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Back to the future Local farms take a step back in time By John Hopkins The Hadwens now offer seminars on how to drive a horse team as they encourage other farmers to take a step back in time. Photo courtesy Jeanne Hadwen
Almost as soon as a visitor steps through the front door of the Farm Meat Shoppe, the ‘farm gate’ establishment located on Wallbridge-Loyalist Road, a few kilometers north of Belleville, they are confronted by a sign posted on the wall. “Back to the future farming is practiced on our farm wherever possible as time allows,” it reads. “More and more ‘of the older ways’ will be re-established. It is our part in reducing our footprint on Mother Nature.” What the heck is “back to the future farming?” In short, it is the attempt by some farmers to revert back to the practices used in farming a few generations ago; things like replacing tractors with horses, eliminating the use of pesticides on crops, not treating animals with growth hormones or antibiotics. The Farm Meat Shoppe proprietors Kim and Jeanne Hadwen have spent the past eight years selling eggs and meat from their farm, specializing in Black Angus beef, and they tout their meat as being hormone free, antibiotic free and naturally fed. What has been consumer response in the area? “At first we were open five days a week but we couldn’t keep up with demand, so now we’re at three days a week and we’ve even reduced our hours,” says Kim. With business so brisk, one would imagine the Hadwens are raking in the money, right? Perhaps not. “There is so little margin,” Kim explains. “It takes three, four or five months longer to get cows to the
22 I
Country Roads • Fall 2010
The Farm Meat Shoppe has been selling meat and eggs for eight years now, but had to cut back its hours due to overwhelming demand. Photo by Jeanne Hadwen
size than it would if we used hormones. The big operators have to do it to survive. “I’d hate to be a young guy getting into farming. A farmer shouldn’t have to work off the farm to keep the people of the world fed.” So why do it? “We do it because this is the way we want to eat,” adds Jeanne. Two factors have given a boost to operations like the Hadwens’. One is the ‘100-Mile Diet’. Launched by Vancouver writers Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon as an experiment to see how they could manage if they were forced only to eat food produced
within a 100-mile radius of them, the 100-Mile Diet has turned into an international phenomenon. “Locally raised and produced food has been called ‘the new organic,’” says their website, www.100milediet.org, “better tasting, better for the environment, better for local economies, and better for your health. From reviving the family farm to reconnecting with the seasons, the local foods movement is turning good eating into a revolution.” A second key is a film called, ‘Food Inc.’, the Academy Award nominated documentary that analyzes the massive consolidation of the American food producing industry and the widespread use of growth hormones, pesticides and other chemicals in an effort to produce food at a faster pace and in increasing quantities. The film features commentary from experts such as Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The Hadwens spent 25 years as dairy farmers north of Toronto before they decided to downsize and change their operation. They now have about 300 head of Black Angus beef cattle on 150 acres of land. Raising free range, hormone free animals has had its benefits, the Hadwens point out, as they find there is less need to treat their animals for disease. “We don’t have the health issues we used to,” Kim says. “In the dairy years, when we were milking three times a day, it seemed the more we pushed them [the cows] the more we had to treat them.”