The Rural Voice, 1993-05, Page 10COVER
MORE
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
It all starts with me
Sitting at a meeting recently,
listening to Conservation Hall of
Fame farmer Don Lobb, it occurred
to me how seldom we hear some
words used when it comes to talking
about farming or
any other
business.
Lobb, the
Clinton -area
fanner who has
become a
provincial leader
in conservation
farming, was
talking about the
process that
brought him to
be a sought-after
speaker today.
Lobb talked
about making a
plan for his farm taking in the
environment as well as his farming
operation and doing it "for profit and
peace of mind". Twenty years ago, he
bought the farm next door and
decided to rearrange his fields which
meant taking out a lot of trees along
the old fencerows. He decided to
plant new trees in more convenient
places because, he said, "It helped
my conscience a lot."
Conscience: how many times
have you heard a speaker at a
meeting (not including church) talk
about his conscience lately? What
Lobb was saying was that he has a
responsibility as a landowner to look
after his little corner of the world and
leave it as healthy as he found it.
Responsibility: there's another
word you don't hear used much — at
least as it applies to oneself. Plenty of
people point out how other people
should be more responsible: the gov-
ernment, the unemployed, big bus-
iness, your neighbour ... but few
who will admit "It starts with me".
Responsibility is not a big part of
personal codes in the 1990s. The left-
over attitudes of the "me" generation
have us worried about our "rights"
but seldom about our responsibilities.
Lobb wasn't downplaying the
need for profit. Only if you havea
profit, he said, can you afford to
make improvements to the environ-
ment on your farm.
On the other hand, the actions of
Don and Alison Lobb and the other
leaders in this movement to look at
the whole farm, show that profit isn't
everything. Where does environment
come in, for instance, in the farms
advocated by all those university
economists who claim farmers must
get more efficient, yet that they must
cut their costs and cut some more.
Efficiency means the hog farmer
who has a small, manageable
operation, must handle more hogs,
which means more manure (let's see
the genetic engineers come up with a
pig that doesn't poop). It means that
Ontario's dairy farms are supposed to
have 300 to 500 head of cattle. It
means that farmers are supposed to
grow more and more acres of corn or
soybeans to the point they have so
many acres they don't have time to
know what's going on in any
particular corner of their farm.
The economists continue to treat
farms as if they were factories. If the
economics aren't right, then make it
bigger. Yet unless farmers have a
greater margin, how can they deal
with the waste those farms produce?
Industry, even very profitable
industry, has been infamous for
getting rid of wastes in whatever is
the most profitable way. If it means
polluting air or lakes, so be it. In
recent years, because of public
outcry, governments have started to
crack down, to make companies pay
to clean up their mess. But for
farmers, the very thing that means
they have to get bigger, those low
margins on food, mean they can't
afford to deal with the problems ex-
pansion brings. Is government going
to pay for the pollution larger farms
create or are farmers going to make
enough money from what they grow
to deal with the wastes? And if they
made that much money in the first
place, would they need to get so big?
People like Don Lobb are trying
to be responsible, to make a living
but live with their conscience. Soc-
iety must help them if we want a
better world to live in.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice and
lives near Blyth, Ontario.