It was while reading fellow columnist Jeff Carter’s column in last month’s issue of The Rural Voice that the subject for this column arose.
    Jeff was writing about an on-line conference held by Oxford University about the demonstrations by Indian farmers who were fighting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s effort to “modernize” agriculture by basically undermining millions of food producers who didn’t meet his idea of how modern farmers should behave.
    The line that jumped out at me was by Oxford University economist Pritam Singh: “Agriculture is not about the past. Agriculture is about the future, Protecting agriculture is very important in the viewpoint of protecting planet earth.”
    The production of food to feed humankind is one of the few through-lines of the human story. We all need to eat. It was only when the producers of food began to grow or hunt more food than they needed for themselves that some people, who never enjoyed working with the dirt or dirty animals anyway, were able to to earn a living in other ways.
    Little by little, with the help of new tools and greater knowledge of the needs of plants and animals, some children of farm families were able to free up their brothers and sisters to take up urban jobs: from millers to grind wheat or the flour for urbanites to priests and doctors. Inventors came up with boats to transport food surpluses farther and inventions like the steam-powered tractor to increase the productivity of farmers still further.
    For the last century, fewer producers of food were needed to feed more urbanites than ever before. Cities have grown, and spread, even as the number of people living on rural concessions has dropped. Despite the Canadian population quadrupling in the last century, we are still the fifth largest exporter of food in the world.
    But though so many farm daughters and sons now work at universities and large companies that provide knowledge and new inventions that allow more food to be produced on the same land base than ever before, this isn’t good enough for some urbanites. For them, the whole idea of plants growing in dirt and animals being eaten by humans or producing milk, cheese, butter or eggs is simply too old-fashioned for our modern world.
    And so I keep reading stories about how, in the future, food will be grown hydroponically on 50-storey buildings, not in dirt in the countryside. We’ll have cheese that’s made from plants and margarine instead of butter, so we won’t need animal agriculture. It’s all so exciting because it’s new and different.
    And, of course, it’s more visible to the urbanite and the urban media than the thousands of food-growers who live outside of cities. Even those who have cottages on lakes that have them driving through farmland to reach, find it far more comforting to buy from smaller producers at farmers’ markets ­– while at the same time not dealing with the majority of farmers who produce food that leaves their farms by the truckload.
    Given the price of urban real estate and the cost of building that has put the price of urban real estate beyond the reach of young urbanites, it’s hard to see how growing food in urban areas makes more sense, economically, than growing it in a field. Still, it re-emphasizes how important it is for people who live in cities  to know where their food comes from.
    As the urban population has grown, generation after generation, the knowledge of how food is produced gets lost. There are those in farming areas who understand this is a problem and that they need to build information bridges between the rural people who grow food and urbanites.
    Let’s not get to India’s situation where the growers of food are seen as too old-fashioned to matter.◊