JAN WONG
Saturday, January 12, 2002
GORMLEY, ONT. -- Farmers rise early. Suggest lunch, and the response is, why not breakfast? Suggest 9 a.m. and the response is, why not 8 a.m., or better yet, 7 a.m.? The unspoken message: that way you'll be out of my hair so I can get some work done.
Farmers once had a slack season. Now, John Doner works year-round. Besides planting soybean, canola, wheat and corn, his all-consuming sideline is agitating for a better farm policy.
At 56, Doner is a seventh-generation farmer. The first John Doner came here from Pennsylvania in 1806. He farmed a stone's throw from Yonge Street, on 200 acres parceled out by Lord Simcoe.
Today, the Doner farm is the oldest family farm in a bedroom community north of Toronto known as York Region. Doner still owns 100 acres of the original farmstead. But the bulk -- 4,000 acres -- is now leased from 75 landlords. "I got a book of leases that thick," he says, his beefy hands spaced six inches apart.
Tenant farming isn't the only change. Two centuries ago, his ancestors cleared thick stands of maple and pine. But now the town once known as Muddy York has crept up to the very edge of his farm. Subdivisions encroach. His next-door neighbour, a real-estate agent, specializes in selling farmland to developers.
Bucolic this isn't. On a clear day, you can see the CN Tower from his fields. Traffic is so snarled that when Doner needs to drive his combine from one field to another, someone has to stand in the middle of the road to signal the cars to stop.
Commuters don't appreciate that. They appreciate even less getting behind his slow-moving combine. Despite being sometimes encumbered with a cellphone and a doughnut, a few commuters manage to express themselves digitally. Then Doner says he feels like telling them, "Mind you, we just prepared your breakfast for you."
He's a stocky man in black jeans and battered boots. His hair is pure white. His tongue is laconic. Asked to describe the colour of his eyes, he says, "Bloodshot."
Over a scrambled-egg sandwich and coffee at a Gormley diner called Famous Sam's, he says he thinks Canadians are forgetting the hand that feeds them. He points to the toast.
"There's the wheat we grow." He taps the top of the red squeeze ketchup bottle. "There's corn in there," he adds, alluding to the corn syrup used to sweeten it.
Asked what his 100 acres of land is worth to a developer, he warns, "Don't go there." Asked instead what a building lot costs in the next subdivision, he repeats, "Don't go there."
He won't even talk about the size of his debt. It's apparently so massive it might engender awe instead of sympathy.
He'd rather talk about the brutal economics of doing business with a buyer's monopoly. Individual farmers must sell to a government wheat board, at supposedly market prices. But free trade and U.S. farm subsidies distort those prices. These days, he says, farmers lose money on every acre of grain they plant.
But if it's such a lousy deal, why farm? "This is what our family has always done." He pauses. "Not that that should always be protected."
What Doner doesn't say is that he has zillions tied up in the business. Surprisingly, Canada's largest farms are not in Saskatchewan, but in Ontario. And his farm, with eight employees, is among the larger ones in Ontario.
Doner owns a fleet of farm machinery. He owns six big red trucks. He also owns a licensed repair shop. For a sideline business, he built 12 grain bins, huge metal cylinders to dry and store grain for his fellow farmers before reshipping to a terminal.
Doner finishes his scrambled eggs and stares out the window. Across the street from the diner are fields once owned by his family. Now, they belong to an auto-parts manufacturer. The corner is occupied by a Petro-Canada gas station.
Doner's father raised Holsteins. At 6, Doner fed molasses to the cows and gathered eggs from the chickens. In the summer, he and his sisters swam in the pond their ancestors dug. In winter, they skated on its frozen surface.
The only son, Doner was still a teenager when he decided to follow the family tradition. That was 40 years ago. He got rid of the chickens and cows. He bought big machines. He built the grain bins and acquired trucks. Then came free trade. In 1996, Washington passed the Freedom to Farm Act, a $20-billion (U.S.) annual subsidy to American farmers. The political agenda: really cheap food for American consumers.
The unintended result was really cheap food for Canadian consumers. The other result was that Canadian farmers got killed. Asked what's so wrong with cheap food, Doner cites national security.
"As soon as you buy your food from another country, you're vulnerable. Food is a sovereignty issue." It's no accident, he adds, that Quebec is the only province where farming is adequately subsidized, with the result that the average age of farmers in Quebec is 44, compared with 58 in Ontario and 60 in Saskatchewan.
Doner began agitating a couple of years ago for a national agricultural policy. In 2000, he joined a farm protest in Ottawa. Last year, he demonstrated outside a Toronto hotel where the federal agriculture minister was speaking.
Yesterday, as greater Toronto congealed into rush-hour gridlock, Doner joined a slow-moving tractor convoy on the Don Valley Parkway, one of the city's main arteries. Tonight, he plans to attend an awareness-raising concert, billed as Family Farm Tribute III, at Toronto's Music Hall on the Danforth.
Canada is the only country in the G8 without a national agricultural policy, Doner says bitterly. Still, he brought his eldest son, Mark, into the business. And he wonders wistfully if Mark's son, Cole, now 2, will one day become the ninth generation to farm the land.
When a farming family leaves the land, Doner says, the decision is often irrevocable. Farming can't really be taught at school. You need to grow up with it. To city slickers, it may feel like the dead of winter, but Doner knows without checking the calendar that it's 100 days away from spring planting.
After breakfast, he points out the white clapboard farmhouse, built in 1840, where he was born. "I just want to show you what's next door," he says, turning his pickup truck onto a curving suburban road. It's lined with newly built mansions, each with a three-car garage.
Doner glances at an all-white pile with soaring Corinthian columns straight out of Gone With the Wind. He drives past a log "cabin," a sprawling two-storey home, made with huge B.C. firs. The winner for ostentatiousness, though, is a mauve stucco atrocity with stained-glass doors and a four-car garage.
Doner's family owned this very land in the 1800s. His father and uncle once plowed here with horses. In a nod to history, some front lawns are adorned with a wagon wheel or antique plow. One has set an old-fashioned creamer by the door, like an ornamental shrub.
This is prime commuting land, a half-minute drive from a six-lane highway that feeds into downtown Toronto. Forgetting he isn't supposed to talk about real estate values, Doner allows that the homes sell here for $600,000 to $2.5- million.
He owns 100 acres of this land. And just how big is 100 acres? Think Yorkdale Shopping Centre, he suggests, naming one of Toronto's biggest malls.
You can't help but feel sorry for Doner, the farmer. And you can't help but feel envy for Doner, the landowner. "Don't go there," he says. jwong at globeandmail.ca
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 http://www.yaysoft.com
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/