The Cost of Food

Food should be cheap right? Access to cheap food is one’s inalienable right.

Right?

On the surface formulating the cost of food is reasonably simple. You have your inputs, that is to say your seed and or feed, cover crop, fertilizer, etc. Then you have your land, infrastructure, machinery, utilities, insurance, certification fees, third party auditors, etc. Inflation, don’t make me laugh. And of course you have labour.

Most Canadian farmers will, at some point through the year, have to hire labour to maintain, harvest, and process their crop to get it to market in a timely fashion. The work is often arduous, occasionally rewarding, and always unglamorous.

The work extracts a toll on your body. For anyone, except the farm owner, working a farm seems, well, a little insane. Those idyllic farm scenes posted to Social Media are farm theatre, not farm reality.

Farm work requires no diploma. Hell, it doesn’t even require experience. Farm work requires a strong back and bug spray and if you make it to the end of the work day you will get paid minimum wage. Maybe a little more if you finish out the contract. A little less if you choose to work for cash. Under those conditions it is near impossible to attract labour.

So Canadian farmers apply to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for off shore labour whereby minimum wage becomes… fluid.

However, not all farmers can take advantage of the program because not all small and independent farmers can provide the plane tickets and billeting required of the program. Their farm labour pool will be transient, most likely illegal, and in the constant pursuit for a better way to self medicate.

It becomes a real challenge to hire workers when the job can not pay a livable wage. And even at that the farmer’s labour cost is maybe in excess of forty percent. That’s the reality.

It would be amazing if farm work were a viable career path that paid well and provided benefits to the employee and their family. But at what cost? Eighty percent. One hundred and ten percent.

What is the cost for a head of lettuce? Broccoli? Eggs?

The cost of food is cheaper than it should be because not all the burden is on the consumer.

Not a complaint. Jus’ sayin’ that’s the reality.