Our Farm

I'm not the sort to write letters to politicians on a regular basis, but it's what I've been doing this morning. This is why:

Land Transfer from the Farm to NCC  

It's not just a cornfield - make your voice heard

 

In his decision in November to sever 60 acres of Central Experimental Farm fields, the Honourable John Baird, minister for the National Capital Commission, has made it clear that, unlike in other countries, a national heritage site designation offers no guaranteed protection from development and doesn't even trigger consultation with stakeholders.

While the Friends of the Farm support a new hospital, it doesn't need to result in the loss of this valuable land with national historic status and ongoing long-term research. Friends' President Eric Jones and former FCEF presidents, along with the media, historians, researchers, heritage and community advocates have written about the land transfer. These commentaries are listed and will continue to be compiled on our website atwww.friendsofthefarm.ca/60acres.

In his exploration of responses to the land transfer announcement, Peter Anderson of Carleton University noted that many see the Farm as empty fields that are "untapped, wasted" which is totally unfounded. Julie Harris, heritage specialist and co-author of the Central Experimental Farm National Historic Site Management Plan, notes that these "empty fields" are, in fact, open-air laboratories where important agricultural research continues to be conducted." It is land on which detailed scientific data has been recorded for over a century. 

For more than 125 years of cropping research at the Farm, there have been many scientificsuccess stories including 260 varieties of improved corn, many high-protein, pest-resistant soybean varieties, wheat varieties resistant to the devastating Fusarium head blight, 28 new milling oat varieties and 50 lines of hulless oats, as well as the development of new techniques and methods of cultivating, fertilizing and screening for plant diseases. As Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz pointed out this week regarding the new grain legislation, "the sector generated about $23 billion last year in grain and oilseed farm cash receipts."

It is clearly not just a cornfield. There are immense benefits to Canadians and to Canada's agriculture and food industries from such research, which depends on continuity in the field experiments using the same testing grounds year after year. Members and supporters of the Friends of the Farm are encouraged to make your views known to MPs, MPPs, city councillors and federal ministers. Help us protect the Farm in its second century.

I spent my volunteer hours at the Farm when I was doing my Hort certificate, and the longterm volunteers were already worried about resource cuts and the possibility that the Farm would be broken up for condos or something. I don't like the trend; it worries me. The data says we're going to have to make substantial increases in food production to keep up with population increase in the next 50 years, plus climate change means extreme weather is liable to make farming a lot harder in the same amount of time - like it's not hard enough already. And here we have a heritage site which has been a productive research station for over a century, in a country which may be large but has a limited amount of land you can grow crops on, (most of which coincides with where people keep building cities), and they're not only cutting resources, but also space. Really, you'd think it ought to be going in the other direction...

Gardener's Horror Movie?

Picture this: You're driving along across the Prairies on a lovely day, admiring the miles of crops spread out around you. Wheatfields in 'amber waves of grain'. Canola in sulfur yellow blossom. And what's that green field coming up? Not corn, or soybean, it's....( duh duh dum) spearmint! And the soft green down the road is dill! Hundreds of acres of mint and dill!

Not seeing where the horror comes in? Mint (and a number of it's relatives) are very good at spreading via runners. On the ground, under the ground...most gardeners who have experience with it either put it away by itself somewhere, or put it in pots. Dill doesn't do the runners, but it reseeds very easily. At my parent's, the dill has not had to be deliberately replanted in years. Mostly the idea is to simply remove it from all but a small fraction of the garden every spring, using the removed plants for fresh dillweed, and let some of the stalks grow for dillseed in the remaining patch. Always, some of the seedheads drop seeds, and we're ready to start over the next year.

Don't worry, I don't think they're taking over the world yet. But these huge field of herbs do exist. I was talking to someone who grows them, they go for things like essential oils - and you know mint is in a lot of things as flavoring! So I suppose if I had ever thought about it, I would have realized that there must be equivalents of the picturesque fields of lavender for other herbs grown for scent and flavor. But quite frankly, the idea of hundreds of acres of mint was novel. And scary. And I shall be remembering it every time I open the toothpaste tube. I raise my toothpaste in a salute to the growers, people brave enough to wrangle and control that green tide of herbs, that we may have flavoring.