The Rural Voice, 1997-11, Page 20It's a multicultural experience when everyone gets together at the Canning farm
in Bruce County. Currently living at the farm are (left to right) James Sinclair,
Bernadette Arreola, P.W. Liyanage, Kim Canning, Nimalia Champika, Peter
Canning and Jackie Canning, as well as two children away at school when the
photo was taken.
They come from different backgrounds but their
time together on a Bruce County farm is a
SHARED EXPERIENCE
By Keith Roulston
The sound of hammering and
sawing comes from within the
old driving shed. Inside a crew
of workers, male and female, skins of
different hues, is busy converting the
building to a wool shed.
This is truly a multicultural
experience, Peter Canning chuckles
later over coffee in the house. Of the
group around the table, only Peter's
wife Jackie is what you'd think of as
stereotypically Canadian. Then
there's Peter, who was born in
Australia; James Sinclair, a native
Ojibway from Selkirk, Manitoba;
16 THE RURAL VOICE
Bernadette Arreola from Ottawa who
was born in the Philippines. Then
there are the two guests to Canada,
Nimalia Champika and P.W.
Liyanage. They're here to experience
a cross-cultural exchange and they're
certainly getting it.
Arreola and Sinclair are the
Canadian half of an agricultural
exchange program sponsored by the
Sri Lanka/Canada Development
Fund under Canada World Youth.
They're partnered, respectively, with
Champika and Liyanage who are in
Canada through the South Asia
Partnership Canada. They'll spend 10
weeks in Canada, living on farms in
Bruce and Wellington Counties,
before returning to Sri Lanka where
the Canadians will live in Sri Lankan
homes and work alongside their Sri
Lankan partners.
In the Ontario part of the
exchange, the eight Canadians and
eight Sri Lankans are living on farms
ranging from a cash crop farm near
Elora to a dairy farm, a pig farm and
an organic farming operation. The
Cannings' is one of two sheep farms
in the exchange and Sinclair says one
of the reasons they picked this farm
was because fall lambing is coming
up and they felt it would be a new
experience. In fact, for Liyanage and
Champika sheep are a new
experience. There aren't many sheep
on the island of Sri Lanka and when
they first saw sheep they wondered if
they were wooly goats.
Though the Cannings' 100 -acre
farm is small by Canadian standards
(and tiny by the standards of Peter's
native Australia) it's huge by the
standards of Sri Lanka where the
average private land holding may be
one-half acre to five acres (the large
tea and coffee plantations may be
200-300 acres in size). Farmers there
may keep a few cows, pigs and
chickens, says Liyanage, thus it was
an eye-opening experience when Sri
Lankans saw the dairy operation of
Ralph and Jane Dietrich nearby
where 50 dairy cows are milked
daily.
Sri Lanka has a population of 18
million people on a land base
slightly larger than Nova
Scotia, so one of the surprises for the
Sri Lankans is the space in Canada,
the idea you can drive down a field
and not see anyone.
On the Canning farm they have
had the opportunity to take part in
Canadian farming practices like
cleaning barns with a skid -steer
loader and spreading manure. In Sri
Lanka there isn't much use of such
large equipment and most farm tasks
are done by hand.
They also get to see farming
practices that are innovative even by
Canadian standards. The Cannings,
for instance, no -till winter rye into
their fields and use it to extend the
grazing season, getting up to two fall
and three spring grazings off the land