ROUND HILL, Alta. — Everything Rick Mercer knows about farming, he learned from the Banack family.
Canadian television comedy host Rick Mercer recently spent the day in Round Hill with Humphrey and Terri Banack and their family, learning about farming and driving expensive combines for a show scheduled for tomorrow.
“I’m always amazed the equipment people will give me the keys for,” said Mercer, who is from Toronto.
Mercer spend the day walking through wheat fields, rolling down piles of grain and learning from Humphrey Banack how to separate wheat by hand.
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“Humphrey was very good showing me the process while you stood in the field, separating the wheat from the chaff in your hand and blowing on it and coming up with the final product. And of course, then we did it with the combine.”
Mercer was connected to Banack through Banack’s position as vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
Even though filming the segment took 10 hours during the busy harvest season, Banack believed it was important to show Canadian families, through Mercer’s show, the Rick Mercer Report, about agriculture and food.
“I wanted (viewers) to understand what agriculture is all about and what we do here and how it relates to them,” said Banack, who talked to Mercer and his staff about the number of loaves of bread that could be made from the wheat on his farm.
He also explained about the millions of dollars farmers must spend buying fertilizer, seed and equipment needed to farm.
“When you have that big of an audience, you want to talk about the importance of agriculture,” he said.
“We did things for him that day that we do every day of the week.”
Mercer said the family nature of the farm, with relatives coming back to the century old family farm to help with harvest, was “tremendous.”
“They were just incredibly generous with their time, which I thought was amazing because I understand how important that 17 or 18 days is when you have that time to harvest your wheat. It was very generous of them to allow me to spend time on their combine and taking part of all aspects of their operation because I am probably not the most efficient hand to be on deck.”
Spending the day on the farm is a classic RMR piece, said Mercer.
“I love to be in a beautiful part of the country and show that off to the rest of the country. Clearly they had that in spades. Then you have interesting people doing something interesting and they had that in spades. Then you have action and me operating big, expensive equipment.”
Mercer’s show is comedy, but he said the Banack farm piece is also educational with Mercer helping tell his audience where food comes from.
“I’m always amazed when people don’t give much thought to where their food comes from, so I was thrilled to be able to show people this type of farming operation. Anything I can do to help there, I’m very excited about.”
