The silo is a simple invention used to store feed for winter. According to the folks at Ontario Barn Preservation, the first vertical silo in North America was built in Illinois in 1873, with the first Ontario silos built not long after.
The first models were built of wood, with the tongue and groove design helping to create the seal needed for fermentation. Improvements were made, moving from wood to clay and concrete tiles with ribbing, and later the towering sealed concrete silos of the 1970s and ‘80s. Silos built a lot of prosperity in southwestern Ontario over the years, but they are falling out of vogue, in large part because they can only do one thing and that one thing can only be done at one speed.
How many times have we heard the belittlement of an arts degree while showering praise on an engineering degree? Why are we so fixated on guiding kids to find a silo in which they will spend their entire career?
Throughout my schooling in the 1990s, there seemed to be a clear message about “success” – get out of Listowel, go to university, get a white collar occupation, and so on. It took a couple special teachers to instill in me a love of learning that was not limited to the narrow lens of “Will this learning aid me financially down the road?” Knowledge is a beautiful thing and the more varied, the cooler tapestry we can weave. Why do we build proverbial silos around ourselves? Why praise the specialist but raise an eyebrow at the generalist? This overarching belief is now shaping the skillset of our population and the well-rounded generalist – a person whose knowledge or skills are far-reaching – is becoming scarce.
In an attempt for efficiency, we’ve tried to put so many things into silos that we’re learning the same hard lesson as the Harvestore salesperson’s favourite dairy farmer – you can only stack up so many silos beside each other before things get disorganized and muddy. We are stuck in silos, lacking creativity and daring at a time when we desperately need to be bold with our actions.
Take the most recent interest rate hike from the Bank of Canada. Within the silo, what can a governor like Tiff Macklem do beyond monkey around with rates and quantitative easing? Those are the only two levers he has at his disposal. It is very clear that his silo is charged with the responsibility of managing inflation, yet we limit the tools available and as a result limit the range of solutions that could be brought forward for a complex problem.
One significant issue with this recent rate increase (and the couple more that analysts expect before the end of 2022) is that it is dubitable how much impact they are going to have on inflationary price pressure. A case can be made that they will actually exacerbate non-housing price inflation moving into 2023 due to chronic supply side issues.
Housing price, the place where everyday Canadians have the most interest rate exposure, has already begun its descent. Canadian financial institution Desjardin predicts Canadian average home values will decrease by over 25 per cent before the end of 2023. When the latest interest rate increase hits mortgage auto-withdrawls in October, people are going to feel it. So while rates may be helping to cool a market that needed an icebath, we are forgetting there is a lot more to inflation than the roof over our heads and for many, household discretionary income is getting stretched.
Micheal Spence, a Canadian economist and former dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, has studied labour and job markets over an impressive career, including a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. He recently published an essay outlining the folly of focusing on interest rates in this current inflationary environment. While rates cannot be ignored, job vacancy rates, supply chain interruptions, and most importantly, lagging productivity, are issues we cannot afford to ignore.
I imagine that you’ve seen your grocery bill steadily rise month over month for the last year. I’d love to tell you it will get better, but I predict it will continue to get worse in 2023. The Canadian agri-food industry, one of Canada’s largest employers and contributors to export activity, is currently short over 200,000. Average job vacancy rate in the industry is over 25 per cent, and supply chains are starting to bend and break. Have you noticed the increasing price on your ham for Sunday dinner? Unfortunately, this trend is likely to continue until Canada admits that the economy is crippled by labour shortages and is willing to take drastic action to correct it.
Canada is so short workers that we are selling unprocessed hams into the global market at a discount and purchasing back boneless hams at a premium. All because there are not enough people showing up every day to turn pigs into ham to meet Canadian demand.
Higher interest rates don’t help us make stuff faster. Instead of turning our focus on rapidly fixing the workforce issue, we have made it more expensive for capital investments in labour-saving technologies that could help businesses weather this issue today and in the future. Spence points out in the aforementioned essay that over 75 per cent of the world’s GDP is created in countries that have declining and aging populations. Supply side constraints have a number of natural phenomenons to be overcome and we are not even talking about it as an issue here in Canada.
A silo is a great tool. Yet it is a very simple tool with limited functionality that really only allows it do do one thing well. Once it has served its useful life preserving forages, the only hope it has is a benevolent owner who decides to beautify the landscape with a new mural. Tools with only one use are great… until their limitation becomes a barrier to their efficient deployment, and they are discarded.
When it comes to empowerment of people, the power of the human brain, and looking ahead, we should start blowing up some silos so that we can harness the creativity of an unencumbered populace. The beautiful thing about learning is you never know what solutions you may discover until you actually ask yourself a new question.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stewart@stonaleenfarms.ca or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
