ACADIA VALLEY, Alta. – It took only a small amount of time, but a group of volunteers near this east-central Alberta town gave tonnes in an effort to make hunger history.
The Graindale Heritage Project saw 160 acres of wheat harvested in less than two hours by eight Canadian flag-clad combines on Sept. 2, with proceeds going to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a Christian organization that helps provide food and development assistance to people in developing countries.
This was the second year for the Graindale project, named after the one-room school that once existed in the area.
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Project manager Jim Neilson said the harvest was a success, yielding 150 tonnes of grain that will be worth more than $102,000 once the Canadian government contributes its four to one matching funds.
Last year’s project raised $150,000 after the funds were matched.
However, Neilson said the project is largely about fostering unity in the community while feeding communities around the world.
“When the whole community gets behind it, that’s a success,” he said. “Of course the other part is to help people that are less fortunate than us.”
Mary Thompson, the food grains bank’s resource co-ordinator for Alberta and British Columbia, said she has felt privileged to work with producers whose generosity has outshone their recent hardships caused by drought, BSE, low commodity prices and increasing input costs.
“The margin is so slim and yet nobody is giving up helping someone else,” she said. “It’s people helping people that they will never meet, in spite of their own stresses in our agricultural community.”
Irwin Kuhn, who used his John Deere 9760 combine to help out, said local farmers participate in these projects despite the depressed rural economy because they’re about more than dollars and cents.
“It’s about helping people that have nothing to eat. That’s why I think most of the people are here.”
He said he has never calculated the dollar value of his donated time, equipment and fuel, but he speculated it would be “huge.”
Just when farmers were able to get back in the fields after rainy weather over much of the area, one would suspect most wouldn’t want to take time away to harvest another field when they could be getting their own crops in the bin.
But Viola Schmidt, the only woman in the harvesting crew, said the morning away from her own farm was time well spent.
“It’s worth it. We care about the poor and the hungry, and that’s why we do it,” she said. “It’s not just about us and we know that we’ll get our crop off too.”
Schmidt drove her tandem Mack grain truck while her husband Willard drove one of the two Gleaner combines.
The community was involved in more than just the harvest. Pioneer Grain donated the seed for the project and chemical companies donated herbicides for all food grain bank projects. Allen’s Agro of Oyen, Alta., seeded the wheat and volunteers sprayed it.
The land was rented from local farmer Chester Neilson, who also devised a special car to raise funds for the project.
Robyn Orthner, branch manager of the Alberta Treasury Branch bank in Oyen, Alta., was in charge of raising funds to cover the costs of the land rent, crop insurance and fertilizer. She said she hopes to be involved again.
“It’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to help people … who live meal to meal, basically.”
Graindale Heritage Project committee member Jim Ness said he’s confident the harvest will go ahead again next year and he hopes a second project could also develop in the area, allowing more people to become involved.
“There are some food grain projects where one or two people do the whole thing, and they’re missing the whole point,” he said.
“The whole point is to get the community involved.”
