Farmer Believes Small-Scale Ag Can Change the World
Published: Friday, March 13, 2020
At the most recent Small Farms Conference, organized by Purdue University Extension's Diversified Farming and Food Systems Team, keynote speaker Jean-Martin Fortier shared some of his story in becoming a small-scale farmer, small farms advocate and farming educator.
"My mission is to inspire and educate people to work to-gether to increase the number of small, ecological farms," Frontier said when explaining his purpose for farming.
Hailing from and currently living in Quebec, Canada, Fortier gained farm rockstar-status when he published his book, titled "The Market Gardener." Fortier is the cofounder and owner, along with his wife, of Les Jardins de la Grelinette (The Grelinette Gardens), a nine-acre micro-farm producing vegetables in Southern Quebec.
"A farm is where you can be the master of your own kingdom," he said. "We planted trees, planted shrubs, planted vegetables. We created spaces for butterflies, spaces for bees, making it all heaven on earth. You can do it. You can be creative and we like that part a lot."
He also manages an experimental farm in Hemmingford, Quebec—La Ferme des Quatre-Temps (The Farm of Four Seasons). It is a social enterprise com-bining the principles of agroecology and permaculture, along with modern technologies and traditional agriculture practices to create a holistic farm cultivating vegetables and raising livestock. The project aims to prove that small-scale, ecological farming can be more profitable and produce food of higher quality than industrial farming. But at the start of his farming journey, Fortier had less intricate goals. Fortier and his wife met at McGill University about 21 years ago and graduated with the intent of helping to preserve the health of the earth. Somehow, this led to them living in a teepee for two years, farming one-third of an acre on rented land.
"No one thought farming was cool," Fortier said. "Our parents weren't happy that we wanted to be farmers. But we felt how pow-erful it could be, and we felt it at farmers markets—there was an energy there that we felt and I still feel today and I think it's important to mention."
Frontier and his wife upgraded to a three-acre plot after their tee-pee adventure, thereafter, and continued to upgrade their vegetable production until they founded Les Gardins de la Grelinette. Frontier said one thing that inspired them immensely was a trip to Cuba, where they toured the country's dense, highly-organic food system, created out of necessity when the country couldn't import fuel for tractors or any other equipment for 10 years.
Fortier says his calling now is to spread the "good news" of small farms, promoting small-scale, ecological and profitable farming. He believes the future of farming may not have to be all technological, but rather, ecological. To make farms smaller, more direct-sale and effi-cient.
"I think that we all share the small farm dream in our heart," Fortier said. "We all know there is something broken in society—how it functions now. Globalization, corporations running the world, and we want to come back to something that is more rooted in community and nature, and small-scale farming is the way to do that."
Frontier said that small-scale farming allows for higher quality of life—the beauty of it being that a farm doesn't have to expand every five years, but rather continue getting more effi-cient, focusing on inputs and costs. He also strives to bring nature back into the farming system, a principle he employs on Le Ferme de Quatre-Temps by combating pests, for instance, by finding their natural predators or finding plants they are attracted to in order to guide them away from the other produce plants. Frontier said he purposefully uses the word "ecological" small-farming instead of "organic."
"Organic does not necessarily mean ecological," he said. "Unlike many organic industrial producers, we are concerned with the health of soils and ecosystems in order to work with nature rather than against it."
Of course, the biggest argument Frontier runs into when proclaiming how small farms can change the world is the claim that small-scale farming cannot produce enough food to feed the world. But if there existed hundreds of thousands of small, ecological farms in the world, he argues, it could be more than possible.
"Every time I share this with certain crowds, they say 'yes but small-scale farming cannot feed the world'," Frontier said. "And that's false, because small-scale farming is, presently, feeding the world. If you ever look at any of the World Health Organization's census programs, they'll say that small-scale farming is producing 70 per-cent of the food consumed on earth."
To make that a reality, Fortier said consumers need to strive to buy and eat local, and policymakers need to scale-up support for sustainable small-scale farming, developing their en-trepreneurial capabilities and create viable livelihoods in rural areas. He promotes these principles to the many intern-ing growers working on both of his farms, because passing on this mentality is important to him.
"I'm not saying tractors are bad," he said. " I'm saying that if an entire food sys-tem is geared toward the machine and not the unit in the machine, or the units around the machines, there's a problem. In the end, we're nourishing people and we're nourishing ourselves."
As he goes forward, Fortier plans to continue to teach as many people as possible how to farm professionally, functionally and on a level that is financially-viable.
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