The Hands That Feed Us

In April 2020, filmmaker Devon Cooke set out on a journey to find out how Canadian farmers make money. Devon spent the next eight months living and working on farms from Vancouver Island to Nova Scotia, as he tried to answer the question "can our farmers afford to feed us?" The Hands That Feed Us challenges audiences to think about what it means to be wealthy and to discover a completely different way of life from the nine to five "hustle culture" of money making. For farmers, wealth comes from stewarding the land - the richest farmers are the ones who have given the most to it. Farmers love their way of life. But does that make it okay that most farmers need off-farm jobs because we pay so little for their food? The farming way of life is threatened by the way farmland is financed. The price of farmland is far beyond the money it earns for farmers, so only giant farms and bigger corporations can access the debt necessary to buy it. Canadians face a choice about our food system: keep supporting it with debt that only corporate multinationals can afford, or adopt an economic system where decisions about farmland are made by the family farmers who live on it.