By Cathy Hird

In the fields, the beans are turning yellow. The rich green of summer is gone. Soon they will become a particular shade of brown.

Farmers are watching this carefully. With soybeans, white beans, lima beans, any of the kind whose seed we use, you cannot harvest them until they are dry. Then, you want to get them off right away because pods will split and white beans in particular will discolour. That doesn't affect their food value, but consumers tend to reject them if they are grey so they sell for less as animal feed.

Farmers are also watching because many who planted soy beans this year will put winter wheat into those fields. As soon as the beans are off, the land will be worked, and the wheat planted. That needs to happen with enough time for the wheat to germinate and get a good start, so the farmer has to be right on top of this process.

One year when I worked in the Collingwood area, the beans ripened late, very late. Farmers worried that they were not going to get time to put in wheat. Not a big deal, you might say. Plant in the spring, or plant something else. But you can't plant winter wheat in the spring. You don't want the land to go fallow, and you don't want to break your normal crop rotation. So some farmers tried an experiment: they used airplanes to spread the wheat seed over the fields, like crop dusters but with seed rather than pesticide.

I never heard how it worked out. That was my last fall working in the area. The story reminds me how complicated planning for field crops is. It also reminds me how narrow our view can become: the farmers that used planes to seed winter wheat could not look past the crop rotation they were used to.

Farming routines are different in different parts of the world. In places like Burkina Faso where rain comes in only one season, planting is organized around the rain. When we were there this summer, the rains were late and farmers were worried they might not come. Drought is more frequent because of climate change.

Most of us expect that food is always going to be there. We just pop into our favorite grocery store and pick up what we need. But climate change is affecting food production all over the world. Rainfall patterns are shifting.

The marches last Sunday in New York, Owen Sound and many other communities here were intended to wake us up to the need to adjust our way of living. The UN Summit on Climate change that happened this week brought world leaders together to commit to changing the way nations deal with carbon emissions.

At the summit, the representative from Micronesia said, "We are obligated by our common humanity to ensure that we leave no one behind in our aspiration for development. It is not too late to change our destructive course." The king of Spain acknowledged that small islands, places like Micronesia, are among the most vulnerable. He said that his country encourages every business to calculate their carbon footprint and then look at ways to decrease it.

Every business and every family can cut back on their carbon footprint. The eat local movement tells us that if we buy food that is grown by our neighbours we cut back on transportation of food and keep that much carbon out of our atmosphere. White beans that have turned a little grey are just as good for us; they don't have to go as cattle feed. We can eat apples with a few spots on them. We can plan different crop rotations and more organic production.

Ojibway elders taught me that every decision should be made in the context of seven generations, seven generations of our ancestors and seven generations of our children. We remember the way things were done on this land. We remember those who will need to eat from this land long into the future. Given the pace of change, we can't imagine the shape of the world 300 years from now, but we need to remember that there will be people living here and work so that they can live and eat well.

Food seems immediate. It is in front of us and we eat it. But what we eat today is connected to our past and our future. We need to change the way we live and the way we farm so that creation does not suffer, so that climate change slows down, so that all may eat and live.

Cathy Hird is a farmer, minister and writer living near Walters Falls.