This column is the opinion of Chris Bruce, a farmer from the Codroy Valley in western Newfoundland. For more information on CBC Opinion Sectionplease consult the FAQs.

With fuel, feed and fertilizer prices soaring, there is no doubt that farmers in Newfoundland and Labrador are going through tough times, and the government should do everything possible to keep farmers afloat. provincial farms.

We simply cannot afford to close any more farms.

However, when we look at the fate of the province’s large industrial farms, we have to understand that this crisis was foreseeable.

There is an idea that farms pull plants out of the ground or keep animals on that land and bring them to market.

That was once true, and the inputs to this farm were minimal. Now, however, that picture isn’t quite the same.

On the province’s largest farms – which are still relatively small compared to the rest of the country – inputs include pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, seeds and lime. All of this requires massive equipment. None of these mega-tractors are of course built in the province, and repairing and maintaining them requires access to a supply chain that likely spans several continents.

I cannot begin to express how little our province cares about small farms.

Some feed inputs come from the province in the form of cereals, corn and fish offal. The rest comes either from afar or far a way.

Local wholesalers, mechanics and retailers are doing a good job around the farms. The majority of annual spring investments go to large corporations that have little or nothing to do with Newfoundland.

Even the biggest farms are more than a barrel big business. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Expect. Is that how it should be?

As a small farmer (coming from a long line of traditional Codroy Valley farmers), this seems largely madness to me.

Crop rotation is not mandatory and has been replaced by a suite of field treatments of fertilizers and various insect and plant poisons to prolong activity.

But let’s say the big guy is doing his thing. Are small food producers equally valued and allowed to engage in the market?

I cannot begin to express how little our province cares about small farms.

There are countless examples of small food producers ignored or whose trade is outright criminalized. This may sound alarmist, but that is the nature of how our province has applied the quota system.

Let’s say you want to raise chickens on a medium sized lot.

You might be thinking, “Hey, Newfoundlanders are the province in the country that eats the most chicken wings, I should be raising chickens. You would be allowed to do that, but you would never be allowed to have 99 without disrupting the quota system.

There is only one player in our market, Country Ribbon, and it is not owned by farmers in Newfoundland, but by an agricultural company in Nova Scotia. They’re the ones you have to ask if you want to raise more than 99 chickens, and they, uh…they won’t say yes.

It may sound wrong, but yes, a private company in Nova Scotia can decide who else enters the market it has full control over. And they got figuratively buckets of money from our government.

A chicken or egg scenario

Let’s say you party and raise your 99 chickens, and you manage to sell them for $25 per bird (good for you). You earned $2,475 before expenses. You too… can’t take it down yourself. Or even pay for someone to come to your land and do it, even if you do one a day in the most sterile of conditions. Regardless, no on-farm slaughter.

But don’t worry, the province says it supports small farmers.

OK, so you lost your shirt in the chicken meat market. So you say eggs! Everyone is having breakfast.

That’s still a small number, and ironically the eggs aren’t all in one basket (there are multiple egg entities), but even 99 healthy layers means you’ll have hundreds of eggs per week. Such a good problem! That’s enough eggs to warrant a small raise and a deal with a local convenience store.

But. You. Can not.

Really you could …but you would need to go through an industrial amount of extra work in order to meet the food standards set for factory-farmed eggs. Your meager profits would be wiped out and the triangle would be short.

Small egg farms are prohibited from selling anywhere other than a local farmers’ market or what is known as the farmers’ door. This means your eggs could be sold on the farm, or you could take the eggs from two towns to a farmers market and sell them, but the local convenience store would be fined if they sold them.

And our food law enforcement officials are ready to enforce those laws.

There are things we can do

The web of food laws we’ve created is tangled and, frankly, quite sad. From top to bottom, our governments and our industry have more or less organized things this way.

Quota holders regularly receive massive government subsidies, as well as truly unprecedented market control over production and prices. Agricultural colleges and lobbying firms are closely tied to conventional chemical agriculture, and provincial and federal governments have been funding it for years.

Farms are becoming fewer and larger and increasingly owned by foreigners.

I don’t want anyone to lose their farm. I also don’t want us to continue to fund a system that never really made sense.

As a small farmer who was told ‘no’ by the province when he asked to produce food because I once asked for too many chickens, I can tell you that we have much bigger problems than the price of fuel.

The province could do a lot without spending more money (although…it should be spending more money on farmers).

Open the lower end of the quota system to allow small farms to operate. Mandate crop rotation. Take cows and chickens out of barns for their entire lives.

Support mixed production farms that don’t waste soil nutrients. Let convenience stores operate like farmers markets. Stop wasting small farmers’ time and energy on red tape.

Do it for the bees, or something like that.

We had to act 10 years ago, we might as well act now.

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