SASKATOON – “I saw it on Oprah,” said Linda Henderson.
An essay contest to give away one section of farmland is one family’s solution to a farm debt crisis.
Henderson, of Rosemary, Alta. and her family are giving away 640 acres of land for “the best essay on how owning ranch land in southern Alberta would affect your life.” The essay must be accompanied by a cheque for $100 as an entry fee.
This past winter Henderson and her family were pondering what to do with the land, jointly owned by six siblings, on which a $450,000 bank loan rested. The land’s appraised value is only $250,000 and the family’s debt was becoming “harder and harder to manage.”
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Henderson was watching the Oprah Winfrey talk show when a man from the southern U.S. told his story of raffling off an inn which he had been unable to sell because of its high debt load. He raised more money than the value of either the inn or the debt and Henderson recognized a possible solution to her family’s problem.
“We can’t hold a lottery or draw because it’s against the law, but our lawyers looked into it and there is nothing stopping us from holding a contest. So that is what we are doing,” she said.
The quarter million dollar piece of ranch land will be given to what the family and an independently hired English professor judge to be the best entry.
The essay must be exactly 500 words, not including the title, and state three reasons how owning ranch land in southern Alberta would affect the writer’s life.
Rules for judging
“It will be judged on originality, style, creativity, grammar, sentence structure and literacy skills … . The family will judge the entries without knowing whose entries they are and make a short list which will then be judged by the professor for a final decision,”said Henderson.
The deadline for entries is Nov. 30, with the draw taking place on Dec. 31.
“We need 4,500 entries or the contest will be void and we will return everyone’s money,” she said.
