PARRY SOUND – The maximum speed of John Varty’s tractor is 28 km/hr.
At that speed he hopes to reach Vancouver in September.
Along the way, he’s talking with farmers for a documentary about the state of Canada’s food industry
Varty quit his job as a professor of agricultural history at McMaster University to tackle the project last year.
“I come from a farm, my family had a farm for seven generations in southeastern Ontario, and I teach ag history, so I have both a personal and professional interest in it, and between you and the fence post, I turned 40 last year and something in me went ‘oh, man, if I don’t do something cool I’ll wake up one day and I’ll be 60 and I definitely won’t do it.”
The journey has less to do with scratching an item off his bucket list, than starting a national conversation on what Canada is losing as farmland is developed and farmers go broke.
“I just spoke to a farmer down in Hillsdale, he said the last two years his farm income had been minus $6,000 and that’s with an off-the-farm job – this is bad,” he said. “And there’s city people who go, they are all fancy, they love their organic tomatoes and their heirloom cucumbers and such and they think they are doing something for farmers but they really aren’t, they are doing something for small market farmers. And those are great things, but we’ve got to save the mid-size farmers so one day maybe they can become market gardeners, too”
On Tuesday, Varty was on Parry Sound’s James Street where he invited any and all intrigued passersby who stopped to take a closer look at the sleeping cabin, built of old barn wood from his parent’s farm, that he is pulling behind the tractor, and talked to them about how the marigolds and tomatoes in the container gardens nailed to the outside walls were growing and where he goes to the washroom.
“The key feature of  (the sleeping cabin) I think, is the veranda,” he said.
“So, when I’m interviewing farmers I just sit them around the table, pour them a cup of coffee and we talk.”
With 150 hours of interviews already, he’s been in discussion with national networks, but nothing’s been finalized.
“I haven’t wanted to part with the creative side of it, I haven’t wanted to part with the filming of it, because as they say in the business, I want to get it in the can, at least half in the can, and then I can start selling it.”
The cross-country journey is behind schedule, he said.
 “I started last July 1, in Charlottetown,” he said. “I had planned to do the whole country in that one summer/fall season, but I only got to Sault. Ste. Marie. It was November. Molly, who is my fiancé, who normally travels with me, threatened to leave me if we travelled one day longer, so we turned around.”
The couple hunkered down for the winter in their home base of Hamilton and Varty picked up the journey again earlier this month.
“I’ve got to get to B.C. this year,” he said, with conviction.