Goodbye Rural Exposure
I had no shortages of losses last year. Among them was the end of my volunteering at Fertile Ground farm, a market garden a few kilometres outside of St Agatha. In 2023 I learned that (after nearly fifteen years) farmer Angie would be moving her farm to Neustadt, nearly 100 kilometres away. That was not Angie's fault; she had been renting the land at St Agatha, and she would never be able to afford it, and there is a lot of reason to believe that all the land in the area will be bought up by developers and turned into suburbs.
I was lucky to have this volunteer opportunity. Angie did not take many volunteers on her farm, but Angie had known me for over 20 years (since 2003, I think?) so I was grandfathered in. The farm staff was very tolerant of my many deficiencies. They let me sit outside in the fields and hand-weed carrots exceedingly slowly. Probably I did not help very much, but I tried to be cheap labour that did not cause too many headaches for Angie or the other members of her crew. I didn't succeed at this, but I also wasn't so much of a headache that they uninvited me from volunteering. I am fairly sure no other farm would put up with me, so my days of volunteering in the countryside are probably at an end.
I enjoy(ed) cycling out in rural areas, and I enjoyed being out on Angie's farm, but I am thoroughly a city slicker. Having said that, volunteering on the farm and learning from Angie exposed me to rural life. It was educational to see how Angie changed her farm practices and her attitudes through the years. She was always skilled at bridging naive city slickers with the realities of farming, but as the years passed it was clear how she developed the "rural mindset". I don't know exactly what the "rural mindset" is, but it is pretty different from the crunchy granola activist mindset that I came from. Farming may seem idyllic, but it is not easy and often is not pretty. I never saw how the sausage was made, but I saw enough to appreciate how rural attitudes differ from city ones.
In addition to volunteering on the farm, a few years ago I started listening to Jordan Marr's farming podcast The Ruminant , which has now morphed into a podcast called Farming in BC. Marr is a farmer who has transitioned his farm plan several times. He interviews a lot of other farmers. Listening to these interviews provided further glimpses into "rural mindset".
One jarring realization for me was just how dumb my affinity for vegetarianism is in a rural context. A large part of the reason I am/was vegetarian was because I am too cowardly to kill mammals. But this is dumb for a number of reasons. Firstly, farming is all about killing things. Each week I would kill thousands of plants because they were weeds and not carrots. When tomato hornworms or squash bugs discovered the crops, those insects had to be removed and killed. In this sense killing chickens or pigs or cows for food is not that different. Certainly vegetarians eating eggs and dairy makes no sense at all, because to produce eggs you have to kill the male chicks, and to produce dairy you have to get rid of the male calves. (Maybe there is some utopic future where chickens grow to be meat chickens if they are male and laying hens otherwise, but it does not seem that such chickens are popular today. Similarly, there are meat cows and milk cows, and they aren't the same, so outside of veal you can't turn the male calves into big meaty bulls.) I feel the rural mindset means getting over the sqeamishness of not killing things, because being alive means killing things.
I continue to believe that excessive meat consumption is problematic, but the strict vegan position that animals have no role in agriculture is probably wrong. Angie mostly grows vegetables, but she also has egg hens, and those hens would gobble aphid-infested brassicas with gusto. There is evidence that involving animals in agricultural practices can improve soil health and sustainability. But that is not easy for a city slicker like me to accept.
Another aspect of rural life that I have come to appreciate is the comingling of self-reliance and community. On a farm people have to solve problems and make things work, often without being able to depend on governments to bail them out. But even though people life far from each other on farms, there is a greater sense of community than in most suburbs. People depend upon each other.
In the city we portray farmers as yokels. This has not been my experience at all. Farmers are continually solving problems. They are amongst the most skilled problem-solvers I have seen.
Many people have commented that rural people are friendlier and kinder than city people. I have found this to be mostly true, despite a few bad experiences I have had. (Hello, Wellesley anti-maskers!)
I have a sense for why lots of rural people vote Conservative, and I have some sympathy for those views. (I am not claiming that Conservative support in rural areas is universal.) I can see how people are suspicious of depending on government incentives, and how they oppose government overreach. Rural people tend to be conservationists even if they are not Conservative.
Maybe this is true of all businesses, but I have learned just how much of farming is about business interests. I sense that many farmers really do care about taking care of the earth, and care about the welfare of their livestock, but they are also running businesses, and those business decisions affect so many choices they make. There is an urgency to farm work that I felt much more acutely when volunteering at Fertile Grounds than when I volunteered at urban gardens like the WPIRG garden or the Hacienda Sarria. Time is money. Mistakes cost money. Farmers (at least vegetable farmers) actually exist in the free market, so margins are low. People have to push against those financial constraints all the time.
It was probably volunteering on the farm that got me interested in the Waterloo Region townships, and in particular their municipal politics. That made me more interested in the Countryside Line, and less supportive of turning the Region of Waterloo into a single-tier municipality.
Overall I cannot reconcile myself with "rural mindset", but I have respect for it. It makes a lot more sense to me than the stupid ways we city slickers live. If nothing else rural life seems less hypocritical. I never want to see suffering, but abstractly I do not mind if it exists, which is why I am able to purchase chocolate bars every day despite knowing that cocoa is an exploitative industry.
I wish more people had more exposure to rural attitudes. It makes me upset that the Countryside Line is effectively dead, and that there is no long-term future trying to farm in most of Waterloo Region -- the land is too expensive, and the area is too close to 400-series highways not to be swallowed up by suburbs. (Of course, this itself is a city-slicker attitude. Lots of rural landowners would love to sell their farms to speculators and developers, especially if they can get suburban prices for that land.) I am sure there will continue to be some countryside, and some farming will happen there, but I think that our insistence on "single detached housing for all" means there will be much less, and that it will be less accessible for most people. It has certainly become less accessible for me.