Our province can always count on agriculture

Amidst the furor over the need to open the legislature and the angst over a potential date of June 8 for Stage 3 reopening, Premier Scott Moe sent out a tweet Thursday that was innocuous and overlooked.

“Hats off to our farmers for their perseverance and hard work this season,” Moe wrote in the tweet that mostly noted 51 per cent of the crop is in this year — exactly the five-year seeding average completed by this date.

Sure, politicians are always sending off congratulatory notes and the more cynical among us will accuse Moe of playing to his solid rural base. But what else in our new COVID -19 pandemic world can even vaguely be described as average or normal?

Actually, Saskatchewan agriculture has been better than normal during this crisis.

While last month’s job statistics showed a staggering 53,000 fewer people working in Saskatchewan, agriculture saw a 1.4-per-cent increase from March to April. That’s slightly down year-overyear with 37,900 working in Saskatchewan agriculture last month compared with 40,300 in April 2019, suggesting farming is not completely immune to the impact of COVID-19.

However, it does seem to be soldiering on without the hand-over-fist federal bailouts everyone else seems to be getting.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced May 4 a $252-million agriculture support package that included $77 million directly to the food processing industry for things like protective equipment. Compare that with the $500-million package for the country’s arts, sports and cultural sectors the federal government announced April 17.

It was less than one-tenth of the $2.6 billion requested by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and precious little of it was aimed at helping prairie dryland farming or western beef and pork producers. Trudeau has not even been willing to move on lifting carbon tax costs — not even for natural gas needed to dry grain.

Yes, there are those who will argue farming in Saskatchewan

gets perennial provincial government subsidies in tax exemptions on fuel, chemicals, fertilizer and seed. And there have been COVID -19-related provincial programs (although the financial commitment from taxpayers is rather minimal).

But what’s generally now happening is what’s always happened — farmers are expected to make a go of it on their own as best as they possibly can. Moe’s “perseverance” description seems especially apt, given that many farmers are starting this year’s seeding with last year’s crop still in the field as a result of last fall having perhaps the worst harvest conditions in recent memory.

Under these circumstances “average” is pretty spectacular, but we have come to take for granted exactly how spectacular Saskatchewan agriculture truly is.

We will see 37 million acres seeded this year, which is also above the five-year average. According to the weekly crop report, that includes 82 per cent of field peas, 78 per cent of lentils, 71 per cent of durum, 69 per cent of chickpeas, 51 per cent of spring wheat, 42 per cent of barley and 38 per cent of canola that have already been seeded.

The rest of the province awaits the government’s Re-open Saskatchewan plan, but agriculture is already reopening our economy by buying fuel and other things that drive local economies.

In fact, bulk grain exports have rather remarkably been above the five-year average in recent weeks. Saskatchewan’s first-quarter export numbers actually increased to $7.4 billion or 4.2 per cent (compared with last year) largely due to the sale of canola, pulse, agricultural machinery, oats and soya beans.

Oil has been the favourite economic child for two decades now and success in this province since has been measured in population growth that has largely meant people flocking to the cities — often at the expense of rural Saskatchewan communities.

But as we now need to examine our fundamentals to determine what things are going to look like as we emerge from COVID-19, it’s rather obvious where we need to start.

Saskatchewan’s “new normal” will be able to count on its most reliable “old normal” — the very thing that has always defined us: agriculture. Mandryk is political columnist for the Regina Leader-post and Saskatoon Starphoenix.