of independence might be possi-
ble. But he doesn't. Today the farmer
with 500 acres is likely to be less well
off than an owner of 100 acres at the
turn of the century.
The problem is that you can't ex-
pect people to be self-sufficient when
you have policies that bankrupt them.
Conservatives are complaining about
farm subsidies at exactly a time when
farm prices are depressed and farmers
are suffering from policies designed
to deplete the farm population.
It's the same kind of thinking that
looks at unemployment insurance as
a problem and seeks to solve it not by
providing more jobs, but by throwing
people (many of whom really want to
work) off the unemployment in-
surance rolls. You can't be self-
sufficient if your income isn't suffi-
cient in the first place. ❑
Keith Roulston is the originator and
former publisher of The Rural Voice.