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6 THE RURAL VOICE
FARM CRISIS IS
RURAL CRISIS TOO
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and publisher of The
Rural Voice.
Sometimes, even when you know
something in your heart to be true, you
have to see it with your own eyes
before it sinks in.
On a recent family trip along the
401 from Kitchener in the west to
Newcastle, east of Toronto, along a
stretch of more than 100 miles, I
realized just how immense the urban
sprawl has become.
You can't help but contrast that
explosive growth with what you see
back home in Huron County, where
population growth for the county's
largest municipalities will be only 16
per cent by 2035. By then, unless free
trade backfires completely, Toronto
may have doubled or tripled in size.
In fact, Huron County might only see
growth if Toronto, Kitchener -Water-
loo, and London start converging on it
from different directions.
I've attended meetings recently
where farm leaders have reacted
bitterly to talk from planners that the
local economy needs more diversity.
Trends show there won't be as many
people farming in the future, while
farmers, already feeling swamped by
the trends of the past decade, plead
that their rural county, at least, should
continue to rank agriculture high in
economic importance.
But the sad facts are: we produce
more corn, beans, eggs, and meat
than ever before, but for a host of
reasons, it's taking fewer people to do
it. The snowballing effect of declining
farm populations is shrivelling our
hamlets too. In my lifetime, I can re-
member when little crossroads comm-
unities like St. Augustine, White-
church, and Holyrood were viable
communities with stores, garages,
community halls, and schools. There
were larger thriving hamlets like
Auburn or Bluevale with their own
business centres, while villages like
Lucknow and Brussels bustled with
activity. Today, the hamlets have
declined to the crossroads of 30 years
ago, and the villages to hamlets. It
all happened because the number of
families living on farms declined,
and with better roads it became
convenient for those who remained to
travel further in search of cheaper
goods.
The trend , begun at the end of
World War II, was accelerated by the
high interest rates and low product
prices of the past decade, and has
turned into an avalanche by the cur-
rent farm cash crunch. The danger
isn't that we'll not only lose a huge
.flunk of our farm population, but that
we'll also lose the whole structure of
the communities built to serve that
population.
For many in the "shrug -and -say -
that's -progress" school of economics,
this is how it ought to be. They'll
make noises about how sad it is to
see the rural lifestyle lost, but they'll
say we must have rational economic
decisions in the marketplace.
But as I drove 401 and saw all
those factories and houses, I had to
question the rationale of the economic
system. It surely costs more to buy
land and build a factory in Missi-
ssauga than in Mildmay or Markdale.
And we all know that businesses have
to pay more to employees to work in
Toronto, because of the higher cost of
housing, than in Teeswater or Zurich.
But still, the factories locate there, and
rural communities starve for jobs. If
one year's worth of factory construc-
tion along 401 were divided among
Ontario's small towns, it could
replenish the rural economy for years
to come.
The crisis on the farm is a crisis
for the entire rural way of life. The
job alternatives aren't coming. If
we can't make farming prosperous,
we all may one day be moving to the
factories and the high-rises in Picker-
ing.0