Report on Business magazine editor Dawn Calleja.Daniel Ehrenworth/The Globe and Mail
Like most city people, I hadn’t given much thought to where my food came from—until 16 years ago, when an editor sent me to work on a dairy farm in southern Manitoba. Within an hour, I was in the barn with one of the owners, helping to artificially inseminate a not overly enthusiastic cow. The next five days were utterly (udderly?) exhausting. Up before 5 a.m. to milk the herd, back 12 hours later to do it again. In between was back-breaking field work—harvesting vegetables, weeding vast fields by hand and bringing in the wheat, an all-hands-on-deck-no-matter-how-citified job that lasted well into the night.
The whole thing was made bearable only by the knowledge that I’d soon be back home in Toronto, buying my food from the grocery store, not wringing its neck in the yard.
I’ve been thinking about that experience a lot lately amid a barrage of stories about U.S. crops left to rot in the fields because Donald Trump’s seemingly indiscriminate roundup of immigrants means there are no workers to harvest them. Some have been deported, often to countries not even their own; others are too terrified to leave their homes—it’s estimated that anywhere from 25% to 40% of farm workers in the U.S. lack legal status. “We’re being hunted like animals,” one undocumented worker in California told The Guardian. “You can’t go out peacefully to do things or go to work with any peace of mind anymore. No one is the same since these raids started.”
This got me wondering how dependent our own agriculture sector is on seasonal labour. The answer, it turns out, is a lot, particularly when it comes to harvesting fruits and vegetables, which still must largely be plucked by hand. This isn’t a constituency we hear from often—mostly only when something’s gone horribly wrong, and often it’s a well-intentioned migrant-rights organization doing the talking, not workers themselves.
But the tens of thousands of labourers who keep food on our plates pay taxes here. They contribute to CPP and EI (though they rarely collect either). They spend money at local retailers. And crucially, they do work that almost no locals are willing to do. Because the truth is, though farm work is often referred to as “unskilled” labour, it’s anything but.
Jason Kirby knows exactly what it takes to clear a field. He grew up in Norfolk County, an agricultural hotspot known for its high concentration of fruit and vegetable farms. As a teenager in the 1990s, he picked vegetables on local farms. Back then, it was so common for locals to do that kind of work that area high schools let kids start the year several weeks late so they could get the crops in.
Not anymore. Over the summer, Jason roamed his old stomping grounds, talking to seasonal workers and the farmers who rely on them—precisely because they can’t find any Canadians willing to do the job. He also tried his hand picking peppers with a group of guys who hadn’t seen a local in their midst in years. His story, “Field advantage,“ offers up a rich portrait of hard-working people hungry to provide a better life for their families back home—and feeding us all in the process.
And speaking of portraits, we paired Jason up with photographer Gabriel Hutchinson, who produced a rich body of photos and videos to accompany the story. He shot some of his work—including our cover shot of veteran Jamaican farm worker Roy Campbell—on film. We asked Gabriel to tell us a bit about the process:
Behind the scenes with photographer Gabriel Hutchinson
Photographer Gabriel Hutchinson.Supplied
For this project, I shot some of the imagery on film using a Mamiya RB67. I quickly realized that much of farm work is still done by hand, and I wanted a medium that could mirror that sense of manual effort. Historically, photography was rare, deliberate and expensive. Film, being slower and more tactile than digital, forced me to slow down and take greater care with each exposure.
With subjects like Roy Campbell, who has been returning to the same farm for four decades, I wanted a medium that conveyed a sense of timelessness, and helped him and others feel that what we were capturing was meaningful and lasting—a way of ensuring that the legacy of the work he has put in over the decades, both for himself and his family, as well as for Canada, will be treasured and not forgotten.
Meet the migrant workers Canadian farmers depend on to harvest their crops
Growing up in the United Kingdom, I remember seeing a lot of grainy old photographs in textbooks of Black and other people of colour working on farms. Looking back, I think I was subconsciously trying to create a modern version of those images. I wanted to show that while clothes, tools and machines may have changed, the hands-on, tactile nature of farming remains the same. I think using this older technology allowed me to draws parallels between past and present, highlighting both what has changed and what has stayed the same in the work and lives of these migrant farmers.
– Gabriel Hutchinson