What A Farmer Wants You to Know About Food

Chapter 1

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

It broke my heart. I was at an exclusive networking conference for entrepreneurs led by an individual for whom I have enormous respect. One of the guest speakers entered a dialogue with the conference leader about a supposed conspiracy between farmers, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the media designed to keep people sick and dependent on costly medications to make ever-soaring profits. He claimed the food industry was deliberately making people obese, infertile, and depressed.

In response, the conference organizer told the audience that whenever he traveled, he brought eggs, olive oil, and other food items with him because he didn’t think the food supply system was safe—in fact, he thought it was poisoning people as if we were still living in Upton Sinclair’s jungle! And now, here he was, encouraging a roomful of highly educated and accomplished people, who trusted everything he said, to believe the same thing.

I paid a hefty price to attend this event where my life’s work and my family’s contributions to feeding and nourishing people for generations were denigrated and maligned. And the type of misinformation propagated in that presentation is becoming increasingly widespread and accepted.

I’ve been a farmer all my life. The average farmer in the US and Canada feeds 166 people. I may never have met many of the people who eat the food that comes from my farm, but my children and grandchildren eat those foods. Do you think farmers want to poison their loved ones—or anyone else—just to make a buck or because some C-suite executive for a pharmaceutical company told them to? Of course not. That’s just absurd.

We all want to do the right thing—for our health, our bodies, and the planet. We want to provide nutritious, ethical, sustainable food for our families, and we want to do it with minimal harm to the environment. It can be extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in discussions around health, diet, and food production.

Some claims made by the guest speaker are founded on seeds of truth, which helps make them sound believable, but the reasoning behind them and the conclusions he extrapolated from those statistics were patently false. I won’t debunk all his claims here because that would be a book in itself, but I will share a couple of examples.

For example, the number of people, especially women, experiencing mental health issues has increased over recent decades. The guest speaker attributes this to unhealthy food and eating habits when, in reality, there are multiple, generally benign causes that explain this rise, including destigmatization, better access to mental health services and diagnoses, and increased socio-economic pressures from things like the cost-of-living crisis, rising unemployment, and COVID-19 quarantine measures.

Of course, it stands to reason that food and food production play vital roles in our health, but it is one factor among many in the constellation of factors that contribute to our overall health and wellbeing, including genetics, lifestyle, policy interventions, health care access, and structural issues. What’s more, the food available to us as consumers is safer and more accessible than ever before.

There is also a growing tendency to moralize food production and consumption. We label foods as healthy and unhealthy, good and bad, or natural and unnatural, when those terms are context dependent. For example, if you buy butter or olive oil, these could easily be labelled as unhealthy foods because they are essentially just fats, but in the context of a balanced diet, the use of a single source of fat for cooking, especially in moderation, isn’t going to have a significant impact on your overall health. In fact, fats can help our bodies better absorb and process certain nutrients!

We see this moralization, particularly in discussions of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and organic foods. Most people believe that organic food is better than nonorganic and are likely have a negative impression of GMOs, but this largely boils down to a lack of understanding of the science behind these foods.

For example, if I offered you snack and said you can choose a banana or a mystery food containing glucose, fructose, glutamic acid, histidine, alanine, lauric acid, yellow-orange E101, ethyl hexanoate, and ethane gas, which would you pick? The banana, right? What if I told you they are both bananas?

Likewise, which form of food production do you think has the potential to feed more people, organic or nonorganic? And which has the lower carbon footprint? The answers will probably surprise you.

Mistrust and misinformation around how food is produced poses a danger to us all. We are talking about the food that fuels our everyday lives. Food that is grown to help stop hunger and famine in developing countries. Food that brings us together around the table for Sunday dinners and holiday celebrations.

Making people afraid of mainstream food production and the health care system is hugely profitable. Indeed, the guest speaker at that conference started a company that partners with supplement brands, fitness centers and gyms, telehealth services, so-called health food suppliers, and health and fitness technology—businesses worth millions of dollars. And he benefits from book sales, online subscriptions, and speaker fees on the same subject. He has a vested financial interest in driving consumer dollars toward his segment of the market just like other pundits in similar positions.

His goal to promote health was deeply entrenched and driven by a previous negative experience with a large company, which led him to assume all large companies were equally treacherous. For me, as a farmer with some degree of success, according to him that meant I was caught up in a nefarious conspiracy with Big Ag. His claims regarding our collective need for supplements, health aids, and particular lifestyle adaptations were based more on opinion, fearmongering, and demonization than fact.

I thought to myself, "This is a smart guy with a goal to improve human health, but he has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to the intricacies of growing food. What he is missing is a farmer’s perspective, someone who cares as much as he does about the safety of our food."

I felt insulted and sad that a fellow entrepreneur, as smart and successful as he was, hadn’t taken the time to explore both sides of the story or considered asking a real expert and entrepreneur what was going on in the fields and factories that supply our food. It didn’t sound like he had ever been to a modern farm or considered the host of people who dedicate their careers to researching these subjects, people like me who have come to a much different conclusion about it all than he had.

Remember, this was a networking conference for entrepreneurs! I love seeing entrepreneurs take a great idea and find success, but being successful in one area of expertise—say, public speaking—does not translate to being an expert in everything. There needs to be some degree of social responsibility that comes with success, especially for entrepreneurs with significant reach.

Moreover, the conversation can get pretty muddy pretty fast when it seems like everyone is out to turn a profit. Capitalism incentivizes demand. If I am an apple farmer, I am going to do everything I can to get you to buy my apples. Maybe that means pouring money into an expensive ad campaignor finding a way to make my apples sweeter, bigger, and juicier. It could even mean partnering with a big food wholesaler who can buy all my apples and sell them on to you. But does that mean I am going to secretly start adding things to my apples to make them addictive? The answer, clearly, is a resounding No.

Part of the dilemma in the conversation around food production also rests on the fact that most people are more removed from the sources of the food they eat than ever before. For most of human history, people grew, raised, or hunted their own food, or they traded, sold, and bought at a relatively local level. Your grandparents or great-grandparents might have known their butcher, greengrocer, and fishmonger by name. Perhaps they even canned their own fruits and vegetables from their gardens.

That has all changed with the global market. Today, most people will never have the experience of growing their own food, aside from maybe a small herb garden in a kitchen window box. They won’t know how quickly lettuce grows or the effect of heavy rain on certain crops. They won’t know what goes into raising chickens or how their milk ends up in that carton in their fridge. And they won’t know how heavily regulated every step of those processes is!

And that’s okay. It is a good thing that farmers can provide so much food that it frees people to do all sorts of other important work that creates the fabric of our society and economy. In fact, less than two percent of the population are farmers in the US and Canada, which means that 98 percent of Americans don’t have to spend their days toiling in the soil!

Still, I think many people continue to picture a farmer as a kind of country bumpkin, someone in overalls and a straw hat being manipulated by the whims of a faceless, evil mega-corporation that doesn’t consider ethics, morals, or safety. Meanwhile, the industry has moved away from that stereotype by leaps and bounds. And this lack of knowledge and understanding creates doubt and mistrust.

Instead, it is more useful to think of farmers as specialists in their area of expertise. How often do people who are concerned about food ever ask a farmer? After all, we’re the ones who grow it all.

We spend our lives, often generation after generation, learning everything about our industry, finding ways to improve it, and producing data-based solutions to real-life problems.

Would you rather have a top heart surgeon conduct your bypass surgery or someone who has seen every episode of Grey’s Anatomy? There is a reason we trust experts with big decisions and difficult tasks, and I believe there are more good, honest people—in society at large and every industry within it—who care about their friends and families and extend that care and concern to others. I know that personally, I care deeply about these issues, and that should give you a sense of security when it comes to food production.

There are real challenges ahead with food production. The population is projected to hit nine billion people by 2050, which means we will have another billion people to feed in the next 35 years. In turn, food production will need to increase by 35 to 56 percent.¹ That is a monumental task if we want to maintain global food security, and it’s not one that can be solved by small organic farms or bureaucratic red tape that creates barriers out of fear.

I think it is time to rebuild the relationship and understanding between producer and consumer. I want to fill in those knowledge gaps. I want people to understand where their food comes from, how it is produced, and everything that happens in that journey from farm to table. Food production is a complex system, but one I hope to make more accessible and less opaque to you with this book.

I’ve worked in the agriculture industry for over 40 years. My great-grandfather emigrated from what was then Russia (now Ukraine), and in 1914, the Canadian government offered a scheme whereby if you broke 22 acres of land, that land would become yours. So, he plowed the soil and planted wheat because coming from the old world, that was all he knew how to grow.

That same farm passed down through four generations of my family until I took it over in 1981. I earned a Bachelor of Science degree where I studied animal nutrition, soil science, and ag economics. I’ve served as a keynote speaker at conferences nationally and internationally.

And my wife, Lynda, and I founded The Rack, which started out by offering fertilizer supply and crop protection services and grew into an industry leader in the science of agriculture and agronomic knowledge. I have three daughters who are likely to follow in our footsteps and take over leadership of the farm, perhaps even passing it to their children, the sixth generation.

I feel immense pride that I’m playing a role that helps feed the world and that what I do will impact future generations. There is a special kind of satisfaction in knowing that when I harvest a crop, it will end up on someone’s table. Over the years, I have grown wheat, rye, barley, canola, peas, lentils, flax, fava beans, and pinto beans, crops that fuel and nourish people. And I want to leave the world a better place than I found it.

I’ve written this book to demonstrate that so much of what people take for granted about food, including farming, organic labels, GMOs, pesticides, preservatives, and other vital subjects is just plain wrong. There is so much misinformation out there. I want to equip you with the facts so you can judge for yourself. Our food supply system has never been safer, and never have farmers been able to feed so many people.

I have spent my lifetime asking all the same questions you ask. This book is the result of my research and conclusions from that research. I want to share with you, in a condensed fashion, the same the road I have taken to better understand food production. I have tried to be as objective as possible and base my conclusions on my experience, the science I use to farm, and peer-reviewed research conducted by experts across disciplines and published in reputable sources.

They say the truth will set you free. I wrote this book so you can learn the truth about food. I’ve written it in the form of vital questions, some of which may have crossed your mind from time to time. Read the ones that matter most to you, or better still, read them all! When you get to the end of the book, I hope you’ll agree that our food system, despite