Give thanks for our farmers

The Ontario countryside is ripe and ready for Thanksgiving.

Burnished by three seasons of sunshine, the cornfields undulate like great golden lakes.

From the boughs of orchard trees, fat apples dangle like ruby pendants.

The grapes will soon be pressed, the carrots and potatoes unearthed for winter tables.

And in their patches, gargantuan pumpkins shine in the daylight like blazing lanterns.

All this peace and plenty has transpired in time to fill our homes with the bounty of another year.

Food, after all, is at the heart of any traditional Canadian Thanksgiving Day.

But before we join hands and voice gratitude for this holiday feast we should pause to remember where it came from.

The harvest doesn’t magically drop from heaven into a field or barnyard. It was planned months, even years ago. It grew to fruition or maturity because of the toil and sweat of men and women many of us never see except from inside a passing car.

And it wouldn’t be on our plates this weekend if it weren’t for Ontario’s farmers.

In a society increasingly urban and distanced from country ways, people are suddenly becoming more aware of the food they eat, where it comes from and why it’s good to buy what’s grown locally or elsewhere in Canada. This makes perfect sense. There’s nothing like biting into a cob of corn picked a few hours earlier a few kilometres away. The cellophane-wrapped variety from south of the border is no substitute.

Nor can a tomato trucked thousands of kilometres from Mexico match one from an Ontario vine for sweet succulence.

But there are other reasons, besides freshness and food safety, why we should value what happens on the 4.9 million hectares of the 49,600 farms in Ontario.

For one, it’s the economy: Cash receipts from the livestock and crops from these operations are worth $12.6 billion a year to the economy.

Moreover, what the farmers produce must be transported, processed and sold to consumers — and this sustains a vast food sector.

Statistics from a 2013 Ontario Federation of Agriculture report revealed agriculture in this province supports nearly 158,000 jobs with $8.1 billion in wages and salaries.

Meanwhile, as we increasingly feel the impact of climate change, buying what’s grown closer to our homes in Ontario often helps reduce our carbon footprint by cutting down on the emissions that come from trucking the food across the continent.

None of this means we can’t drink coffee or eat a banana.

However, it’s wonderful to savour the strawberries, peaches, apples, carrots and potatoes from Ontario farms and in their special season.

As people across Ontario celebrate the riches of the land that give us life this weekend, they should thank the people who made it possible, who labour hard, who work with nature while knowing its challenges and who may not have a real holiday because they still have work to do.

For what we are about to receive, may we be truly grateful — to the farmers.