I asked a Christian Reformed church member about the size of his former dairy farm, what the land was like – if there was any forest on it? He said that he kept trees in a piece because, well, “we did a lot of clearing and it seemed good to leave a little in forest.”…
Heather Looy and John R. Wood’s article “Save the planet; Eat bugs: Why it’s time for the West to embrace edible insects” (CC, Sept. 20) inspired this column. I agree that the Biblical story about Peter and Cornelius and the vision of the lowered sheet is not about clean or unclean foods: it is, as…
When I was a child I dreamed of the day I’d be strong enough to go baling like my brother Willie. Alas, I was Paul Puny. I was older and stronger when I moved to Canada from the States and the “small” square bales were relatively light grass hay, unlike Willie’s 80 pound alfalfa bales….
The rising rate of farmland loss in Canada is a cause for alarm for many who work in agriculture and food security. Canada has experienced a 3.2% decrease in total farm area since 2016, according to the recently released Census of Agriculture. With only 189,874 farms left in Canada today, the toll on rural communities and…
“We just left everything behind . . . we might need to accept your offer to stay.” My heart sank for my friends as I read the text. We had been praying and anxiously receiving updates about the water levels rising near their farm, then onto their yard, then into their basement. The entire area…
In a mega/MAGA world, it is easy to hold up greatness as an ideal. Size matters, we’ve heard, whether it’s the size of our stock portfolio, pickup truck, political rally or congregation. Today I would like to consider the ant. Not, as a guide to industriousness (in Proverbs), but only in terms of its size….
So there we were, my husband and I, running down a country road in shorts and sandals chasing three black sheep. We were sweaty and frustrated, having just spent the last hour trying to convince those sheep to head back into the barn instead of out across the road. We were also scared – the…
Maybe you’ve seen the “I stand with farmers” bumper stickers or the tweets from celebrities like Rihanna. Maybe you drove past the hundreds of people protesting in Vancouver last December or the thousands in Toronto. Maybe more recently the protests in Brampton or Edmonton have stopped traffic for you. Or, like me, you came across…
What does Sabbath mean when we can’t worship together physically because of the dangers to physical health? Do we take a break, essentially “fasting” from celebrating the Sabbath? Are we in “a time of eucharistic fasting, in which we join with the whole communion of saints in longing for the bread of new life and the wine of the age to come,” as the Anglican Church of Canada’s website suggests?
The word round can suggest futility, but it can also describe a continuous loop, year after year of opportunities to serve and to observe, to grow food and to eat food, to speak loudly and to meditate in silence, to labour and to stand in awe.
The Song of the Lazy Farmer provided many chuckles for rural readers in the 1950s and 1960s when I was a boy.
However, prior to 1965 there was a lot of chaos for milk shippers. Most farmers will agree that the creation and existence of the Ontario Milk Marketing Board has been the salvation of all milk producers in Ontario.
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