BRANDON — An aggressively hungry ewe.
Newborn chicks flopping and flipping a few minutes after cracking their eggs.
Horses clopping down the alleys, hefty-muscled and throwing off that anxious-for-the-ring energy.
Fur, straw, boots, company-branded gear, ropes, helmets, and that smell of animals, mini-doughnuts, manure and leather.
The agricultural world was in fine display inside the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair. It wasn’t the hardcore commercial ag feel of Manitoba Ag Days, which happens in the same space as the Fair, with gigantic machines, aggressive salesfolk, the strutting of important people and the smell of rubber, new paint and fresh grease.
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But it was a more holistic representation of the world outside of Winnipeg’s Perimeter Highway and beyond the sprawling of Western Canada’s other urban centres.
How many Canadians still experience this world? We know that very, very few people still live and work within agriculture. Small-town Canada is shrinking, except with exurban people turning villages into suburbs.
It’s a unique world. So many things are different, but only slightly so. The jeans country and city people wear are famously divergent, but many elements of how people interact, chat, queue up and react to inadvertent physical collisions are just a little bit off, from a city person’s perspective.
I always enjoy noticing this when I go to a farm show, because I’m a city person, but I spend much of my life out in the country, on farms, talking with farmers and getting too worked up by agricultural issues. I took my 14 year-old with me. Every year I try to get my three kids to come with me to see the Fair, to breathe in those smells, to see those animals, to walk along manure-enhanced hallways, in the belief that this will in some way expand their blinkered urban minds.
I wish more of my neighbours and friends had their kids here. It was such a great event. But how many people outside agriculture get to see it?
