Stop the Hogs!

From food to frailty: the link between long-term care and land concentration

[ https://rabble.ca/columnists/2021/02/fo ... centration ]

Lois Ross February 24, 2021

EXCERPT:

It's the same way I felt when I wrote a column in November 2019 on land grabbing [ https://rabble.ca/columnists/2019/11/la ... production ] here in Canada and elsewhere in the world.

What do for-profit long-term care homes such as Revera and land concentration have in common? Both are being impacted by "financialization." And you and I, albeit unwittingly, are a part of it.

Financialization is a term increasingly used to underscore the process by which financial actors -- including hedge funds, private-equity firms, wealthy individuals, and pension funds -- are buying farmland as part of investment strategies.

But the term financialization can also be extended to for-profit long-term care homes.

And therein lies the link between land concentration and land grabbing, and what has become the painfully obvious neglect happening in many for-profit long-term care homes during this pandemic.

But the links between land concentration and retirement homes do not stop with "financialization" -- and this is where you and I become complicit in this horrible scheme of things. It is also where local meets global -- and how our pension-plan management policies are not only harming us here at home, but likely our neighbours around the world.

It is a story of how we are fouling our own nest, and, along the way, the nests of others. . . .

MORE . . . .

7 millennials who view agriculture as a career — and moral calling

[ https://broadview.org/7-millennials-who ... l-calling/ ]

In the next 15 years, almost half of Canadian farms will change hands. These millennials are ready to takeover — turning their passion for ecology and food security into their career.

By Lois Ross | January 3, 2017

It took Al Boyko and Hélène Tremblay-Boyko more than 25 years to build Breadroot Farm, a 607-hectare certified organic farm near Canora, Sask., where they raise grass-fed beef cattle and grow grains and other crops like peas, hemp and oil seeds.

They’re both in their 60s, and starting to wonder what will become of their land once they retire from active farming. Their three daughters are established in other careers, so passing Breadroot Farm down to a family member is not an option. And after spending years paying down the debt they took on as they built the operation, they have misgivings about selling it outright and seeing someone else face the same burden. “It seems to us,” says Tremblay-Boyko, “that the only people making the money in those exchanges are the banks.”

Rather than sell their land, the Boykos are planning to donate it to a community land trust that will lease it to a young farmer committed to the same sustainable, ecologically sound agricultural principles they champion. Boyko explains: “We are hoping to set it up so that people who are farming this land see themselves more as stewards or caretakers of the land, and that they are able to farm it and make a living for their family, and pass it along to their [children] and continue to do it that way rather than every generation having to borrow money and pay for the land over and over again.”

The Boykos have no illusions about it being easy to find the right fit. “It’s like an online dating service,” quips Tremblay-Boyko, “and sometimes you wonder if you’re going to meet the right one.”

If the right one does eventually come along, there’s a good chance that he, she or they will emerge from the ranks of a movement of millennials who have chosen agriculture as a vocation for living out passionately held views on ecology, economic justice and food security. Many have little or no background in farming but are committed to making a go of it using innovative approaches that echo their ideals.

The movement they embody is broadly called New Agrarianism, defined by author, activist and farmer Wendell Berry as “not so much a philosophy as a practice, an attitude, a loyalty, and a passion — all based in close connection with the land. It results in a sound local economy in which producers and consumers are neighbours and in which nature herself becomes the standard for work and production.”

In the last 55 years, Canada has lost 63 percent of its individual farms, though the total amount of farmland has remained close to the same. More than half of the remaining farms are run by a farmer over the age of 55; with almost half of the country’s farmland expected to change hands in the next 15 years, rural Canada is in the midst of a profound transformation. The New Agrarians are determined to be part of it — for the sake of their families, communities and the planet. . . . .

MORE . . .