We met her along a suburban crescent of retirement-like houses in Vineland, Ontario. The homes were built in 1990 on local farmland, but looked brand new. Anyway, for semi-retired Patricia Pierce, the setting was perfect – almost opposite her old elementary school and close to the farm where her parents had raised her and thousands of Niagara Peninsula fruit trees.
“I would never have thought in a million years I’d be here in this retirement village,” she said. “But somehow it seems very appropriate.”
Patricia’s family (the Culps) and my wife’s family (the MacAulays) had known each other when the two girls were growing up. When Patricia left Canada for a career in publishing in England, the two kept in touch. In fact we had visited overseas. Patricia and her husband Bob had even put a roof over our daughter’s head one night when Whitney needed a place to land back in the late 1990s.
But when her husband died, Patricia felt a tug back to Canada. And the Vineland retirement village seemed to fit. We visited her last weekend. She gave us a tour of what used to be her family farm and an insight about the future of a Canadian institution. First, we drove up Culp Road.
“Yes, the road is named after my family. They were United Empire Loyalists and one of the first pioneer families to settle in the area,” Patricia said. But she seemed to ignore the new, over-sized houses that now occupy the former Culp peach farm. “I try to imagine they aren’t there.”
Her frustration, at the apparent paving over of much of Niagara’s fruit belt, is shared by her brother Brian and sister-in-law Vallerie. Busier than ever, they’re both retired from farming now and have to settle for a backyard garden where once orchards yielded some of the world’s most sought-after varieties of peaches. But free trade, globalization and the closing of local canneries eclipsed the Culp peach patch in rural Niagara.
“You can’t compete with peaches that come from California and look as fresh or fresher than the ones from here in Vineland,” Vallerie Culp said.
“Except that they don’t have nearly the flavour,” I quickly pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “The ones from California are less expensive. And that’s all that supermarkets care about.”
The disappearance of the Culp peach orchard got me thinking about a couple of related agricultural issues. It’s not so long ago that farmers in our area brought their message about the endangered family farm to the attention of the Uxbridge community. I didn’t attend the event, but I learned later that local representatives presented a united front about the need to support local food production and its indigenous workforce. If not stated at the meeting, between the lines the message (to borrow from the Prime Minister) remains: Use it or lose it.
But maybe the governing Conservatives should take their message about maintaining sovereignty over the Arctic and move it a few degrees of latitude southward. In recent weeks, the agri-business powerhouses have beaten a path to the door of Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. Once a Crown corporation – nationalized by the provincial NDP in 1975, then privatized by the provincial Conservatives in 1989 – today PCS controls 22 per cent of the world’s supply of potash (a fertilizer for increasing food-crop yields).
But Canada’s ownership of this vital natural resource is threatened too. Today, offshore interests from Australia (BHP Billiton) to China and Europe are lining up with bids to buy a majority of PCS shares. A recent survey, however, reveals that a majority in Saskatchewan oppose such a takeover.
“The sense of the discussion is, ‘Is this really a good thing for the province?’” an Insightrex Research spokesperson told reporters.
It may not matter. The decision to allow or disallow the foreign takeover of PCS now rests with the federal government. And since it allowed Brazil’s takeover of Canada’s largest aluminum and nickel mines, and U.S. Steel’s purchase of Canada’s largest steel producer, we can guess where it will come down on potash.
It does not bode well for Canada’s reputation as a food producer. If governments, multi-national corporations and communities blithely sit on the sidelines while others push home-grown food producers aside, what’s the future of Canada’s food production infrastructure? Who will stand up for Canadian consumers when food commodities are threatened?
Last Saturday, as my wife and I left her friend Patricia Pierce in Vineland, she asked, “Are you going to do a story about our failing fruit belt?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The story may already have written itself.”
Without a local food supply (such as the Culp family peach farm) or control of potash sales, we could find ourselves grovelling to import from California or China what was once the bounty in our backyard.