Fewer farms, aging farmers: Here's why N.L. needs to get more serious about agriculture

We were trying to find a place in Kilbride one Saturday this spring when I was reminded that this great wedge of suburban St. John's was, not that long ago, farmland.

It still is, kind of. Or at least some parts of it.

Cutting through a side road I had not used in years, I could see the hallmarks of farms: sheds, heavy equipment, plots of land being slowly warmed up by a crisp May sun.

But as I continued my drive, it struck me that the area's surviving farms seem to be bordered on all sides now by housing developments, some of them mature, some of them new.

The tug of war between arable farm land and subdivisions has been running for a long time, and development has consistently been the winning side. Eastern Newfoundland in particular is hardly known for its choice farming land we're not called "the Rock" for nothing and with the northeast Avalon Peninsula gradually filling in, it sometimes feels like farms are overwhelmed, if not threatened outright.

The Avalon is hardly the only area where farming has been dwindling. Right across the province, even in areas with much more fertile soil, farms have been disappearing.

In 1951, in the first federal census taken after Confederation with Canada two years earlier, there were no fewer than 3,626 farms in Newfoundland and Labrador.

If that number seems high, that's because it is. The last Census of Agriculture was completed in 2016 (the latest count is happening this year), and it found that there were just 407 farms in Newfoundland and Labrador. Food First NL clocks that as the smallest number of farms of any Canadian province.

Consider this: there were 558 farms in the province just 10 years earlier, and that number was down 13.2 per cent from five years before that.

This chart shows just how dramatically the farming landscape has changed.

It's not just that there are fewer farms, too. Farmers themselves have been getting older. In 2016, the average age of a Newfoundland and Labrador farmer was 55.8 years a stat that has been gradually increasing over the years, even as the number of people farming has been declining.

Retirements on the horizon

Last year, my colleague Lindsay Bird paid a visit to Elvis Gillam, a veteran of the agricultural industry. Now in his mid-60s, he started farming in Loch Leven, southwest of Corner Brook, when he was a teenager. He clearly loves the work, but also knows his limits.

"I'm not sick of vegetable farming. I'm a little tired of vegetable farming," he said last year.

This May, his Riverbrook Farms posted a notice on Facebook that loyal customers had been expecting: Gillam is moving into semi-retirement. The farm stand on O'Connell Drive in Corner Brook has closed, and this year the farm will cultivate 30 per cent of last year's acreage. "In 2022 we will grow our last crop of vegetables then enter full retirement," the post says.

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It's hard to begrudge anyone who has spent decades of hard work their retirement, just as there are understandable reasons why other farmers working with tough margins even in good years, and persistent problems getting their produce on local shelves have decided to sell their land to developers.

Farming is not a huge industry. There's a striking chart from the Department of Finance in the recent "Big Reset" report that shows that in terms of gross domestic product, agriculture is at the smallestrung of impact and that's even when it's grouped with forestry and logging.

Aiming to double food production

There are things afoot, though. The provincial government which is well into a five-year program to double local food production has been making tens of thousands of hectares of Crown land available. There's a mentorship program to match new farmers with veterans, a program to train new agricultural technologists, an innovative project with the Association of New Canadians that brings newcomers into growing food the list goes on.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes we've also seen is the education of consumers about the value and power of eating locally grown food. It's not cheap, to be sure, and this is the point where food security (our ability to feed ourselves) and food insecurity (the inability to afford nutritious food) come together, if not collide.

Policy concerns abound here, about why, for instance, farmers want to throw in the towel and sell their land, about why young adults don't see agriculture in their future, about how people with limited means cannot afford the good food they need.

Weighty stuff.

In the meantime, when I drive around my own city, I remember how my mom would point out areas that had been farms when she was a girl in pre-war St. John's. They include much of the east end, the university campus, and so on. In my own lifetime, I've seen places like Kelsey's milk farm on Kenmount Road fade away, to be replaced by the Kelsey Drive shopping area.

I'll leave you with a thought that Elvis Gillam revealed last year, as he pondered his retirement, and what will become of the land he has worked for almost half a century.

"I hope and pray that it stays in farming. It would be a crime to see my lifetime put into making something so fertile and richend up as a golf course."

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