The Call of the Land: Meet The Next Generation of Farmers | Short Film Showcase
Well, there's no other real choice, is there, but to fix what we have? It's kind of like you don't have that much control over what you're passionate about. We're not really used to hard work, a lot of people. We didn't grow up on farms; we didn't grow with farming families. We didn't grow up necessarily getting up at 6:00 a.m. and working every day. Even though if we go back a few generations, we begin to realize that it's in all of us; it's in all our roots.
Why did I get into it? You don't know you're getting into it, and then suddenly you're into it. That's the thing. I found academia; I was tired of it by the end. It's like all this mental, and I just felt like lots of it was just talking and not doing anything. And that's what appealed to me about farming—it’s got tangible results. There's this great quote, I think it's from Bill Mollison, that you can teach philosophy while you're teaching farming, but you can't teach farming while you're teaching philosophy.
While you're farming, you're just observing the world around you. I feel like the first thing I got to do is be able to grow my own food and have that basicness covered. So, I felt like maybe I could help humanity and plants and the ecosystems by applying my biology degree to farming. After that, it was pretty much no turning back.
Strange came by. A farm is like a breeding ground where humans connect; where you connect with the land, where you connect with yourself. It’s an amazing place to really get connected with that feeling. It really takes you for a ride because the farm decides when you can take a day off, like when it's raining, or the farm decides how quickly something's going to bolt or how well it's going to germinate.
Like, you can help play into those factors, but you have to just let it go. It doesn't really even feel like you're doing the work because so many people have done work before you or because nature's actually just doing it, and you're sort of whispering your hand here and there and making it come together. Sometimes you think, "Oh, everyone's getting into farming; it's the cool thing to do now," but actually that's not true at all.
No one's getting into farming in the larger picture; it's minuscule. Like, 65 is the average age of farmers in Canada, and there are not enough young farmers to replace them. How did we get here? How did we get to the point where we were taking corn apart into like these little tiny pieces and then recombining it into these other things and making like this cracker out of it? Like what? Like why can't you just eat some corn?
It's almost like not knowing the history of your country and living there and just accepting that things are the way they are, when having no context of the past. You know, if you don't know about farms, you don't know the past of your food, and the whole history book of that piece of food has been erased. And then, how can we make good choices if we have all the history erased?
We're losing this whole culture of getting up in the morning and opening the chickens and collecting the eggs and making an omelet for your family and then going out in the garden. We're into production because it's how we make our money, but this whole life that goes along with that production is dying, and we're trying to revive it.
If the family farms are healthy, it can create the fabric for society to be healthy. One of the first things you can do is get back in touch with the food, 'cause that's ultimately what you are. The big long-term vision is if it was an obvious and easy career path for kids to choose—like, not just, "You can be a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer"—when you're a kid, that that was something that kids were like, "Yeah, I want to be a farmer," and "I know how to get there."
And we don't want to do it all; we want people to do all those other things that are really cool. And it just has to be the thing for you when everyone can find out what that thing is and then just follow that really switched-on feeling of like it's coming through and I'm creating something amazing. Then you let go of that feeling of, "Oh, it's not right right now." It's just becoming more perfect every day, and you don't even know where that perfect is going.