The reality of farming in Canada today
Welcome to the reality of Canadian farming
It’s dry. It’s also windy. Very windy. The kind of wind that howls and menaces the imagination. Nutrient-rich topsoil from nearby fields has created an opaque haze, reducing visibility and increasing anxiety levels among farmers.
Fall 2017 was dry. The water table is critically low in much of southern Manitoba. If rain doesn’t come, my crops at best will not germinate until moisture arrives. At worst, the drought will starve any plants that found just enough moisture to start growing. If the wind persists and my fields start dusting, I could also lose the seed.
There is about $35,000 worth of canola seed and fertilizer nestled just beneath the surface of the field in front of my house. It’s a field I am renting this year, a 250-acre piece of beautiful, black, recently seeded land. My field and my investment are now vulnerable to the ravages of frost, drought, flooding and wind.
The above description is especially poignant, because it is real, current and accurately illustrates the vulnerabilities of farming in Canada, of which there are many.
This is not a plea for sympathy. This is farming: a vocation constantly testing the mental and sometimes fiscal thresholds of its participants.
Imagine if your annual salary washed downstream in a heavy rain or was destroyed by hail. Imagine if what you made this year was susceptible to the ebbs and flows of commodity prices, rising land costs, exorbitantly high machinery costs and inclement weather.
Veteran growers able to navigate and perhaps even see opportunity amid seeming catastrophe don’t possess anything necessarily superhuman. But they are familiar with coming to terms with such heavy, consequential things as a total loss of annual revenue.
Add to that an erosion of public trust and farmers are truly left to deal with heavy subject matter on their own.
Thanking a farmer is more than just a pro-agriculture public relations campaign. It’s a concerted and collective effort to show farmers you understand the pressures affecting them and appreciate a group of people who don’t mind getting dirty and dealing with insurmountable hurdles in order to grow food.
We usually get rain in May, so we expect it. But there’s nothing causal about the relationship between moisture and May. Farmers know this. They don’t take good weather for granted.
There were dry years in the ’80s. There were wet years in the ’90s. Rain in May is a hope and expectation based on what happened the year before and the year before that and the year before that, and so on.
We finished seeding about two weeks ago. The wheat is starting to emerge from the soil, the canola is about to do the same and the soybeans will follow.
It has become increasingly clear that before I fully take over my family’s farm, I will need to develop the mental tools required to prevent the things I can’t control from tampering with my ability to make clear, defensible decisions on the farm.
If I’m a fatalist and a skeptic in my life as a writer, I’ll need to find ways to circumvent that tragic blend of traits as a farmer. I’m working on it. It’s not easy.
I rely on examples of mental stamina from the veteran farmers around me.
Clouds are beginning to form and the rain forecasted for later today looks more likely. Here’s hoping. Many farmers, including myself, will feel a little lighter when the clouds hovering above my canola burst open.