Pistachio

The Canada Goose is a health hazard.

– Senator Nancy Ruth

This isn’t what I had in mind when I was considering in my last post how two problems could add up to two solutions.

Pissed that too many geese and their detritus are spoiling her cottage property, the senator took the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to task.

The geese should be shot and cooked and served to the poor, she said, or more specifically, as she explained to the media later, shot, plucked, inspected and sent to food banks.

And hey, it’s not just the fecal matter washing into her lake. It’s a problem near her Toronto home, too.

“We cull other animals,” she insisted, “why not these?” She might have a point, if it weren’t for her shameless sell-interest.

I wonder what else is going awry in the senator’s personal life that we can enlist the goverment to set right?

We’re already feeding a lot of people.

Crystal Mackay, Executive Director of the Ontario Farm Animal Council

Crystal Mackay thinks we could be feeding many more. As host of  last week’s symposium about how to grow farming, she said we’re ready for it.

One quarter of the Canada’s farms are in Ontario. The province is home to a third of the national population, and less than two per cent are farmers. As a case study in enterprise, we can look at how 50 percent of our pork is exported to the US.

We have the soil, climate and infrastructure to support a much larger industry, experts said. But then came the lament that not enough people wanted to go into farming. Manufacturing is going down the tubes, but agriculture isn’t likely to fully compensate. We’re going to need seed money, they said.

The investment fund established two years ago to promote the commercialization of local farming is just the beginning.

A wave of decentralized farming has begun. and it’s going to be huge.