Just three weeks into his tractor drive across the whole of Canada, John Varty already has a pretty good feel for the life of a farmer.
“It’s bumpy and uncomfortable,” he says, and slow, too. His Massey Ferguson 1600 compact tractor tops out at 19 miles per hour. “I did manage to get it to 30 miles per hour, but that was going down a hill with the tractor out of gear.”
A Canadian historian, Mr. Varty plans to drive the tractor from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to Vancouver, British Columbia, stopping along the way to document the changing state of farms and the people who work on them as the world struggles to feed a burgeoning population. He hopes to reach Ontario before winter, but by late July he and his two crew members are already five days behind schedule.
“When you’re towing your house on a hay wagon down a secondary road, it’s not too long before a farmer will stop us, wanting to talk,” says Mr. Varty, who welcomes the conversations. “The majority of farmers in Canada are still working out of a family unit, and we need to know more about their challenges.”
Mr. Varty was partway into a fellowship as an assistant professor of Canadian history at McMaster University when he latched onto the thought of taking at least a year off from teaching. Earlier he’d been a fellow in agrarian studies at Yale University, and that had opened his eyes to the possibility of a career outside academe.
“People with Ph.D.'s went off to different things,” he says, “like filming in Africa or whatever.”
The tractor odyssey came to him one night last winter when he literally sat up in bed with the idea that a documentary film on Canada’s farmers could be his next career move, combining a recent interest in photography and video with his research skills and background in agrarian history and modernity. Mr. Varty’s partner, Molly Daley, agreed to join him, and a former student from McGill University, Mike Liew, came along to work the camera. AGCO, the company that produces Massey Ferguson implements, signed on to sponsor the project, providing a new tractor with an air-conditioned cab.
“When we pull into a town with a Massey Ferguson dealer, they give the tractor a mechanical check and top it up with diesel,” Mr. Varty says. “It’s a huge help. Fuel consumption is measured by hours, so we get five to six hours out of a tank, and at 40 bucks a fill-up the costs mount.”
As the summer wears on, he’s tooling down a rural road in Atlantic Canada alone with his thoughts or with music filling his cab, perhaps “Carefree Highway,” by his fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot. On the wagon behind the tractor is a mini-farmhouse that he sleeps in, built with material reclaimed from his family’s 150-year-old ancestral homestead in Ontario. Mr. Varty checks in at local festivals and markets to collect the personal stories of farmers, some of whom invite him and his crew to see their land, or even spend the night there, and always to talk.
The squabble over land use, he says, has been a running theme through many of the conversations.
“On one side, there’s the need to maintain agricultural land, and on the other hand, farmers are trying to sell off their land for development,” Mr. Varty says. “I can see both sides. It’s tough.”
In farming, he says, “the one thing that’s guaranteed is a debt load, so I’ve been pressing them hard on why they farm for so little compensation.”
So far he’s concluded that the intangible attraction for Canada’s farm families is rural life itself.
“They enjoy the freedom, the ability to own land, raise their kids in the countryside,” he says. “They see a real advantage in their lifestyle and are willing to lose some income just to have the lifestyle.”
Many have also been willing to share that income, making small donations toward Mr. Varty’s project, either in person or via his Web site (tractorcanada.com). Mostly what keeps him going, though, is the mounting wealth of original research material that he’s collected.
Next year when Mr. Varty’s journey ends, he expects to have a good start on a new career or renewed energy for his old one. He has a lot of time to think about it.
