Westwind Farms have become the centre of my universe.
My life has come full circle. My growing-up years were spent on a 50-acre farm, the front half of a string hundred. It originally started as a three-horse, two-cow, one-sow, multiple-laying hen operation. One rat-killing terrier dog, various multi-coloured mice-catching cats, and host, on the average, to 40 hives of busy buzzing honeybees, rounded out very nicely the homegrown fruit and veggies in our backyard kitchen garden.
If flour was needed for bread, pies, and/or pans and pans of gingerbread cookies baked in a cast-iron woodstove oven, a bag or two or three of our homegrown grain, oats, wheat or mixed oats and barley, were traded to the miller on our once-monthly clip-clop, clip-clop by horse and wagon to the three-mile-away small town mill.
Eggs and home-churned jersey butter were traded at the grocery store for a hundred pound bag of white sugar for canning and a one gallon crock jug of molasses, which was drained from a huge barrel out back.
Life was simple, barter feasible, money meagre and a penny worth rescue from a crack in the sidewalk. Neighbours knew neighbours, and forth and back favours flowed freely. Help showed up at sawing bees, where winter wood was sawn, in foot long lengths, for the coming year.
As grain crops ripened, the owner of the area’s threshing machine toured the neighbourhood with his spike-toothed tractor, while one after the other teams of horses showed up, hitched to a wide-racked wagon, manned by two, one on the load, to catch and build, and one to pitch shocked sheaves from the ground. Time was traded, happiness created and life was socially healthy as well.
Then unacceptable wealth crept in, bankers encouraged huge loans, larger and better equipment was needed, and more land was necessary to feed the overextended, overdue, bank loans. Commercial farming became a must, 10- to 12-acre fields morphed into those stretching miles from sideroad to sideroad, robbing, without thought, miles upon miles of linked, wind- breaking wildlife habitat.
These giant fields are being sown with genetically modified seed, fed by multi-national Dow’s growth-enhancing chemical fertilizers, and sprayed, multi-nationally, to evenly ripen and kill existing weeds with Monsanto’s glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, which has been known for greater than two decades to be one of the leading causes of cancer.
Feedlots mushroomed countrywide. Greed spawned shoulder-to-shoulder over crowding, growth hormones became the norm, and antibiotics a necessity. Cattle, dairy and beef, pigs, sheep, and whatever, stood, ate, drank and slept shoulder to shoulder, often up to their hocks in soup-like mixtures of their own excrement.
Poultry, turkey and chickens, both egg-layers and meat, are treated little better. Near all, few escaped, from hatching to slaughter, never glimpsing the light of day.
The fact can no longer be hidden that dictatorship has seeped into the soul of our present parliament’s thinking. Blind eyes are turned to those whom they well know are doing wrong, and multi-wrongs. Little concern is given beyond their self-approved retirement pensions.
Ruthless profit grabbing by multi-nationalists has no place here in Canada. Small farming operations must be brought back, worldwide, into existence. If humanity is to survive, organic growing must exist. Feel free to come see how it is being done here in the centre of my universe.
Take care, ‘cause we care.
Barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105