It’s no wonder the next generation has no desire to take over their parents’ farms. A number of agricultural organizations recently tracked the prices of a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four to determine how much money goes back to the average farmer from that bill.
Depending on the food group, the farmers’ share ranged from four per cent for grain products to 51 per cent for milk and alternatives. Farmers spend thousands of dollars, countless hours and their own sweat and tears to produce wheat and grains for our families and for what - four per cent? These hard facts are only complicated by the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak of 2003.
Local farmers are finding it hard to make ends meet and are having to work full-time jobs in addition to tending to their farms on evenings and weekends. They are also being forced to sell of their lands bit by bit to stay in operation. Farmers are essential to our lives, without them, we wouldn’t have cereal in the mornings, sandwiches for lunch or the meat that stars on our dinner plate. But like so many of the Earth’s creatures, local producers are becoming extinct. With an increasing population and agricultural land being developed for housing, Canada is increasingly relying on other countries for our food.
There is no easy solution to the problem. Basing the price of goods on a percentage of what it took to produce them would make healthy foods even more difficult for low income families to afford. Young families have no desire to take over the family farm because of the negative profit margins, but without them who will feed our families?
