A most unsettling story list of this thing we still call farming

Credit: Moscow Ministry of Agriculture and Food

I'm a loyal reader and financial supporter of the British non-profit news outlet The Guardian, and subscribe to its "Animals Farmed" newsletter. Every couple of months or so, the newsletter arrives in my email inbox with news of the wild, weird world of what we still call farming, but that mostly just looks like mass murder at this point.

Even just reading the little summary blurbs about the stories is an excellent reinforcer of my efforts to ramp back my meat consumption to almost nothing. I used to love my farm set when I was a kid, but realistic play with a modern-day "farm set" would require stuffing your cute plastic animals into an overcrowded, hellish stink-barn for a very short life of misery, with not a whiff of green grass or fresh air to be found.

So let's start there with my first link from this morning's newsletter, about how Russian industrial farms are experimenting with virtual reality for dairy cows, to see if tricking them into thinking they see an open meadow will make them happier. And able to produce better milk, of course. Because it's a given that anything we do in industrial farming that outwardly looks like we're being a bit kinder to the animal is in fact just a way to trick them into giving us better, tastier, or more products from their bodies.

Next time you eat a lamb shawarma in the Middle East, think about the 14,346 Romanian sheep that died last week when the cargo ship they were being carried on overturned. Romania is the third biggest exporter of sheep in the European Union, and the sheep were bound for Saudi Arabia. Speculation is that the ship was overloaded, but at any rate, the sheep were trapped in the hold and didn't stand a chance when the ship flipped.

Only 254 sheep ended up rescued. I'm hoping that none of the dead creatures were among these sheep that passed by us when we were visiting Romania this past spring, but the future's not bright for Romanian sheep overall.

The risk of mass sheep death at sea is not just an issue from "over there," either. More than 22,000 lambs a year make the journey from New Zealand to the United States to satisfy hungry consumers, and that number is up 20 per cent from a decade ago.

And how is life going for our pig friends? Not so good. African Swine Fever is in the process of wiping out what's expected to be a quarter of the world's pigs. In China alone, some 100 million infected pigs were killed last year in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease.

But that's great news for "farmers" of non-infected pigs, who are finding surging global demand and increasing sale prices when piggies go to market nowadays. The value of monthly UK pig exports hit £36.4 million - $63 million in Canadian dollars - in September, a 50 per cent increase over a year ago.

In other pig news, Britain's Conservative Party has backed away from a promise to ban farrowing crates, because they go against everything a mother pig would naturally do to prepare for and care for her piglets. But pig producers have worked equally hard to shut down that conversation.

The crates are small cages that pregnant pigs are kept in from before their piglets are born until they are a month old.

Now let's turn to China, the home of my ancestors but also a country that often seems viciously committed to eating every species from the face of the Earth. That includes donkeys, 4.8 million of whom are killed every year just to satisfy China's demand for a gelatinous traditional medicine called ejaio, which is made from the hides of donkeys. If demand continues apace, half of the world's donkey population will be wiped out within five years.

Bummed out yet? We ought to be. I get that humans are omnivores and have a long history of killing animals for food, but we're so far past any kind of hunter-gatherer framework with modern-day industrial farming. One last link before you go, this one to a deadly algae bloom of "red tide" in Florida that wiped out 200 manatees, 127 dolphins, 589 sea turtles and hundreds of tonnes of fish when it hit in 2018, and is now back again.

It's a naturally occurring phenomenon, but you can likely guess what makes it much, much worse. Yup, industrial farming, which in Florida is flooding the sensitive wetlands with agricultural runoff.

I started into "flexitarianism" mostly because there's only so long you can keep telling yourself that your eating habits are harmless, but reducing our meat intake is also a major step toward reducing our individual (and ultimately, global) carbon footprints. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that industrial livestock production is responsible for 14.5 per cent of human-caused carbon emissions.

Do the right thing. Put peas on your fork.

Nicaraguans can grow their own food, but not without land

     Who has the right to own land?

     In countries like Canada, we decided some time ago that it’s either government, aboriginals or people with enough money to buy a piece of tierra firma, and many of us get along just fine without owning land. While almost 70 per cent of Canadians own their own homes, it’s not a prerequisite to happiness.

     But the issue is more complex in countries like Nicaragua, where owning land can make the difference between being able to feed your family and going hungry.

     Subsistence farmers in Nicaragua can survive on the most minimal incomes if they own enough land to grow their food. Their basic diets of corn and beans may be monotonous and not diverse enough to guarantee good nutrition, but at least the calories are sufficient to keep a family going. 

     But that breaks down when a poor family doesn't own land or can't plant on someone else's land.

     If you have to buy your beans and corn at the local market, you’re going to need money – something that’s in scarce supply in much of rural Nicaragua. If you have to rent land to grow your food, every harvest has to be sufficiently productive that you don’t find yourself in the hole at the end of the day. With little access to affordable credit for land purchases and climate change wreaking havoc with production cycles in Nicaragua, these are difficult days for small-scale farmers. 

     Land ownership is a critical concern for the 2,200 women farmers that belong to the organization I work for here in Managua, a federation of women’s farming cooperatives that goes by the acronym FEMUPROCAN. Much of the organization’s advocacy efforts these days are focused on one section of an agricultural reform law that promises credit to women farmers so they can buy their own land, but has never been enacted.

     Only eight to 12 per cent of the country’s private lands are owned by women.  That places them at a huge disadvantage, not only in their ability to feed their families but to be able to participate in the country’s economic development. They’re up against the culture as well; even when a farming family does own land, more times than not the title is in the name of the husband only. In the event of his death, it’s not uncommon to see that title pass to his brother or other male member of the family, leaving the wife with neither land nor recourse.

     Without land of her own or her name on title, a woman in Nicaragua also struggles to qualify for credit – vital for small farmers given that they have to borrow against tomorrow’s harvest to be able to afford the seed today. Bank interest rates are brutal, upwards of 30 per cent.

     This year has been particularly harsh for FEMUPROCAN’s members in the parts of Nicaragua hit hard by drought, where some farmers who rent their lands are so afraid to lose what little they have that they didn’t even plant at the start of the second growing season in September.

     In Somoto, a particularly dry region, a woman farmer told me that with land renting for around 2,700 cordobas ($120 Cdn) per hectare, poor farmers risk ending up worse off financially than if they’d never planted at all if the rains don’t come on time. The owners of those lands expect to be paid regardless of how the growing season turns out.

     And with no additional money to buy more seed if the rains start late and the first crop dies in the field – as has happened this year in the country’s “dry corridor” – farmers are in some cases choosing to scrap the whole season and wait until next May to plant, hoping that the drought will be over by then.

     That means at least one member of the family will have to find day labour somewhere between now and then, because otherwise there’s no money for food. But day labour is in short supply as well, seeing as most of that work involves earning money by helping land-owning farmers with their own harvests. With the drought now in its second year, this is a tough time to be a small-scale farmer in Nicaragua.
     The solution is simple enough: Find ways to help women buy farm land. FEMUPROCAN's members have said over and over again that they don't expect to get anything for free, but they're going to need realistic interest rates, a generous amount of time to pay back their loans, and at least a little understanding that in a year when the weather doesn't cooperate, they're going to be strapped and might need a break. 
     It's all doable. Unfortunately, nobody's doing it, and probably won't be until Nicaragua works out the whole other complicated issue of a largely non-functional land registry system.

     But as I’ve come to expect from Central American farmers after almost four years of working here, they carry on. The Somoto woman I spoke to said all of 2015 has been a disaster, from the drought that disrupted both of the year’s two growing seasons to the community well that ran dry. But then she smiled, shrugged, and added that the women of FEMUPROCAN will just keep fighting the good fight. “That’s what we do,” she said. 

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