Speaking about local markets, with my farm being right in the city of Fredericton, there's no other farm closer than 30 miles from me. I feel very fortunate. The way I view the world is that the Europeans had it very correct. They built communities around small little farms, there wasn't anything for 50 more miles, and then you had a small farm, maybe a dairy farm, somebody who grew this and somebody who grew that. I think that is the way....
When I first joined the CYFF, I had only ever seen what went on at my farm, or my grandfather's farm. I wasn't really into the agricultural sector and I didn't really understand it. I've started to understand more about commodities, the grains out west and whatnot. When we were at our AGM this year and we went on our farm tours, there was a guy who was growing grapes in the Niagara region. He talked about Welch's and how people started to cut down a lot of their vines because they actually got paid more money to take the vines out than to try to sell them. I totally understand that; it's hard.
To touch on what Becky was saying, it was hard, because for years a lot of people pushed going to university. They got away from our trades and away from just basic living and what human beings had been doing for 3,000 years. Because of the Industrial Revolution and cheap food, people started to want things faster and faster. I'm not a big fan of social media, things like Facebook and Twitter, but it is the way of the future, as much as it wastes our children's time to be looking on the computer when they could be, I don't know, doing work.
I'm not sure if that quite answers your question, but to touch on Ms. Bonsant's question, which Becky started to talk about, we do have some of those programs here. We have “Fresh From the Farm”, the Really Local Co-operative, the buy local New Brunswick movement, and the 100-mile diet. I don't know if that's around your area as well, but it's a big movement here.