The Rural Voice, 1989-05, Page 33basis. They have three children, aged
12, 15, and 19. The eldest is studying
fine art in Michigan, at the Alma
Mater of both Elbert and Nellie.
About a third of van Donkers-
goed's working time is taken up by the
Jubilee Foundation for Agricultural
Research, the research and education
arm of the CFFO set up five years ago
as a non-profit charitable organization.
The foundation is intended to further
the work of the CFFO through those in
the rural and urban community who
don't see themselves as members of a
professional organization for farmers
like the CFFO, van Donkersgoed says.
The foundation's first initiative
was to publish the booklet "Econ-
omics and the Family Farm," one of
the earliest documentations of the
nature of the farm crisis. Today it
helps to support the CFFO magazine,
Earthkeeping, and underwrites the
annual Faith and Agriculture talks
held at the University of Guelph. This
fall, tentatively, the talks will focus on
the pastoral statement of the Catholic
Bishops of Ontario.
environment during Environment
Week this June.
The Jubilee Foundation, van
Donkersgoed says, is likely to get a
yet higher profile in the future, and
may take more of his time. At
present, CFFO staff add up to three
and a half, Jubilee staff to two.
Van Donkersgoed joined the CFFO
as secretary -manager back in 1971,
after having taught primary school at
Calvin Christian School in Drayton
since 1967 (he'd chosen the most rural
school out of the opportunities avail-
able). The list of his activities on
behalf of agriculture is too long to
reprint; when the CFFO executive
nominated van Donkersgoed for an
OMAF Centennial Award last year,
the nomination ran nine pages without
its appendix. One of his current pro-
jects, through Friends of Foodland, a
coalition of citizens' groups, is putting
out a Citizens Guide to Foodland
Preservation, which he hopes with be
in print by the middle of this year.
Recently he was in Perth County as
one of the panelists called together by
"The future of the dominant farming system is that it will more
often bump its limits .... 1 think the dominant farming system
is at a point now that even with normal growing weather it is
probably not going to deliver as we had anticipated."
Other aspects of the Jubiliee
Foundation's efforts are Project Hope,
which is working to encourage self-
help groups in the rural community,
and the financing of the Family Farm
Stewardship Library recently set up at
CFFO headquarters in Guelph and
already being visited by students from
Guelph's university. The library,
which collects CFFO literature and
documents from the past 20 years, was
assisted by a grant from the Environ-
mental Youth Corps, a program of the
provincial Ministry of Skills
Development.
Another grant, this one from
Environment Canada, is helping to
fund a kit called A Sabbath for the
Environment, which suggests that
church pastors offer a service on the
the Perth County Federation of
Agriculture to discuss "A Positive
Look at Agriculture in the '90s." Is
there good reason for optimism? he is
asked. Is the farm crisis over?
The chess player studies the board.
Yes, he replies, if you compare the
"economic pressures that surprised us
in the 1980s" with the better financial
outlook for significant sectors in
agriculture in the 1990s. But, he says,
pointing again to a worrying combin-
ation of a farming system that is
causing the health of the world's land
base to deteriorate and a dependence
on normal or better than normal good
weather, "I've never defined the farm
crisis in purely economic terms."
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MAY 1989 31