As a few stories in this week's newspaper highlight, the popular Alberta Open Farm Days tours will return to our province later this month, providing people in Airdrie and elsewhere the opportunity to visit participating farms, ranches, greenhouses, and other agriculture-related facilities for free to learn about where our food comes from.
In today's urbanized world, most of us have become disconnected from our food sources. We understand the process and what agriculture and the food economy entails, but we've lost a deeper understanding of where our food comes from and how it ends up on our grocery store shelves a few days or weeks later.
That's why the Open Farm Days tours are great – they provide a snapshot into our more rural roots, so to speak. While it was common in the past for prairie-dwellers in Canada to grow up on a farm, (or at least have a parent or grandparent who did), that lifestyle has largely been replaced by a city-oriented society.
Agriculture is in a state of transition across Canada, and mostly gone are the days of passing down the family farm from one generation to the next. And that is concerning. According to a report published earlier this year by RBC, 40 per cent of Canada's farmers are slated to retire in the next decade and roughly two-thirds don't have succession plans. Over the same period, a shortfall of 24,000 general farm, nursery, and greenhouse workers is expected to emerge across Canada.
To combat this impending labour shortage, the Canadian government wants to introduce a plan to recruit tens of thousands of farmers and agriculture workers from abroad. But an obvious barrier, regardless of where Canada's next generation of farmers are from, will be the rising cost of farm land and the overall increased costs of being a farmer.
All the more reason, then, to participate in events like Alberta Open Farm Days. All in all, the tours provide an educational opportunity and the chance to support a local producer directly.
