The Family Farm

Shot throughout Canada, filmmaker Ari A. Cohen's documentary looks at independent family farms and cooperatives, which are having an increasingly hard time surviving in the face of rigged laws, double standards that favor Big Agriculture, and environmental devastation caused by the chemical-happy food industry. The film begins by underscoring the benefits of family farms and ranches, with their local ties, encouragement of microbial life in the soil, free-range animal policy, and philosophy of cyclical sustainability (i.e., the way that different animal species benefit from one another's contribution to a farm ecology). Viewers see bison and cattle slaughtered more humanely than on the killing floors of the mainstream meat industry; produce grown without pesticides; and human harvesters who are not fearful of exposure to toxins. But this independence comes at a price: the legal authority of regional managers to manipulate supply and demand by restricting, for example, the number of hens that poultry farmers are allowed to have. For a family farm, with margins much smaller than mass-producing operations, the loss of chickens due to these rules can have a huge economic impact. Some farmers partially circumvent that problem by selling through farmers markets in cities, but the going remains tough. Also noted here is the fact some U.S. agricultural products, drenched in chemicals that are banned in Canada, are sold to our neighbors to the north anyway, creating another disadvantage for small farms. A compelling film about the importance and struggles of family farms, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)