Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2013-09

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IN THIS ISSUE

• Don Henderson forwards a speech about the importance of farmland and farmers
• Tony Lewis sends these comments about the horse meat scandal in the UK
• Jane Straus pointed out the #1 grammar error that people make
• Barbara Wear and Irene Harvalias send a familiar comparison
• Catherine Green forwards the story of a fearsome old man
• Pat Moore´s post is about a biology exam
• Sites are suggested by Carol Hansen, Catherine Green, Catherine Nesbitt, Don Henderson, and Tony Lewis

Don Henderson forwards this speech from Rene Van Acker, Ph.D., P.Ag., Professor and Associate Dean of the Ontario Agricultural College at the University of Guelph, on the subject of

VALUING AGRICULTURE, FOOD, AND FARMLAND

Thank you to the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Task Force and the organizers of this event for the opportunity to discuss such an important topic. And to put my comments in some context - I am approaching this from the perspective of someone who is an expert in agriculture, an agriculturalist.

In this respect, and from that perspective, there are four critical elements that must be taken into consideration if we are to fully value agriculture, food, and farmland.

These four elements are soil, water, genetic diversity, and farm and farmer viability.

I start with soil - and an important place to start with soil is to know that it is formed over geological time scales and not human generational time scales, and therefore it is essentially a non-renewable resource. And yet, it is fundamental to human life on the planet because it is fundamental to plant life and to productive farming.

Sometimes people suggest that global climate change will be great for Canada because it will allow us to farm in the North. This is a wholly misinformed idea because the reality of limitations to farming in the North are often not climate, but lack of soil. We farm where there is soil, and we don´t where there isn´t. And it is not only loss of soil that is a concern - but quality of soil - quality soil is extremely rare and valuable. If you were to ask Dr. Ralph Martin, the Loblaw Chair in Sustainable Food Production at the University of Guelph, what the critical measure of sustainability is for food production, top of his list would be soil organic matter and soil quality - something so critical and precious - but no one talks about it.

The loss and degradation of our soils, globally, is a very important issue that goes largely unnoticed, perhaps because soil isn´t cute, or maybe soil suffers a bad rap, often being referred to as "dirt". Nonetheless, quality soil - farmland - is critical to human life on the planet, and it is very valuable.

Water - the engine of life on the landscape, is driven by water. Transpiration and the employment of water in photosynthesis are in many ways the foundational mechanisms of ecological life. So having water is very important, and drought is devastating for agriculture and food production, as we have seen last year across the American Midwest, and across much of southern Ontario, and over decades to devastating effect in especially fragile communities and countries in eastern and Sub-Saharan Africa). Here in Canada, crop insurance data shows us that the vast majority of crop insurance claims come from water related disasters - but not only lack of water, also too much water.

People speak about global warming when they mean to speak about global climate change. If the change in climate we are facing was only warming, agriculturists would not be very concerned. What concerns us is the true threat of global climate change, which is that the variation in weather will increase tremendously. The unpredictability of weather and increasing extremes in weather (drought, flood, storms, hail) are very difficult to adapt to, and it is against this great threat that we recognize the real folly of simple approaches to complex problems (like producing food) and our sometimes ignorant disregard for valuable resources like water, and the critical role water plays in producing food which allows for human life on the planet.

Genetic resources - The value of genetics is in diversity. Diversity is how nature works, literally. The natural landscape is diverse not because that makes it look nice, but because that is what eons of evolution looks like. The value of diversity in creating resilience in systems is fundamental. It is a law of nature, like gravity, and when we fight it, like fighting gravity, it takes a tremendous amount of energy, and when the energy is taken away, it all crashes to the ground. Diversity in our landscapes is essential, and yet we do not even understand the extent to which this diversity is important, and often we only recognize its importance when it is gone.

At the University of Guelph, through a generous donation from the Weston Family Foundation and the leadership of Wendy and Tamara Rebanks, we have an opportunity to hire a new Chair in Pollinator Conservation. And through the search process for this chair we have had an opportunity to see remarkable research from world-leading scientists in this area, and what they have all shown us is that there is no question that diversity in the landscape promotes life, including living pollinators, who in turn ensure fruit and seed production and food. They have also shown us that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of destroying pollinator (life) friendly agricultural landscapes and that there definitely needs to be an element of precaution in our treatment of farmland.

The last element I want to speak to is farm and farmer viability. The importance of farmers … of having farmers, struck me in particular last spring when I was in Russia working on a possible research collaboration. Upon my return, someone asked me about the potential I saw for Russian agriculture. "Poor, in this generation,´ I said. But why, I was asked: don´t they have vast resources of deep chernozemic soils, excellence in science, favourable climates, and access to water? Yes, they have all those things, I agreed, but they are missing one crucial element - farmers.

Post-1917 there is no longer any such thing as a Russian farmer. And post-perestroika, there was no transition from the collective farms to a regeneration of multitudes of independent owner-operator farmers - like we have here in Canada, for example. Without farmers, Russian agriculture, any agriculture, will not progress or be productive, and it will not develop to be robustly productive and adaptive. Without true farmers, in this fashion, there is a lack of competition, no communities of learning, no diversity and robustness of enterprise, no distributed incentives to innovate, and no farmland-based dedication to farmland stewardship. Without a healthy and large population of farmers, agriculture is much less diverse, it is less progressive, less robust, and fundamentally unsustainable.

These elements then: water, diversity, farmers, and at the base of it all, good farmland, are all critical to human life on this planet, and as such they are very valuable. But do we consider these factors in the valuation of what we do? Most often we don´t - and society is still cavalier with farmland, often giving it away for money now, and denying the potential it holds for the future.

And to this end, we might want to think about where future opportunities lie, even from a cold economic and job-growth perspective. For example, at the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC - where I work), and with leadership from our dedicated alumni, we commissioned a study in late 2011 to quantify the job opportunities in the agriculture and food sector in Ontario.

This study, which we released a year ago, showed us that this sector, which employs almost 250,000 Ontarians (including retail and food service) continued to grow post-2008, and over the next five years is predicting job growth of 10-20%. That equals 25,000 to 50,000 more jobs over a five-year period, just in this sector, and just in Ontario. These are opportunities not to be ignored, opportunities that are built around agriculture and food, opportunities that ultimately, are built on farmland - which is very valuable indeed.

Tony Lewis sends these examples of comments made on the internet within hours of the news that Tesco´s "all beef hamburgers" contained 30% horse meat:

A LITTLE BRITISH HUMOUR TO GO WITH YOUR MORNING COFFEE

I´m so hungry, I could eat a horse … I guess Tesco just listened.

Anyone want a burger from Tesco? Yay or neigh?

Not entirely sure how Tesco are going to get over this hurdle.

Waitress in Tesco asked if I wanted anything on my burger … so I had a £5 each way bet!

Had some burgers from Tesco for my tea last night … I still have a bit between my teeth.

A woman has been taken into hospital after eating horse meat burgers from Tesco. Her condition is said to be stable.

Tesco are now testing all their vegetarian burgers for traces of unicorn.

I´ve just checked the Tesco burgers in my freezer … AND THEY´RE OFF!

Tesco now forced to deny presence of zebra in burgers, as shoppers confuse barcodes for serving suggestions.

Said to the missus, "These Tesco burgers given me terrible trots."

To beef or not to beef. That is equestrian.

A cow walks into a bar. Barman says, "Why the long face?" Cow says, "Illegal ingredients, coming over here stealing our jobs!"

I hear the smaller version of those Tesco burgers make great horse d´oeuvres.

These Tesco burger jokes are going on a bit. Talk about flogging a dead ….

THE NO. ONE GRAMMAR ERROR

Jane Straus wrote "The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation", founded the GrammarBook.com website, and created a free weekly newsletter about common grammatical errors [newsletter@grammarbook.com]. She died two years ago, and her husband of 25 years maintains the website and issues the weekly newsletter, to which I subscribe. He sent the following excerpt from one of her posts:

Would you like to know the #1 Grammar Error? Hint: The word involved is small and it´s contained in this sentence.

That´s right: "its" vs. "it´s". Yet the two rules are actually quite easy to remember.

Rule 1: When you mean "it is" or "it has", use an apostrophe.

Examples:

It´s a nice day. It´s your right to refuse the invitation. It´s been great getting to know you.

Rule 2: When you are using the possessive, don´t use the apostrophe.

Examples:

The cat hurt its paw. The furniture store celebrated its tenth anniversary.

Ms. Straus noted: From what I understand, the possessive was also written "it´s" until a couple hundred years ago. While I don´t know for certain, it is possible that the apostrophe was dropped in order to parallel other possessive personal pronouns such as "hers", "theirs", "yours", "ours", etc.

Barbara Wear and Irene Harvalias forward this comparison, which is still true today:

COMPUTERS COMPARED WITH CARS

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on:

At a computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill´s comments, Ford issued a press release stating:

If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash … twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You´d have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

PS - I´d like to add that when all else fails, you could call "customer service" in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!

Please share this with your friends who love - but sometimes hate - their computer!

Catherine Green sends the story of

THE FEARSOME OLD MAN

An old man and woman were married for many years.

Whenever there was a confrontation, yelling could be heard deep into the night.

The old man would shout, "When I die, I will dig my way up and out of the grave and come back and haunt you for the rest of your life!"

Neighbours feared him, and the old man liked the fact that he was feared.

To everyone´s relief, he died of a heart attack when he was 98.

His wife had a closed casket at the funeral.

After the burial, her neighbours, concerned for her safety, asked "Aren´t you afraid that he may indeed be able to dig his way out of the grave and haunt you for the rest of your life?"

The wife said, "Let him dig. I had him buried upside down.

"And I know he won´t ask for directions."

Pat Moore shares this story of a

BIOLOGY EXAM

Students in an advanced biology class were taking their mid-term exam. The last question was, "Name seven advantages of mother´s milk."

One student in particular was hard put to think of seven advantages. However, he wrote:

1) It is perfect formula for the child.

2) It provides immunity against several diseases.

3) It is always the right temperature.

4) It is inexpensive.

5) It bonds the child to mother, and vice versa.

6) It is always available as needed.

And then the student was stuck. Finally, in desperation, just before the bell rang indicating the end of the test, he wrote:

7) It comes in two attractive containers and it´s high enough off the ground where the cat can´t get it.

He was awarded an A.

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Carol Hansen suggests this site for a performance of Ravel´s Bolero by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, which surprised a curious and enthusiastic crowd in Brisbane´s South Bank:

Catherine Green sends this link to a video of an unusual strip tease:

Catherine Nesbitt suggests this site for a video of gorillas playing in fallen leaves:

Catherine also forwards the URL for a video of Laurel and Hardy dancing to the Rolling Stones:

Don Henderson writes that the Mum Song is funny, in case you haven´t seen it before:

Tony Lewis sends this link to a video of students playing instruments made of landfill junk, a testament to the ingenuity of desperate people and the dedication of their conductor:

Apollo Robbins, the master pickpocket, demonstrates the tricks of his trade:

William Kamkwamba, born in a village in Malawi, was 14 years old when he became fascinated with the idea of building a windmill after looking at a book on energy at a library he frequented when his family could no longer afford the school fees. Although he could not read the English text, he gleaned enough to build a crude windmill that produced 12 volts and powered four lights, bringing electricity and a water pump to his impoverished, famine-stricken village. This is his story:

To check out the features of the "freedictionary", which changes daily, go to