Retrospect: mixed farming

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor reflects about global versus local economic activity.

I lived in the Annapolis Valley 1980-83. I was just a kid then; perhaps because of that, my time there made deep impressions on me. Interestingly, I continue to realize new ideas from that place as I get older. (As of late, it seems, I qualify for the seniors’ discount in some contexts, which my wife loves to bring up.)

In the Annapolis Valley, a lot of the kids I knew in school were farmers. Many were mixed farmers, or even, it seemed, subsistence farmers. For instance, they raised chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, etc. They either ate those chickens themselves, or sold them; same with their eggs. They drank milk their cows produced; they ate pork from their pigs, and lamb from their sheep.

Typically, those farmers also had large vegetable gardens as well as hayfields, cornfields, and orchards. They fed their livestock from the hay and corn, or else sold it for cash. Their vegetable gardens they ate from, but could sell produce from as well when opportune. With the orchard fruits it was similar: they sold some, and consumed some.

I never saw the vehicles those farm kids’ families had, because no kid I knew got driven home by a parent. Close to a dozen school buses dropped off and picked up every day, bringing kids and returning them far and wide. As I understood, the kids who lived within about a mile of the school, including myself, walked.

Life for those mixed farmers, it seemed, wasn’t glamorous. They were clean, well-fed, and healthy, but I didn’t see them being picked up in luxury cars or carrying name-brand trinkets around. Rarely was money mentioned. However, their way of life seemed resilient. No mixed farmer I knew there was a recent arrival. Rather, their families had lived there for generations.

A decade later, on the west coast, I lived in a mill town where life (although not mine) seemed much more glamorous than in the Annapolis Valley. Kids in the mill town got picked up from school in new, expensive cars. They wore expensive clothes and often talked about money; the kids themselves seemed to have a lot of disposable income.

One of the sources of income in the rich mill town was a lumber mill that, I was told, made its best money from one or more production lines that produced timber specifically meant for the Japanese luxury housing market. No Canadian ever bought that timber; it was barged straight across the Pacific.

Notwithstanding their lavish lifestyle, numerous of the people from that mill acknowledged that its business was potentially ephemeral. That mill is long-gone, now. Its earners, as I understand, either moved away or took remote work in mining, oil, or some other export industry.

Exporting can be very lucrative, but markets can be fickle. Perhaps one probably won’t end up driving a new luxury vehicle from mixed farming, but one may be safer from globalization, at the same time.