Nine years ago, in 2016, just as a hundred-day drought was breaking for farms in southern Ontario, I wrote this article entitled The Driest Summer for Edible Toronto magazine. The cover shot featured the depleted irrigation pond built by my friends Barbara Klatt and Brian Tyson at their Brookside Farm outside Hastings.
“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry”
(Thomas Fuller, 1608 - 1661)
Our small farm has weathered the drought. This August’s heat has given way, finally, to September’s moderation, and early Fall plantings of mixed salad greens are emerging robustly where Summer’s sowings failed to materialize or thrive. Through June, July, and August, for week upon week, lashings of deep well water were unleashed on surviving plants, some evaporating on the hot surface soil and some providing life-saving relief. In our region of Peterborough, the hundred or so days from the beginning of May to August 10 were the driest here for this period since records began – in the century before last – in 1891. These extremely dry conditions covered an arc around Toronto, from the Niagara Peninsula to Price Edward County.
At Rolling Hills Organics, where we are now sixteen years certified organic, we have just three acres dedicated to market salads greens, herbs, and heirloom vegetables; the rest of our 55 acres is pasture, woodland, and wetland. We were forced by the lack of rain to switch to a much-reduced planting regime, watching helplessly as successive early plantings were sacrificed to the dry, taken over by weeds which were in turn sacrificed to the mower or tiller. With the initial weeks of no rain, it seemed counter-intuitive to till the bone-dry soil in order to plant. As the drought conditions continued, however, we found it necessary to water and plant, water and water (using our drilled well with good pressure), so as to continue to have greens for markets, albeit at reduced volume. Early in the morning, late in the afternoon, every day, we watered, for weeks on end. (We do not have a switch to flip as the bigger farms do). The heat was befuddling, but the deep-seated dry became demoralizing.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. On farms across the region wells and ponds were drained or run dry; water was pumped from rivers and lakes, canals and creeks; some farms drew from swampland; one ran a crowd-funding campaign that brought in double its target enabling three truckloads of water per week to be delivered. In the Holland Marsh – a hub of large-scale ‘conventional’ (chemicalized) food production in southern Ontario – fields were seen smeared in green algal liquid pumped from local waterways, itself the product of pesticide runoff from these same fields. Compounding the dent in bottom-line farm income, the emotional cost was steep as severe heat kicked in. Crop yields were naturally down, yet the quality of produce such as berries, tree fruits, tomatoes, grapes for wine was outstanding, the flavour intense.
The pond at Brookside Farm in Hastings that was put in at great expense for the purpose of irrigation. This year it has shrunk to such a point where farmer Barbara Klatt may need to bring in water to maintain the spring that feeds it, or else possibly lose the pond altogether.
A neighbour’s ‘conventional’ farm cut down both its glyphosate-treated soybean and corn crops, apparently as silage for the cattle. The corn crop grown across vast swathes of farmland (to be converted into government-subsidized fuel ethanol) fared poorly and reduced yield is an unavoidable consequence. Farmers Forum reports that “… in a normal crop year, prices go up. But this year’s drought corresponds with an anticipated world-record crop, putting downward pressure on prices. Corn prices hovered at $4.40 per bushel at the end of August, a long way from $8 per bushel in September of 2012.” Assuming a reduced yield of around 100 bushels per acre, this translates to ‘conventional’ farmers in corporately-controlled commodities markets receiving a paltry $440 per acre for this year’s industrial corn crop. Hay production is also low, so many livestock farmers will be forced to buy in hay as feed at inflated cost and/or sell off their animals for low return (due to a saturated market).
However, to put things in perspective: spare a thought for subsistence farmers in southern Africa. While we in parts of southern Ontario were experiencing our disturbing hundred days of drought, as Dahr Jamail reports at www.truth-out.org, “the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization warned of being in a ‘race against time’ for at least 23 million drought-stricken farmers in Africa where the southern part of the continent Africa continues to be plagued by massive droughts as climatic disruptions prevail. According to the UN, more than 60 million people worldwide, two-thirds of whom are in eastern and southern Africa, already face chronic food shortages due to ongoing droughts.” Droughts are but one part of a bigger picture, of course. As Lester R. Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, has warned: “Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize.”
Here in southern Ontario, as the rains return, a more normal production of Fall crops should be resumed. As organic market farmers growing many different crops, we are able to be nimble in negotiating mother nature’s curve-balls. We can write off one crop while another thrives; we can plant more, or less, water more, or less. We can wait out the storm rolling through. But sometimes, the extremes are severe shocks to the farm system, and they are increasingly systemic. Make no mistake: this challenging season was not just a wake-up call to be doused by a few gallons of water; this was a full-on jarring alarm that we could merely turn off in order to nod off to sleep again. Extended water shortages may well be a major part of our future and of farming that we had better get our heads around. We need to be vigilant in conserving water; conserving soil fertility, moisture and nutrients; conserving crop resilience and diversity. With no water, there is no food and no life. The industrial farms with their massive acreages of genetically modified glyphosated corn and soy have their own challenges as they face the long-term unsustainability of their animal feed, ethanol, industrial processing mono-crops model.
Even as the drought hit farmers hard, ground-water continued to be taken by licensed corporations for mega-profit. Regarding the extraction and bottling of water in Ontario, the Weather Network reports: “According to documents on a ministry website, Nestlé Canada has three permits, which allow the company to extract a total of 8.3 million litres of water each day for bottling. Meanwhile, Nestlé Waters Canada, a division of Nestlé Canada, has six Ontario permits allowing them to take out a further 12 million litres each day. The ministry has a map online showing all of the water-taking locations linked to active permits across the province with southern Ontario in particular, covered by a sea of blue dots. Several other companies with large water-taking permits in the province include Gold Mountain Springs at 6.1 million litres a day and Gott Enterprises at 5.8 million litres, The Canadian Press reports. For every million litres of water, Ontario charges companies $3.71 after paying a permit fee of $750 for low or medium-risk water takings, or $3,000 for those considered high risk.” This arrangement smacks of governmental insensitivity and corporate greed, particularly at a time of severe water shortage.
For all you loyal farmers market customers out there: stick with us small-scale local and organic farmers. Yes, some of us have faced challenges, we always do; but no, we are not giving up on you. We are a resilient bunch, we weather adversity well, coming back stronger. We are in this for the long term, planting more to make up for lesser yields, continuing to conserve water and build fertility. In a competitive market for consumer dollars, our prices will remain remarkably constant and out-of-sync with runaway inflation at the supermarket. Though the water table remains extremely low and sub-soils depleted of moisture, the crisp, clear days, cooler star-lit nights and, hopefully, occasional rains of Fall will revitalize our sapped plants and our weary bodies.
For now, as Helen Hunt Jackson wrote:
By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.
