A Tribute to Brewster Kneen 1933-2025

I first met Brewster Kneen sometime in the mid 1990’s, in the early days of Family Farm Defenders. One of our all consuming projects at the time was opposing the use of Monsanto’s Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). Brewster was working on one of his many books, Farmageddon- Food and the Culture of Biotechnology. He came to Wisconsin from Canada to see first-hand how universities were partnering with industry on the promotion of rBGH, —and there was plenty of biotechnology research being done (although quietly) at the UW Madison. John Kinsman was also protesting against rBGH weekly at the UW, so they made a natural team.

Brewster also wanted to visit the World Dairy Expo, and question the army of Monsanto staff that ran probably the largest trade show booth at the Expo. In those days, Family Farm Defenders were allowed to have a booth at the Expo (we were deemed too subversive at some point) and boy did we have some discussions with the Monsanto folks, so, we were on common ground with Brewster.

As he recalls the early opposition to rBGH, he stated that it was “not on ethical grounds, but largely on grounds of food safety,” which he found totally unsatisfactory when so much more was at issue. While he was clearly concerned about food safety, he also pictured all the farmers who’s livelihoods would be at risk due to the further “totalitarian occupation” of farming that was envisioned by the biotech industry. —“if five or six giant corporations have control over every seed, of all the commercial crops planted anywhere on the earth, that is totalitarian”.

Brewster spent a few days on our farm and was, as Rebecca notes, “the perfect house guest”. Our kids were drawn to him because he was funny and treated them like people. While he was a deep thinker, a student of theology, philosophy and science, he could talk for hours with kids, anyone for that matter, because while he cared about many things, he cared so much about people.

As a high school a senior in 1951, he wrote an essay in which he stated, “Obviously, labor cannot survive without management nor can management survive without labor. Both can and must work as a single unit for the benefit of all. Management can help in this union by making the employees the stockholders. This makes the employees work for their own benefit and they take pride in ownership as everybody does, especially ownership of their job.” Years later he would write his memoirs, Journey of an Unrepentant Socialist. 

He didn’t care much for corporations, perhaps from long before the day he formulated that senior essay on workers and management. “A corporation cannot control life, it can threaten, it can intimidate, it can take you to court and ultimately can kill. Like the state, it may have the power to take life, but neither have the power to give life.”

Brewster‘s wife of 52 years Cathleen, was drawn to “his passionate commitment to social justice and active pacifism –his theology has been central to his life and work.” Brewster related that, after moving to Nova Scotia, they attended a Presbyterian church with what he described as, “a hate-filled Paisleyite Irish preacher” who after offering prayers for Richard Nixon and the US war against Vietnam, Brewster stood up in the choir and made a short statement about the blasphemy of such prayers and politics and left the church, never to return.

Brewster was a student of and fierce practitioner of ethics, —again it was his devotion to people and their well being that drove his life. Brewster and his wife Cathleen published the Ram’s Horn, a monthly news letter that analyzed both the ethical inadequacies and examples of hope within the world’s food system. It was both a source of evidence and, as the title indicated, a call to action for food sovereignty activists around the world. A source of information and truth that fearlessly exposed the totalitarian occupation of corporate agribusiness.

Brewster was not a born farmer, but eventually his concern with “development and the inequity it was supposed to address” started he and Cathleen to think about moving from Toronto to the “hinterlands” and put his body where his mouth was. They moved to Nova Scotia in 1971 and started a sheep farm, eventually having 400 ewes, among the largest flocks in Eastern Canada. After 15 years of farming, with their “indentured servant “children gone to college, –too much work running a farm brought them back to Toronto where Brewster did much of his writing, until they made another move to a small farm near Sorrento British Columbia in 1995. The farm was in the traditional territory of the Shuswappeople who Brewster noted “added a very important dimension to our lives.”

Rebecca and I were fortunate to spend a few days with Cathleen, Brewster, his daughter Rebecca and her partner Brian McIsaac on their farm (and brewery) in British Columbia many years ago. When Rebecca and Brian took over the farm, Brewster and Cathleen moved to Ottawa to be better able to protest the shenanigans of the Canadian government. We saw Brewster for the last time when we visited him in Ottawa in 2019, he was still his charming and witty self, grateful for our help planting his garden, but very much missing Cathleen since she passed in 2016.

He was a good friend, a good loving person and a fearless activist for peace and social justice. His family created a memorial page https://www.kneen.ca/ .

In the acknowledgements for Farmageddon Brewster closes with a line that is, well, so evocative of him.

“May the weeds in the crops of mono-culture grow strong”

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