A full spirit

What a pleasure to sit in the presence of Brian Brett Sunday morning as he mixed short readings from Trauma Farm, his memoir of life on his Salt Spring Island farm, with additional stories and details of farm life and tough-minded criticism of agribusiness and factory farming. And Brett is a presence. A large, craggy-faced man, his powerful body wrapped in leather vest and unpretentious work clothes, he reminded me of a Yorkshire farmer, or following that genetic line farther back, a Viking. Brett's appearance is largely the result of testosterone treatment for Kallmann's Syndrome, as he tells us in his memoir Uproar's Your Only Music: "Over the years I have metamorphosed into a creature resembling my childhood biker pals." But Viking or biker, he is a gentle, voluble one, bubbling with mirth and enthusiasm as he shared vignettes of farmyard slapstick with the audience, before reading a final passage that was eloquent and moving in its affirmation of the connectedness of all living things.

Brian Brett 

Trauma Farm is structured around a single summer's day in the life of the ten-acre, mixed farm Brett and his wife Sharon have toiled to reclaim and preserve. But it is an "eighteen-year-long day," Brett told the audience, the sum of his two decades of experience with small-scale, sustainable farming, and life lived amid the natural world, woven into the memoir's intentionally digressive narrative. Life is a web, Brett argues, not the linear progression that Western notions of history and development construct and valorize. He wanted his memoir to be akin to "native teaching tales" that blend "history lesson, how to behave, and adventure story." The "bullshit stories of farm," the various animal characters of Trauma Farm, a naked Brett walking his land in the sacred early morning or the soothing night, all contribute to a reverent and holistic view of life. I left the event feeling I'd been in the presence of a full spirit.

However, as Brett warned, good feelings or good intentions have been losing the battle with constructed notions of continual progress. Our science, technology, and focus on the bottom line, while not inherently evil, are the main drivers, and have pushed farming, and our planet, to the point of crisis. Brett provided frightening examples of the industrialization of food production. A giant pig factory in Nevada that produces more waste than the city of Los Angeles. Mixed manures sprayed as feed on fish farm ponds in southern China that when ingested by migratory birds gave rise to avian flu. The technologically accelerated, thirty-three-day cycle for a piece of KFC to go from egg to deep fryer. Brett also recognizes that the world wouldn't be able to feed itself without some version of large-scale methods, but decries the associated regulatory and economic disadvantaging that imperils the small-scale producer. As one example, Salt Spring lamb production, previously a viable and sustainable cottage industry supplying a superior product, has crashed from 10,000 animals a year to 1400. Slaughtering the lambs has become cost prohibitive now that regulations require the slaughtering to be done in facilities that don't exist on the island. And the innards from the slaughtered animals must currently be shipped in airtight containers to Alberta for final disposal.

Trauma Farm comes at the right time, and joins a growing body of literature exploring different possibilities for our relation with the planet and the food we eat: locavores, 100-mile diets, organic farmers, fair trade growers, sustainability, diversity, community, environmental stewardship, and the simple awareness of the huge importance of what we eat and how it is produced. If these movements and concepts can become truly central to the way we think, maybe the planet has a chance.

The CBC's Mark Forsythe hosted Trauma Farm, and again he presided over a small gem. For me, over the past three Festivals, the slightly quirky, offbeat Sunday morning events at the PTC Studio have been among the most memorable.